
Esperanto is finding new life online - shawndumas
http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/29/8672371/learn-esperanto-language-duolingo-app-origin-history
======
splat
It's not often mentioned as a reason to learn Esperanto, but the literature of
Esperanto is really quite wonderful and makes learning the language well worth
it. I've only read a handful of books in Esperanto so far, but it has been an
excellent way to read first-hand accounts of people writing about their own
cultures and experiences.

Last night I finished reading _Vikitmoj_ (Victims) by Julio Baghy. The book is
a semi-autobiographical story of the author's experiences in a Siberian
prisoner of war camp after WWI. It's a fascinating glimpse into life in these
camps and how the different populations (POWs, soldiers, peasants, Jews,
bolsheviks, etc.) all interacted with each other. As an example, one practice
Baghy writes of is a kind of "duel" that the POWs would sometimes engage in
between each other. (In the book it came out that one of the POWs had been
sleeping with the wife of another of the POWs back before they had been
captured.) They weren't allowed weapons, so they had to be a little creative.
They would draw lots and the loser would have to provoke the soldiers on one
of their marches so that the soldiers would beat him (sometimes to death).

If you learn any national language, you'll be able to read people in a handful
of cultures write about themselves in their own words. But one of the unique
features of Esperanto is that after you learn it, you can read the works of
people in cultures all across the globe without the need of a translator as
intermediary. (Of course the subset of people in a culture who write in
Esperanto is not representative of the general population, but it's better
than nothing!) In particular, many of these works haven't been translated into
English (or any other language for that matter), so you would have no way to
read them otherwise anyway!

~~~
colindean
Ĉu vi legis libron "Marvirinstrato"? Mi posedas ĝin ekde liberigo, sed mia
Esperanto ŝajnas esti tro baza eternale :-(

[http://www.amazon.com/Marvirinstrato-Originalaj-noveloj-
Espe...](http://www.amazon.com/Marvirinstrato-Originalaj-noveloj-Esperanto-
Edition/dp/1439236348)

~~~
splat
Ne, bedaŭrinde mi ne tre familiaras kun la esperantliteraturo. Ĝi ŝajnas
interese, tamen!

Se vi volas pli facile legeblaj libroj, mi rekomendas _Faktoj kaj Fantazioj_
de Marjorie Boulton. Ĝi ne estas tro malfacila, sed tre amuziga!

------
baddox
Speaking of constructed languages, you might find Lojban interesting. It is "a
constructed, syntactically unambiguous human language based on predicate
logic." I have read most of the official language description. It's a
compelling book not just about Lojban, but about logic and English grammar.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban)

[http://mw.lojban.org/papri/the_Complete_Lojban_Language](http://mw.lojban.org/papri/the_Complete_Lojban_Language)

~~~
tmalsburg2
There is a reason why human languages evolved to have syntactic ambiguity:
better throughput. Psycholinguistic research is obsessed with syntactic
ambiguities (and there are good reasons for that) but in real life these
ambiguities are pretty much always resolved by other sources of information:
context, prosody, world-knowledge, social cues. If you disambiguate a language
on the syntaxtic level you're basically just adding excessive redundancy.
There are special niches where disambiguating information is scarce or where
any misinterpretation could have catastophic consequences (e.g., aviation
handbooks) but outside these domains the absence of syntactic ambiguity is
hardly a desirable property.

~~~
digi_owl
International diplomacy?

~~~
tmalsburg2
There you can always ask for clarification. I'm not aware of any war that has
been started because of a syntactic ambiguity. But when your plane is about to
crash or when your nuclear reactor is threatening to melt down, you may not be
able to get a clarification.

------
martinrue
For anyone interested in learning a little more about Esperanto, Duolingo just
put their Esperanto course into public beta and there's a good amount of
learning content already: [https://www.duolingo.com/course/eo/en/Learn-
Esperanto-Online](https://www.duolingo.com/course/eo/en/Learn-Esperanto-
Online).

There's also [http://lernu.net](http://lernu.net), probably the most well-
known source of Esperanto news, lessons and other stuff.

Amuziĝu!

~~~
rmxt
Came here to share the good news about Esperanto on Duolingo, too!

Duolingo is fantastic and I am addicted to keeping my streak alive. However, I
find the lack of variety and relative rigidity of the sentences to be
offputting over time. I've nearly completed two trees, and have been a pretty
consistent user over the past 3 years, so sometimes the monotony of the
sentences drags me down. I have to imagine that we (collectively) are very
close to having a sentence generator that can throw together a pertinent and
sensical verb phrase and noun phrase that differs _just_ slightly from the
curated/created sentences, at least for the Indo-European languages.

------
athenot
All languages have a culture associated to them. It's hard to dissociate the
culture from the language. Even English, which is used in different cultures,
has local optimizations when it is used daily.

