I did learn some Esperanto for a few months and one point of view that stuck with me is that Esperanto can be thought as the recorder/flute of languages. That easy instrument you learn as a kid that everybody can learn easily how to play and allows you to learn music. It is indeed a language easy to learn and which can give you trust to speak it and in general give you a fondness and confidence to learn more languages. I think it would be very nice to have kids learn of it if only as a fun “gym” for language learning. The fact that it still has a small international community where you are all more or less “equal” in terms of communication capability (all are speaking a second language) is a fascinating additional perk of the language.
I got sucked into Esperanto after a year in Spain trying to learn Spanish. I was intrigued by the premise of an easy to learn, exception free language, with vocabulary that would already be somewhat familiar, and logical ways of building new words from components.
After having spent a lot of time on learning it (before moving on to Latin for a couple of years, and later French), I've become more skeptical of some of the elements that drew me in to begin with. According to the comprehensible input hypothesis of language acquisition, studying grammar is not as important as the number of hours spent taking in messages that you understand in the language. So, a simple grammar is actually not so important. Of course, it will let you start immersing more quickly after less grammar study. But you might also have spent that time instead immersing with a "real" language in content that is more enjoyable and interesting (good entertainment in/translated to Esperanto is scarce) and come out of it with a useful skill with roots in the real world. (Sorry fellow Esperantists if that comes across as harsh...)
Esperanto also does away with a lot of redundancies, like grammatical gender, or arbitrary groups of verbs with distinct conjugation schemes. On its surface that's a good thing. It makes it easier to memorise the rules. However, it also makes the language more fragile as a medium of communication, or less noise resistant. Grammatical gender and redundancy in syntax is very useful to a fluent speaker whose brain is familiar with all the arbitrary rules, because these things provide our brains with different checksums to rely on when parsing spoken sentences. That utility is largely why such grammatically redundant features have persisted.
> Esperanto also does away with a lot of redundancies, like grammatical gender, or arbitrary groups of verbs with distinct conjugation schemes. On its surface that's a good thing. It makes it easier to memorise the rules. However, it also makes the language more fragile as a medium of communication, or less noise resistant.
My L1 has no grammatical gender and word order is free and we still can parse our sentences fine without those checksums and certainly is not "fragile". To my brain grammatical gender is noise.
> Does your L1 contain other sources of redundancy that can be used for error correction?
Never looked at it from this angle. I guess the extensive case system for example, which allows to omit agent noun since the information is contained in the verb, but in reality is rarely omitted.
Yes, case systems are an example of this. Most Indo-European languages use some combination of fixed word-order, noun classes (aka gender), and case systems to compensate for errors in communication.
English for example has a relatively strict word order.
Keep in mind that linguistic drift was a much stronger force in the past than it is today and being able to infer meaning through some incomprehensible input was a very important feature for languages to have.
>I guess the extensive case system for example, which allows to omit agent noun since the information is contained in the verb, but in reality is rarely omitted.
Is this just in the written form or also when spoken? Spoken language is much more susceptible to comprehension errors.
I really used to hate gender in (Romance) languages, but from gradually getting better at my second language (Spanish), I'm starting to see them as just a way to remember which word you were talking about (with an adjective) in languages without really strict word order.
In Spanish it's redundant, you can tell the gender of 99% of words from the ending, others are Greek neuter borrows that end in 'a' and are unexpectedly masculine, and most of the remainder have an inconsistent gender that depends on which country you're from.
So I'm not even sure that getting rid of gender simplifies much. Checksums are a good comparison. I am sympathetic to using 'e' endings when talking about groups or unknown people for the sake of bringing women into language parity with men, but that actually makes gender in Spanish more complicated.
>I'm starting to see them as just a way to remember which word you were talking about
I find it even simpler than that: they're just [different versions of articles] designed to help the language flow better.
