The Invented Language That Found a Second Life Online (bbc.com) 225
More than 100 years after it was invented, Esperanto is spoken by relatively few people. But the internet has brought new life to this intriguing, invented language. From a report: Since it [Esperanto] was first proposed in a small booklet written by Ludwik L Zamenhof in 1887, it has evolved into the quintessential invented language, the liveliest and most popular ever created. But, many would tell you, Esperanto is a failure. More than a century after it was created, its current speaker base is just some two million people -- a geeky niche, not unlike the fan base of any other obscure hobby.
[...] Learning Esperanto used to be a solitary quest. You could practise it by sitting for weeks with a book and a dictionary, figuring out the rules and memorising the words. But there was usually no professor to correct your mistakes or polish your pronunciation. That's how Anna Lowenstein taught herself Esperanto in her teenage years, after becoming frustrated with the oddities of the French she was learning in school. In the last page of her textbook, there was an address for the British Esperanto Association. She sent a letter, and some time later was invited to a meeting of young speakers in St Albans.
The global community that Lowenstein was joining was put together via snail mail, paper magazines and yearly meetings. [...] Newer generations are not as patient, and they don't have to be. Unlike most of their elders, who rarely had the chance to speak Esperanto, today's speakers can use the language every day online. Even old computer communication services like Usenet had Esperanto-speaking hubs, and a lot of pages and chat rooms sprouted in the early days of the Web. Today, the younger segment of the Esperantio is keen on using social media: they gather around several groups in Facebook and Telegram, a chat service.
[...] Learning Esperanto used to be a solitary quest. You could practise it by sitting for weeks with a book and a dictionary, figuring out the rules and memorising the words. But there was usually no professor to correct your mistakes or polish your pronunciation. That's how Anna Lowenstein taught herself Esperanto in her teenage years, after becoming frustrated with the oddities of the French she was learning in school. In the last page of her textbook, there was an address for the British Esperanto Association. She sent a letter, and some time later was invited to a meeting of young speakers in St Albans.
The global community that Lowenstein was joining was put together via snail mail, paper magazines and yearly meetings. [...] Newer generations are not as patient, and they don't have to be. Unlike most of their elders, who rarely had the chance to speak Esperanto, today's speakers can use the language every day online. Even old computer communication services like Usenet had Esperanto-speaking hubs, and a lot of pages and chat rooms sprouted in the early days of the Web. Today, the younger segment of the Esperantio is keen on using social media: they gather around several groups in Facebook and Telegram, a chat service.
Bast Shatner movie ever! (Score:4, Funny)
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Nerd alert: Tolkien invented two Elvishes: Quenya (High Elvish) and Sindarin (Grey Elvish). He didn't really create any other languages, just tossed a few phrases into his books to make them sound good (Dwarvish, Black Speech, Westron, Rohirric--note that Westron was usually "translated" into English while Rohirric was turned into Old English--all fall into this catagory).
Re:Bast Shatner movie ever! (Score:4, Informative)
There may be a couple million people in the world who speak some Klingon, but I'd bet the number who can sustain a conversation fluently in Klingon for, say, half an hour, is probably less than 5000.
Probably much less than 5000. This article [salon.com] estimates the number of fluent speakers of Klingon at a few dozen.
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Wow, that's a few dozen times more than the number of people who can speak Lojban fluently.
Esperanto... no (Score:2)
Tell you what... I might look into Esperanto when I get finished learning (Mandarin) Chinese. Because Mandarin is much, much more important in general as in there are large numbers of people who speak it, even here in the USA, and Chinese food is mostly awesome and it helps when ordering to be able to speak the language (and Esperanto lacks food traditions entirely, so phbbbt.)
Don't even get me started on Cantonese. Or other variants. Ouch.
The catch is... near as I can tell, I'll never finish learning Manda
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Somewhere there must have been an emperor who ensured that Mandarin was going to be the hardest language to learn ever.
