Perfect occasion to ask something that I didn't know who to ask: does anyone here knows if it has ever been tried to "simplify" the visual aspect of Esperanto, by getting rid of all accents? (ĉ, ĝ, ŭ, etc.)
I'm a French speaker and I know some Spanish, so I should be used to accents and maybe biased towards the idea of having them as part of a language, but on the contrary, I love that English has none:
- Accents make a language look more complex at first glance, and therefore less appealing to beginners (my opinion).
- They make it harder to learn and type in the language on a keyboard, even a virtual one. In my case, choosing a language for a keyboard is a big deal.. French one so that accents are easy to type, or English so that code is easy to type? (I chose the latter).
I'm gonna risk a comparison here: it's a bit like programming languages syntax, you can build an app with either Objective-C or Swift, but I suspect many beginners would find Swift's syntax a bit less intimidating. Similarly, someone looking at Esperanto might be immediately put off by seeing that they will have to learn to type ĉ, ĝ, ŭ, etc.
I would love to see someone refactor Esperanto's syntax to remove its accent while still keeping its capabilities.
1. Is that even technically possible, or would that imply making words too complex or adding new letters?
2. Has this idea ever been debated, could I read about it anywhere? (on a public forum/wiki maybe?)
Thanks!
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Edit: Thank you for your answers! So Esperanto has indeed been changed, and each "constructed language derived from Esperanto" is called an Esperantido.
> Perfect occasion to ask something that I didn't know who to ask: does anyone here knows if it has ever been tried to "simplify" the visual aspect of Esperanto, by getting rid of all accents? (ĉ, ĝ, ŭ, etc.)
This is highly subjective view. Of course some people hate diacritics and prefer to write sx instead of ŝ but many have the opposite opinion. As for me sx looks plain disgusting. I would even love to see sh being replaced with ŝ or š or ș in English and the same to happen with sch in German, sz in Polish, ch in French etc. And there have in fact been projects to replace the English alphabet with something that makes more sense and doesn't use combinations of letters to represent a single sound (e.g. the Shavian alphabet). Obviously both ways have their pros and cons, their proponents and opponents so it probably just should be left as it already is in whatever a language.
Completely agree with you that sx doesn't look good at all! My suggestion was not to replace with something that looks worst, but ideally that looks cleaner
(didn't actually even know of the sx form before I read all the great comments, I do not know Esperanto)
People get around the problem of not being able to type these letters by adding an x or an h (cx, gx, ux). Apparently Zamenhof himself was addressing the issue in order to make the language "simpler," as well.
For accents to be removed, there can't be any ambiguity. For instance, in Spanish, the words cómo and como, or the many forms of "porque" (with very different meanings) are a source of confusion for many speakers. This wouldn't be any easier without accents. I think that a language would have to be designed from the ground up to get rid of accents for this to be possible.
A funny thing happened in Slovenian, particularly colloquial Slovenian. We have accents. Many accents. Each vowel has several different pronunciations and sometimes those completely change the meaning of a word. Or they make the text flow better. Or it's an accent thing.
Either way the language has many accents in writing.
But over time, those accents are disappearing. Written Slovenian from the 19th century is absolutely littered with them. Modern Slovenian in colloquial writing is starting to lose even the č, š, ž accents.
Interestingly, people don't compensate with things like cz, or ch, or cx. They rely on context informing the reader how to pronounce a word.
I believe the loss of accents on vowels happened because they're not that necessary. The loss of č š ž is happening because of computers. Takes an extra keypress to type those. On iOS/Android it takes a long press and who has time for that when typing a text? Nobody. So we don't.
Could Spanish not work similarly? Do Spanish people write out all the accents when sending a text?
I know my French girlfriend doesn't always write all her accents and French is also chock full of accents.
Something similar is happening in Vietnamese and I think smartphones are to blame. Writing properly accented Vietnamese on mobile keyboards, particularly the iPhone, is pretty tedious so people often leave out the accents and rely on context to figure out meanings. Unfortunately for a language like Vietnamese which has tons of monosyllable words and where the accent markings completely change the meaning of a word this can lead to a lot of ambiguity.
Why a company with Apple's resources can't be bothered to implement proper autocorrect for a bit market with 80+ million native speakers is a mystery to me.
I could be wrong, but don't people have autocorrect on their phones that will correct the character based on context? Is that even possible?
Lets say somebody wants to say "how I eat" in spanish. The correct way to do it would be "cómo como". "cómo" means how, and "como" means "I eat". I wouldn't make sense to say "como cómo", so therefore, autocorrect should, in theory, feel free to correct all instances of "como como". Only until it becomes an international household brand name will this ever be a problem- for this one phrase at least.
Afaik autocorrect doesn’t work for Slovenian. And even if it does, most people I know have it disabled because our colloquialisms use a lot of English, some German, plenty of Serbocroatian, and sometimes Italian. We often spell those loan words our own way.
This combination of languages and intentionally incorrect spellings makes autocorrect total trash.
There is a trend that confuses this (apparent) simplification trend with "evolution" or "progress".
Don't fool yourself, though.
Accents are there for a reason.
Orthography influences pronunciation. In time people will start pronouncing those words as the orthography suggests rather than deducing it from the context.
Even if only because the context won't be discernible. But, generally, because of the principle of the lesser effort: it's always easier to just read what is there than thinking which pronunciation applies.
Eventually, the words will become homophonous (edit: assuming there are other words which differ only in the accents) - you'll effectively loose the words or they'll change, probably for worse.
The language will become more ambiguous and more dependent on the context knowledge - which will be hard to get if you don't know the language well to begin with.
In other words, you've just made the language "harder" to learn.
Orthography influences pronunciation. In time people will start pronouncing those words as the orthography suggests rather than deducing it from the context.
is there any evidence for that?
anecdotal evidence in english for example suggests just the opposite: light -> lite, etc
however learning a language as a child growing up, vs as a second language later are quite different, and the dynamics that affect language change are hence very different too.
http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/m.html explains how esperanto is unlikely to change, and also why that would be a good thing.
back to your argument, i don't think the words with different pronunciation would be lost, but certainly the language would be harder to learn.
English is atypical in its irregular pronunciation rules IMO. At least compared to Latin languages. And it doesn't have accents that change the pronunciation in otherwise similar words.
As such, people are aware that you just have to know how to pronounce every particular word, rather than relying solely on orthography.
Anyway, your example isn't very good: "light" and "lite" are homophonous anyway.
A better one would be "calm". The "l" is almost mute. Presumably, one could "simplify" the orthography to "cam". And you would pronounce "kom" or "kam" according to context.
I claim one of the pronunciations would eventually disappear, sooner or later.
If you're asking for a "scientific study", I don't have one and I don't even know where such a thing can be found.
But the country I'm from has had 3 orthographic reforms in the 20th century. The last one being all about removing supposed "mute" consonants - but which acted like accents in that they altered pronunciation of the word.
Exactly!
And I see that typewriters were invented in 1878, so the difficulty to type Esperanto with typewriters was most probably not taken into account when it was invented.