English has the same sort of thing going on with its indefinite articles a/an- sure, that's not gender per se, but it functions the same way in terms of "fill the empty space when there's a vowel sound coming up". Picking the incorrect gender for a noun in Romance languages is not quite as grating but ultimately after a while you... just know because the other way sounds weird.
There's a chain of Mexican restaurants in the UK called "El Mexicana" which, as anyone who's studied Spanish for more than 10 seconds knows, is wrong: it should be "El Mexicano" or "La Mexicana". ("Lo Mexicano" would work too, come to think of it.)
The mistake is so obvious that it can only be deliberate. I guess it's supposed to be endearing or cute? To my mind it's just grating and annoying and makes me not want to eat there.
(An alternative hypothesis is that the grammatically invalid name is a marketing gimmick designed to get people talking about the company. Looks like it's working.)
They make really good fast Mexican food, way better than any other Mexican chain I've known of in the UK.
El Mexicana is (I think) a brand they use for Extra service stations. They tried to branch into restaurants under the name "Cocina" and had I think 4-5 locations pre-COVID and now have just one, I am guessing down to the lockdowns and associated investor panic rather than the quality of the restaurants.
Accusative nouns is one of my favorite things about Esperanto. My native language actually has accusative nouns (as well as dative and possessive; whereas English only has possessive). Accusative is somewhat redundant, because if you follow the subject-verb-object order which is the most common in esperanto, the noun following the verb is most likely accusative. However mandating the accusative n means that I can rearrange the sentence order and it is still understandable (which is really useful for e.g. poetry). I’ve often found my self really wishing english had accusative nouns.
The whole dictionary is loaded client-side and a lookup is performed on each keypress. Because of the search speed, it's surprisingly fun to use this dictionary to explore the language. I'd like to see such dictionaries built for other languages too.
I've always loved learning new languages, I feel that learning new languages is a way to get insights into the culture that shaped the language. It's also a way to connect with the native speakers in a way that's more personal and natural than speaking a third common language.
I've always stayed away from Esperanto exactly because of those reasons. Because it's an artificial language that has not had a community large enough and existed for long enough, I feel there's little culture tied to the language. There's also very few native speakers so that also nixes the other reason for me to learn a language...
So, I'd rather learn Cantonese and Teochew than learn Esperanto. Even if I can almost always use a third common language (either English or Mandarin) to speak with native Cantonese and Teochew speakers. It's still worth it for the insight in the culture and for the connection one can get when trying to speak the other party's native language.
There is a specific mindset that makes someone want to learn Esperanto: curiosity, affinity for linguistics, ideals of a "world citizenship". I think this leads to a shared culture between two Esperantists, even if they are from different countries. (That's if you can find two of them.)
I don't understand why someone would learn something like Esperanto when they can put that time and effort into learning a language that people actually use in the real world instead.
Now excuse me as I go back to making a Snake clone in Zig.
First a lot of us native English speakers are monolingual, because that's all we need to be. A lot of us view fluency in another language as something reserved for incredibly intelligent people. Esperanto is so easy to learn that it disabuses us of that notion.
Secondly, linguistic curiosity. What's a constructed language designed to be easy to use actually like? Is it as easy as people say it is?
Lastly, community. There aren't as many esperanto speakers as there are Hindi or Spanish or Mandarin speakers, sure. No one is denying that. But a brief search suggests there's 100,000 active speakers, which isn't nothing.
To be fair, if you're a native English speaker learning a second language, you'll probably get just as much out of learning Esperanto as you would German or French or Indonesian.
As someone who has studied both Esperanto and Indonesian, I'd say they are roughly comparable (although Esperanto is easier). But Indonesian is pretty easy as far as natural languages go. People wonder why anyone would bother as Indonesia isn't really a major country (and most of their population actually speaks things like Javanese rather than standard Indonesian) and would say learning Mandarin would be more useful. Which objectively it is, but I've also studied that, for a considerably more amount of time than I've studied Esperanto or Indonesian, and with less success.
