
Today is Esperanto Day – here’s why I learned it - martinrue
https://martinrue.com/zamenhofa-tago-18/
======
kevinios
Perfect occasion to ask something that I didn't know who to ask: does anyone
here knows if it has ever been tried to "simplify" the visual aspect of
Esperanto, by getting rid of all accents? (ĉ, ĝ, ŭ, etc.)

I'm a French speaker and I know some Spanish, so I should be used to accents
and maybe biased towards the idea of having them as part of a language, but on
the contrary, I love that English has none:

\- Accents make a language look more complex at first glance, and therefore
less appealing to beginners (my opinion).

\- They make it harder to learn and type in the language on a keyboard, even a
virtual one. In my case, choosing a language for a keyboard is a big deal..
French one so that accents are easy to type, or English so that code is easy
to type? (I chose the latter).

I'm gonna risk a comparison here: it's a bit like programming languages
syntax, you can build an app with either Objective-C or Swift, but I suspect
many beginners would find Swift's syntax a bit less intimidating. Similarly,
someone looking at Esperanto might be immediately put off by seeing that they
will have to learn to type ĉ, ĝ, ŭ, etc.

I would love to see someone refactor Esperanto's syntax to remove its accent
while still keeping its capabilities.

1\. Is that even technically possible, or would that imply making words too
complex or adding new letters?

2\. Has this idea ever been debated, could I read about it anywhere? (on a
public forum/wiki maybe?)

Thanks!

\----------------------------

Edit: Thank you for your answers! So Esperanto has indeed been changed, and
each "constructed language derived from Esperanto" is called an Esperantido.

\-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformed_Esperanto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformed_Esperanto)
(this version has been created by Zamenhof himself and removing the accents is
part of the proposal.

\-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ido_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ido_language)

Would love to see a new crowdsourced and open-source reform on Github, in
2019!

~~~
snazz
For accents to be removed, there can't be any ambiguity. For instance, in
Spanish, the words cómo and como, or the many forms of "porque" (with very
different meanings) are a source of confusion for many speakers. This wouldn't
be any easier without accents. I think that a language would have to be
designed from the ground up to get rid of accents for this to be possible.

~~~
Swizec
A funny thing happened in Slovenian, particularly colloquial Slovenian. We
have accents. Many accents. Each vowel has several different pronunciations
and sometimes those completely change the meaning of a word. Or they make the
text flow better. Or it's an accent thing.

Either way the language has many accents in writing.

But over time, those accents are disappearing. Written Slovenian from the 19th
century is absolutely littered with them. Modern Slovenian in colloquial
writing is starting to lose even the č, š, ž accents.

Interestingly, people don't compensate with things like cz, or ch, or cx. They
rely on context informing the reader how to pronounce a word.

I believe the loss of accents on vowels happened because they're not _that_
necessary. The loss of č š ž is happening because of computers. Takes an extra
keypress to type those. On iOS/Android it takes a long press and who has time
for that when typing a text? Nobody. So we don't.

Could Spanish not work similarly? Do Spanish people write out all the accents
when sending a text?

I know my French girlfriend doesn't always write all her accents and French is
also chock full of accents.

~~~
lphnull
I could be wrong, but don't people have autocorrect on their phones that will
correct the character based on context? Is that even possible?

Lets say somebody wants to say "how I eat" in spanish. The correct way to do
it would be "cómo como". "cómo" means how, and "como" means "I eat". I
wouldn't make sense to say "como cómo", so therefore, autocorrect should, in
theory, feel free to correct all instances of "como como". Only until it
becomes an international household brand name will this ever be a problem- for
this one phrase at least.

~~~
Swizec
Afaik autocorrect doesn’t work for Slovenian. And even if it does, most people
I know have it disabled because our colloquialisms use a lot of English, some
German, plenty of Serbocroatian, and sometimes Italian. We often spell those
loan words our own way.

This combination of languages and intentionally incorrect spellings makes
autocorrect total trash.