You can potentially replace them with digraphs if the digraphs aren't used for some other purpose, which some Esperantists have done with the x-method, like gxis for ĝis 'until', although some people find that quite ugly.
An interesting example to me is that pinyin uses the diacritical marks to mark tones in Chinese, which can be hard to type on a limited system but also hard for Chinese learners to remember. The Gwoyeu_Romatzyh system has different spellings for each vowel depending on the associated tone!
This is presumably harder to learn but easier for learners to remember. Similarly, Finnish uses double letters to mark a long vowel as opposed to the ā, like maa 'country' which other languages might write as mā. On the other hand, are also vowels ä and ö which are different from a and o, so to find a way to spell Finnish without these marks one would need to find some unused digraph, which might actually be a big challenge, since Wikipedia says
> The Germanic umlaut or convention of considering digraph ae equivalent to ä, and oe equivalent to ö is inapplicable in Finnish. Moreover, in Finnish, both ae and oe are vowel sequences, not single letters, and they have independent meanings (e.g. haen "I seek" vs. hän "he, she").
If one wanted to write Spanish without the accent marks, it might be possible to find digraph equivalents, such as maybe ou for ó (which is a problem in "estadounidense" but almost nowhere else!). The ñ could be written with nh as in Portuguese (señor/senhor).
This would work for ñ but it wouldn’t necessarily work for replacing accents unless the vowel followed by u becomes an accent - which leads to the estadounidense problem you identified.
From what I remember from high school Spanish, there is a default syllable that has an “invisible accent” on its vowel in a Spanish word without accents and the purpose of an accent is to change the syllable that gets emphasized.
Yes, we'd ideally need to find a digraph that absolutely doesn't occur in Spanish. This can be tricky with compound words and loanwords. It seems that ou, oe and oo are super-rare in Spanish morphemes but can occur in loanwords and compounds. I just searched for unaccented digraphs that literally don't occur at all in /usr/share/dict/spanish and the only examples (of which there are 184 excluding k and w) contain only consonants and y.
So, there's not any easy natural way to do this without creating at least some ambiguities.
Spoken Japanese, in my very limited experience, runs into this issue due to the number of homophones and the only recourse are context clues to distinguish their meaning. So there can be ambiguity in an otherwise functional language, although it certainly makes it harder.
True, though native speakers do distiguish a good swath of "homophones" by differing pitch accent---e.g. in the standard dialect あめ means "rain" if the pitch drops on め or "candy" if it stays level. To a native speaker, these sound as different as the two ways of saying "present".
If you grab a native Japanaese dictionary that has accent indicators, like 新明解国語辞典, there really are surprisingly few true homophones in a typical vocabulary.
Guilty! Felt like it was the perfect audience to ask for a question that I could not ask people around me :-)
On HN, there is usually always at least one domain expert on any given topic, so it's a pleasure to know that someone will probably have an answer for you.
Realistically accents are such a small hurdle that if a learner can't stomach it, they're probably not going to make it. It's something like complaining that Russian is written in Cyrillic, which is something you can get over much quicker than the myriad of crazy grammar.
Makes sense. Although if the idea is to choose one language because it has been created with the purpose of being as simple as possible, it might be normal that we want this to be as optimized as possible. If I already know that I'm gonna have to install a fourth keyboard on my smartphone and switch to it every time I write in Esperanto so that accents are easier to type, that might an unnecessary barrier we could get rid of.
Basically, this was invented decades ago by a few people. It's 2018, I wonder what language would be produced if several thousands people collaborated online to simplify it to a maximum, while retaining its capacity to express any idea.
Hey I’m all for language experimentation, though if it were truly a modern language designed for the world based on population, consider that it may be a tonal language with characters! Or just use English.
Esperanto was created in 1880, it’s older than world war 1, it’s older than English as the international language, and it’s older than Europe having much exposure to Asian languages
Interesting! I see that this refactor was made in 1907.
This makes me wonder... in an age where we have tools to open-source and crowdsource software programming, would it be possible to crowd-source the creation of a new language?
It could then be refactored regularly (with new major versions published every X years), the source of truth would be the main branch of the repo, and the role that an Academy usually assumes (approving changes to a language) would be given to contributors.
I suspect that a language created by a common effort from a thousand brains would be simpler and more optimized than one invented by a single person in the late 19th century, no matter how hard that person worked on it.
Regular refactoring seems to be a dangerous thing:
Ido was created around a quarter of a century after Esperanto. The name Ido means "offspring" in Esperanto and was so named by its creators because it was a development of Esperanto. The creation of Ido led to a schism between those who believed that Esperanto should be left as it was and those who believed that it had what they perceived as inherent flaws which made it not quite good enough to be the world's international auxiliary language. Those who opposed change maintained that it was endless tinkering that had led, in their opinion, to the decline of Volapük a once popular constructed language that had predated Esperanto's publication by a few years. They would also surely have pointed out that Dr Zamenhof's reform proposals of 1894 had been rejected by popular vote.
The problem would be to get the thousand brains to agree.Now thousands and thousands of brains are applied every day to stretching anbd applying Esperanto to all aspects of life. I have found Esperanto of a lot of use when travelling on my own, to get my bearings within a country. Esperanto may not be perfect, but I've used it successfully in Africa, South America and Europe, and it does the job, serving as a unique common language on my travels in, for example, Armenia and Bulgaria.
Esperanto speakers are highly organised. There is a Jarlibro (Yearbook) published annually giving access to a network of local representatives. These people, scattered all over the world and act as 'consuls', providing help and information, and passing on the visitor from another country to his/her contacts. Esperanto does have an Academy, but it is the people who decide in practice.
when I used esperanto on IRC (many years ago), people wrote "cx", "gx" "ux", etc. This seems very standard usage when you are writing on limited charsets. Nowadays, you can just type the actual letters, it's not a big deal. I actually find the choice of accents cute and I love them.
Very interesting. I should spend a few minutes reading about it, but: does that mean that accents do not actually have a utility in Esperanto, and that using ĝ or g in the same word does not create two different meanings?
Is it just for pronunciation purposes?
Edit: The forum link that kissickas's posted answers my question :-) Thanks
Ok I see.
By "Nowadays, you can just type the actual letters, it's not a big deal.", I had understood that you could actually just use the normal letter and it would still be understood.
> I should be used to accents and maybe biased towards the idea of having them as part of a language, but on the contrary, I love that English has none
This is popular misconception shared by a lot of French but actually English has accent and a few other diacritics as well. You can see them in loanwords such as canapé or saké, and on word like coördination.
You may be right but I was Born and went to school in the UK and I don't remember any accents. The first two words are just French and Japanese words we use but the accents are generally left out of English spellings of them without any noticeable difference, the other I've always spelled as "co-ordination" with a dash.. of course if you went to a posh school it is likely done properly.