Latin is bound to an ancient culture (and a religious one).

Even Klingon and Quenya are bound to the universes and cultures created by
their authors & fan bases.

But I don't see any culture associated with Esperanto. I'm wondering if things
might be different if its proponents started associating with a niche culture
(be it business) and then expand out to encompass things from everyday life. I
don't know what the answer is…

~~~
panglott
There is a very distinctive culture to Esperanto: people who continue to hope
for positive social transformation and international and intercultural
harmony.

Esperantist and conlanger William Annis (on the Conlangery podcast) said
something to the effect that, if you go to a Esperanto congress, you should
start with the default assumption that everyone you meet is a gay vegetarian.
[1]

I cannot speak to the truth of this myself ;)

[1]
[http://conlangery.com/2011/12/05/94/](http://conlangery.com/2011/12/05/94/)

~~~
neverartful
That sounds more like a philosophy than a culture.

~~~
schoen
There is even an Esperantist movement that explicitly argues that it's a
culture.

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

------
7erb
I'm working on a conlang called __7erb __(pronounced Verb).

It's a language of only seven (7) words in its entire vocabulary. Here's what
I got so far:

\- All seven words in the vocabulary are a negative. A word means "everything
_but_ that word. Words are then "stacked" to be more "anti-specific"

\- 7erb is completely present-tense. Past and future are not acknowledged

\- Anything in this world that can be evaluated in various ways depending upon
arbitrary conditions are generally avoided in 7erb. 7erb is a language of
reality, not subjectivity and opinion. There are no words in 7erb that
function as adjectives

\- However, vocal pitch and tonality can indicate degrees of closeness,
height, intensity etc. In written form, this can be expressed with bold text,
underscoring etc

If anyone is interested in developing this new language, please contact me
(see my profile).

------
Red_Tarsius
I've always thought _Esperanto_ to be an incredibly bad idea.
[http://xkcd.com/927/?cmpid=pscau](http://xkcd.com/927/?cmpid=pscau)

~~~
freehunter
Esperanto has some incredibly good aspects to it, though. The biggest, of
course, is that learning Esperanto (which is very easy to do) helps
tremendously with learning other languages. So it doesn't really matter if you
think Esperanto is an incredibly bad idea, Esperanto is an incredibly good
idea if you're looking to learn other languages afterwards. It's not just
another standard. It's a great learning aid.

"A group of European secondary school students studied Esperanto for one year,
then French for three years, and ended up with a significantly better command
of French than a control group, who studied French for all four years."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Third-
language_acquis...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Third-
language_acquisition)

~~~
gkya
Well, this is for esperanto being a conlang that is borrowing mostly from
romance, slavic and germanic languages and indo-european languages in general.
I have been studying italian for about 6 months, and I can comprehend written
french and portuguese, and written/spoken spanish to an extent, all of which
are romance languages i.e. latin descendants. And I have not really studied
these languages. So esperanto is no special case here, it is not the magical
special key to learn all the other languages.

~~~
freehunter
You're right, it's easier to learn a third language than it is a second. But
Esperanto is super easy to learn in the first place, it gets you to learning
your third language that much quicker.

------
panglott
It's been a long time since I was in high school, but I've long thought that
the American educational system should give up on teaching modern foreign
languages badly and just mostly teach Latin, Greek, and Esperanto.

If all you're going to do is make high schoolers take a year of foreign
language in a classroom, they'd get a lot more from a year of Latin or
Esperanto.

Edit: The Klingon Duolingo course should be pretty awesome, though.

~~~
ajkjk
I'm honestly surprised to learn that anyone defends learning Latin outside of
academic scholarship. I guess I feel the same about Greek but no one learns
that in the US so it's less argued about.

I took Latin in high school and felt that I wasted four years I could have
spent learning (rudimentary) Spanish, or at least something that had any
cultural relevance at all. You have to find a way to make kids care about it
as well as justifying its utility.

I see Latin and Greek education as historical relics, akin to how we used to
emphasizing testing students' ability to construct shapes with compasses and
straightedges, or their ability to memorize bible verses.

~~~
Red_Tarsius
> _...something that had any cultural relevance at all._

My high school was heavily focused on Latin and ancient Greek. We spent the
first two years grokking grammar and semantics. Then, in _liceo_ (the last 3
years) we would study history by translating and studying poems, speeches,
plays...

Teacher and students used to discuss for hours about the meaning and context
of this or that sentence. It was a wonderful way to _understand_ our
ancestors' mindset. Dead languages are the best tools for a deeper
appreciation of history.

~~~
agumonkey
And current languages too. A while back I found this diagram
[http://imgur.com/ZNlwDUZ](http://imgur.com/ZNlwDUZ), to me it shows how
logical greeks were. Terms are symmetrical, well organized, forming a tiny
core of combinators.