------
4thaccount
Glad to see this on HN. I'm not fluent in Esperanto, but the 20 or so hours
I've put into it, I can read, write, and speak much better than I can in
Spanish (where I've gone through 3 years of formal education).

The reason is that Esperanto doesn't have irregular anything, drops out
unnecessary things, easy phonetics, and introduces devices to make things
easier. For example, all nouns end in "o", questions usually start with "cu".
Also, the vocabulary you need is reduced by marking certain things as
opposites (if you know the word for good "bona" the word for bad is "Mal" \+
"bona" or "malbona".

I still have a ways to go to learn the language, but I figure I have more
chance of learning it than other languages I'm interested in like Spanish and
Swedish (relatively easy for native English speakers) and Hungarian and
Finnish (far beyond my wildest grasps).

There are not many Esperanto speakers you'll meet on the subway, but there is
a vibrant online community and international events.

It's beneficial to us in the USA and the UK that English is the lingua Franca.
What if the tables were turned and we had to learn Mandarin? The Esperanto
language was eventually repurposed as an international auxillary language. So
everyone learns their native tongue and international discussions (like the
U.N.) are all done in Esperanto and you don't need armies of translators. It
will never happen, but I really like the concept.

~~~
philsnow
You must accept that Esperanto is many times easier for westerners to learn
than anybody else, though, right? If we really wanted a "neutral language" for
the vast majority of people we should have based the language on Malagasy or
something.

~~~
cageface
I've been learning Vietnamese for the past few years and I have to say it's
been very refreshing to realize how little of the complex grammar typical in
Western languages you really need to communicate. Vietnamese throws verb
conjugation, tenses, plurals, possessives, etc out the window and is still a
perfectly expressive language. I understand a lot more why people often reject
the idea that Esperanto is a universal language because it brings a ton of
grammatical baggage that, for example, many Asian languages don't have.

~~~
kurtisc
I've been learning for a few months. So far my favourite parts are that the
word for right (direction) is the same as a word for right (correct), that
months and days are named 'Nth month/day', and that refrigerator is 'cold
cabinet'.

~~~
cageface
Yeah Vietnamese is often a very literal language. The names of many Vietnamese
dishes are just a description of what's in the dish and how it was prepared.
"Bún thịt nướng", for example, just means noodles with grilled meat. You can
handle past and future tenses with just a couple of modifier words. In a lot
of ways it's a pretty elegant language and the only really hard thing about it
is getting the tones down and learning all the slang people use in everyday
conversation.

------
bluedevil2k
I wonder if a better solution for a "universal" language would be a Simplified
English, where the English language as spoken in the US/UK is greatly
simplified in terms of rules, spelling etc. Go with the Esperanto idea of a
common verb tense rule (I go, He go -> I goed, He goed), and clean up the
spelling (tough -> tuf, though -> tho). Most people in the world have a grasp
of English based on the Internet and entertainment, maybe making it even
easier to learn would help them become proficient in it.

~~~
kevinios
I would love that, but there is one potential issue: English is really hard to
pronounce well, and therefore it takes years to understand it well. There are
many ways to pronounce the same combination of letters, depending which word
they are part of (like "ough", etc.). Words have emphasis that also make them
more difficult to pronounce.

Many non-native English speaker I know (myself included) still have a hard
time understanding some English words after 15-20 years or more of English as
a second language and having lived in English-speaking countries for years. A
native English speaker could still pronounce a word and they would have very
little idea how to write it, and therefore won't be able to look it up in a
dictionary.

On the contrary, after a few minutes/hours of learning Spanish pronunciation,
one is usually able to write words that they hear pronounced slowly, since
they are written as they are pronounced and there is only "one" way to
pronounce them. Same for Esperanto I believe, or language like Korean
(although it's a different alphabet so it takes more time for anyone used to
the latin alphabet, but it is still phonetic).

~~~
currymj
As linguists will sometimes joke, English spelling is extremely useful, you
can look at an English word and tell exactly how it was pronounced 700 years
ago.