I see your Mandarin, and raise you Finnish. No one can speak Finnish except the Finns.
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But remember, effort to learn Mandarin is very difficult, effort to learn Esperanto is very easy. That's why Mandarin isn't necessarily going to be the must-know language soon. English is only a standard language for economic and commercial reasons, not because it's easy to learn. Similar, French wasn't Lingua Franca because it was easy. Esperanto started precisely to be easy to learn and thus an easy path to be a common language. Especially if your native language is from Europe (western/central) then
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Maybe that's one reason that lingua francas come about. People learned Latin because the Romans dominated everything and didn't want to learn the local language. People today learn English because Americans rarely bother to learn someone else's language. That is, you suck up to the powers that be by learning their language; it helps you get into their schools, it helps your businesses relationships, the powers that be are going to have the books that you feel you need to read or movies to watch, etc.
So if
Fast second language (Score:5, Interesting)
Learning a third language is easier when you know a second language. Hungarian kids somehow learn Esperanto and then English like 40% faster if they learn English only to the same eventual English fluency.
Go figure.
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My guess would be that this has more to do with the clusterfuck the Hungarian language is than anything else...
Re:Fast second language (Score:5, Interesting)
My guess would be that this has more to do with the clusterfuck the Hungarian language is than anything else...
It's not just the Hungarians. I know in a small number of French schools they do the same thing, some places in China do this too. They teach Esperanto first and then a secondary language next. They learn both languages quicker than if the learnt the second language alone.
Esperanto is deliberately designed to be easy for anyone to learn. It's not a complicated mess like most natural languages; you can learn Esperanto in a fraction of the time it takes to learn most other languages. I think for many people (without foreign language skills already) it acts as a way to train your brain to be receptive to learning new languages. Once your brain has adapted to learn other languages, it makes learning additional ones easier.
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It's a bit like operating systems. Apparently Windows always run on more than one architecture to make sure people wrote portable code.
Even when only the x86 version was distributed there was always an internal build for Alpha and then Itanium and Microsoft started off developing in i860s and then MIPS machines and only add x86 rather late to stop people writing x86 only assembler which the old 16 bit code was full of.
As Raymond Chen observed x86 is the wierdo [microsoft.com], i.e. all the other architectures have more in
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Learning a third language is easier when you know a second language. Hungarian kids somehow learn Esperanto and then English like 40% faster if they learn English only to the same eventual English fluency. Go figure.
Well Hungarian is not part of the Indo-European language family meaning English is as foreign to them as Chinese or Japanese. Esperanto is a good mix of Germanic, Romance and Slavic but all firmly rooted in the Indo-European tree. And to learn a second language you need to learn about and be able to map between different language constructs. You might say you go from one to two languages but you go from zero to one translations and then it's easier to add more. So easier yeah, is it worth the detour if the
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is it worth the detour if the goal is to learn English? Probably not.
The data says Hungarian, Russian, and French people who spend four years studying Esperanto (1 year) and a third language (3 years) all learn the third language to greater proficiency than if they spent all four years studying only the target language.
I would say 110% is more than 100% and thus worth the detour when the total resource (time) investment is the same. In this case, it's more like 210%, because you also picked up Esperanto along the way, for whatever that's worth.
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As someone who is making a concerted effort to lear
Re:Fast second language (Score:5, Funny)
Learning a third language is impossible if you don't know a second language.
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Being a Hungarian: [citation needed]
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Thing is it takes them longer to pick up English than both English and Esperanto. If you want to pick up Russian and English, it takes you longer to pick up those two together than English and Esperanto; and it takes longer to pick up Russian alone than it does to pick up Russian and Esperanto.