True, but I suspect they are sufficiently rare not to constitute an argument for a beginner not to learn English
(also, correct me if I'm wrong but most of those words have accents because they come from other languages)
English had native accents, as in naïve, to show that the double vowel was pronounced as two sounds, but they have declined in use over the year. Cooperate isn't spelt with 'oö', which makes pronouncing it from the spelling difficult. But English has never really been spelt phonetically anyway, so it is now overdue for a reformation really.
Glad to see this on HN. I'm not fluent in Esperanto, but the 20 or so hours I've put into it, I can read, write, and speak much better than I can in Spanish (where I've gone through 3 years of formal education).
The reason is that Esperanto doesn't have irregular anything, drops out unnecessary things, easy phonetics, and introduces devices to make things easier. For example, all nouns end in "o", questions usually start with "cu". Also, the vocabulary you need is reduced by marking certain things as opposites (if you know the word for good "bona" the word for bad is "Mal" + "bona" or "malbona".
I still have a ways to go to learn the language, but I figure I have more chance of learning it than other languages I'm interested in like Spanish and Swedish (relatively easy for native English speakers) and Hungarian and Finnish (far beyond my wildest grasps).
There are not many Esperanto speakers you'll meet on the subway, but there is a vibrant online community and international events.
It's beneficial to us in the USA and the UK that English is the lingua Franca. What if the tables were turned and we had to learn Mandarin? The Esperanto language was eventually repurposed as an international auxillary language. So everyone learns their native tongue and international discussions (like the U.N.) are all done in Esperanto and you don't need armies of translators. It will never happen, but I really like the concept.
> The reason is that Esperanto doesn't have irregular anything, drops out unnecessary things, easy phonetics, and introduces devices to make things easier.
This is an illusion generated by the fact that Esperanto has no community of speakers. Your language can be as unusable as you want as long as nobody has to use it.
Compare this quote I collected from Wikipedia years ago:
> In Esperanto each transitive verb has two present participles (active and passive), two past participles, and two future participles. Some speakers have also analogously constructed two conditional participles, which are not in widespread use and are not officially sanctioned by the Akademio de Esperanto, but which are nonetheless readily understood.
Wikipedia today still acknowledges the conditional participles of Esperanto, but protests that they're just a joke, not a real part of the language. But grammatical innovation is guaranteed to occur if a language is ever spoken by more than one person. This neatly summarizes the problem with the concept of a perfectly regular language that's easy to learn -- as soon as people try, those qualities are immediately lost. Esperanto picked up a group of speakers whose native languages had conditional participles, and now Esperanto has them too, even though the existence of conditional participles is a violation of every founding principle of Esperanto.
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> I'm not fluent in Esperanto, but the 20 or so hours I've put into it, I can read, write, and speak much better than I can in Spanish (where I've gone through 3 years of formal education).
Again, this is an illusion caused by the fact that Esperanto has no speakers. If you look at a real language, Latin, you'll notice that it's much easier to read Latin written in the Renaissance by non-native speakers than Latin written in the Roman Republic by native speakers. Those Renaissance writers were writing in a foreign language, their native language was grammatically closer to yours, and the result is that their Latin is incredibly straightforward. In contrast, Caesar's De Bello Gallico is known for the clarity of the prose, but it is nevertheless infinitely more complex (for a modern reader), because Caesar was writing in his own native tongue.
At least in Europe, the Esperanto community is large enough, with frequent enough events or everyday interaction at the main organizations’ offices, that some Esperantists even spend a substantial portion of their year among it, so your assertion that Esperanto has no community of speakers is false. I say that not to defend Esperanto; I myself ultimately left the Esperanto movement because I found this community to be a bit too demanding of one’s fealty and, in a sense, cult-like. And this community of active speakers who meet in person is definitely small, but it nonetheless exists.
Sorry, but you're guessing without having any data or knowledge of Esperanto. At the World Kongresso hundreds of people from around the world meet and only speak Esperanto all week. They have zero trouble communicating. There are several Esperanto video channels where people meet others who don't speak their tongue and they can communicate fluently. There are even some native Esperanto speakers believe it or not.
You say this as if you think it contradicts what I said. Hundreds of people who meet for a week once a year are not a language community. While it was alive, Manx would have exceeded that amount of yearly communication, and it was spoken only on the Isle of Man. Unknown Sentinelese languages have more of a community than Esperanto does, right now.
> They have zero trouble communicating.
Note that I said that it's easier to understand a language which the speaker isn't comfortable in.
I moved to Finland, and as you say Finnish is hard. It does have its pluses though, certainly some of the things that are listed as advantages of Esperanto:
* Regular grammar.
* Consistent pronunciation.
Given the pain of moving to a foreign country and learning their language I'd struggle to learn another language "for fun", without the ability to use it "for real" on a regular basis.
Indeed, while there is a logic to Finnish's system of consonant gradation (changes to the consonants of words in different noun and verb forms), it is only completely graspable by those with some knowledge of historical linguistics. Ordinary learners have to simply memorize many things by rote.
This is why Harjoitus tekee mestarin, a popular workbook series for foreign learners of Finnish, provides hundreds of pages of exercises to help students memorize the different noun declensions and verb conjugations, and it is not an easy task. Then, after you have learned the complicated written language, learning the actual spoken Finnish used in everyday life involves learning even more such exceptions. (Finland has diglossia not too different from, say, what reigned in Greece until the 1970s).
You must accept that Esperanto is many times easier for westerners to learn than anybody else, though, right? If we really wanted a "neutral language" for the vast majority of people we should have based the language on Malagasy or something.
Anecdotally, most esperantists at conventions are from europe, especially France. It's probably a combination of it being easier for europeans combined with europeans having more vacation days. There are a lot of japanese esperantists too but they don't go to conventions until after retirement, which I found quite sad.
I've been learning Vietnamese for the past few years and I have to say it's been very refreshing to realize how little of the complex grammar typical in Western languages you really need to communicate. Vietnamese throws verb conjugation, tenses, plurals, possessives, etc out the window and is still a perfectly expressive language. I understand a lot more why people often reject the idea that Esperanto is a universal language because it brings a ton of grammatical baggage that, for example, many Asian languages don't have.
I've been learning for a few months. So far my favourite parts are that the word for right (direction) is the same as a word for right (correct), that months and days are named 'Nth month/day', and that refrigerator is 'cold cabinet'.
Yeah Vietnamese is often a very literal language. The names of many Vietnamese dishes are just a description of what's in the dish and how it was prepared. "Bún thịt nướng", for example, just means noodles with grilled meat. You can handle past and future tenses with just a couple of modifier words. In a lot of ways it's a pretty elegant language and the only really hard thing about it is getting the tones down and learning all the slang people use in everyday conversation.
China is one of the strongest supporters of Esperanto and it seems like they are satisfied with the neutrality of it. It is "basically an isolating language"¹, which is more common in Asia, and anyway a lot easier to learn than another regional language.
Instead of malbona, why not unbona or ungood? Or to express a greater good, can I suggest doubleplusgood? It's so strange how some of the merits of esperanto you listed reminds me of the merits of 1984's Newspeak.
