
‘Saluton’: the surprise return of Esperanto - kawera
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/dec/06/saluton-the-surprise-return-of-esperanto
======
Karrot_Kream
In conlang (constructed language) communities, Esperanto is a type of conlang
known as an auxlang (auxillary language) that tries to be easily learnable and
speakable by many people. Esperanto remains very popular and has tons of high
quality learning material (I myself learned it from a book in my local
community college public library over a few hours in between summer classes)
and translated works.

That said, there's plenty of criticism for Esperanto. In Esperanto nouns are
male gendered by default, and a suffix is used to make them female. (e.g la
patro means "the father", and la patrino means "the mother"). Esperanto is
also much harder to learn for people without western language backgrounds.

For folks interested in the world of auxlangs, there are other prominent ones.
Toki Pona is ridiculously easy to learn (the vocabulary is some odd 150-or-so
words) and has a very neutral phonology (easy to pronounce regardless of
language background). You can pick it up in a month or so of idle study. There
are texts out there and communities on Telegram which make it fun and easy to
join in. It's hard to be specific in Toki Pona, but it turns out most banter
is just light conversation anyway. I've used it in a bar setting with friends
and it's a fun way to have a "secret" language.

Lojban is a conlang based loosely around predicate logic, which makes it
weirder than most other languages, but also easy to express complex ideas in.
Lojban has unambiguous syntax, and many parsers have been written for Lojban.
The "standard" camxes parser is useful when learning the language. It doesn't
have as big of a following as Esperanto, but is unique and fun. Lojban has
rougher learning materials than Esperanto and fewer translated works, but they
are there (including "lo selfri be la .alis. bei bu'u la selmacygu'e", Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland) I'm partial to Lojban myself as far as auxlangs is
concerned, though I find it to sound very... harsh.

~~~
wnoise
> In Esperanto nouns are male gendered by default, and a suffix is used to
> make them female. (e.g la patro means "the father", and la patrino means
> "the mother").

Unfortunately, that is indeed the common usage, but it would be equally
consistent with the affixes and structure of the language to use patro for
parent, virpatro for father, and patrino for mother.

i.e. the sexism is strictly speaking a cultural problem, not a language
problem.

~~~
ruricolist
"Patrulo" would also work.

"Ino" and "ulo" are practically redundant, which makes it (I think) the
easiest way to sneak in a masculating affix.

~~~
microcolonel
Like some other languages, one of the two is both specifically male in some
contexts, and generic in others (which is why vir- exists, to clear up
confusion in otherwise-generic contexts). English even retains some irregular
words of this sort, such as dog vs. bitch, where dog is male in contexts where
gender matters, but bitch is female in all contexts (at least when it comes to
dogs).

Only one gender can get the shorter prefix, and there are only so many vowels
(many people say that Esperanto already has _too many_ vowels). Real surviving
cultures aren't so petty that they'd make all their words longer by two
characters for the sake of "fairness".

As for -in* being two extra characters for explicit-feminine, it's just
something you trade for regular conjugation with such restricted phonotactics.

Now, you could make the argument to ditch grammatical gender altogether, and
I'd probably be on board with that. In most cases it does not shorten or
clarify sentences.

------
dsr_
I blame Duolingo. Two months with their app brought me from not knowing any
Esperanto to being terrible at it.

~~~
ravenstine
I never learned much from Duolingo. It makes learning languages incredibly
boring, and my eyes would glaze over every one of the dozens of times I had to
match/construct some variance of "der junge trinkt die milsch." I learned more
German just reading English translations of Rammstein lyrics. Anything by
Pimsleur is still not very interesting, but at least it can hold my attention.

~~~
stevenjohns
Consider coupling Anki[0] with one of the many existing German decks out
there[1].

I've been using it for Spanish[2] and I've found it to work extremely well. It
has somewhat brought back my interest after Duolingo became repetitive.

[0] [https://apps.ankiweb.net/](https://apps.ankiweb.net/)

[1]
[https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/german](https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/german)

[2]
[https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/spanish](https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/spanish)

~~~
adrianN
Anki is pretty awesome. I spent about 1000h learning Japanese with Anki so
far. Together with Yomichan it's pretty much the ultimate learning tool, imho.