It's weird. It's like saying to get to fluency level 5 with Russian, you need to sink in 5 years; or, you can sink in 1 year of Esperanto and 3 years of Russian and get to fluency level 5 in Russian. Getting to
Re:Fast second language (Score:4, Interesting)
Interesting. In Finland, Swedish is a minority language that everyone must learn, which is a cause for an ongoing debate. Proponents argue that Swedish is a gateway language, having a shared cultural logic with Finnish while being a Germanic language. Knowing English and German better than Swedish, I don't consider it that familiar in a deeper sense -- there's some familiarity in the vocabulary, but the grammar is quite different across all three. This is despite having some linguistic tendencies; for those without, Swedish just gets in the way of learning English and other world languages adequately.
LOGLAN! LOGLAN! LOGLAN! (Score:4, Interesting)
We need to force everyone to speak LOGLAN [wikipedia.org] so that fiercely logical LOGLAN soldiers can conquer the world, then the galaxy and finally the universe.
LOGLAN is like metric but applied to your mind.
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I think I'd prefer a metaphorical language like that of the Tamarians:
"Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra."
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The whole point of that episode is that all of our languages are metaphor piled on top of metaphor. The difference is that we've lost the connections to much of the context. Example: The word "talent" is used a millions of times every day by people who have no idea that it's a metaphoric reference.
I think I'd prefer a metaphorical language like that of the Tamarians:
"Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra."
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That's why the premise of the episode seems so unsound. That the universal translator can pick up on the literal meaning and not the metaphor, but only for this one culture. For all others, intent is always clearly translated.
Meme culture and "Turn in your geek card" (Score:2)
You're talking about "Darmok" (ST:TNG 5x02), an episode that the staff of Ars Technica disagree about [slashdot.org].
But we already have that. It's called "meme culture" and "Obligatory xkcd/Oatmeal/Onion" and "if you don't get it, turn in your geek card" [slashdot.org].
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.u'i xu do tavla fo lo jbobau? .i jbobau ko!
https://mw.lojban.org/papri/la... [lojban.org]
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"How many Lojbanists does it take to change a broken light-bulb?"
"Two: one to decide what to change it into and one to decide what kind of bulb emits broken light."
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I prefer Lojban. But I'm a splittist.
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Enemy of logic detected. LOGLAN nanites dispatched to cure ...
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You will be Cyber Converted!
Engineering analogy (Score:3)
Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/927/ [xkcd.com]
One way to learn it (Score:2)
...Just wake up on the Riverworld.
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"...Just wake up on the Riverworld."
Diable, vi venkis min in!
Esperanto Practice (Score:2)
“Bonvoro alsendi la pordiston, lausajne estas rano en mia bideo!”
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Interpolated rather than invented (Score:2)
BTW I tried to learn Esperanto a few years ago : it was ridiculously easy... I gave up because it was useless to me (at that time). But if learning Esperanto could reward you with the same university credits as other languages (for a similar level), I am sure that many (lazy) students would learn it.
Great Esperanto Podcast on Freakanomics Radio (Score:3)
There's a great podcast about Esperanto on Freakanomics Radio...
http://freakonomics.com/podcas... [freakonomics.com]
The Irony of Esperanto (Score:5, Informative)
Esperanto was invented by an opthamologist, L. L. Zamenhof, to be a universal second (and maybe eventually first) language that would overcome the "curse of Babel", so many different tongues in use that people cannot communicate. Being an artificial language there would be one codified grammar that everyone would use instead of the many dialectical variations seen in natural languages.
Only Zamenhof, while multi-lingual, was no linguist and did a mediocre job of designing the language. In his (partial) defense he was one of the first to try this (there were a few earlier projects), artificial language design was not trendy the way it seems today.
And so for a universal, common language Esperanto has had a tendency to generate new dialects (Ido, Romániço, etc.) often due the inadequacies of Zamenhof's original specification.
There are a number of significant design flaws that make this "easy to learn" language unnecessarily hard. The transitivity of verbs for example requires memorizing the semi-arbitrary rule assignments for hundreds of verbs, and most Esperanto users make frequent errors. Also the actual interpretation of verbs was not properly defined by Zamenhof, whether they express tenses (past, present, future) or aspects (whether it is completed or on-going). Zamenhof apparently did not understand the distinction himself and wrote contradictory things. In fact his grammar is often vague and numerous controversies have developed over the years.