I caught the esperanto bug briefly in high school too, but I quickly gave up on it as the initial novelty wore off.
Esperanto is a nice idea but impractical. Idealism only gets you so far. There are hundreds or thousands of years worth of literature, history, culture, etc tied to the major languages that already exist. Esperanto is not going to overcome this advantage of incumbent languages.
You brought up an interesting point. What if the tables were turned and we had to learn mandarin? If I was forced to learn a language, I'd rather learn mandarin than esperanto. And as frustrating as irregular aspects of languages can be, the irregularity leads to the beauty of languages. There is history to the frustrating aspects of language.
And though esperanto might be useful for the UN, it is useless everywhere else. Almost everyone on earth lives with or near people who speak the same language as them. Think about it? In your day to day experience, when do you really need esperanto? For most people, the answer is never.
The goal of Esperanto is having a quick, easy way for people around the world to communicate with each other. You don't need to live near Esperanto speakers to use it online, by mail, or while traveling.
Esperanto is basically a ticket to joining a global diaspora where members are extremely supportive, they’ll go out of their way to meet up with you and be friends. In English you’re just another joe, so there’s that. It’s not for everyone, in fact this works only insofar as Esperanto is not mainstream!
Also I never use Esperanto at home, only when I travel. It’s a great way to meet people from all around the world and chat about culture and life.
I was waiting for the newspeak argument. If we were talking about Toki-Pona I would agree, but Esperanto doesn't dumb you down and Sapir-Whorf isn't proved either.
Also, I'd certainly talk to a whole lot more international folks if I could speak with them. I know a lot of people who travel places where the natives don't speak English. That alone would be helpful.
I wonder if a better solution for a "universal" language would be a Simplified English, where the English language as spoken in the US/UK is greatly simplified in terms of rules, spelling etc. Go with the Esperanto idea of a common verb tense rule (I go, He go -> I goed, He goed), and clean up the spelling (tough -> tuf, though -> tho). Most people in the world have a grasp of English based on the Internet and entertainment, maybe making it even easier to learn would help them become proficient in it.
Tok Pisin and other English-based creoles are not simplified English though – they’re languages in their own right where English has served as a major influence. I don’t think that many English speakers would view Tok Pisin inflecting verbs for transivity, having inclusive/exclusive and dual/trial pronouns and making extensive use of reduplication as being simpler.
I would love that, but there is one potential issue: English is really hard to pronounce well, and therefore it takes years to understand it well. There are many ways to pronounce the same combination of letters, depending which word they are part of (like "ough", etc.). Words have emphasis that also make them more difficult to pronounce.
Many non-native English speaker I know (myself included) still have a hard time understanding some English words after 15-20 years or more of English as a second language and having lived in English-speaking countries for years. A native English speaker could still pronounce a word and they would have very little idea how to write it, and therefore won't be able to look it up in a dictionary.
On the contrary, after a few minutes/hours of learning Spanish pronunciation, one is usually able to write words that they hear pronounced slowly, since they are written as they are pronounced and there is only "one" way to pronounce them. Same for Esperanto I believe, or language like Korean (although it's a different alphabet so it takes more time for anyone used to the latin alphabet, but it is still phonetic).
As linguists will sometimes joke, English spelling is extremely useful, you can look at an English word and tell exactly how it was pronounced 700 years ago.
Even native English speakers struggle with it. This is the so-called "curse of the autodidact": when people have read quite a bit on a specialized topic but never had a spoken conversation about it, and mispronounce technical words or place the stress on the wrong syllable.
> A native English speaker could still pronounce a word and they would have very little idea how to write it, and therefore won't be able to look it up in a dictionary.
Not by coincidence, in USA they have spelling challenges aired nationwide.
Indeed, and I suppose spelling bees makes sense for any language that is not written exactly as it is pronounced, French being one of them.
From what I've read so far, Esperanto only has a single way to write every sound it uses, so it would be much less challenging.
Let me know what you think, but I suspect spelling is not exactly the issue, but rather the fact that there is not a single way to write each sound. There are several sounds possible for each spelling ("ough").
If there were a single way to write each sound, then the spelling in itself wouldn't really matter, as we would only learn the spelling of each sound once and be done with it; we'd always recognize it.
Especially since this is effectively what is happening - when I speak English with someone from a non-native country I essentially drop into much simpler non-idiomatic vocab set.
Saw this a lot in Indonesia and Malaysia where specially “manglish” is common. They have a need for English, but not all the rules.
Cognates sometimes take their more obvious English phonetic spelling.
Issue with those two languages specifically is they don’t have great past present and future tenses. “I have a car” and ^“I had car”* are initially similar and you need to differentiate later, “I have a car but I sell it, so I won’t drive you”. so English with its tenses is important - but “P as in pterodactyl” isn’t.
Eh? Pernah (had) and dulu (before) are our modifiers to make past tenses, and so is akan for future tense (the exact same usage as will, and less confusing!)
Indonesian English is only used by a few people (mostly urban youngsters), but from what I know Manglish is common because some Malaysians refuse/don't see the point in learning Malay, which is sad...
I don’t speak it, so IDK. It was just explained to me that tenses weren’t always there. But, that was explained to me by a primarily English Malay speaker which - goes to the topic you mentioned which is sad.
Whatever, inventing a new language (even based on another one heavily) only makes sense if it is going to be better than all the other existing by orders of magnitude. IMHO just making an existing language slightly easier to learn while annoying all the existing speakers (English speakers reading a text won't immediately recognize tuf as tough) does not qualify. As long as we don't manage to produce a distinct engineered language so unquestionably amazing that a huge part of the people would adopt it readily the only viable alternative remaining is just sticking with an existing language that is reasonably easy to learn (e.g. English is usually considered easier to learn than Chinese or even than French but I'd love to know if it actually is easier for people whose native language is neither Indo-European nor Sino-Tibetan and uses a different kind of alphabet) and already is spoken by a significant portion of the whole set of people it is meant for.
Fixing the spelling in a way which pleases everyone is a challenge (pure phonetic spelling likely makes it significantly harder to read for Latin-language speakers as well as English speakers, for example)
But in general the quirks in English are quite easy to drop without losing meaning, things like definite and definite articles can be made optional and then you end up with something not dissimilar to how many basic ESL speakers from different countries communicate with each other anyway...
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La parolantojn de aliaj lingvoj, preciple la angla-parolantojn mi ne plu kuraĝigas por Esperanton lerni. Estas malŝparo de energio. Anstataŭe, la lingvon mi uzas sen tiu celo.
Bedaŭrinde, mi ne certas se bonan diskuton pri tiu temo ni povas havi ĉi tie. Se estas parolantoj ĉi tie, mi anticipas ke la nivelo malaltas. Espereble, pli fortan diskuton mi povas havi aŭ vidi.