------
interlingua7
Another interesting artificial language is interlingua. Interlingua is very
easy to learn for many people in Europe since interlingua words are taken from
English, French, Italian and Spanish. Interlingua is a pragmatic solution for
a common language across Europe. As a native spanish speaker I was able to
understand about a thousand words in one or two hours studying it. Esperanto
is like Haskell, interlingua is like C, one is pure with universal rules for
derivation, the other is for using the language from the first day for
communication.

~~~
HumanDrivenDev
Interlingua is the most intriguing conlang for me. It just seems incredibly
practical. I'm a native English speaker with only high school french, yet I
can pretty much read interlingua despite never having learned it. I imagine
native romance language speakers are fluent readers right off the bat. That's
huge.

~~~
geowwy
Folksprak is another one like Interlingua, except based on the Germanic
languages. One of the nice things about being an English speaker is you can
pick up both pretty easily.

Another interesting one is Uròpi which tries to go back to the Indo-European
roots of all European languages. It's not as immediately readable as
Interlingua or Esperanto but not too bad either:
[http://uropi.free.fr/comparaisons.html](http://uropi.free.fr/comparaisons.html)

------
mapmeld
I used a bunch of Esperanto text sources to make a NLP program (figured it
would be easier for a newbie to do since the language is so regular). The code
corrected some grammatical errors in the Esperanto Wiki; I did a write-up
earlier this month: [https://medium.com/@mapmeld/esperanto-nlp-
part-3-correcting-...](https://medium.com/@mapmeld/esperanto-nlp-
part-3-correcting-grammar-6d34f93bded1)

------
msla
Here's perhaps the only large-scale critique of Esperanto from a linguistic
perspective, as opposed to a reactionary[1] or nationalist[2] one:

[http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/index.html](http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/index.html)

[1] ("NEW LANGUAGE? DON'T WANNA! WAAH!")

[2] ("The language I happen to know best also happens to be the easiest and
best and most universal. Funny how that worked out, neh?")

This seems to be the biggest unanswerable criticism the Esperantists face:

"It looks like some sort of wind‐up‐toy Czech/Italian pidgin. And if there's
one part of this world that _doesn 't_ need a local pidgin, it's Europe, which
is not only the continent whose languages are best covered by online
translation services, but also the home of the current de facto global lingua
franca: English."

~~~
taoistextremist
To be fair to Esperanto, when it was invented English wasn't nearly the lingua
franca it is today, and the Internet didn't exist.

I don't think it's fair to critique it just because its original intent was as
an auxiliary language. I would argue that intent failed. But it has native
speakers, and it has communities who use it, and that itself justifies a
language's existence.

~~~
msla
Esperanto has nothing to be ashamed of as regards its history or current use,
but if it's being touted as a modern auxlang which should be used more often,
there are a number of problems its promoters have to come to grips with.

~~~
taoistextremist
I don't think it's any worse than other auxiliary languages (which I think are
all doomed to failure if that's really their goal as opposed to just building
a community). I don't know if you can really attack the languages for
"problems" if it starts being adopted to the point that it evolves like a
natural language (as Esperanto has done). Anything "inefficient" or the like
about the language will be changed to the point that native speakers find it
suitable.

------
tbirrell
Learning Esperanto is my New Year's resolution. Are there any successful
learners who have tips? Right now my plan is to get through duolingo then
figure it out from there.

~~~
antognini
I really, really like Step By Step in Esperanto by Montagu Butler. It's the
best introductory textbook of any language that I've read. It's composed of
maybe ~1000 or so very short lessons (each is about a paragraph), so it makes
it very easy to make a little progress every day even if you only have a
couple of minutes before bed. There's a nice mix of reading, translation
exercises, pronunciation exercises, and grammar.