Then there was the wholly unnecessary inclusion of gender for nouns. Zamenhof apparently did this because the languages he was familiar with did this, but the gender assignments are arbitrary, add nothing of a value to the language, require memorization, and are a problem that must be decided with each newly coined word. As a result the language in use has diverged from the official grammar and dictionary, with the conversion of most "male" gendered words to neutral. And this has led to a dialectical split in the language with people who want to simply eliminate gender (or at least the male gender) and those that want to preserve the original specification (such as it is).
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They act as sort of a redundancy check over low quality communication channels. But it would be nice to find a better solution.
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Interesting. I've always thought that assigning a gender to inanimate objects was useless. This is the first reason that I've seen that shows a use. Are there other reasons?
I am procrastinating about going to work, so I decided to google it and got sent to the wiki, of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
1 In a language with explicit inflections for gender, it is easy to express the natural gender of animate beings.
2 Grammatical gender "can be a valuable tool of disambiguation", rendering clarity about antecedents.
3 In literature, gender can be used to "animate and personify inanimate nouns".
...and goes on to describe #2 as the most useful, as you mentioned.
Among these, role 2 is probably the most important in everyday usage.[citation needed] Languages with gender distinction generally have fewer cases of ambiguity concerning, for example, pronominal reference. In the English phrase "a flowerbed in the garden which I maintain" only context tells us whether the relative clause (which I maintain) refers to the whole garden or just the flowerbed. In German, gender distinction prevents such ambiguity. The word for "(flower) bed" (Beet) is neuter, whereas that for "garden" (Garten) is masculine. Hence, if a neuter relative pronoun is used, the relative clause refers to "bed", and if a masculine pronoun is used, the relative clause refers to "garden". Because of this, languages with gender distinction can often use pronouns where in English a noun would have to be repeated in order to avoid confusion. It does not, however, help in cases where the words are of the same grammatical gender. (There are often several synonymous nouns of different grammatical gender to pick from to avoid this, however.)
Since the flower bed example points out what I always thought was a glaring deficiency in English, I grudgingly accept #2 as useful.
But now it's time(masc) for me(masc)
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There is no grammatical gender in Esperanto.
Yes and no. A treatment of this issue can be found here [wikipedia.org]. This goes to the issue of how well designed and specified the language was in the first place.
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Additionally read answer 2 here [stackexchange.com].
I do not know Esperanto, but have had some interest in its history, adoption, and current state. I do rely on the analyses offered by others of evident expertise.
Frog (Score:2)
Bonvoro alsendi la pordiston, lausajne estas rano en mia bideto.
Obligatory (Score:2, Informative)
Learn not to speak Esperanto [jbr.me.uk]
tl;dr: Esperanto is badly designed, with a lot of irregularity and Eastern European-isms built into it, especially the choice of phonemes.
Also this: https://xkcd.com/927/ [xkcd.com]
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Justin Rye was a notorious troll on soc.culture.esperanto.
His arguments are based on the false assumption that a conlang must be linguistically flawless to be useful and accepted.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and for all the advantages some alternatives might have, none has outpaced Esperanto.
It's like the argument over Linux. Critics say it's badly designed, difficult to learn, obsolete, etc. to which the defenders say, "show us something better." No? Okay, we will continue with our regularly-
Interlingua is better (Score:4, Interesting)
Interlingua is one of Esperanto's competitors. It resembles a simplified modern spoken latin and is very useful for scientific communication. It is said that interlingua can be understood relatively well by most speakers of european languages, although the reverse is not necessarily true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
It is a good language to study just to learn the word roots which have high cognates with other modern languages.
What new life? (Score:2)
I checked (Score:2)
europanto (Score:2)
Re:primu posut (Score:5, Funny)
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People called Romanes, they go, the house?
