
How Does Esperanto Sound? - martinrue
https://martinrue.com/how-does-esperanto-sound/
======
sivers
A couple years ago, I sat down to check out Esperanto the same way that any of
us programming language nerds check out another programming language.

Polyglot Benny Lewis recommends that if you don't know any foreign language,
the best place to start is Esperanto, because it's so easy. See
[https://www.fluentin3months.com/2-weeks-of-
esperanto/](https://www.fluentin3months.com/2-weeks-of-esperanto/)

I intended to give it about an hour, one Sunday, so I sat down in my chair at
4pm, and went to the most recommended tutorial:

[https://lernu.net/](https://lernu.net/)

I had so many “whoa!” and “wow!” and “this is amazing!” moments while checking
it out that I didn't get out of my chair until almost midnight. I didn't even
notice the house had grown dark around me.

It's a really fun, simple, easy language to learn. I ended up learning it for
six months to a conversational level. I found someone fluent in
[https://www.italki.com/](https://www.italki.com/) and we talked by Skype for
three hours per week. I used Anki flashcards to memorize vocabulary. I slowly
read a few books in Esperanto.

After six months, I attended the international Esperanto conference in Seoul,
Korea, and spoke only Esperanto for a few days. I was glad I was doing it, and
somewhat glad I did it, but in hindsight maybe should have used that time to
learn Mandarin or another language where I can communicate with people that
don't speak English.

Still, I miss it. Esperanto is wonderfully designed. I highly recommend anyone
curious go to [https://lernu.net/](https://lernu.net/) and work their way
through the course there, even if that's all you do.

~~~
gwbas1c
Makes me wonder, if a highly international organization could make Esperanto
part of onboarding?

If it's so easy to learn, at some point shouldn't it just be "worth it" if
you're going to do something with lots of different people who are all
different native language speakers?

~~~
freehunter
The problem with widespread Esperanto adoption (in the Western world at least)
isn't that English is an easy language, but it's so pervasive of a language.
There is a _lot_ of English-language media to study, and a _lot_ of people
speak English to practice with. If one person speaks French and another speaks
Polish, it would probably be easier and more beneficial for each of them to
learn English than each of them to learn Esperanto. And once they do, they'll
be able to communicate with others who know English but don't know Esperanto,
which is a huge number of people.

I've studied Esperanto in the past and I love the concept, but getting TV
shows, movies, and books in Esperanto is much much much harder than getting
them in English. Which means people are exposed to English far more often and
in more real-life scenarios than they would be in Esperanto.

This is a similar problem with any non-English language, I've found. I speak
German and trying to keep up with the language in America is nearly impossible
because I can't find any good source of German language books or TV shows or
movies here in the US. And beyond trying to legally purchase them, it's
difficult to even _pirate_ German language media. It just doesn't exist.

~~~
sharpneli
The importance of consumable media should not be underestimated.

My native language is Finnish, which is farther from English than Hindi. But I
learnt English at a very young age simply via TV, Games and Movies. And that’s
the reason why English skills are so high here in general. It doesn’t matter
that English is ”clunky”. It’s so pervasive that it’s hard not to learn it.

~~~
programmer_dude
Interesting! I understand Finnish is not an Indo-european language, but
English and Hindi are.

~~~
ptaipale
That is correct. Also Russian and other Slavic languages belong to Indo-
European family. Russian is linguistically closer to English than Hindi, but
Finnish is far apart (and is close to Estonian, and more remotely related to
Hungarian).

Still, as a native Finn I can get some things from Russian even if I have
never studied it, because there is so much common vocabulary.

------
SomeProgrammer_
Personal thoughts, Esperanto is designed & spoken with notable allophony to
help accommodate different regional usages. For example, the <r> in Esperanto
can be pronounced allophonically as the "French R", "American R", "Spanish R",
etc.

However, a lot of conlangers have noticed that there are a lot of consonant
clusters and basic phonemes that don't seem to have nice analogues in many
languages - like Esperanto's affricates, affricate & fricative clusters, etc.

On top of that, the language is phonemically regular in the sense that there
are no natural-sounding phonemic irregularities that one might normally
expect.

In my view, Esperanto sounds fine. It has it's own aesthetic. Though at the
same time, I find that because a lot of Esperanto was designed without a
global audience in mind, there are a lot of "approximations" to what
Zamenhoff, the original creator of Esperanto, maybe had anticipated that the
language would sound like.

~~~
gordonguthrie
'designed without a global audience in mind' \- it was exactly designed with a
global audience in mind - but I think Zemnhof didn't have the exposure to the
width of linguistic research he would have now

~~~
jcranmer
It was designed with a global audience in mind at a time when (to the global
elite) Africa and Asia weren't worth considering, and the Americas (including
the US!) were of lesser importance. In other words, it was global for an
audience who understood "global" to be synonymous with "European".