Even native English speakers struggle with it. This is the so-called "curse of
the autodidact": when people have read quite a bit on a specialized topic but
never had a spoken conversation about it, and mispronounce technical words or
place the stress on the wrong syllable.

~~~
kevinios
Interesting!

------
ebzzry
Estas interese, ke je Hacker News ĉi tiu afiŝo atingis.

La parolantojn de aliaj lingvoj, preciple la angla-parolantojn mi ne plu
kuraĝigas por Esperanton lerni. Estas malŝparo de energio. Anstataŭe, la
lingvon mi uzas sen tiu celo.

Bedaŭrinde, mi ne certas se bonan diskuton pri tiu temo ni povas havi ĉi tie.
Se estas parolantoj ĉi tie, mi anticipas ke la nivelo malaltas. Espereble, pli
fortan diskuton mi povas havi aŭ vidi.

Kompreneble, mi povas konsenti ke fortas Esperanto. Min mem mi farigis kavio.
Mi volis scii, se fakte utilas tiu lingvo. Post preskaŭ kvar monatoj, mi
konsciis, ke mi pravis. Jes, fakte funkcias Esperanto. Jes, eĉ la plej
bizarajn ideojn mi povas esprimi Esperante. Jes, la lingvon mi subtenos en
miaj restantaj jaroj.

------
asutekku
I love the concept of esperanto but to be honest there are no practical uses
for it. Fun language and it teaches you the concepts of others but as I said,
not that useful.

~~~
mycorrhizal
One practical use that has been studied (only a little) is to use Esperanto as
a stepping stone to learning other languages. Essentially the idea is that you
can first spend a few months learning Esperanto and that might actually speed
up the total time for learning a "third" language. I believe school systems in
both the UK and France have experimented with this, both with promising
results.

~~~
yorwba
When you actually look at those "promising results" you'll notice that they
come about by cherry-picking, not controlling for confounders (like Esperanto
teachers using better teaching methods) and wishful thinking. See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14848019](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14848019)
, which I wrote some time ago when the same topic came up.

I don't doubt that Esperanto is easy to learn, but there's no evidence to
suggest that learning Esperanto helps more with learning another language than
spending the same time learning that language instead.

~~~
myth2018
I'm not aware of any controlled studies bringing evidence on this as well. But
there seems to be lots of anecdotal evidence.

One may argue that people who learn Esperanto are naturally inclined to
language learning anyway, but what you actually see is people who allegedly
have always struggled with languages and, after giving Esperanto a try, they
begin to find more effective ways of learning foreign languages in general.

It worked for me at least.

------
PaulHoule
Sometimes I think something gets talked about in science fiction and then it
gets stuck in people's heads.

Harry Harrison talked about Esperanto in the "Stainless Steel Rat" books and
that is why it is so much better known than Interlingua

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

which is really a cleaned-up Latin that you might already know how to read if
you've been exposed to Romance languages much at all.

------
jccalhoun
The link in the article about native speakers is interesting.

1\. All "native" speakers are actually raised bilingual. and 2\. George Soros
was raised learning esperanto. I am surprised that there isn't some conspiracy
about Esperanto

~~~
chillacy
I've met native speakers, and some things surprised me:

1\. Some still have a heavy accent. In fact it tends to be the accent of their
parents. (all of us have an accent, it just happens that some of our accents
are considered standard english)

2\. They tend to be fluent but fluency is also a function of frequency of use,
and some non-native speakers reach higher fluency by living with other
esperanto speakers and using it daily

3\. They all type using `x` notation, since they were typing Eo before Eo
keyboards existed, so gxis instead of ĝis

------
xiaq
If you are into artificial languages, also check out lfn
([https://elefen.org](https://elefen.org)). Like Esperanto, it also features
regular spelling and simple syntax, but one key difference is that its
vocabulary is almost entirely Romance; it is a artificial Romance creolo. As a
result, it is very easy for native speakers of Romance languages (French,
Italian, Spanish, etc.) to understand, and it can also serve as a "gateway
language" for learning other Romance languages.