Re:primu posut (Score:4, Funny)
No, it's Romani ite domum. Now write it out one hundred times. If it's not done by sunrise, I'll cut your balls off.
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Morphology vs. syntax; Latino sine flexione (Score:3)
It's not quite "grammar taked out". Grammar is made up of morphology (inflections and derivations) and syntax (word order). The more you take out of morphology, the more rigid the syntax becomes. For instance, Chinese and English have very little inflection, but their syntax is more rigid than (say) Russian or Latin.
Besides, there is a Latin minus inflectional morphology, and it's called Latino sine flexione [wikipedia.org]. It was proposed by Giuseppe Peano, who also invented fractals and put math on a rigorous axiomatic
Re:primu posut (Score:4, Interesting)
It is very much a romance based language.. That bias is likely one of the reasons why it never caught on. If you know Spanish, you have no use for Esperanto, and if you don't, you're better off learning Spanish.
Also, like Volapük before it, relying on letters that are not standard in any alphabets is a very big obstacle.
Lojban addresses that, as well as avoiding the ambiguity that many artificial languages (and perhaps especially Esperanto) suffers from, but it arrived too late - English has already become the de facto trade language, taking over from Spanish and Portuguese, and there's little need to learn Yet Another language.
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Esperanto has not much to do with spanish.
Flexion is _greek_
The vocabulary is an attempt to collect words that are common in as many european languages as possible.
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Quoting Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
"the vocabulary derives primarily from the Romance languages, with a lesser contribution from Germanic languages and minor contributions from Slavic languages and Greek."
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Look at the commonest words in Esperanto [wikipedia.org]. If you actually spoke Spanish (which you don't) you'd see a fair degree of similarity. If you spoke French and Italian (which you don't) and were intelligent enough to adjust for the spelling system (which you aren't) quite a lot of the others would be familiar too.
Stop. You're embarrassing yourself.
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It is very much a romance based language.. That bias is likely one of the reasons why it never caught on. If you know Spanish, you have no use for Esperanto, and if you don't, you're better off learning Spanish.
Also, like Volapük before it, relying on letters that are not standard in any alphabets is a very big obstacle.
Lojban addresses that, as well as avoiding the ambiguity that many artificial languages (and perhaps especially Esperanto) suffers from, but it arrived too late - English has already become the de facto trade language, taking over from Spanish and Portuguese, and there's little need to learn Yet Another language.
Esperanto is VERY different to Spanish. Just because it begins with "Esp" don't assume it is a derivative language. I know a little bit of both languages and they are very different.
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Esperanto is VERY different to Spanish. Just because it begins with "Esp" don't assume it is a derivative language. I know a little bit of both languages and they are very different.
It, like so many things, depends on your point of view.
From a non-Romance speaking point of view, I'd claim it is more similar to Romance languages than anything else.
The vocabulary is largely Romance based and has more in common with Spanish and Catalan than any other languages [ezglot.com], the pronunciation is based on Italian, it lacks dative/genitive/oblique which most non-Romance languages have, treats double negations as emphasizing instead of cancelling, and other features that increases the distance from many o
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Because people who do that started two world wars.
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Re:Too Bad (Score:4, Interesting)
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You've also described German (for the most part). It's not 100% perfect, but they have a council (the RdR) that continues to scrub out weird historical spellings. Every year they get closer to perfect.
German has all sorts of weird grammar rules and compound words; etc. It's a terrible language for a world's "second language"; probably not as bad as English, but still a terrible second language. As English speakers it is a little easier to learn than some others; for much of the rest of the world its a complicated mess.
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Herman has no weird grammar rules.
The grammar is more or less the same as english.
And what exactly is the difference between world war I and worldwar II?
Oh, the second is a compound word and that is .... difficult?
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German has all sorts of weird grammar rules and compound words
The compound words are incredibly simple to learn and understand. It's much better than having a unique word for something, so while the German dictionary is larger than the English one, the number of times you reach for it is actually quite low due to compound words being incredibly descriptive.
