
Esperanto: the language that never was - samclemens
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/features/the-language-that-never-was-esperanto-languages
======
zeemonkee3
To what extent are many languages today "artificial"? Modern Hebrew was
resurrected from a language unspoken for millennia outside of religious
services and given an up-to-date vocabulary. Shakespeare and Elias Lonnrot
invented thousands of everyday words used today in English and Finnish
respectively. Standard German and Italian are products of their
unification/nationalist movements, supplanting old regional dialects, as is
the Greek _Katharevousa_ (official language until 1976).

Esperanto and other conlangs are more an extreme case, but there's
surprisingly little that's "natural" about the "natural" languages either.

~~~
gkya
Most standardised languages are sorts of conlangs. I can be a testimone for
Turkish, where the language was cleared from persian and arabic loanwords by
very oppressing revolutionary govt action. So much so that one generation had
difficult time talking to grandparents, they say.

~~~
brian_cloutier
To add to this, I met someone who claims she cannot read Neitzsche because she
doesn't know most of the terms recent Turkish translations use and can't find
any older translations.

~~~
gkya
She's right, especially in philosophy, every translator invents his own
language, and never care enough to inform the user with a translator's note or
whatnot. I had my worst experience till now with translations of Lajos Egri
and Schopenhauer. Sometimes it's easier to just learn the original language...

~~~
brian_cloutier
This is a little odd but I stalked you a little and think you've made some
cool comments. I'm also in Istanbul, would you be down to grab coffee
sometime? I would send you an email but your profile doesn't have any contact
information.

------
jalami
I like the idea around Lojban[0]. Esperanto feels like another standard to
replace the 99 others where lojban seems to be more than that. I don't like
inconsistency in structured language and there's always glaring inconsistency
in natural spoken language. If I learn a linguistic rule that is only
applicable in ~70% of cases, its becomes a mental stressor.

However, I'm not certain any secondary language can ever really become a
universal language. Until there's direct economic force behind adoption, I see
it as a hobby language. I am also not sure any constructed language can remain
_pure_ when it becomes popular. Languages, dialects, idioms etc. like to drift
between isolated or semi-isolated groups. As communication and transportation
become cheaper though, who knows how prevalent that will be in the future.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban)

~~~
pathsjs
Where do you find Esperanto inconsistent?

~~~
iso-8859-1
Esperanto is a compromise since it tries to be familiar AND logical. The word
ovaro "collection of eggs" pointlessly duplicates the meaning of nesto "nest".

From:
[http://miresperanto.com/konkurentoj/not_my_favourite.htm](http://miresperanto.com/konkurentoj/not_my_favourite.htm)

~~~
thomasfoster96
What makes you think 'nest' and 'collection of eggs' are synonyms? True, it's
common for a collection of eggs to be found in a nest, but they don't mean the
same thing.

------
jhbadger
Esperanto was the first (beyond my native, obviously) language I learned about
twenty years ago. What I enjoyed about it then (and still do today, although
I've learned a couple of natural languages since) was that I could learn it to
a useful level (as in reading novels without a dictionary) in probably a
couple of hundred hours. I still haven't managed that in other languages with
much more study even in ones where I have reasonable conversational ability.

To use a hacker's analogy, learning a natural language is like learning C++,
and learning Esperanto is like learning a scripting language like Ruby or
Python.

~~~
gkya
That's mostly about how you study. My approach is sort of Lisp-like, and I
become comfortable very early on with a mostly exploratory and immersive
process.

------
LeoPanthera
Interlingua is designed to be understandable by anyone who speaks one of a few
common European languages.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua)

~~~
geowwy
There is also Folkspraak which does the same thing but with Germanic languages
instead of Latin languages.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folkspraak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folkspraak)

If you speak English it's pretty easy to get the gist of both.

 _Interlingua_

    
    
        Patre nostre, qui es in le celos,
        que tu nomine sia sanctificate;
        que tu regno veni;
        que tu voluntate sia facite
        como in le celo, etiam super le terra.
    

_Folkspraak_

    
    
        Ons Fater, whem leven in der Himmel,
        Mai din Name werden helig,
        Mai din Konigdom kommen,
        Mai din will werden,
        in der Erd und in der Himmel.

~~~
vintermann
I recommend Arika Orkent's "In the land of invented languages" for people who
are interested in the history of invented languages. Esperanto is still the
only which is in any sort of regular use, though.

~~~
lmm
Klingon now has more speakers than Esperanto, no?

