Even someone not from the area can hear the difference between someone from England and someone from Scotland though each of these countries has plenty of diversity in themselves. Computers have a hard time understanding them.
If Silicon Valley were in Scotland instead of California, you could be sure Siri would be able to handle a thick Scottish brogue.
Why do some Scots have such a notably thick accent? Well, there might be a language divide. That accounts for just about 40 percent of the entire population. Of this number, about 1. That likely means Scots-speakers can understand English more easily than English-speakers can understand Scots. In this sample alone, you can glean a few things about Scots. Of course, if you are reading the language written down, you have a better chance of understanding it than if it were spoken to you in an accent.
It should also be noted that Scots is not a monolith, with its own varieties spread throughout the country. Around this time, Gaelic was also arriving in the area, which would eventually evolve into Scottish Gaelic and become the majority language of the region. Yet with the invasion of tribes from the European mainland came linguistic diversity. The new language started to gain influence, replacing Scots Gaelic in the Scots Court at some point after , when the Scots-speaking region of Northumbria officially became part of Scotland in the Battle of Carham.
By the 16th century, Scots was the language of many people in Scotland. At this point, the language had spent centuries developing separately from English. If this had continued, Scots would likely have continued changing and become its very own, very distinct language. But then, a convoluted succession of royalty caused the language to change course.
As he ascended to the throne, he took the Scots Court with him to England, and all of a sudden the independence of Scotland was dealt a major blow. English was the language of the state, and Scots became regarded as an inferior dialect. In spite of that, Scots has not gone away, and it still remains a vital part of the Scottish identity. In , a referendum was held that let Scotland decide whether it wanted to remain a part of the United Kingdom. With just over 55 percent of the vote, the Scottish people decided they wanted to stay.
Its proximity to English and its lack of universality has led to the near extinction of this language a number of times. And yet, the language lives on. For a while, Scots Wikipedia was home to thousands of articles, and was cited by many publications including this one as an example of the revival of the language. The result was articles written in something that looked like Scots, but had a number of errors. He claims his intentions were good — he admired the language and thought he was translating accurately — but many defenders of the language believe he has done huge harm to the language.
If the Scots on the website is wrong, the language the artificial intelligence learns is wrong. And so once again, robots and the people of Scotland are at odds. It has been updated to address errors, as well as to introduce new information. An earlier version of this article cited Wikipedia as an authentic source for the Scots language, but it has since been reported that much of the language there is inaccurate, which this article now reflects.
Thanks to a societal obsession with youth, the generation constantly under the spotlight right now is Gen Z, or the Zoomers. Is the youngest generation really so different from the ones that came before, though? Why is this the case? There are a complex set of factors, including age, technology and changing demographics.
This is roughly accurate, though other places might vary the definition by a few years. As of this writing, that means the age group spans anywhere from 9 to 24 years old. The younger side is preoccupied with getting through elementary school, while the older is entering the workforce. This might not sound entirely intuitive, but research into different age cohorts shows that people really do speak differently based on their age. Not politically, but linguistically.
It was first used mostly by young people, and so it may have been assumed that as those young people grew up, quotative like might just become the norm. The real problem is that it changes constantly. As mentioned above, Gen Z is more racially diverse and more gender diverse than the other generations, so it makes sense they would have a vocabulary to reflect that. If you break it down by age cohorts, though, that percentage more than doubles when you look at the group of to year-olds.
And while less than 1 percent of people over the age of 65 had even heard the term before, 42 percent of to year-olds were aware of it. We could keep going through examples, but you get the point. Facebook launched in , only seven years after the oldest millennials were born, and the first iPhone was sold only three years after that. Gen Z is growing up online — 95 percent of to year-olds have access to a smartphone, 97 percent are on social media — and so is their language. The talk of likes, faves, retweets, subscriptions and more are all decisions some company made when creating the vocabulary for their products.
Yet when young people come online, they build their own vocabulary. Whereas in the past, words usually had slow, convoluted paths into pop culture, today a single TikTok can launch a phrase into virality.
This was a somewhat extreme case, but the interconnectedness of youths does allow for slang to move very differently than it did before. The medium is different, but the message is essentially the same. The English language is filled with colorful turns of phrase. There can be many reasons as to why some phrases make no sense. Maybe their original meaning has been lost to time, or the definitions of individual words have shifted.
This one might seem to make sense. They have a few sweat glands like other mammals, yes, but their preferred method of cooling down is to find a nice mud bath.
Why do we say someone sweats like a pig, then? As it cooled, it would gather droplets of water that made the iron look sweaty. In all of recorded weather history, there have been a few occasions of animals falling from the sky. But never has there ever been a report of cats and dogs raining down. Lewis Carroll played around with a lot of English idioms in his Alice in Wonderland series.
Their origins are often lost. August is the time of year when it feels like fall and winter will never come again. Yes, those are the dog days of summer. And sure, the image of a dog sweltering in the heat captures the feeling of the month pretty well. It does seem like at least a bit of a stretch to call them dog days, however, especially when all the animals are suffering under the sun. The Greeks believed that during the times of year when Sirius and the Sun rose in the sky at the same time July into August , the combined intensity of the two stars is what caused the summer heat.
They were wrong, of course, but the phrase stuck around. What could it mean to kick the bucket? Is the water in the bucket the symbol of your life? Maybe it was a reference to someone being hanged, and kicking the bucket out from beneath themselves. Theater is filled with old superstitions. At this point, you might be unsurprised to know this is another phrase origin no one agrees on. It made the leap to theater at some point after that.