It is unfair to say that Esperanto doesn’t have original literature. There is extensive poetry, music, fiction, and even movies which are written in Esperanto. For example, one of my favorite authors Þorbergur Þórðarson (a legend in Iceland) wrote some of his work in Esperanto (which I’ve actually never read).
Not at all. But there are culturally rich languages with even fewer speakers then Esperanto, and people still learn them. Consider for example people learning ancient Norse, so they can read the Icelandic sagas in the original, or Ancient Greek, or even Klingon or Tolkian elvish so they can understand a fictional Klingon opera or Elven poem.
When you learn Esperanto you get access to a specific literature not available in Indonesian or German. That might be worth it for some people.
I'm learning Spanish because I enjoy travelling to Spanish-speaking countries and do so often. Learning a language is such a massive, multi-year undertaking that I can't imagine doing it only as a hobby!
That's exactly the problem many people have with learning languages, they think it's a huge undertaking and cannot be taken lightly. So they don't even try. Imagine if sports - running, basketball, soccer etc - were thought to be the same, that one cannot do them for fun as a hobby. Absurd! We'd have lot less monolinguals when we'd stop taking language learning so seriously.
I speak 4 languages, have passive understanding of another 3-4 and rudimentary basics of 3-5 more. Never worked hard for any of them, it has always been for fun as hobby. My spouse says I'm gifted with languages but it's not true, I'm just playing around until something sticks. I just don't have that mental block.
The fact that its a constructed language is a big part of the appeal. It's fun to speak something that's logically structured and easy to learn. It doesn't have anywhere near the level of content of other languages, but it's still enjoyable.
Because it is very easy to learn and help learn more languages.
Since its a mix between Romance, Slav and Germanic, it can easily act as a gateway, like if you speak a romance language and want to learn Slavic, starting with Romanian the learning Russian will be easier.
With Spanish you cover Latin America, Spain a good chunk of the US, 33% of the English language and a big chunk of Lusosphere, Francosphere and Italosphere.
But that's not the idea, at least for me. Learning languages is useful to keep your brain on edge. I speak French, English and German, and since I wanted to learn a Slavic language, i wanted to 'learn how to learn', a bit like learning scala in school is more interesting straight Java, because you add a FP paradigm, or coming from OO, learning ocaml might cover more than learning Haskell, despite being less pure.
And i read a EU study that read something like 'rather than teaching 5 years of English at school, we might be better of teaching 2 years of Esperanto then 3 years of English, especially for people whose mother tongue isn't Germanic based'. And then explain that the difference in English fluency between northern and southern Europe cannot be solely explained by education and the maternal tongue also have a significant effect.
So I'm learning Esperanto (i wanted to move to Estonia before covid, nowadays learning a new language is less pressing tbh...)
Well, in my case I am pro practicality. I can understand 60-70% of the spoken English and almost 99% of the technical one, so with Spanish and English I can communicate with a huge chunk of people across the world. OFC writting and speaking it's very difficult to me, as I live on a non-native country, but I'm able to talk the basics of a subject at least.
With Interlingua, these people are trying to do with Latin and Romances what Spanish did 500-1000 years ago first with the peninsula (Spanish was the lingua franca between the Iberian kingdoms) and later across the pond.
To me it looks as if the German, Dutch, English and Norwergian/Sweden/Dane language speakers tried to create a proto Neogermanic language to be able to be understood between themselves, when they already have the English language.
If any, they could just radically change the English spelling being closer to the Nordic languages (cutting down the vowel amount to a max of 7).
The language really is as easy to adapt as advertised.
Too bad it got clamped, but I wouldn't be too surprised if it suddently resurfaced among youth as some koombayah meme.
I think it’ll continue to be this undying language that done people perpetually pick up.