Kompreneble, mi povas konsenti ke fortas Esperanto. Min mem mi farigis kavio. Mi volis scii, se fakte utilas tiu lingvo. Post preskaŭ kvar monatoj, mi konsciis, ke mi pravis. Jes, fakte funkcias Esperanto. Jes, eĉ la plej bizarajn ideojn mi povas esprimi Esperante. Jes, la lingvon mi subtenos en miaj restantaj jaroj.
I love the concept of esperanto but to be honest there are no practical uses for it. Fun language and it teaches you the concepts of others but as I said, not that useful.
No practical uses! What! Over recent years I have had guided tours of Berlin, Douala (loo it up!), Yerevan 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 useful and practical way to overcome language barriers.
Take an unguided wander around the net. You wil find political stuff, religious stuff, scientific stuff - all in Esperanto.
Your experience may serve as a rebuttal to the OP about lack of "practical use", but with your couple of posts here I feel you are being very disingenuous and leaving some key things out that would put Esperanto in a bad light. Yes, the Esperanto movement does have a network of proponents around the world that is close-knit and local Esperantists are often willing to show a foreigner around. However, among them are so many weirdos and eccentrics that a person might well be served better by learning either English or the local language and getting all his hospitality and local information through that instead.
When I was active in the Esperanto movement, it was common for my fellow Esperantists to joke or kvetch about how certain kinds of political movements or bizarre lifestyles would come out in force at congresses and make everyone else cringe, or how creepy or insufferable one's Pasporta Servo host turned out to be. Something as idealistic and unfashionable as Esperanto is bound to attract more odd people than when using a language like English that is more utilitarian and has less overt shared values.
There's some truth to that, but learning the local language for everywhere you want to travel is very difficult, and learning English can only get you so far.
The great thing about Esperanto is that the speakers are very enthusiastic to speak it with other people, so you'll get better than average hospitality. You're also right about the weirdos, so you need to be very careful when selecting a host.
I really like the idea of Amikumu, where you chat with people in Esperanto before meeting in person. Meeting more Esperantists is great because you can discuss experiences using Esperanto abroad.
I am marginally into the language (I lurk about on Esperanto subreddits, have done the Duolingo course, and visit Lernu.net periodically), but I wouldn't call myself fluent or anything. However, I might try to use it if I go somewhere with generally weak English skills, like Japan or parts of each Europe.
he is probably leaving these things out because he didn't make the experience. or didn't notice it because it didn't seem out of the ordinary for him.
those wierdos and eccentrics showing up is a sign of the openness and tolerance that is lived in the esperanto community. so yes, esperanto is bound to attract those people.
eccentrics by necessity favor communities where openness and tolerance for their lifestyle is practiced. so they will gravitate to communities where they are welcome.
to the chinese for example, all western foreigners look like wierdos and eccentrics. the sideeffect is that weird and eccentric westerners in china are treated with the same respect as everyone else because the chinese for the most part can't tell the difference, unlike at home where they don't fit in.
but those eccentrics are part of the early adopters in the innovation adoption lifecycle. they have less opportunities to find acceptance elsewhere. esperanto presents an opportunity for them.
the challenge of the esperanto community is to break out of the early adopter phase and find a way to let the language appeal to the majority.
Compared to other conlangs, esperanto is probably the most useful. Heck, compared to some natural languages, esperanto has a unique usecase of letting you join a very passionate language diaspora with members scattered around the world.
One practical use that has been studied (only a little) is to use Esperanto as a stepping stone to learning other languages. Essentially the idea is that you can first spend a few months learning Esperanto and that might actually speed up the total time for learning a "third" language. I believe school systems in both the UK and France have experimented with this, both with promising results.
When you actually look at those "promising results" you'll notice that they come about by cherry-picking, not controlling for confounders (like Esperanto teachers using better teaching methods) and wishful thinking. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14848019 , which I wrote some time ago when the same topic came up.
I don't doubt that Esperanto is easy to learn, but there's no evidence to suggest that learning Esperanto helps more with learning another language than spending the same time learning that language instead.
I'm not aware of any controlled studies bringing evidence on this as well. But there seems to be lots of anecdotal evidence.
One may argue that people who learn Esperanto are naturally inclined to language learning anyway, but what you actually see is people who allegedly have always struggled with languages and, after giving Esperanto a try, they begin to find more effective ways of learning foreign languages in general.
i think the point is that your first foreign language is harder to learn because you are unfamiliar with the idea and the process. the time and effort it takes can be demotivating.
once you learned one language, learning others should be easier because you have overcome that first mental challenge.
introducing esperanto as that first foreign language should provide some early success that motivate the students in their language learning.
that's the theory anyways. we do need some more studies to verify that.
any second language makes it easier to learn a third one.
Chinese schools used to teach Esperanto during the 80's. I've asked some esperanto speakers about it and some of them say that Esperanto was seen as a bridge to learning English and other western languages, which are of course very different than chinese languages.
If you feel interested, google about Esperanto propaedeutic properties.
We used to have a stepping stone to learn other languages. It was called latin. For some odd reason, we stopped teaching it in our public schools here. But the wealthy private schools still teach latin and give their kids and enormous leg up in their studies.
As someone who took Latin in high school, the stepping stone argument always felt a bit disingenuous. There seemed to be a component of not wanting to admit it was being taught primarily because it was part of a traditional Classics education among Western upper classes. As opposed to a useful skill of some sort.
I have absolutely nothing against traditional Classics though I’m not sure how good a fit they are with typical US public high schools today. However I’m pretty skeptical that a few years of Latin—as opposed to Spanish, German, or French (which I also took) or something else entirely—is a uniquely good use of time.
I absolutely agree with spanish, german, french or any other language being a good stepping stone to learn other languages. Not only that learning another language helps you better understand your own language.
However, what makes latin special is that spanish, german, french, english and many european languages have significant history with latin as a language and has been tremendously influenced by latin. And it's not just language. Much of science, literature, music, math, etc has strong latin roots.
If there is one language that offers the most bang for the buck, it's latin. It's something every kid should be taught in my opinion, especially in the west since latin influenced nearly every language and academic field.
any second language is a stepping stone to later languages. by the time you learn latin and then french, you might as well have learned french directly and then german or chinese.
esperanto is different because it is easier to learn, so instead of taking years to mastery, you are done in a few months, and teachers can focus on proper learning techniques without fearing that students get demotivated because it takes so long. then you can apply those techniques to the next languages and hopefully come out ahead
To echo others, I would need to be convinced that learning a synthetic language that, for most of us, will never have any direct practical use has some unique pedagogical value. For me, learning an actual language, however imperfectly, that has a history, literature, and in many cases current speakers and culture seems far more interesting. But, then, I never had any interest in learning Klingon or elvish either.
that would be an obvious yes because esperanto is easier than spanish.
but also, dutch is similar enough to english that learning spanish will not help you much at all, other than that third language effect which can be had with any other language too.
I find this hard to believe as a conclusion anyone could come to. A universal shared language for international communication? People can keep their mother tongue yet no matter how provincial it may be, can still communicate effectively with the rest of the world?
True, and some people would even call it "globish". (as in "globe") It's a form of non-native English that is as close to being universal as the world has ever seen.
