

Invented languages and their long history of failure. - fogus
http://failuremag.com/index.php/feature/article/discouraging_words/

======
fogus
This article is about spoken languages, but much of its spirit can be extended
to invented [1] programming languages; that is, the likelihood, no, the
inevitability of their being stillborn.

[1]: they are all invented of course

~~~
shabda
Agreed. Languages and Frameworks are grown over time, not invented. That is
why I have much higher hopes for Jython or Jruby than Groovy or Scala.
Similarly all successful frameworks (Django, Rails and PHP) were extracted out
of existing software, not invented.

~~~
notaddicted
That is the case, but languages grow by adding features from experimental
languages.

------
jacquesm
All language is invented, every time somebody coins a new word they're
inventing language. What doesn't work is to raise the barrier so high that
people will have to learn a lot of new words at the same time.

Learning language is an incremental thing, and the pressure to learn it is
dependent on the installed base.

An artificial language will be hard to spread because there is the chicken-
and-the-egg problem, if enough people spoke it then there might be a reason to
cross that huge barrier to entry.

~~~
req2
Words aren't language; an example of a "natural" languages invented today can
be found in <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language>. Many
creoles follow the same pattern of spontaneous development. This is a distinct
difference from the inventedness of Esperanto or Lojban.

Artificial languages don't spread because they don't solve anyone's problem;
they solve everyone's problem.

------
tokenadult
Some context about Esperanto:

<http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/>

~~~
wynand
That is not really context. It's a prejudiced rant.

I went through an Esperanto phase some years ago and read this article back
then.

He's basically criticizing the language for not being as simple as it could
be.

He completely overlooks the point many people will find Esperanto easy to
learn. If you speak an Indo-European language and have never studied another
language before, I dare even say that learning a bit of Esperanto will help
you learn another Indo-European language.

It's been ages since I've used Esperanto but I definitely don't regret having
learnt it (especially since I didn't have to put in much time).

~~~
tokenadult
_It's a prejudiced rant._

The author of the link I submitted above

<http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/>

calls his hypertext article a "rant" in its very directory name, but I would
call it an informed rant, as the author evidently knows a good deal more
linguistics and more about non-Indo-European languages than most advocates for
Esperanto as a world auxiliary language.

 _He completely overlooks the point many people will find Esperanto easy to
learn._

Which people? Based on what evidence?

I have studied (in chronological order)

German (school study, beginning in elementary school)

Russian (" ", begun in secondary school)

Esperanto (self study, begun in secondary school with a friend from my Russian
class)

Modern Standard Chinese (school study, begun in university)

Cantonese (" ", begun in university)

Biblical Hebrew (" ", begun in university)

Literary Chinese (" ", begun in university)

Attic Greek (" ", begun in university)

Biblical Greek (" ", begun in university)

Taiwanese (self study sometimes with Mandarin-speaking tutor, begun after
university)

Japanese (self study with Mandarin-speaking tutor, begun after university)

Hakka (self study with Mandarin-speaking tutor, begun after university)

and some sporadic self-study of Latin, French, Spanish, Indonesian, Mongolian,
Aramaic, and other languages, begun and resumed here and there in the above
time span. I have been employed for years as a Chinese-English interpreter and
translator and read German comfortably.

There is nothing particularly easy to learn about Esperanto. In particular,
there is nothing particularly easy to learn about Esperanto for native
speakers of non-Indo-European languages. One participant on the sci.lang
Usenet newsgroup showed, more than a decade ago, that the percentage of
Esperanto speakers on the continent of Asia has to be strictly less than 1
person in 1,000. He wasn't axe-grinding for English--he himself was a Han
Chinese from Hong Kong, a native speaker of Cantonese, who usually took a kind
of pan-Chinese view of linguistic issues. Esperanto's lack of network effects
--the paucity of people who speak it or write in it--means a learner who tries
to learn it in natural settings by direct exposure finds Esperanto much more
difficult to learn than many other languages. It's easy to encounter
conversations in French or Spanish (I encountered them frequently when I lived
in Taiwan) or German (the same) or even Russian (that was more rare in Taiwan
when I first lived there, but is easy here in the United States). It is
exceedingly difficult to find live conversation in Esperanto anywhere but in
an Esperanto club meeting.

Here are some informational questions, for anyone with knowledge of the
subject to answer:

1) What consumer product, produced anywhere in the world, has product labeling
or assembly directions or instructions for use printed in Esperanto?

2) What terrestrial broadcast TV station, anywhere in the world, has a regular
news program in Esperanto? How about the same for a broadcast radio station?

3) What weekly news magazine anywhere in the world with professional
journalists on staff publishes in Esperanto?

4) What international scientific meetings are conducted regularly with
Esperanto as the working language?

5) What scientific journal, anywhere in the world, expects articles to be
submitted with an Esperanto abstract?

6) What hotel, restaurant, or travel agency, anywhere in the world, advertises
for new employees who are expected to be fluent in Esperanto?

Esperanto's fussiness in grammar and difficulty in learning killed its network
effects, and its lack of network effects kills its future prospects for
growth. Esperanto's peak number of speakers at a given moment across all time
is less than the number of speakers English and Chinese (and probably other
languages) each add each year simply by natural increase and voluntary second-
language learning.

------
DanielStraight
She rocks for writing that book. I definitely want to read it.

------
rawr
I'm pretty sure Klingon is still a failure, but for different reasons.