Takes 3-6 months to learn fluently, and a lifetime to find other speakers. ;-)
Maybe in the next 100 years, some neo hippie collective of a not insignificant size decides to make it the preferred language of their community. It’d be cool to walk into a part of a city where Esperanto is the norm, like Chinatown or the Jewish neighbourhood.
I think every 10th comment I make on HN is arguing against the notion that technology will fix the problem. But I think now I’m gonna do the opposite. It seems like technology is indeed well on its way of making the need of an international auxiliary language obsolete.
For government functions live translation is something skilled translators can do pretty easily, and for common folks, live machine translations is getting better and more accessible.
I for example read many tweets written in languages I don’t understand. And I think it is only a matter of time before other social platforms (including GitHub and HN) catches on to provide accessible translation tools so people can read and write in their native language, and have machines translate for them.
As for communicating face to face, surely there could be a device (or more likely a phone app) that does that, but mostly I think people will just continue to learn an auxiliary language or two and find a common language to communicate in, only using the translation app as a backup in emergencies.
Anecdata, but I've met a whole two other Esperanto speakers (that I know of) in the wild since I began learning it a couple years ago! It's not prominent with the general population, but I do think there are certain types of people whom are more inclined to learn it.
Anecdata: In recent times, to a high degree: programmers. I attended one music festival with a high presence of volunteers from the Esperanto community, and among these people, ~20% were programmers.
The grammar is mostly regular. It seems like the thing a stubborn introvert likes: You can hardly use it anywhere, but it has nice properties. And unlike Lojban, Esperanto is something you can learn to fluency fast on your own on the internet.
Fun fact, George Soros (the banker much targeted by conspiracy theorists) is a native Esperanto speaker, as he was raised to speak the language but his father, who was a well known Esperanto speaker
I didn't know that. Fascinating to hear there actually is a native speaker of it. I was aware from reading the wikipedia article that Esperanto was championed by the Ba'hai and Oomoto religious groups, among others. I had also forgotten that Theosophy promoted it as well. Plenty of different Christian groups tried using it too, even Jack Chick, famous for his maligning of D&D.
One of the more interesting parts of the Esperanto story is that right at the moment when world organizations were starting to take it seriously (in this case, the defunct League of Nations), the movement split between the users of Ido -- a spinoff of Esperanto -- and the Esperantists themselves. It was due to this split that the League failes to make a firm recommendation on a specific international auxiliary language, because they were waiting to see what would happen
There was also a unit of currency that some Esperantists proposed called the "Spesmilo." A few banks used it prior to WWI (one of which was a bank called Ĉekbanko Esperantista that conducted its business in Esperanto).
Its legacy lives on in the modern age in a Unicode character for the currency: ₷
Of note is that the LoN effort was championed by Japan and China. This may be surprising if you know how Esperanto draws mostly from Polish and other European languages, but consider that the contemporary diplomatic languages were French and English (still are). It would have put everyone on a more even footing.
> It would have put everyone on a more even footing.
This may seem obvious - after all, Esperanto is an "easier" language than French or English – but I doubt it.
Much of what makes Esperanto easy for speakers of related European languages is the large amount of shared vocabulary, allowing even a beginner to guess the meaning of many words when encountering them for the first time.
Then there is the grammar that would be familiar if you already know a related European language: affixes on verbs to express tense, affixes on nouns to express gender and number.
Starting from Chinese, those advantages don't really apply. It helps a bit that the affixes are predictable: Whereas "sleeped" would be considered incorrect, though understandable, "dormis" is just the expected form. But while the root "dorm" is associated with sleeping in many languages influenced by Latin, from the Chinese perspective it's just a nonsense syllable (or three).
Then there's the thing that there's no grammatical tense in Chinese at all, only grammatical aspect. The perfective aspect (indicating completion of an action) often corresponds to past tense, but when used to describe completion in the future, that's no longer the case. So there's no simple one-to-one correspondence the way a French or English speaker can map their native language's tense system onto Esperanto.
Im my experience, Chinese Esperantists struggle with vocabulary and verb tenses about as often as they would in English.