This is particularly noticeable in Europe. Due to the European Union's thinning/erasure of borders, there is an order of magnitude more inter-European travel and mobility than 10 years ago. And the most widely understood language between these travelers is English. In Barcelona, vendors would speak to Dutch and Chinese tourists in English. Even in Paris, famous for its disdain of English, the language is fairly widely spoken, not so much to accommodate the British, but visitors from the rest of Europe and the world.
Folks quickly figured out that instead of learning multiple European languages (and even then, only be able to communicate with other Europeans and people from former European colonies), they could instead learn English and be able to communicate with not only Europeans but people from Asia, the Middle East, etc.
English is used even among people of the same ethnicity. I was with a friend at a restaurant in Chicago's Chinatown, and noticed that my Cantonese-speaking friend had a hard time conveying her order to the Mandarin-speaking mainland Chinese waiter, so they both switched to English. The communication was successful.
> A universal shared language for international communication?
That is a very good idea. But in order to be successful such a language needs to be spoken by a large share of people internationally.
The best language we have for this is English. It's not perfect, because in large parts of the world, particularly in Asia, many people don't speak it. But it's far better suited than Esperanto in almost every imaginable way.
Before WW1, Esperanto was actually becoming popular and was taught in schools in parts of Europe.
The nationalistic policies around WW1 and after put a stop to it.
I think it's a tremendous shame... it would be so nice to communicate with everyone in a simple language.
Note that such a language would not actually need to be actively spoken in normal live much. It just needs to be simple enough to be learn in a short amount of time and to have international backing so it is taught in schools.
Latin isn't spoken much and we still call it a language: a dead language. Esperanto is still spoken, it's just a particularly uncommon (but not even the smallest) language.
http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/m.html gives a better definition of a dead language: one that does not naturally evolve because it does not have any native speakers, but only second language speakers.
Also, many Esperanto speakers were killed in WWII as Hitler hated it because the inventor was Jewish and for nationalist reasons and Stalin because he thought they would be spies. I recall Zamenhoff's children died in concentration camps. Truly horrifying.
Esperanto is not really politically neutral. Like other such projects for world peace and understanding, its proponents tend to be overwhelmingly on the left, even if disputes might occasionally arise within it between leftist factions. I spent some years in the Esperanto movement and attended a large number of Esperanto congresses and meetups, and I worked with the main organization representing Esperanto (UEA). In this community, advocacy for world federalism or closer EU integration was heard extremely frequently and such ideas were a common theme for conventions. On one hand, I thought that was cool, because I myself was sympathetic to such causes, but at the same time it was obvious that there was a strong enmity towards any ideas associated with the right and that this "neutral" movement was not as open to just any man off the street around the world as it wanted to seem.
you make a fair argument, but i think it is worth distinguishing esperanto the language, and and the community of esperanto speakers. there is nothing in the language itself that enforces these political views.
it is for example conceivable that people could use esperanto as a communication language with foreigners to avoid english domination out of a conservative isolationist motivation.
As things stand, your theoretical conservative isolationist is unlikely to even meet a fellow Esperanto speaker outside of the community of Esperanto speakers. There are so few Esperanto speakers that if one wanted to actively use the language in any way, one would have to engage with its community. Some Esperantists do keep their distance from the core, rather fanatic community and they try to use the language purely as a means of communication or as a game. However, the actual organizations that provide most of the infrastructure to actively use the language are bound quite closely with the community, and a certain set of shared cultural behaviours and acceptable political boundaries has now arisen within that community.
sorry, i used the wrong term, i didn't mean 'political' in terms of political factions or streams, but in terms of nations. (like it is used in political map vs geographical map)
with culture i don't mean the words in the language but the culture of the speakers. english is dominated by speakers with western (american,british,australian) culture.
by comparison, the speakers of latin are all dead. so, while latin has a rich historic culture, it is not dominated by any living culture.
likewise, esperanto is not dominated by any living culture because its speakers come from all over the world.
that would be like saying, phones are not practical because not everyone has one. or maybe facebook or google+ are not practical because not everyone is on them.
but that is a limitation that has nothing to do with any inherent quality of esperanto, only with it's lack of popularity which is something that can be changed without needing to change esperanto itself.
Esperanto is no more "universal" or "shared" than any other European or Romance language, which is to say its idioms are "universal" only to a limited subset of humanity.
Might as well just tell the world to keep using English, or make Westerners learn Mandarin.
The link in the article about native speakers is interesting.
1. All "native" speakers are actually raised bilingual. and
2. George Soros was raised learning esperanto. I am surprised that there isn't some conspiracy about Esperanto
I've met native speakers, and some things surprised me:
1. Some still have a heavy accent. In fact it tends to be the accent of their parents. (all of us have an accent, it just happens that some of our accents are considered standard english)
2. They tend to be fluent but fluency is also a function of frequency of use, and some non-native speakers reach higher fluency by living with other esperanto speakers and using it daily
3. They all type using `x` notation, since they were typing Eo before Eo keyboards existed, so gxis instead of ĝis
If you are into artificial languages, also check out lfn (https://elefen.org). Like Esperanto, it also features regular spelling and simple syntax, but one key difference is that its vocabulary is almost entirely Romance; it is a artificial Romance creolo. As a result, it is very easy for native speakers of Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, etc.) to understand, and it can also serve as a "gateway language" for learning other Romance languages.
Well, but probably most of the languages work this way, maybe all of them. English vocabulary resembles a pile of goods stolen from french, germanic languages and so on.
"The problem with defending the purity of
the English language is that English is
about as pure as a cribhouse whore.
We don't just borrow words; on occasion,
English has pursued other languages down
alleyways to beat them unconscious
and rifle their pockets for
new vocabulary."
- James Nicoll
This is intentional: the roots were all taken from what Zamenhof surmised were the "most common" for a given word/concept across Indo-European languages
One of the nice surprises I had after learning Esperanto a while back was that there is a small but vibrant literature of original novels and poetry in Esperanto. Especially in the first half of the 20th century quite a few gems were written. I've been able to read works about life in Russia at the turn of the 19th century, a Czech Jew's experiences during WWI, and a collection of short stories written by Chinese authors shortly after the Cultural Revolution, all without need of a translator. One Esperanto poet, William Auld, was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times before he died about a decade ago.
over time, several flaws in the language have been pointed out, and proposals to fix them, as well as alternate approaches to an auxiliary language have been made.
and while it can be said that esperanto was not yet able to appeal to the majority, it is wildly more successful than any other attempt.
why is that?
why have none of the alternatives even made it out of the experimental stage?
with any of the well meant proposals in this discussion, it is important to understand what would make those proposals succeed. (and by succeed i mean at first reach a speaker-base that equals that of esperanto)
i believe that the results up to now indicate that the quality of the language is not the issue.
esperanto is like python 2, but in a world where everyone prefers to use php.
or is it?
are the flaws in esperanto what's holding back further growth? do we need to start from scratch, and go through the painful stages of initial growth esperanto has already been through?