~~~
whatshisface
The posted link ([https://elefen.org](https://elefen.org)) isn't working for
me. Here is another link:
[http://elefen.org/introdui/en.html](http://elefen.org/introdui/en.html)

~~~
xiaq
Hmm, [http://elefen.org](http://elefen.org) should work.

~~~
whatshisface
It appears that https is not working, but http is. That's not very good
because it exposes the details about your visit to observation.

------
Koshkin
The vocabulary resembles a big pile of stolen goods.

~~~
myth2018
Well, but probably most of the languages work this way, maybe all of them.
English vocabulary resembles a pile of goods stolen from french, germanic
languages and so on.

~~~
krapp

        "The problem with defending the purity of 
        the English language is that English is 
        about as pure as a cribhouse whore. 
    
        We don't just borrow words; on occasion, 
        English has pursued other languages down 
        alleyways to beat them unconscious 
        and rifle their pockets for
        new vocabulary."
    
        - James Nicoll

------
antognini
One of the nice surprises I had after learning Esperanto a while back was that
there is a small but vibrant literature of original novels and poetry in
Esperanto. Especially in the first half of the 20th century quite a few gems
were written. I've been able to read works about life in Russia at the turn of
the 19th century, a Czech Jew's experiences during WWI, and a collection of
short stories written by Chinese authors shortly after the Cultural
Revolution, all without need of a translator. One Esperanto poet, William
Auld, was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times before he
died about a decade ago.

------
em-bee
over time, several flaws in the language have been pointed out, and proposals
to fix them, as well as alternate approaches to an auxiliary language have
been made.

and while it can be said that esperanto was not yet able to appeal to the
majority, it is wildly more successful than any other attempt.

why is that?

why have none of the alternatives even made it out of the experimental stage?

with any of the well meant proposals in this discussion, it is important to
understand what would make those proposals succeed. (and by succeed i mean at
first reach a speaker-base that equals that of esperanto)

i believe that the results up to now indicate that the quality of the language
is not the issue.

esperanto is like python 2, but in a world where everyone prefers to use php.

or is it?

are the flaws in esperanto what's holding back further growth? do we need to
start from scratch, and go through the painful stages of initial growth
esperanto has already been through?

------
billfruit
Did duolingo remove their Esperanto course? It was there like 2 years ago, but
I don't see it now.

~~~
Typhon
No, no it's still there at
[https://www.duolingo.com/courses](https://www.duolingo.com/courses)

------
InfiniteBeing
I got as far as reading gerda malaperis in esperanto, but then I was done with
the language. I didn't want to dedicate anymore time to it.

------
zozbot123
Relevant and entertaining: JBR's "Ranto" about Esperanto -
[http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/](http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/)

(you can try https, but it was acting up for me somehow. Sorry!)

~~~
myth2018
Yeah, the article is a bit too long, I haven't gone through it yet but I
intend to. But I disagree about a few points I've read so far.

Esperanto case declinations consist basically of marking direct objects with
an -n suffix. You forget it sometimes, and many jokes among Esperanto speakers
are about forgetting the accusative, but it is not that hard and gives you
some nice flexibilities regarding word ordering.

I don't remember of adjectival concords in Esperanto, but I'm not a
linguistics expert, I speak Esperanto but maybe there is something there which
I haven't realized, or some rule that maybe has become second nature to me due
to my mother tongue.

It sounds indeed more familiar to european-languages speakers but well,
chineses find Esperanto easy so I don't know..

The notation may be a bit clumsy for keyboard users, of course, but one has to
consider that computers with ansi keyboards didn't exist by then and, anyway,
there is already a widely used convention to overcome the lack of those two
funny symbols: to simply use an "x" after the targeted letter.