(Consider also the case of Pseudo -Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-Chinese created by writing Japanese using as many kanji as possible and removing all grammatical affixes, resulting in text that often allows Chinese speakers to guess the meaning based on shared vocabulary. It's surprisingly good for Japanese → Chinese one-way communication, but pretty useless for anyone who doesn't have the shared context necessary to make sense of it.)
It is not _too_ surprising, since Esperanto also shares some coincidental features with Chinese -- its regularity makes the word-building process similar to Chinese. Perhaps poetically, the regularity of roots and affixes does for the arbitrariness of word-building (compared to the lexicons of European languages), what a phonetic alphabet does for the arbitrariness of writing (compared to logographic scripts used in East Asia).
> Of note is that the LoN effort was championed by Japan and China.
I didn't know that! What a missed opportunity. I spent many months buried in archives reading old Esperantist magazines from around the world (Revuoj) to try to piece together this story. Was so much fun!
Yeah, they were at one point accepting entries and I believe various other languages were submitted, including one I am currently learning called Interlingue (aka Occidental). https://occidental-lang.com/ You can even learn the Rust programming language in Occidental.
Yep. A few months of just very casual study took me MUCH further than 3 years of daily Spanish in school. The regular grammar and 10,000 other nice additions takes so many complexities out of the language. It also just sounds beautiful to me.
Mi parolas Esperanton kaj mi rekomendas uzu la librojn Teach Yourself Esperanto kaj la novajn Enjoy Esperanto kaj Complete Esperanto de Tim Owen, kaj na Lernu.net kaj Duolingo.
To anyone who are interested in constructed languages, but have always been intimidated learning one, try to learn "toki pona". It's a simple one, perhaps the simplest one, based only on 123 words. I learned it in a few days, there's a memrise course for it, and the difficulty comes mostly from figuring out how to express yourself with the limited vocabulary. It's like a puzzle every time you try to say something. It's a lot of fun!
My first experience with Esperanto left me disillusioned because it looked silly. It tries to be universal by becoming a Frankenstein monster of the most popular languages. And the diacritics, it could have taken the opportunity to reduce them to the minimum indispensable, but no. Page = paĝo for some weird reason.
I've always wanted to learn Loglan/Lojban because of that, but those are even more niche.
I set up my keyboard so I can type the additional letters with the right alt key. There are keyboard layout options for Windows, Mac, and Linux as well as mobile keyboards.
For example: Right alt + c = ĉ
For linux its pretty simple, you just have to use:
setxkbmap -layout us -variant altgr-intl -option esperanto:qwerty
Or one can just use the simple internet tradition that a letter followed by an x is as if it had the caret on it. For example, instead of ĉ just writing cx.
Actually, that's not how Esperanto works. There is a language that literally tries to be the "Frankenstein Monster of the most popular languages" for better or worse, but that is Interlingua. Esperanto on the other hand, while it takes roots from various Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages, instead modifies them to fit a rational system. As part of that there is a rule of "one letter one sound". That's why it uses diacritics. paĝo and pago are pronounced differently. Languages that don't use diacritics (which are very rare, English being one of the few examples) deal with it by accepting that spelling and pronunciation have little to do with each other. Which is a terrible system.
IMO building an artificial language should have been an opportunity to simplify phonemes and writing. Did Esperanto really need "g" and "ĝ" phonemes? Did it really need more diacritics than the simplest accented letters?
Spanish is surprisingly close to "one letter one sound" for being an organic language. If you see "papa" and "papá", and know the rules of syllabic stress, you can pronounce them without ambiguity. And it only uses acute diacritics on vowels, and the letter "ñ".
I acknowledge that I'm probably biased towards Spanish because it's my native language. And honestly, languages heavy on diacritics, like Vietnamese, spook me.
Why is pago weird? I don't understand the Frankenstein part either? It uses a vocabulary that has a good bit in common with the romance languages. Not sure what else.