Yeah, the article is a bit too long, I haven't gone through it yet but I intend to. But I disagree about a few points I've read so far.
Esperanto case declinations consist basically of marking direct objects with an -n suffix. You forget it sometimes, and many jokes among Esperanto speakers are about forgetting the accusative, but it is not that hard and gives you some nice flexibilities regarding word ordering.
I don't remember of adjectival concords in Esperanto, but I'm not a linguistics expert, I speak Esperanto but maybe there is something there which I haven't realized, or some rule that maybe has become second nature to me due to my mother tongue.
It sounds indeed more familiar to european-languages speakers but well, chineses find Esperanto easy so I don't know..
The notation may be a bit clumsy for keyboard users, of course, but one has to consider that computers with ansi keyboards didn't exist by then and, anyway, there is already a widely used convention to overcome the lack of those two funny symbols: to simply use an "x" after the targeted letter.
I admire Esperanto's ability of being such a rant magnet. When it comes to other languages, people usually simply don't learn them when they don't feel interested enough.
When I was in elementary school, we were taught English grammar in English class. Actually, we weren't. We were taught Early Modern Latin grammar using the English language, and everyone pretended that English was somehow a simple variant of Early Modern Latin.
Why were we taught such an egregious abomination? Because the traditional study of grammar was in the study of a very rigorous classical Latin and Greek, which was extended to vernacular languages by the Late Middle Ages. For the presciptivists of the Early Modern, it was a short step to use the same framework to try to describe English--and when the framework is woefully underequipped to deal with English grammar, they simply declared that such constructs shouldn't be used because you can't do it in Latin. Linguists only really developed the capability to tackle English about 100 years ago, and primary education still hasn't caught up.
The complaint in the rant on Esperanto essentially boils down to pointing out that Zamenhof's idea of what constitutes a sufficient description of a grammar is following that ancient underpowered Latin grammar rubric. The second major theme is that Esperanto doesn't look much beyond Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages, and its considerations for what's important, what's omitted, and what's variant is largely derived from consideration of how those languages are similar or different.
Uhm.. I tend to disagree, I think this rant is not based on such elaborate and architected arguments. Are there some references about them?
The criticism I usually hear is something in the lines of Esperanto has been defeated in the international language championship and now refuses to shut the mouth up and go back home.
The author says somewhere in that rant explicitly that Esperanto is a Romance/Germanic/Slavic creole and there are already too many of those, which is a pretty clear restatement of what I referred to as the second theme.
Most of the rant itself is essentially a lot of nitpicking at the corners of the language. For example, the complaints about the passive voice structure or the gerunds in Esperanto, or the entire discussion of the difference between tense and aspect. This discussion can generally be simplified as "linguistics is more complex than is presented by its author." http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/b.html gives a more thorough elaboration on this topic in particular by going line-by-line through the Fundamento and pointing out some of the misconceptions of linguistics embedded in it (among other things).
Those are very interesting theoretical points, but in practice nobody who actually speak the language complains about them. So, I don't know if they are relevant on a practical standpoint.
One may demonstrate that Zamenhof overpromoted his product (maybe out of ignorance, given Zamenhof was an amateur linguist). But the thing works beautifully well anyway and the criticism around there seems not to care about this.
the rant does contain a number of interesting arguments, when each is looked at by itself. but for most arguments there is no attempt at actually solving the discussed problem, so we are stuck taking the authors word for it.
a few are obvious and really should be solved. gender neutrality for example. given todays climate, that is a real problem that other languages like english and german are dealing with now, and esperanto will have to follow suit.
but most others are more an issue of the perfect being an enemy of the good.
sure, those issues could be fixed, but is it worth the effort?
from an idealistic perspective maybe yes, but as long as english dominates, and there are no viable alternatives to esperanto that actually are better, the whole argument is rather moot.
either solve the problems and come up with a better solution, or put up with what we have.
everyone else is putting up with english, so surely dealing with the issues that esperanto has can't be that hard.
for certain, a better language is conceivable, but i'll rather use esperanto despite its few faults than wait for that perfect language that may never materialize. and if it does, then knowing esperanto will make it easier to judge said new language.
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I've once learnt Spanish and found it the easiest language I've ever seen, easier than English, it took just 2 weeks to learn. Then I've started learning Esperanto (as the idea of engineered languages (or whatever) amazes me, I feel like we should engineer everything) with DuoLingo (I don't happen to know any better Esperanto course) and it felt easy yet it was just a tiny bit easier than Spanish so I was wondering why do we need a new easy language when there already is one spoken by so many people (and it also is very similar to it) but continued learning. Then I've found out Esperanto has grammatical cases and stopped, cases make me panic. I still feel like I would like to learn Esperanto to fluency once as I adore its spirit of technocracy, borderlessness and defiance of nationalism.
More than 14, but half of them are just adding "have" to the mirror form. Still it's not the number of tenses that matters, English has most of them, but the way they're constructed with terminations instead of auxiliary verbs (will, shall, would). Oh, and also: we will understand you quite well even if you talk with badly broken syntax, just try to learn vocabulary.
Extranger sports players use to talk very soon in an intelligible way.
I don't think so... in general. It's much more difficult for us because we have five very defined vowels, compared to the dozen or so in English. Until you practice a lot, it's easy to get lost in beer, bear, bird, beard, etc.
Distinguishing every tense as a distinct entity is usually a matter of methodology. It usually is more practical just to understand the logic behind. I.e. I consider the way I was taught English at school (past indefinite is this, future perfect continuous is that etc) rather inefficient, I could explain the whole system to my past self in a much more intuitive way a lot faster. You also don't need such a huge number of tenses for everyday life. And of course I don't claim I've learnt all the irregular verbs, just a humble portion (and I already can't name a single of them now as years have passed - practice is vital, zero practice = you forget 99.9% of what you've learnt).
How are you measuring having "learnt" a language? Because IMHO that's an incredible feet that almost requires you not to sleep! Or do you just mean learning the grammar?
In fact it requires you to sleep well, eat well, take nootropics, exercise physically outdoors and be motivated by something extremely inspirational like having fallen in love. And the exercise time is not excluded from the study time - listen to good audio courses (like Michel Thomas and/or Pimsleur) during it.
I mean learning it to the point when you can say anything you might want to tell somebody you meet in real life (not in a philosophical discussion club however), looking up some words in a dictionary occasionally: the grammar + basic vocabulary (+ phonetics, orthography etc of course). It is worth mentioning, however, that I've already forgotten almost everything I've learnt of Spanish as practice is vital for remembering and I had absolutely no practice after learning it.
"looking up some words in a dictionary OCCASIONALLY". There is no single language I can speak/write without looking up some words in a dictionary ever.
Is there a definition of having learnt a language or of "the rough outlines"? As for me having learnt a language means being able to communicate in it fluently (not necessarily in a finely literate manner) and for "the rough outlines" - do we ever learn anything but the rough outlines of anything? I can't even say I know anything but the rough outlines of my native language (it had never felt any close to possible for me to write it without mistakes) or of English.