~~~
gordonguthrie
From a practical perspective - the nearest Uni was St Petersburg - if you had
to guess how many comparative grammers of say Russian/Ndebele Russian/Cherokee
Russian/Urdu were available in late 19th C Biyalostok? I would go for 0

Yes there are structural reasons that inform Esperanto as a Romance-lexified
Western Slavonic - but it is hard to argue that it could be anything but
structural - how could Zamenhof personally have chosen different?

------
umvi
Even if Esperanto were widely adopted, there would be nothing to keep it from
developing edge cases and funky grammar exceptions over time just like every
other language.

Esperanto only works for scholarly types that adhere strictly to the rules,
not lazy uneducated people who just want to communicate something with as
little effort as possible and don't care if they aren't adhering to the
grammar. Also, you'd get localized variants depending on the region.

~~~
nabla9
That's why Esperanto would be a good universal second language.

There would be no native speakers, you would only speak it with speakers of
other languages, or read books in it.

~~~
biztos
Isn't that what Latin was for centuries?

And just like some people (Italians?) had certain advantages in learning their
Latin, some people have advantages in learning Esperanto.

------
jcranmer
> Exploring the problem further, I discovered that Slavic languages have a
> good overlap with the sounds found in Esperanto, especially vowel sounds.
> Better yet, many professional TTS engines have Polish voices.

There's a strong case to be made that Esperanto was designed to have the
phonemic inventory of the dialect of its creator, an Eastern Polish dialect.
See
[http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/index.html#01](http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/index.html#01).

~~~
gordonguthrie
It clearly is a Western Slavonic language relexified into Romance - the
orthography has the characteristic Slavic 1 symbol/1 sound and is distinctly
Hussite (ie accents on a short Latin). The core case system has 4 cases (down
from the 6/7 of Polish) - except with remnants of more in the Correlatives.

Modern Hebrew - created by a colleague of Zamenhof is also a Western Slavonic
- except relexified into Semintic (so I believe - I have no Hebrew).

It all makes the Western Slavonics a super interesting language group...

~~~
AprilArcus
I think you're just saying that because of the palatal affricates, which
English very notably also has. The phonemic inventory of Esperanto looks like
English minus its weirdest features, i.e. the interdental fricatives and
tense/lax vowel distinction.

The case system, as you describe it, sounds Germanic, not Slavic.

~~~
gordonguthrie
Except that Zamenhof spoke Slavic languages as a native - and not German nor
English - and specifically chose Romance languages to relexify - there is no
discernable German or English influence on the language

~~~
gordonguthrie
And the case system differentiates between indirect objects of motion and
position (like Polish) and doesn't have a genitive (which German does)

And also English has like 12-16 vowel sounds and Esperanto (like the Slavics)
has half that many

~~~
AprilArcus
[Not trying to argue against Esperanto's Slavic influence, just having fun and
being pedantic]

Yes, the fact that English has a tense/lax vowel distinction rather than
long/short is very unusual.

My English dialect (Providence) has five tense-lax pairs (ɑː/æ, eɪ/ɛ, iː/ɪ,
oʊ/ɔ, uː/ʊ), a central unrounded vowel (ʌ), and three diphthongs (ɔɪ, aɪ, aʊ),
so arguably fourteen "vowel sounds" (General American merges ɑː and ɔ,
bringing the total down to thirteen). Which is a lot, by any measure! And many
European languages do have much simpler systems, famously Spanish.

However, Esperanto has its five pure vowels as well as six dipthongs (ai, ei,
oi, ui, ou, eu), for a total of eleven, which is hardly "half as many"!

~~~
squiggleblaz
Concerning the number of vowels a language has:
[https://wals.info/chapter/2](https://wals.info/chapter/2) does indeed class
7-14 as a lot. But it's very hard to count vowels in any kind of neutral way.

Concerning Esperanto, it only has two diphthongs - aw and ew. Aj, ej, oj and
uj are actually just sequences of a vowel and consonant. For an comparison,
consider is English "ye-" as in "yes" is a consonant and a vowel, but the same
sound (ie-) in Spanish or Finnish is a diphthong.

What constitutes a diphthong vs a sequence is specific to an analysis of a
given language. In Esperanto, we can see that "diversa sono" and "diversaj
sonoj" differ just by the addition of a -j sound and we always teach that it's
an affix. It isn't the deletion of the /a, o/ and its replacement by a
diphthong /ai, oi/ which would destroy the simplicity of Esperanto and confuse
anyone whose native language wasn't English.

Additionally, the only hole is -ij, which is missing for good phonotactic
reasons - the sounds aren't distinct enough - which is extremely common and
shared by a missing ji- so it can't fairly tempt us to analyse it as a
diphthong.