The really weird letter in Esperanto is ĥ. It uses a sound that isn't very common in many languages so it's hard for a lot of speakers to pronounce. (It's like a "ch" sound in German.) Typographically it looks weird. There has been a general trend towards replacing it with a "k".
I have bursts of progress trying to learn Esperanto, also with Duolingo. I guess the unfortunate aspect of Esperanto is that you don't meet a lot of other learners in real life so it's a bit of a solo endeavour.
I give a lot of credit to whoever put together the Duolingo course, there's a lot of amusing innuendo with Adamo kaj Sofia and apt sentences like "Li trinkas bieron, cxar li estas malfelicxa".
I admire the Esperanto movement and its history, but at the same time wish that it would collapse, because I believe it's holding back the very real need for an international auxiliary language.
But isn't Esperanto an international auxiliary language, I hear you ask?
Well it is, but not the one that people want, and that's a problem because most people look at it and say, I don't like it. Or they will learn it and say, I don't like how it sounds, or it isn't easy once you get past the basics and want to say more complex things.
If I could use a programming analogy, it's like if BASIC had such a fanatical following, it drowned out all other attempts to make or promote a better programming language. So all anyone hears when they think of learning a programming language is BASIC!!! BASIC is what you need to learn to write any type of computer program! There are other programming languages, but they are all dead and people in the programming community all know BASIC. Then I look at it and think, meh, I would hate to have to use that. Or I would learn just enough to think, yeah, screw this. I don't want to continue down this road.
Esperanto has some warts like any language, but since it was created artificially, a lot of the grammar rules make more sense. It does make me wonder how much easier it would be to do natural language processing on it compared to other languages.
I also wonder what a language would look like if it was designed to be easy for computers to “understand” while at the same time being easy to speak and learn
Well, the standard Lojban reference book "The Complete Lojban Language" which defines the official language has a single author (John Cowan) at any rate. That's whom I'm talking about.
I'm surprised that no one has linked JBR's famous "Ranto": http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/index.html Quite appropriately, it starts with a "Bad Language" warning.
That's a silly myth based on the idea that everyone who bought a copy of The Klingon Dictionary (which includes me actually) learned Klingon. Esperanto has thousands of books written in it. You can count on one hand the number of books in Klingon.
There is also toki pona which was made more recently. I think one of the differences between it and esperanto is that Toki Pona takes a lot less time to learn (it took me a few months).
I admire people learning a language like Esperanto just for its own sake, it's beautiful that people do something like that. It would be fun to learn Esperanto and be in on this diffuse subculture around the globe!
But in terms of pure practicality, learning Spanish is tough to beat. It's generally the best candidate second language for English speakers to learn.
Grammatica del Espaniolese es multo relativemente complexe (multo bon pro un lingua natural!), los se multiples lingua construeva del lingua romances o Latino: Interlingua, Latino sine flexiones, Elefen, et cetera e los como alteres ha compatibile
La gramática del español es relativamente muy compleja, (muy buena para una lengua natural). Por eso están las múltiples lenguas contruídas desde el Latin: Interlingua, latín flexiones, etcétera o como hay otros (¿compatibles?)...
Spanish grammar is relatively very complex, (very good for a natural language). Thus there are the multiple languages built from Latin: Interlingua, Latin without inflexions, and so on as there are another compatible ones...
The words under the parentheses are doubts on the meaning...
But at least you got the 95% of the meaning in Spanish.
What are some example of borrowings from specifically _Iberian_ Romances? Not having looked into it beyond reading a bit about Esperanto's history, I'd always believed what the likes of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_etymology#Source_lan... said that French and Italian were sources. Of course there would be many Iberian cognates. Even estas which looks very Iberian has a different source https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/esti#Esperanto
Also very latin-centric. I remember reading of an alternative artificial language that was easier for Chinese/Arabic speakers but I cannot recall the name.