I admire Esperanto's ability of being such a rant magnet. When it comes to
other languages, people usually simply don't learn them when they don't feel
interested enough.

~~~
jcranmer
When I was in elementary school, we were taught English grammar in English
class. Actually, we weren't. We were taught Early Modern Latin grammar using
the English language, and everyone pretended that English was somehow a simple
variant of Early Modern Latin.

Why were we taught such an egregious abomination? Because the traditional
study of grammar was in the study of a very rigorous classical Latin and
Greek, which was extended to vernacular languages by the Late Middle Ages. For
the presciptivists of the Early Modern, it was a short step to use the same
framework to try to describe English--and when the framework is woefully
underequipped to deal with English grammar, they simply declared that such
constructs shouldn't be used because you can't do it in Latin. Linguists only
really developed the capability to tackle English about 100 years ago, and
primary education still hasn't caught up.

The complaint in the rant on Esperanto essentially boils down to pointing out
that Zamenhof's idea of what constitutes a sufficient description of a grammar
is following that ancient underpowered Latin grammar rubric. The second major
theme is that Esperanto doesn't look much beyond Romance, Germanic, and Slavic
languages, and its considerations for what's important, what's omitted, and
what's variant is largely derived from consideration of how those languages
are similar or different.

~~~
myth2018
Uhm.. I tend to disagree, I think this rant is not based on such elaborate and
architected arguments. Are there some references about them?

The criticism I usually hear is something in the lines of Esperanto has been
defeated in the international language championship and now refuses to shut
the mouth up and go back home.

~~~
jcranmer
The author says somewhere in that rant explicitly that Esperanto is a
Romance/Germanic/Slavic creole and there are already too many of those, which
is a pretty clear restatement of what I referred to as the second theme.

Most of the rant itself is essentially a lot of nitpicking at the corners of
the language. For example, the complaints about the passive voice structure or
the gerunds in Esperanto, or the entire discussion of the difference between
tense and aspect. This discussion can generally be simplified as "linguistics
is more complex than is presented by its author."
[http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/b.html](http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/b.html) gives a more
thorough elaboration on this topic in particular by going line-by-line through
the Fundamento and pointing out some of the misconceptions of linguistics
embedded in it (among other things).

~~~
myth2018
Those are very interesting theoretical points, but in practice nobody who
actually speak the language complains about them. So, I don't know if they are
relevant on a practical standpoint.

One may demonstrate that Zamenhof overpromoted his product (maybe out of
ignorance, given Zamenhof was an amateur linguist). But the thing works
beautifully well anyway and the criticism around there seems not to care about
this.

~~~
em-bee
the rant does contain a number of interesting arguments, when each is looked
at by itself. but for most arguments there is no attempt at actually solving
the discussed problem, so we are stuck taking the authors word for it.

a few are obvious and really should be solved. gender neutrality for example.
given todays climate, that is a real problem that other languages like english
and german are dealing with now, and esperanto will have to follow suit.

but most others are more an issue of the perfect being an enemy of the good.

sure, those issues could be fixed, but is it worth the effort?

from an idealistic perspective maybe yes, but as long as english dominates,
and there are no viable alternatives to esperanto that actually are better,
the whole argument is rather moot.

either solve the problems and come up with a better solution, or put up with
what we have.

everyone else is putting up with english, so surely dealing with the issues
that esperanto has can't be that hard.

for certain, a better language is conceivable, but i'll rather use esperanto
despite its few faults than wait for that perfect language that may never
materialize. and if it does, then knowing esperanto will make it easier to
judge said new language.

------
qwerty456127
I've once learnt Spanish and found it the easiest language I've ever seen,
easier than English, it took just 2 weeks to learn. Then I've started learning
Esperanto (as the idea of engineered languages (or whatever) amazes me, I feel
like we should engineer everything) with DuoLingo (I don't happen to know any
better Esperanto course) and it felt easy yet it was just a tiny bit easier
than Spanish so I was wondering why do we need a new easy language when there
already is one spoken by so many people (and it also is very similar to it)
but continued learning. Then I've found out Esperanto has grammatical cases
and stopped, cases make me panic. I still feel like I would like to learn
Esperanto to fluency once as I adore its spirit of technocracy, borderlessness
and defiance of nationalism.