As for weird grammar rules they really aren't weird at all. They are just different. In fact if we discuss weirdness as in different from the norm, then in all the North Germanic languages English is the one with th
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Dutch has the advantage of getting rid of gendered nouns (which was a mindbogglingly stupid idea in the first place).
(Gendered pronouns are also stupid but at least there are far less of them.)
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Dutch has the advantage of getting rid of gendered nouns (which was a mindbogglingly stupid idea in the first place).
(Gendered pronouns are also stupid but at least there are far less of them.)
Only half. There is still a gendered and neuter combination. When speaking Dutch I often fall back on little linguistic tricks. The Dutch are quite cute with their over use of diminutive forms of nouns, and all diminutives take a neuter gender. De auto, becomes het autooje, and you get an instant bonus for offending people who drive hummers. :-)
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I love watch - "ArmBandUhr". Why yes, I suppose a watch IS an arm-band-clock.
That actually comes back to a grammatical oddity of shortening languages.
We describe a Taschenuhr as a pocket watch, but the leave out the "wrist" of the "wrist watch" for the most common kind of watch. Technically this is no different in German. I don't think I've heard Armbanduhr (only the first letter of the noun is capitalised) used in conversation.
But if you really want to mess up your brain learn Dutch too. In German Uhr means clock or it means o'clock as in "Es ist fuenf Uhr" (5 o'clock). In Dutch "H
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Subject goes 1st. Verb goes 2nd. Every time. Conjugation is detailed but generally very predictable. There are some oddballs like "Gern" and "Doch" thrown in. The worst part for me was noun gender, but since German is the only language I speak that uses gender on nouns that makes some sense. I'm told it is far less hard to deal with for most other E
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I didn't find the grammar rules weird at all. Mind you, I fit your description of an English-as-first-language speaker. I'd like to compare notes with you.
Subject goes 1st. Verb goes 2nd. Every time. Conjugation is detailed but generally very predictable. There are some oddballs like "Gern" and "Doch" thrown in. The worst part for me was noun gender, but since German is the only language I speak that uses gender on nouns that makes some sense. I'm told it is far less hard to deal with for most other European speakers, since all of the Romance languages use gendered nouns as well as most German-related languages. Let's not talk about Finnish or Hungarian.
What parts of German, especially Grammar, did you find to be particularly bad?
Well, to start off with there is the three gender, not just two as in many languages. Get that wrong and you can get almost every word in the sentence wrong. How many permutations of "the" are there when you take, not just gender, but tense into account. Or the word "ein" which changes too. It's also completely illogical in many cases. The famous example is that "Turnip" is a feminine noun but "Girl" is neutral. German language assign gender to a turnip but not a girl-child.
Then you have some insanely
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That really sucks. Ido is better. Why can't people use languages which don't have exceptions to its rules and one which its words sound exactly how they're spelled?
Japanese is pretty darned regular. Regular conjugations, consistent grammar rules, unambiguous pronunciation.
It's a shame that the writing system is insane.
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Taking different a bit of all languages (from this, the roots; from that, some alphabet chars, from those, some cyrillic chars; from that, some verbal conjugation; from that other language, the sentence structure, etc.) so all people can find something "familiar" in the language just to maximize the popularity..
So, English?
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Esperanto is most definitely simplified. Sure, there's familiarity in the root words, but the rules of the language are greatly simplified on purpose.
I don't know if natural langauges naturally evolve to simpler forms, what they do is evolve towards being easier to understand verbally. Ironically, this often means more complex grammatical rules in order to make understanding easier. Ie, two people shout at each other from neighboring hilltops, it's a mess. "Did you say Pig or Dig?" Listening means you
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Thousands of the world's real languages have fewer speakers than that.
They're all failures too.
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Two million who know "some" Esperanto.
La viro estas malbona!
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>python which I completely despise than in lisp which I hold in high esteem
We don't need your sort around here. Go back to the parentheses farm where you belong.