~~~
arundelo
Esperanto has way way more speakers than Klingon.

"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]

"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]

[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)

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Studies have shown Esperanto is a useful aide for teaching languages. For
example, teach students Esperanto for 1 year and French for 3 years, and they
end up speaking French better than the group who just learned French for 4
years. Learning one language makes learning other languages easier, and as a
constructed language, Esperanto is very regular and thus easy to learn.

See:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Espera...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto)

~~~
jmfayard
That's important because IMHO the most important point in the language debate
is that we must become much more efficient language learners.

A part of my experience is that people start with grossly inefficient methods
to speak foreign languages. Spend way too much time. Discard it as too
difficult or not worth it.

Another part of my experience is that speaking a foreign languages is actually
totally doable. We human beings are naturally skilled at it.

So what about esperanto? (One my languages).

There is still this misconception (also in this comments section) that it had
the goal to do to existing languages what the euro did to existing currencies.
That would have been silly, fortunately it has been a non-goal from the start.

What makes much more sense is that since it has a much nicer learning curve,
young people and monoglots can use it as a testbed to get how to learn a
language. Then reach much quicker a level where they can have a casual
conversation in that or those other languages they are interested in.

That strategy work actually quite well, but require a non-conformist mind.
People have a malthusian approach to language learning and _will_ tell you
that you are just being silly.

------
yoz-y
One big problem I see with many of these artificial languages is that they do
not put the ease of pronunciation at the topmost priority. I think it would be
interesting to make a study on what sounds can anybody produce. It is also
important to study the different subtleties that people perceive as different
sounds. For example in my experience the Chinese have a hard time
understanding you if you mangle the different tones they use for vowels,
however they completely ignore the 'length' of a tone which is very often used
to distinguish words in the slavic languages.

~~~
yoplait_
Esperanto is very easy to pronounce even for Chinese

~~~
yoz-y
But is it for Japanese? In general I think that an artificial language should
never put two consonants together.

~~~
yoplait_
I only have second-hand accounts from proselytes, and they say esperanto is
nowhere as bad as English for Chinese, Japanese and Koreans. Just google
around if you want to read from them. English is so difficult to pronounce
correctly than my prior is to believe them.

~~~
talideon
One infamous example being the consonant car crash that is 'strengths'.

------
dctoedt
Esperanto's underlying desire for language simplification is still worth
keeping in mind. Perhaps a standardized, simplified, "minimum viable _English_
" could be identified _and declared to be socially acceptable_ "because we say
so." Non-native speakers might find such an MVE to be easier to learn and more
comfortable to use.

The easy part would be to develop a set of tweaks to the more-arcane
grammatical- and spelling rules of English, using crowd-sourced suggestions.
For example --- and as a language purist it pains me deeply to say this:

\+ Allow _they_ and _their_ (and even _there_ ) to be used as singular generic
pronouns; so, for example, _Any student can learn to speak English if they put
there mind to it._

\+ Allow _there_ to be used as a possessive (vice _their_ ).

\+ Allow consistent apostrophes for possessives; so, for example, _The spread
of English is hindered by some of it 's fussy rules_ (which in currently-
standard usage is incorrect).

This might be a useful project for someone working in linguistics: Collect and
organize real-world examples of how people actually use English in non-
standard ways, then _propose a subset of those examples as MVE._

The hard part would be convincing the world that it's just as socially
acceptable to speak and write MVE as it is to speak and write "standard"
English.

~~~
dempseye
Similar work has been done.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English)

~~~
vintermann
A common accusation against Esperanto is that a lot of the complexity it takes
away from grammar, it sneaks back in the form of idioms - but that's nothing
to Basic English.

------
Nadya
The only flaw with Esperanto is that it is a language. Languages hate staying
still unless they're dead. I say this as someone who spent several months
studying Esperanto and holding a few conversations. :) I treated it more as a
"springboard" to language learning. Learning a second language is tough -
learning a third language less so! So picking an easy second language, I
found, helped speed up language acquisition (which was my goal).

Languages naturally change over time as the population invents slangs and
irregulars, typically out of laziness. Certain vowels will be mixed or
slurred, parts of words might change entirely, etc.

Even if Esperanto was taught to every individual as a second language -
various regions would invent their own slangs based on the "native language of
the region". Borrowing loanwords from their parent language and creating
various dialects of Esperanto that may or may not be understandable with other
dialects to varying degrees.

I highly recommend learning Esperanto to anyone interested in learning a
second language - to use it as a springboard to your third.

------
isidor3
Ithkuil is my favorite conlang, it has an amazing amount of depth that can be
presented in surprisingly few syllables. It was designed to be a sort of uber-
language. Have the most amount of information in the least number of syllables
while allowing absolutely no ambiguity. It also attempts to be somewhat
tailored to map to how we naturally think about concepts, and a lot of
information you have to get from context in languages like English are made
explicit in the grammatical forms of the language. I think the grammar of it
is really something special, however, it was never designed to be either
learnable or really even speakable, which is a shame. I think given the right
overcoat the grammar could form the base of a surprisingly usable language.

------
TwoBit
Esperanto's design may have been a good idea 100 years ago. But its design is
too shortsighted for this modern world. All it solves is spelling and
pronunciation problems, when it could do so much more.

