

Esperanto could save 25 billion euros a year - Borkdude
http://dotsub.com/view/54b18453-7176-44ef-b686-952b239975f9

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tokenadult
The definitive online analysis of Esperanto is Learn Not To Speak Esperanto by
Justin Rye,

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

which is based on facts about how the language actually works. I recall that
soon after the change.org website originated, a group of Esperantists proposed
that Esperanto be made a mandatory second language in school instruction. It
became painfully apparent as that discussion unfolded that such a government
mandate was supported mostly so that the expensive hobby of Esperanto
involvement could become paying work for Esperanto hobbyists. If a language is
genuinely useful for human communication, it is possible to find paying work
teaching the language without any government mandate in the free-enterprise
system (as I have both as a teacher of Chinese in the United States and as a
teacher of English as a second language in Taiwan and in the United States).
There is NO WAY that there is any coherent economic analysis behind an
estimate that Esperanto saves any money for any purpose. There is not even
good neutral research (as contrasted with flawed studies

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

published in Esperantist publications) on how rapidly second-language speakers
acquire reasonable levels of Esperanto proficiency.

AFTER EDIT: As a metacomment on this discussion, I see the karma of this
comment bouncing up and down wildly. That's okay. I've never objected to
downvoting for disagreement, for reasons stated in a comment by pg back before
I was a participant on Hacker News.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171>

But I suggest that if you disagree with my opinion that Esperanto (a language
I have studied, among more than a dozen other languages) is not really very
useful as a world international auxiliary language, then you may as well make
use of the opportunity here to reply with thoughtful, verifiable reasons why
Esperanto is really better than the other candidates for international
communication, which happens every minute of every day in a variety of
languages already. An important fact to note is that the number of NEW high-
proficiency speakers of English (or Chinese) each year is greater than the
TOTAL number of Esperanto speakers that there has ever been in any period of
history, and that Esperanto is actually declining in use as a percentage of
all world language use for all purposes.

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bdfh42
English would save more - as it would require a much smaller education budget
and most of the infrastructure is in place already.

~~~
mhd
For the sake of the argument, I'll assume that it's actually possible (and
desirable) to unify languages in Europe.

A lot of the infrastructure could be used for any kind of language at all, as
long as you've got text books. If Esperanto really would be an order of
magnitude easier to learn, than that alone would make it much cheaper. You
might have some initial expenses, but you'll make up for them soon enough.

It also has the additional advantage of not being tied to a particular
country. You won't get a whole country's support for free, but you won't hear
people cry about cultural imperialism.

But yeah, this isn't exactly new. A lot of these arguments were in existence
when Esperanto was invented over a hundred years ago. Not much came from it.

~~~
bdfh42
The key point surely is that English is a living language that is adapting
constantly to reflect a world culture as it develops.

Plus there is a great body of existing English speakers in Europe matched by
qualified teachers in most secondary schools.

There might be cultural objections in parts of Europe to adopting the language
of another country but in reality - English is already the dominant business
language.

Having said all of that it would be sad if other European languages were not
maintained - you can say things in (for example) French that you just can't
say in English - well not without a lot more words and it still would not be
quite right. French is the second language of our family but I am sure this is
true for all other languages.

~~~
mhd
And a while back, French was the language of international diplomacy, Latin
the language of science and mathematics, Italian for music.

An argument could be made for all of them. Probably even for German, as it has
a lot of native speakers in Europe.

I don't think anything will remove English from its throne as the _de facto_
"lingua franca", but I think the chance of making it a true, unified _de jure_
version is about as unlikely as seeing Esperanto seated there.

And I don't quite get the "key point". We're not talking about Latin here,
updating Esperanto shouldn't pose a problem. Although it's more likely to be
in the French style, with a central committee.

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Borkdude
Reposted, because I first mistakenly posted the url in the "Text" textbox. The
old post with already one comment is here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3339859>