This is in contrast to a language like English. /-j/ cannot be added after
just any vowel. Moreover, whenever it occurs, it's part of the same
root/morpheme as the previous vowel sound. So there's no advantage to
analysing them separately (altho some people try to cut back on the number of
English vowels, perhaps to only six, by counting the ones you note as ah/a,
ey/e, iy/i, ow/o, uw/u, ʌ/(ʌr), oy, ay, aw - but this is normally rejected as
being too weird).

English speakers often seem to teach Eo /aj, oj, uj, ej/ as diphthongs simply
because of the phonetic properties of English.

------
sudosteph
Great work! I had been hoping that an alexa-esque voice for Eperanto would be
created one day, though I realized Amazon had no financial incentive to do it.
I'm amazed it sounds as good as it does when it was a one-man side project.
Even as a very casual esperantist, I could understand it without much
difficulty. Thank you for doing this and sharing your work.

~~~
martinrue
Thank you for the appreciation, I appreciate it :) Please feel free to take it
and create some cool Alexa thing with it... that'd be awesome.

~~~
gordonguthrie
I just turned on the sofa and asked my Orla if she thought Alexa in Esperanto
would be a good idea and to my surprise she said yes ;-)

~~~
martinrue
All the stuff behind Parol is OSS
([https://git.io/fjb5n](https://git.io/fjb5n)), do bonvolu senti sin libera
Esperantigi aferojn :)

------
wolfgke
Relevant: the yuri visual novel "The Expression Amrilato" about a girl that is
stranded in a world where everybody speaks Juliamo (the in-game name for
Esperanto) instead of Japanese.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Expression_Am...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Expression_Amrilato&oldid=903669020)

[https://www.gog.com/game/the_expression_amrilato](https://www.gog.com/game/the_expression_amrilato)

------
zubi
Excellent work, and indeed it sounds pretty much neutral. One question though:
I always thought Esperanto pronunciation and letters map quite one-to-one with
Turkish, have you considered basing your work on Turkish instead of Polish?

Except ŭ, Esperanto vowels have exactly the same sound as they do in Turkish.
Among the consonants, ĥ and c don't map, but all others do. Even ĉ, ŝ, ĝ and ĵ
map to one specific letter with the identical sound.

------
jujun
I speak Esperanto since I was 15 years old, (now I am 30). I even met my GF
with it 10 years ago. It's something great to meet very interesting and
generous people anywhere on earth. And it's also a nice programming language.

~~~
ferzul
mi trovis mian edzinon per Esperanto, sed mi devis lerni alian lingvon por
paroli kun ŝia familio, kiuj ne parolas Esperanton

~~~
martinrue
Instruu al ŝia familio Esperanton - eble tio pli facilus :)

~~~
schoen
Sed li "devis lerni", do mi pensas ke li _jam lernis_ la lingvon de ŝia
familio!

~~~
quickthrower2
Bonega! Bonega!

------
6thaccount2
I've been learning on Duolingo and Richardson's book. It really is simply so
elegant. Easy to learn, easy to read, easy to understand, easy to speak. It
just sounds cool to me as well. I think at 3 weeks in I had made more progress
than 3 years of Spanish as you don't have to worry about irregularities and
even the vocabulary is easy to remember.

------
CodeCube
This is the first time I've actually heard Esperanto spoken aloud ... very
cool, thanks for posting.

What drove you to learn Esperanto originally?

~~~
martinrue
Glad you enjoyed it! Originally I read about it on Wikipedia, and studied it
just because it was super geeky and cool to me. Later I started attending
events and met people, and at this point I have lots of international friends
through the language. I wrote a bit more about this on my blog, which you may
find interesting: [https://martinrue.com/zamenhofa-
tago-18](https://martinrue.com/zamenhofa-tago-18)

------
tracker1
I wonder if there are still more Klingon speakers than Esperanto today. I
don't know that outside linguist circles I'd see as much value in learning
Esperanto as a more broadly used language. I took up a little bit of French
and German (and Klingon) when I was young, but it's been 25-30 years since
I've spoken either and don't remember anything.

~~~
Viliam1234
> I wonder if there are still more Klingon speakers than Esperanto today.

I believe there were never more Klingon speakers than Esperanto speakers.

More precisely, I doubt there are any Klingon speakers -- where "speaker"
doesn't mean a person who memorized a few words and sentences, but who can
spend one hour talking fluently about their favorite topic -- but even
assuming there are any, I really doubt there would be one hundred of them,
worldwide.

On the other hand, I have met hundreds of Esperanto speakers at various
Esperanto-related activities, and they are quite able to talk the whole day
without having to use another language. I used to be fluent at that language,
too.

But maybe that's just my bubble. Could you perhaps give me a link to e.g.
people giving a lecture in Klingon in front of live audience, preferably on a
topic other than constructed languages?

~~~
tracker1
Not sure about numbers, but there's the Klingon Language Institute[1], which
recently had a conference[2]. I mainly remember it being said that there were
more conversational Klingon speakers than Esparanto around a decade ago.