~~~
pathsjs
Not quite. It also has a very regular grammar, handles regular composition of
words (skribmaŝino, bovido, ...), regular formation of words like [nowhere,
someone, whatever], simplifies the formation of verb tenses (also handling
things like the future of the past which do not exist in other languages), has
a choice of roots that makes it familiar for people knowing any indoeuropean
language, and more

------
INTPenis
It's a wonderful and practical idea to try and standardize language, albeit a
naive one.

IMO it's pointless to try and debate the design of esperanto, or any other
forced language. Because it's just that, it's forced. I just don't believe you
can force a language on people.

Languages are as naturally ocurring as anything else in nature. They evolve
organically. If we were hypothetically able to force esperanto on a part of
the populace then that very same populace would evolve the language and the
wordlists would be rewritten by the people introducing new words.

~~~
majewsky
> I just don't believe you can force a language on people.

Forcing English on large parts of the world seems to have worked very well. ;)

~~~
olakease
Only for the native english speakers. Others we must do a tremendous effort.
Even worse, in a discussion —because you are not native— you feel always
weaker. So my point will be for a non natural language. Easy to learn for
everybody so we all play with the same rules.

[EDIT] The idea is not to replace natural languages, but to pick an extra non-
natural language as an international one

~~~
avar
As a non-native English speaker I think this is a horrible idea. So rather
than for us to all communicate in English which is spoken natively by around
half a billion, you'd rather international communication take place in a
language nobody speaks natively?

That seems like a horrible idea. When the lingua franca is some common
natively spoken language at least people who can confidently correct you
exist.

Having everyone speak a non-native language would just lead to a regression
towards the mean, and such a language would be much harder to learn than any
existing language because it wouldn't come with a culture. There would be very
few books, movies etc. in that language.

~~~
olakease
English is the third most spoken language. There is more people speaking
Spanish and almost double speaking Chinese. More or less 1 of every 7 people
in the world speaks Chinese. Should we make Chinese the lingua franca? Why is
english better? Also, there are more people speaking Spanish than English.

~~~
avar
One of the inherent fallacies in your initial comment that I didn't address,
but which you've brought up here: Nobody makes anything the lingua franca,
it's something that happens organically.

I'm sure you're as aware as I am why English is the current lingua franca.
It's mostly a historical accident, and it's what we've got.

Whether the lingua franca might be English, Chinese or whatever is unrelated
to your initial comment, which is what I was replying to.

There you were proposing that everyone should learn some artificial language
for international communication. I think this is a bad idea for the reasons I
stated above.

Now instead of defending your argument that we should all use some constructed
language you're off on a digression about why English and not Chinese, both of
which are natural languages.

~~~
olakease
I'm still defending my argument. And for that reason I'm saying that "English
is already spoken by X people" is not argument. And that is the argument I
always hear about this topic.

My argument is that to learn and master a natural language will take years
—and even with a lot of effort— you will probably not master it. Which makes
English an elitist skill. Should the international language be an elitist
thing? No, it should not. If your mother tongue is a Germanic one then you
will find English quite easy. Otherwise not.

Non natural languages like esperanto are easier to learn and master. In a
couple of months you are used to them.

~~~
avar
I wasn't making any argument for why English _should_ be the lingua franca. In
any case all such arguments are academic, it's not like there's going to be
some meeting where the lingua franca gets decided.

Let's say that there was such a meeting and "we" all decided that we're going
to speak Klingon or whatever as a lingua franca. How do you think that would
work? People wouldn't care what the decreed language is, maybe you'd have UN
meetings in it, pass laws to teach it in school in lots of nations or
something.

It would probably become even more of an elitist skill than just using a
language that already has lots of native and non-native speakers already and
lots of culture to go along with it, just like Latin was back when we
effectively had this sort of arrangement, sans the constructed language.

Finally, if you really haven't heard a better reason for why English became
the current dominant language than "it's already spoken by X people, but how
come not Chinese and Spanish" you really owe it to yourself to read some of
the things that come up when you Google the likes of "history of lingua
franca" etc.