~~~
amaccuish
> it took just 2 weeks to learn

How are you measuring having "learnt" a language? Because IMHO that's an
incredible feet that almost requires you not to sleep! Or do you just mean
learning the grammar?

~~~
qwerty456127
I mean learning it to the point when you can say anything you might want to
tell somebody you meet in real life (not in a philosophical discussion club
however), looking up some words in a dictionary occasionally: the grammar +
basic vocabulary (+ phonetics, orthography etc of course). It is worth
mentioning, however, that I've already forgotten almost everything I've learnt
of Spanish as practice is vital for remembering and I had absolutely no
practice after learning it.

~~~
drugme
_looking up some words in a dictionary occasionally..._

 _It is worth mentioning, however, that I 've already forgotten almost
everything I've learnt of Spanish_

Well that's the whole point -- you didn't really "learn it", then. You just
learned the rough outlines of it.

~~~
qwerty456127
"looking up some words in a dictionary OCCASIONALLY". There is no single
language I can speak/write without looking up some words in a dictionary ever.

Is there a definition of having learnt a language or of "the rough outlines"?
As for me having learnt a language means being able to communicate in it
fluently (not necessarily in a finely literate manner) and for "the rough
outlines" \- do we ever learn anything but the rough outlines of anything? I
can't even say I know anything but the rough outlines of my native language
(it had never felt any close to possible for me to write it without mistakes)
or of English.

~~~
drugme
_Do we ever learn anything but the rough outlines of anything?_

Actually, people do -- those who become, if not necessarily world-reknown
experts -- at least generally recognized as competent professionals in just
about any field.

For example, if you've managed to successfully operate a well-regarded
restaurant in a major city for a significant length of time (10 years, say) --
it's safe to say that you've moved beyond learning the "rough outlines" of
that field - but in fact have mastered the core material.

As for learning a language - the metrics would probably be (1) fluency (not
needing a dictionary to make yourself understood 99% of the time, in quotidian
contexts at least) and (2) durability (not forgetting everything you've
learned after a few weeks or months). That is to say - they've mastered the
core material.

Most language learners are on a spectrum somewhere between these endpoints
(and your English is really quite good, BTW). The whole point it, it sounds
like your exposure to Spanish was much closer to learning the "rough outlines"
of it than having "mastered the core".

Which is generally what people mean by saying "I learned X" (as opposed to "I
learned a bit of X").

~~~
qwerty456127
Nice point.

> not needing a dictionary to make yourself understood 99% of the time, in
> quotidian contexts at least ... (and your English is really quite good, BTW)

But I still had to google the definition of "quotidian" \- although my guess
of what does it mean given the context was correct I had never met it before.
A nice addition to my vocabulary, thanks :-)

> The whole point it, it sounds like your exposure to Spanish was much closer
> to learning the "rough outlines" of it than having "mastered the core".

That's why I've said I've learnt it, not mastered it. I doubt I'm going to
master any language ever. Perhaps I could master my native language if I were
interested enough. It seems people capable of mastering a foreign language are
rare and they usually work at intelligence agencies AFAIK.

> Which is generally what people mean by saying "I learned X" (as opposed to
> "I learned a bit of X").

IMHO saying "I learned a bit of X" would mean "I can say 'hello', 'bye', 'my
name is' and 'I'd like a cup of coffee' in it", having intuitive understanding
of the language grammar and being able to express any quotidian idea in it so
you would be comfortable living in the country, would feel no "language
barrier" and would be able to read a local newspaper qualifies for having
learnt (not "mastered") a language.

~~~
throwaway675309
As you mentioned earlier that English is not your native language, allow me as
a native English speaker to affirm the previous reply. In English, when
somebody states that they "learned X" \- while not necessarily implying
mastery, certainly suggests a strong understanding of something which is
emphasized by the "past simple" tense of the statement.

~~~
drugme
Yup - the past simple almost always means "did X to completion, more or less".

E.g. "ate dinner", "wrote a program", "invaded France", etc. Or "learned
Spanish".

Some verbs have indefinite scope in this regard, however - for example
"study", which is similar to "learn" but more open-ended.

So to say "I studied German" doesn't imply anything about how successful the
ultimate outcome was. But to say "I learned German" definitely implies you
became at least reasonably proficient at it.