------
RobertRoberts
I learned about Esperanto from the novel series the Stainless Steal Rat. I was
really disappointed with the audio books though, because I always pictured him
a young guy, maybe a bit pompous or silly. But certainly not an old gruff
grouchy guy. :(

I thought it was just awesome when 10 years later I found out Esperanto was
real!

~~~
lakkal
I thought it was neat that Esperanto was used in the books. I first learned of
it in about 1980 from a book belonging to a friend's father, who was in the
military. It was called 'Esperanto: The Aggressor Language", because it was
used by the US Army in their training games.

I GM'd a game of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fringeworthy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fringeworthy)
where I had the UN exploration teams use Esperanto as a common language.

------
jameskegel
Interestingly, a project I have been tracking, called Monero, has an
Esperanto-centric nomenclature for all of their projects, with Monero itself
being the name for “coin”

~~~
chillacy
A prominent wallet is called monerujo (ujo makes the word mean container of
monero), and the plural form of monero is moneroj. Monero itself of course is
mono + -ero, so something like particle of money, like breadcrumbs are to
bread or a grain of sand is to the sand as a whole. I'm ashamed that I only
recently discovered that was an intentional thing, though the name has caught
a sliver of my interest for at least a year now.

~~~
jameskegel
Well noted. There is another project that I'm fond of in the Monero ecosystem
called 'Kovri', which means "to cover, veil, or wrap". It is a router that is
i2p compatible, used to further obfuscate personal information for those who
require more anonymity than the traditional transactional security of Monero.
There may be others, as well.

------
sdfin
Apart from entertainment, which other reasons exist to learn Esperanto or some
constructed language?

~~~
colanderman
Esperanto media and social gatherings are a good way to expand your cultural
horizons. Esperanto speakers tend to hail from many different countries and
cultures (especially non-English-speaking ones) so seeking out Esperanto media
and groups is an easy way to filter for multicultural content.

------
jimmcslim
Esperanto is also the official second language of the Space Corps in Red
Dwarf.

------
mlamat
Esperanto? Why not Klingon?

~~~
arundelo
Esperanto has many many more speakers! (People joke about Klingon having more
but it's not true.) Really accurate numbers are hard to come by but even based
on estimates, it's no contest:

"Arika Okrent guessed in her book _In the Land of Invented Languages_ that
there might be 20–30 fluent [Klingon] speakers."[1]

"In 2009 Lu Wunsch-Rolshoven used 2001 year census data from Hungary and
Lithuania as a base for an estimate, resulting in approximately 160,000 to
300,000 to speak [Esperanto] actively or fluently throughout the world, with
about 80,000 to 150,000 of these being in the European Union."[2]

In fact, Klingon has fewer _total_ speakers than Esperanto has _native_
speakers:

"As of 1996, there were 350 or so attested cases of families with native
Esperanto speakers. Estimates from associations indicate that there are
currently around 1,000 Esperanto-speaking families, involving perhaps 2,000
children. In all known cases, speakers are natively bilingual, or
multilingual, raised in both Esperanto and either the local national language
or the native language of their parents."[3]

(Also Esperanto is much easier than Klingon, has much more material to read,
and is spoken by a wider variety of people than just science fiction fans,
though there are plenty of those too.)

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_language#Speakers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_language#Speakers)

[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Number_of_speakers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Number_of_speakers)

[3]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Esperanto_speakers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Esperanto_speakers)

EDIT: The "160,000 to 300,000" quote was from an older version of the
Wikipedia page (I based this comment on an old comment of mine). The current
version has various estimates, including Lindstedt's ballpark figures of
"10,000 speak it fluently" and "100,000 can use it actively".

~~~
D-Coder
Prof. Sidney Culbert of the University of Washington estimated 1 million to 2
million fluent Esperanto speakers about a decade ago. He is the only person
I've heard of who has done actual research (he produced the number-of-speakers
figures for some 100 languages for the World Almanac). Some methodology at
[http://www.panix.com/~dwolff/docs/culbert-
methods.html](http://www.panix.com/~dwolff/docs/culbert-methods.html).