~~~
olakease
What makes English an elitist skill is precisely its natural language nature.
I hope you had some time to visit europe. All of us get English as a second or
third language at school.In european countries were films and tv programs are
translated to their own language is not that easy to find common people that
can speak English beyond the pretty basic. And this is a reality in countries
like Italy, Spain, France or Germany.

In such countries, when you want to learn english —and you do not have a lot
of money— your best deal is to travel to UK and get a crappy job so you can
learn the language.

If instead of a natural language they got taught a non natural one, they will
not need to that, because one of their advantages is that you get them really
fast.

~~~
avar

        > I hope you had some time to visit europe.
    

I've lived there my entire life, and not in native English speaking countries.
As I said at the start of this thread I'm not a native English speaker.

    
    
        > In european countries were films and tv
        > programs are translated to their own language.
    

This isn't the case in all European countries. I don't think Germany, Italy,
Spain etc. are doing themselves any favors by doing this. Not dubbing your
movies is the perfect opportunity to teach your population the lingua franca,
they're missing out, and it shows in their English skills.

I didn't grow up with dubbed movies, and I think it helped by language skills
immensely.

    
    
        > your best deal is to travel to UK and get a
        > crappy job so you can learn the language.
    

Plenty of people learn English a near-native level without living in a
natively English speaking country. I did, just watch some TV (not dubbed) and
read lots of books (not translated).

    
    
        > If instead of a natural language they got
        > taught a non natural one.
    

I guess, maybe, but really this is never going to happen, we might as well
fantasize over how easy it would be if we did away with this whole
communication via sound waves fad, and just all learned the same sign language
instead.

We live in an increasingly globalized world, English is the de-facto world
language by sheer inertia. States that don't have it as a native language that
aren't teaching their children it at a native level are at a distinct
disadvantage.

------
Apocryphon
I've been trying out different Romance languages, and have heard that learning
Esperanto makes learning such languages easier. Does anyone know if that's
true or not?

~~~
benbreen
Honestly, for your purposes it sounds like learning basic Latin would be a
much better choice. Having Latin syntax and vocab in the back of my mind
definitely helped when I was learning French and Portuguese (even though my
Latin is terrible, just knowing things like verb conjugations helped a lot
with seeing the patterns in what initially looked like arbitrary differences
between the two languages).

~~~
wolfgke
Being native in German I found having to learn Latin in school didn't help me
in any sense for French, Spanish or Portuguese. If you like Latin, feel free
to learn it. But I consider it as a waste of time, in particular if you just
want it to learn as a foundation for modern foreign languages.

~~~
barking
Makes sense to me what you say. People often say that knowing latin is good if
you want to study medicine. It's ridiculous. Learning a list of 100 relevant
latin root-words would likely achieve as much.

------
barking
Too lazy to check if it's still a thing but iirc way back there used to be
shortwave radio programmes in esperanto

~~~
urubu
China Radio International still has daily transmissions on shortwave. I
listened to one yesterday night, as it happens.