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>python which I completely despise than in lisp which I hold in high esteem
(We don't need your sort around here. (Go back to the parentheses farm where you belong.))
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Argh.
>python which I completely despise than in lisp which I hold in high esteem
(We don't need your sort around here. (Go back to the parentheses farm where you belong.))
[(x) for opinion in opinions]
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Yes, but how is that different from someone in Albania who has to learn the ridiculous language of English? It makes no sense, the spelling is arbitrary, the vocabulary is immense, irregular verbs are the norm, and so forth. They're not learning English because it's well designed, or because they desire to have a cultural exchange of ideas, or all those other reasons that people learn Esperanto. They learn English because they want to make more money in the future, get into a better school, or to be able
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Latin was widely useful for communication even after there were no native speakers of it. If you were a merchant then it was in your best interests to know this dead language for economic reasons. If you were an aristocrat, diplomat, scientist/philosopher, your job was easier if you knew Latin. It's how the church communicated with all of its priests and members. It was a very widely known language for centuries, and yet there was no village of native Latin speakers.
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When it was new, the reason for the language was to communicate with others and to make this communication easier. The idea is that if it were easier to speak with people from other countries, those people would get along better, there would be fewer wars, fewer problems of misunderstanding, and so forth. It was not invented as a nerd language.
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For a runner up, French which is widely spoken in Africa and is expected to eventually become the most widely spoken language in the world due to good improving health care in Africa.
The only people who believe this live either in Quebec or in France. The rest of the world wrote off French a century ago.
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Rofl ...
Nevertheless your parent is right.
Many parts of Africa, note 'parts', have french as the main language or even official administration language. And/or have a currency derived from french franc and bound to euro.
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For a runner up, French which is widely spoken in Africa and is expected to eventually become the most widely spoken language in the world due to good improving health care in Africa.
The only people who believe this live either in Quebec or in France. The rest of the world wrote off French a century ago.
Just show a prospective language learner a book on French verbs. They'll pick something else soon enough.
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There's something to what you say, but removing a language accompanies a great loss of culture. Sure, probably everyone in the world should try to speak at least one of the four you mentioned, but it would be a crime (IMO) to forget your heritage and make the world a homogeneous mush. I love the richness of the world with all the different cultures, and language makes up a big part of that.
Zamenhof was originally an idealist who wanted to make a universal second language, but more recently conlangs as I bel
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The tone inflection (pitch change) is tricky to learn, but is not the main impedance in my opinion. Mandarin grammar is simpler than English, which compensates for the tones in terms of learning time.
However, Mandarin has no consistent written form. Pinyin is one attempt to provide a phonetic written form (using Latin-derived characters), but it's not used much in China. Chinese use the
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Taiwan uses a simplified version of the same pictographs, but "mainland" China rejects those probably for political reasons. The simplified set is more efficient to use.
NB this is exactly backwards: Taiwan uses the traditional version, mainland China uses the simplified version. It's not really a big deal....in each system, most of the characters are the same (and the characters that are simplified are simplified in mostly a systematic way). In my observation it only takes a few weeks to get used to the other system if you already know one of them.
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>hardly any native speakers
Ohh. Me! I'm one.
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While I believe we are all better off speaking one language, I don't think we should sacrifice our history to do it. Already, we have lost a lot of history due to the fact that nobody speaks the language any more.
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...as was pointed out, it was very Latin and European language-oriented. There wasn't much that looked like Mandarin, Japanese, or Swahili in it. For all purposes and means, English is used now as a universal language although this is likely to change in the next centuries, if history and memory serves.
Yet, despite that; China is one of most common places for people to learn it.
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>The problem with learning any language is that if you don't use it, you will lose it. There is absolutely no reason to learn anything if you can't continuously apply it.
I retained enough French from school (30 years ago) buy croissants and booze in Paris on a recent trip. Hardly useless. The croissants were very nice.