~~~
schoen
That diagram is great, but I'm not sure this sort of preposition inventory is
that specific to ancient Greek. When I studied German, I feel like we had
rather similar charts.

German has specific prepositions I recognize as equivalent to _each_ main
Greek preposition as defined in that chart, except maybe the distinction
between εις and εν, which German would handle by a noun case distinction
(ancient Greek εις την θαλασσαν → German _ins Meer_ (accusative, < "in das"),
ancient Greek εν τῃ θαλασσῃ → German _im Meer_ (ablative, < "in dem"). German
breaks up some meanings differently -- "among" is _unter_ (shared with
"beneath" rather than "between") -- but anyway there are other languages with
a pretty nice set of prepositions!

~~~
agumonkey
Thanks, I'm all for finding similar structures in other languages.

------
tokenadult
From the article: "Four people had been listed as 'attending' on the Facebook
page for the event, but by the time the meeting began, eight Esperantists were
sitting in a rough semicircle of dormroom couches and hard plastic chairs."
Ladies and gentlemen, that is in New York City, where a social club meeting on
almost any topic might be expected to attract more attendance. Esperanto has
severe growth problems if that is how interesting it is to prospective
learners.

I have used some Esperanto textbooks to learn a bit of Esperanto, and I have
read whole books about the artificial language movement and the development of
Esperanto over time. If we take Esperanto to be a hobby, like stamp
collecting, then I say "More power to you" if you are interested in Esperanto.
But if we take Esperanto as a serious proposal to produce a practical
"interlanguage" for worldwide communication, then we have to count Esperanto
as a failure. Esperanto has had fewer speakers (to a given level of
proficiency) and fewer readers (likewise) in all time than either English or
Chinese gains in one year simply by natural increase and extension of
education to the masses.

As I studied Esperanto, along with studying human languages such as Chinese
(four modern Sinitic languages and also ancient Literary Chinese), Russian,
German, Japanese, Biblical Hebrew, Attic Greek and Koine Greek, and assorted
other languages, I was struck by how many design bugs Esperanto has. Many of
the decisions made by Ludwik Zamenhof as he designed Esperanto reflected
exactly the languages he knew in childhood in Russian-occupied Poland, but
didn't reflect at all what makes a language easy to learn or to use as a
second language with speakers of varied backgrounds. I used to think that I
would have to do a write-up about the flaws of Esperanto myself, but then in
the 1990s I discovered an online description of Esperanto by a sophisticated
student of constructed languages,[1] and I see by checking the link again that
that description has been continually updated over the last two decades.

The statement in the article kindly submitted here that "Esperanto is an
artificial language, designed to have perfectly regular grammar, with none of
the messy exceptions of natural tongues" is demonstrably false, and the link I
have shared here will show the statement to be false. What ultimately turned
me off to Esperanto as a movement and even as a hobby was seeing frankly
incredible statements about Esperanto and about other human languages made by
Esperanto-hobbyists who thought they were proposing a practical tool for world
communication. If Esperanto is your hobby, more power to you. But if you
propose Esperanto as a world interlanguage, you had best acknowledge the
reality that Esperanto has always failed in that role, and always will.

[1]
[http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/](http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/)

~~~
panglott
Esperanto is a "failure" only if help up to standards and goals that are
completely unrealistic.

Compare English: Britain spread it throughout a global empire for centuries.
America is the world's fourth most populous country, possibly the most
powerful and prosperous country in the history of the world, and nearly
entirely monolingual in English. India is the world's second most populous
country, where English is the major language of intercommunication. Nigeria,
the Philippines, and other large countries use English in an official
capacity. English is now the dominant language of science, and increasingly
the language of intercommunication in Europe.

And yet for all that power, prestige, and influence, English only has 1.2
billion first- and second-language speakers, and is far from the world's only
interlanguage.

So by those standards, English is a "failure" as the world interlanguage.

Edit: To be sure, Esperantists can be pretty off-putting. They are nothing if
not...enthusiastic!

~~~
tokenadult
You have just related a lot of facts that show that English is a success as a
world interlanguage. The British Empire has barely existed during my lifetime,
and the great majority of people now living were born after its demise.
English has a majority of speakers who live outside the "inner circle" on
English-speaking countries, and a very widespread use of English is as an
interlangauge among persons all of whom are not native speakers of English. I
have seen numerous conversations in English in the country of Taiwan among
people who grew up in various countries of Asia where English is not a native
language, and I hear news reports literally every day with interviews in
English from people all over the world.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#Geographical_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#Geographical_distribution)

~~~
panglott
English is perhaps the most successful world interlanguage in the history of
the world. My point is that, it would still be considered a failure by the
standards that Esperanto set for itself. I take that more as an indication
that Esperanto's standards are unrealistic more than that Esperanto is a
"failure".