~~~
barking
I am impressed by both you and china radio. Are you part of a community of
esperanto speakers or is it a solitary pursuit?

~~~
urubu
Listening to languages I'm vaguely familiar with - I also like the BBC in
Persian and Hausa - seems to have become part of my evening routine (I work as
a technical translator). I learned Esperanto on a whim in uni in the 80s but
haven't used it actively ever since.

------
tokenadult
There are two different ways to treat Esperanto, both of which come up in the
comments. One way is to take Esperanto seriously as a proposal for a world
auxiliary language that people from all over the world can use for
intercommunication if they didn't grow up speaking a common native language.
This first way of treating Esperanto for discussion immediately runs into
practical issues and real-world trade-offs. As the article kindly submitted
here for our discussion notes, "Because, of course, the massive, trumpeting,
stamping, ear-flapping, blanka elefanto in the room is… English; English;
English; the English language; the widespread global adoption thereof." It is
already well known that the plurality of daily use of English around the world
is use of English as an "interlanguage," communicating among persons who are
not all native speakers of English, including millions of conversations a day
in English that don't include any native speakers of English.[1] I have
personally overheard hundreds of conversations in English in multiple
countries among people who didn't grow up speaking English, and English is of
course the interlanguage of online discussion sites such as Hacker News. (I
have also overheard, and participated in, many hundreds of conversations in
Modern Standard Chinese that include no native speakers of that language, as
Chinese is my most proficient second language.)

For practical value for a language learner, incentives matter. People respond
to incentives in deciding which languages to learn, and how attentive to be to
opportunities to learn languages. And more opportunity to learn, with more
sound recordings to listen to and more texts to read, makes it easier to learn
a language. The pervasiveness of English all over the world makes English an
easy language to learn--I'm not kidding. Precisely because hundreds of
millions of people use English every day as an "interlanguage," English is
quite "fault tolerant," full of social conventions about how to get around
people with a beginning command of the language communicating with one
another, including officially adopted controlled vocabularies for occupations
like seafaring.[2] (Again, Modern Standard Chinese is similar in that poorly
pronounced Mandarin Chinese is an actual lingua franca in many parts of
southern China.) English-language daily newspapers abound all over the world,
English-language videos number in the millions on YouTube, many recorded by
second-language speakers of English, and English-language books and
advertisements make up the plurality of the world's books and advertisements.

Languages spread around the world mostly by people using them or not for
practical purposes. The majority of the settlement of the interior of North
America by Europeans was done by Europeans who were not native speakers of
English. (For example, both of my maternal grandparents, both of whom were
born in Great Plains states, grew up in German-speaking families and had all
of their schooling in the German language.) The freedom of the United States
included a freedom to speak whatever language people pleased. (Abraham Lincoln
funded German-language newspapers to help his presidential campaign, and
Theodore Roosevelt campaigned in English, German, and French, the three
languages he knew from childhood, in various places in the United States.)
English was the customary language of governance in the United States, and
still is not official at the federal level, but mostly English won out in the
world's third most populous country because it was a common language that
immigrants from a variety of places could use to communicate with one another
(as happened in my paternal ancestral line). The huge population base of
native speakers of English (in the following generations) in the United States
who still had family ties to other countries provides English with a great
advantage in spreading around the world.

Another way to treat Esperanto is to take it as a hobby, an exploration of the
characteristics of a constructed language. Many language hobbyists have
explored Esperanto from that point of view,[3] as I have. For a hobby
language, the main criterion is fun, and I do not judge anyone else's opinion
about what is fun. I don't waste my time in online discussion debating whether
coin collection or knitting is a better hobby, for example. To each their own
in hobbies.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#English_as_a_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#English_as_a_global_language)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaspeak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaspeak)

[3] [http://interlanguages.net/Esp.html](http://interlanguages.net/Esp.html)

[http://miresperanto.com/konkurentoj/not_my_favourite.htm](http://miresperanto.com/konkurentoj/not_my_favourite.htm)

[http://www.zompist.com/kitespo.html](http://www.zompist.com/kitespo.html)

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

~~~
BillChapman
You suggest that the choice is between taking Esperanto seriously as a
proposal for a world auxiliary language or take it as a hobby. My experience
relates to neither of those. I see Esperanto as a remarkable success story, by
far the most successful auxiliary language. It has survived wars and
revolutions and economic crises and continues to attract people to learn and
speak it. Over 400,000 people have signed up to the Duolingo Esperanto course
in the last year. Esperanto works. I’ve used it in about seventeen countries
over recent years. I recommend it to anyone, as a way of making friendly local
contacts in other countries. English is not enough! I’ve made friends around
the world through Esperanto that I would never have been able to communicate
with otherwise. And then there’s the Pasporta Servo, which provides free
lodging and local information to Esperanto-speaking travellers in over 90
countries. Over recent years I have had guided tours of Berlin, Douala and
Milan in this planned language. I have discussed philosophy with a Slovene
poet, humour on television with a Bulgarian TV producer. I’ve discussed what
life was like in East Berlin before the wall came down and in Armenia when it
was a Soviet republic, how to cook perfect spaghetti, the advantages and
disadvantages of monarchy, and so on. I recommend it as a very practical way
to overcome language barriers.

I will never learn more than the basics in Armenian or Slovene or Finnish, but
I make use of Esperanto to get to know about the history, economy and the
legal systems of countries I visit.

------
cloudjacker
Its a pretty cool phenomenom