[1] [https://www.kli.org/](https://www.kli.org/) [2]
[https://www.kli.org/activities/qepmey/qepa-chamah-
javdich/](https://www.kli.org/activities/qepmey/qepa-chamah-javdich/)

~~~
Viliam1234
Klingon Language Institute has a web page in English, but not in Klingon. That
usually does not happen to Esperanto organizations.

Having two books translated to Klingon is impressive. To compare, the library
of UEA offers 770 books in Esperanto in category "Translated Prose", and 362
in category "Original Prose".
[https://katalogo.uea.org/index.php?kateg=prtr](https://katalogo.uea.org/index.php?kateg=prtr)
[https://katalogo.uea.org/index.php?kateg=pror](https://katalogo.uea.org/index.php?kateg=pror)

There is also a Wikipedia in Esperanto, with over 1/4 million articles. Fewer
than English with almost 6 million articles, but still more than many
languages with millions of native speakers.
[https://eo.wikipedia.org/](https://eo.wikipedia.org/)

This is why I find the statement about more Klingon speakers than Esperanto
speakers very unlikely, whether now or a decade ago. (Klingon Language
Institute boasts about growing fast, while Esperanto speakers usually complain
about stagnation; which makes it even less likely that the statement would be
true a decade ago if it isn't true now.)

------
Savageman
A friend of mine has a started to create a new language fit for European
citizen.

It is based on a translator-based computer program and performs a synthesis of
European languages. Each word is the result of a democratic choice made by an
algorithm, so that it is the closest to that of the majority of European
languages.

The website is in French, but there's a paragraph written in Europa (the name
of the language) that starts with "Vos have comprendet que haver ambition".
I'm really curious how people can understand it without any learning.
[http://www.europeo.li](http://www.europeo.li)

They have another website, with video of people speaking and this article
about built languages is quite interesting: [https://www.europa-
lingua.org/en/tour-de-table-des-langues-c...](https://www.europa-
lingua.org/en/tour-de-table-des-langues-construites-quelle-langue-pour-
leurope/)

------
antognini
If anyone is interested in listening to a little more Esperanto, there's a
great Esperanto podcast: [http://pola-retradio.org/](http://pola-
retradio.org/)

It's been a long while since I listened to it, but the speech is very fluent
and it's about as close to as a "neutral" Esperanto accent as you'll get.

~~~
martinrue
As well as [https://kern.punkto.info](https://kern.punkto.info), which covers
lots of diverse subjects, including many technical ones.

------
travisgriggs
This being HN and all, I’m curious if anyone has any experience using
Esperanto as a base language for code. Are there any code bases out there
where the names of variables and functions and stuff are expressed in
Esperanto?

------
Koshkin
Sounds like Italian to me...

~~~
martinrue
I can assure you, it's Esperanto :)

~~~
anderiv
FYI, the date header on your (most excellent) post says "26 Oct 2019". :)

~~~
martinrue
Oops... I guess I was thinking about the future too much :)

~~~
gordonguthrie
Not often Esperantists get accused of living in the future tho ;-)

------
amp108
I have read the pronunciation is bad in the 1966 film _Incubus /Inkubo_, (cf.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubus_(1966_film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubus_\(1966_film\)))
but William Shatner acts like he's a native speaker in it.

------
jodrellblank
Bonan voĉon :)

Kiam oni finas frazon kun " ?", la ilo eraras, ekzemple: " _testing in
english?_ " funkcias, sed " _testing in english ?_ " malfunkcias.

(When you end a phrase with a space then a question mark, the tool gives an
error, "failed to fetch").

------
nydel
from my experience, most words in esperanto should have the emphasis on the
second-to-final syllable. this is a good guideline!

mi esTAS STUdando ... sounds weird. mi EStas stuDANdo ... sounds right.

this works almost everywhere because of esperanto's constructed nature and
following uniformity.

~~~
schoen
It's not just an informal guideline, but #10 of Zamenhof's 16 rules of
Esperanto grammar from the 1905 _Fundamento de Esperanto_.

[http://www.akademio-de-
esperanto.org/fundamento/gramatiko_an...](http://www.akademio-de-
esperanto.org/fundamento/gramatiko_angla.html)

------
thosakwe
Might be due to a lack of practical experience (or the low audio quality in
the video), but I found it difficult to understand what the human speakers
were saying in some parts.

As for Parol, though, it was clear as day, and very easy to understand. Nice
work!

------
tyingq
I hear something (tonal, tempo, not the words really) like the Spanish they
speak in Argentina. Like if someone tried mimicking them using nonsense
sounds. I guess that makes sense, since Argentina has significant Italian
influence?

------
darkhorn
Huh! Doesn't have vowel harmony. Not gonna work for me.

