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The Invented Language That Found a Second Life Online (bbc.com)
More than 100 years after it was invented, Esperanto is spoken by relatively few people. But the internet has brought new life to this intriguing, invented language. From a report: Since it [Esperanto] was first proposed in a small booklet written by Ludwik L Zamenhof in 1887, it has evolved into the quintessential invented language, the liveliest and most popular ever created. But, many would tell you, Esperanto is a failure. More than a century after it was created, its current speaker base is just some two million people -- a geeky niche, not unlike the fan base of any other obscure hobby.
[...] Learning Esperanto used to be a solitary quest. You could practise it by sitting for weeks with a book and a dictionary, figuring out the rules and memorising the words. But there was usually no professor to correct your mistakes or polish your pronunciation. That's how Anna Lowenstein taught herself Esperanto in her teenage years, after becoming frustrated with the oddities of the French she was learning in school. In the last page of her textbook, there was an address for the British Esperanto Association. She sent a letter, and some time later was invited to a meeting of young speakers in St Albans.
The global community that Lowenstein was joining was put together via snail mail, paper magazines and yearly meetings. [...] Newer generations are not as patient, and they don't have to be. Unlike most of their elders, who rarely had the chance to speak Esperanto, today's speakers can use the language every day online. Even old computer communication services like Usenet had Esperanto-speaking hubs, and a lot of pages and chat rooms sprouted in the early days of the Web. Today, the younger segment of the Esperantio is keen on using social media: they gather around several groups in Facebook and Telegram, a chat service.
[...] Learning Esperanto used to be a solitary quest. You could practise it by sitting for weeks with a book and a dictionary, figuring out the rules and memorising the words. But there was usually no professor to correct your mistakes or polish your pronunciation. That's how Anna Lowenstein taught herself Esperanto in her teenage years, after becoming frustrated with the oddities of the French she was learning in school. In the last page of her textbook, there was an address for the British Esperanto Association. She sent a letter, and some time later was invited to a meeting of young speakers in St Albans.
The global community that Lowenstein was joining was put together via snail mail, paper magazines and yearly meetings. [...] Newer generations are not as patient, and they don't have to be. Unlike most of their elders, who rarely had the chance to speak Esperanto, today's speakers can use the language every day online. Even old computer communication services like Usenet had Esperanto-speaking hubs, and a lot of pages and chat rooms sprouted in the early days of the Web. Today, the younger segment of the Esperantio is keen on using social media: they gather around several groups in Facebook and Telegram, a chat service.
Everyone go watch Incubus, then we'll circle back here to discuss.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Learning a third language is easier when you know a second language. Hungarian kids somehow learn Esperanto and then English like 40% faster if they learn English only to the same eventual English fluency.
Go figure.
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We need to force everyone to speak LOGLAN so that fiercely logical LOGLAN soldiers can conquer the world, then the galaxy and finally the universe.
LOGLAN is like metric but applied to your mind.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/927/
Romanes eunt domus.
DaveyJJ
It's not quite "grammar taked out". Grammar is made up of morphology (inflections and derivations) and syntax (word order). The more you take out of morphology, the more rigid the syntax becomes. For instance, Chinese and English have very little inflection, but their syntax is more rigid than (say) Russian or Latin.
Besides, there is a Latin minus inflectional morphology, and it's called Latino sine flexione. It was proposed by Giuseppe Peano, who also invented fractals and put math on a rigorous axiomatic foundation. The better-known Interlingua began as a reform of LSF.
You've also described German (for the most part). It's not 100% perfect, but they have a council (the RdR) that continues to scrub out weird historical spellings. Every year they get closer to perfect.
Taking different a bit of all languages (from this, the roots; from that, some alphabet chars, from those, some cyrillic chars; from that, some verbal conjugation; from that other language, the sentence structure, etc.) so all people can find something "familiar" in the language just to maximize the popularity..
So, English?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
It is very much a romance based language.. That bias is likely one of the reasons why it never caught on. If you know Spanish, you have no use for Esperanto, and if you don't, you're better off learning Spanish.
Also, like Volapük before it, relying on letters that are not standard in any alphabets is a very big obstacle.
Lojban addresses that, as well as avoiding the ambiguity that many artificial languages (and perhaps especially Esperanto) suffers from, but it arrived too late - English has already become the de facto trade language, taking over from Spanish and Portuguese, and there's little need to learn Yet Another language.
People called Romanes, they go, the house?
There's a great podcast about Esperanto on Freakanomics Radio...
http://freakonomics.com/podcas...
Esperanto was invented by an opthamologist, L. L. Zamenhof, to be a universal second (and maybe eventually first) language that would overcome the "curse of Babel", so many different tongues in use that people cannot communicate. Being an artificial language there would be one codified grammar that everyone would use instead of the many dialectical variations seen in natural languages.
Only Zamenhof, while multi-lingual, was no linguist and did a mediocre job of designing the language. In his (partial) defense he was one of the first to try this (there were a few earlier projects), artificial language design was not trendy the way it seems today.
And so for a universal, common language Esperanto has had a tendency to generate new dialects (Ido, Romániço, etc.) often due the inadequacies of Zamenhof's original specification.
There are a number of significant design flaws that make this "easy to learn" language unnecessarily hard. The transitivity of verbs for example requires memorizing the semi-arbitrary rule assignments for hundreds of verbs, and most Esperanto users make frequent errors. Also the actual interpretation of verbs was not properly defined by Zamenhof, whether they express tenses (past, present, future) or aspects (whether it is completed or on-going). Zamenhof apparently did not understand the distinction himself and wrote contradictory things. In fact his grammar is often vague and numerous controversies have developed over the years.
Then there was the wholly unnecessary inclusion of gender for nouns. Zamenhof apparently did this because the languages he was familiar with did this, but the gender assignments are arbitrary, add nothing of a value to the language, require memorization, and are a problem that must be decided with each newly coined word. As a result the language in use has diverged from the official grammar and dictionary, with the conversion of most "male" gendered words to neutral. And this has led to a dialectical split in the language with people who want to simply eliminate gender (or at least the male gender) and those that want to preserve the original specification (such as it is).
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Interlingua is one of Esperanto's competitors. It resembles a simplified modern spoken latin and is very useful for scientific communication. It is said that interlingua can be understood relatively well by most speakers of european languages, although the reverse is not necessarily true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It is a good language to study just to learn the word roots which have high cognates with other modern languages.
Clickety Click
Latin was widely useful for communication even after there were no native speakers of it. If you were a merchant then it was in your best interests to know this dead language for economic reasons. If you were an aristocrat, diplomat, scientist/philosopher, your job was easier if you knew Latin. It's how the church communicated with all of its priests and members. It was a very widely known language for centuries, and yet there was no village of native Latin speakers.
No, it's Romani ite domum. Now write it out one hundred times. If it's not done by sunrise, I'll cut your balls off.