Do we ever learn anything but the rough outlines of anything?
Actually, people do -- those who become, if not necessarily world-reknown experts -- at least generally recognized as competent professionals in just about any field.
For example, if you've managed to successfully operate a well-regarded restaurant in a major city for a significant length of time (10 years, say) -- it's safe to say that you've moved beyond learning the "rough outlines" of that field - but in fact have mastered the core material.
As for learning a language - the metrics would probably be (1) fluency (not needing a dictionary to make yourself understood 99% of the time, in quotidian contexts at least) and (2) durability (not forgetting everything you've learned after a few weeks or months). That is to say - they've mastered the core material.
Most language learners are on a spectrum somewhere between these endpoints (and your English is really quite good, BTW). The whole point it, it sounds like your exposure to Spanish was much closer to learning the "rough outlines" of it than having "mastered the core".
Which is generally what people mean by saying "I learned X" (as opposed to "I learned a bit of X").
> not needing a dictionary to make yourself understood 99% of the time, in quotidian contexts at least ... (and your English is really quite good, BTW)
But I still had to google the definition of "quotidian" - although my guess of what does it mean given the context was correct I had never met it before. A nice addition to my vocabulary, thanks :-)
> The whole point it, it sounds like your exposure to Spanish was much closer to learning the "rough outlines" of it than having "mastered the core".
That's why I've said I've learnt it, not mastered it. I doubt I'm going to master any language ever. Perhaps I could master my native language if I were interested enough. It seems people capable of mastering a foreign language are rare and they usually work at intelligence agencies AFAIK.
> Which is generally what people mean by saying "I learned X" (as opposed to "I learned a bit of X").
IMHO saying "I learned a bit of X" would mean "I can say 'hello', 'bye', 'my name is' and 'I'd like a cup of coffee' in it", having intuitive understanding of the language grammar and being able to express any quotidian idea in it so you would be comfortable living in the country, would feel no "language barrier" and would be able to read a local newspaper qualifies for having learnt (not "mastered") a language.
As you mentioned earlier that English is not your native language, allow me as a native English speaker to affirm the previous reply. In English, when somebody states that they "learned X" - while not necessarily implying mastery, certainly suggests a strong understanding of something which is emphasized by the "past simple" tense of the statement.
Yup - the past simple almost always means "did X to completion, more or less".
E.g. "ate dinner", "wrote a program", "invaded France", etc. Or "learned Spanish".
Some verbs have indefinite scope in this regard, however - for example "study", which is similar to "learn" but more open-ended.
So to say "I studied German" doesn't imply anything about how successful the ultimate outcome was. But to say "I learned German" definitely implies you became at least reasonably proficient at it.
My point is not that the tutorial was hard. My point is that to "know" a language in my friend's estimation is different than what it is to "know" a language for my purposes, as I believe is the case with your Spanish.
Chiming in to say that stating "I learned X language in two weeks" is kind of an ambiguous statement without any real meaning behind it. How are you quantifying "learned a language"?
Are you merely stating that you learned the grammatical aspects or are you claiming communicative fluency? I've heard that to be moderately fluent in Spanish you need to have mastered anywhere between 5000 and 10000 words. Even at the low end of fluency, that would mean you're memorizing approximately 350 words every day - not to mention the upkeep necessary to maintain it assuming you're using some kind of SRS.
Do you actually know how many words you know? Speaking as someone who first memorized a substantial subset of the vocabulary of a language (in my case Chinese) before learning to communicate in it, I will also state that one needs a lot of time digesting the language from a real-time auditory standpoint. Knowing the vocabulary is a far step from being able to understand the language spoken to you at a native speaker's pace.
I'm not trying to be overly harsh, but unless you're some kind equivalent of a synesthesia Tammett, there is simply no way you came even close to fluency in Spanish in two week. Hell even studying 12 hours a day would only net you 168 hours of language study. On the other hand, if by "learned Spanish", you mean that you know the grammar, numbers, asking for directions, food, simple questions, etc then yeah, 2 weeks is ambitious but definitely doable.
What I mean under having learnt a language approximately is being able to understand the news (a newspaper or BBC-style TV news) and express yourself in any ordinary tense in quotidian contexts. This means having intuitive understanding of the basic grammar and an active vocabulary of 500-1500 words. AFAIK the vocabulary of an average newspaper is always below 1000 words, also Spanish and English have thousands words in common.
> Do you actually know how many words you know?
No.
> Speaking as someone who first memorized a substantial subset of the vocabulary of a language (in my case Chinese) before learning to communicate in it
I adore you, I would never manage such a boring way. I really need a constant sense of a practical achievement (not a metric like "now I know n words" but something I can apply like "now my degree of freedom of expression in the language has grown to the level when I can say this and that and the exact phrases were not in the textbook") as a reward to fuel my effort.
heh, I get what you're saying. I'm actually horrible at rote memorization but since Chinese is pictographic, each character is composed of radicals (like little building blocks) which can be used to construct prosaic and flowery mnemonics that assist you in remembering the meanings and also makes the entire task less tedious.
For me, being able to use quantitative metrics like vocabulary is really helpful. Additionally, I like to think of vocabulary as "ingredients in my linguistic refrigerator". The more I have, the more recipes I can concoct allowing me to express myself better in conversation.
I absolutely don't need anybody to believe me. If bragging was my intention I wouldn't use a random nickname ;-) In fact I have never really learnt to write, only to read, listen to and to say reasonably simple things (but I don't mean the phrases from a phrasebook). And as I have already mentioned I have already forgotten almost all I've learnt years ago.
I'm a French speaker and I know some Spanish, so I should be used to accents and maybe biased towards the idea of having them as part of a language, but on the contrary, I love that English has none:
- Accents make a language look more complex at first glance, and therefore less appealing to beginners (my opinion).
- They make it harder to learn and type in the language on a keyboard, even a virtual one. In my case, choosing a language for a keyboard is a big deal.. French one so that accents are easy to type, or English so that code is easy to type? (I chose the latter).
I'm gonna risk a comparison here: it's a bit like programming languages syntax, you can build an app with either Objective-C or Swift, but I suspect many beginners would find Swift's syntax a bit less intimidating. Similarly, someone looking at Esperanto might be immediately put off by seeing that they will have to learn to type ĉ, ĝ, ŭ, etc.
I would love to see someone refactor Esperanto's syntax to remove its accent while still keeping its capabilities.
1. Is that even technically possible, or would that imply making words too complex or adding new letters?
2. Has this idea ever been debated, could I read about it anywhere? (on a public forum/wiki maybe?)
Thanks!
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Edit: Thank you for your answers! So Esperanto has indeed been changed, and each "constructed language derived from Esperanto" is called an Esperantido.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformed_Esperanto (this version has been created by Zamenhof himself and removing the accents is part of the proposal.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ido_language
Would love to see a new crowdsourced and open-source reform on Github, in 2019!