Of all the fruit in the world, it seems strange that the apple would be chosen above all others to be the symbol of love. Sure, apples are good, but are they really the sweetest possible thing to compare your love to? Probably not. Some people think it makes perfect sense, while other have trouble parsing it. Kaj dankon! I actually had been trying to figure out what the native countries of the two main hosts are, but I can't remember them saying anywhere, and since they were all so familiar with Germany I just assumed they were German.
I'm guessing Eva is Slovak? Some can be disproved with a simple Google search and the rest are just rude.
No one would say such things about a language—unless the language is Esperanto. The Hungarian Academy of Sciences has determined that Esperanto is a living language. The International Academy of Sciences in San Marino uses Esperanto as its language of instruction and administration and confers accredited degrees.
Google it. And if we go to Latin America or Africa for sure we will see that often local languages have the same consideration.
I've heard that many times about French, living in Canada. Yeah, that language. Get started. How useful is it a….
How useful is it actually? Cumeon 6. June 21, I learned Esperanto to get access to a community of cool people. So yes, to me it turned out to be really useful. Sounds pretty good. Do you know where it is mostly spoken, like country-wise? I have heard it is very popular in Japan, China and Brazil. There are a couple million Esperantists spread around the world though.
The northeastern part of the USA is where it's at! Do I care? Not much. Do I socialise with it? Not much, I mean as you observed the culture is dominated by oddballs and extremists. But was it a waste of time? Get real? The ignorance of that claim is so deep it grates.
All you judgments are fine, but this is just plain wrong. There is simply a lot to be said for learning to crawl before you work and I would seriously recommend any constructed language to anyone as a second language to help them let go of monolingualism, exercise new grammar and vocab all in context without exceptions, idioms, centuries of nuancal rhetorical meaning layers and soon. The reward is fast, rapid and you learn that you can learn, and discover that communication can work in weird and wonderful ways after and it's not possible.
Most flounder and fail at any natural second language, drowning in the complexity. If you don't kudos to you, but then you're probably be speaking Esperanto in a week if you pulled your head out of your And that said, the culture seems to be shifting with the internet as most are, and I suspect as the old guard slowly die off and the new enter it becomes a little less aberrant, more "ordinary" people learn it and in total opposition to your faulty conclusion in 6 - again nonsense, not an opinion or judgment a claim and the claim is utter nonsense because any language with speakers has a use.
Which brings us to one of the dominant uses of Esperanto. Seriously explain to me how you can give my children this:. A few months casual lessons and exercises, watching some videos, and then pen pals in Japan, China, Russia, Brazil, France, wherever with whom you can exchange in a language that you are peers at?
Not yours. This is one of its greatest gifts to English speakers. I bummed around Japan for two months in my 20s visiting among many people Esperanto speakers, and these were among my most valued relationships, because I spoke with peers, we both struggled with a a simpel toy language gifted to us, that cost us very little and neither of us owned or mastered,.
With this I could and di stay with a Japanese family help them harvest their rice, played Go with Grandad, and I stayed in a monastery and wend mountain climbing and all with people who I had no access to with English and if I did, I was always the mentor, not the peer. And that distinctly changes our relationship. There is no better language to learn for a world vagabond as I was, that comes as cheaply, and opens as many doors, in ans many nations, as does Esperanto.
But if you're not a globetrotting young vagabond, who cares? I mean I don't preach it in the street, in fact rarely if ever mention to anyone socially that I can speak Esperanto. Why not? Because unless I see some reason they may be interested, why would I raise it? And I see only two real plusses at present maybe three:. Hitchhike and speak Esperanto. No two things will open as many genuine friendly doors for you as those, nope not even couchsurfing.
These two things will offer far more spontaneous and genuine relationships I promise you, having done just that for a decade. We'll manage a simple conversation in a few days and you'll be able to browse and understand websites in a week or two. You can of course potter around like any language and not get there, and not be progressing with it, but I promise you this, if that's the case, you probably would not be different with another natural language only slower, and more frustrated.
But crack this nut and feel the reward, and learn above all, about your learning skills and passion. Unless though I think you're yearning for one of tose three things, you will probably never learn form me that I speak Esperanto.
Which is what takes me back to your motivations. Namely the lack of grace. An almost childish tantrum against a pile of eccentrics you don't like, confusing that with a language. And likewise, no disrespect intended at all! I totally get where you're coming from and have felt similar and much of it resonates with my personal experience of the Esperanto world.
Just in places you are plain wrong is all. First of all thank you Mr. Nagel for your comment. The beauty of that world is that we, for many of us, still have the right and the liberty to express our opinions! Also, I'm begging your pardon for all the mistakes I'll may do. You'll understand here that English is not my native language. There are people out there who sees Esperanto as a tool. And that's fine! It's only related to my native culture!
Nothing to do with the fact I use Esperanto! So, what's the matter with the politic! Just for that, it wins my favor. Openness is one of the key for improving our intelligence Just a little research on the web concerning FFM Five factor model and OCEAN Openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism should convince you of the benefits of it ;.
I won't debate anything here, you have excellent comments about it on your own blog I read them all. English win. It's everywhere" Wrong! First thing first : It is NOT everywhere. If you traveled a little bit, you will admit that outside the hotels and outside the highly touristic sites, you' will find no one to help you in English.
And those who will help, will do with a barely understandable English! Second, the vast majority of the people who use English as a working language will : Have a decent to poor vocabulary in English.
Often it's just enough to do the job but nothing more. I know what I'm talking about, I classify myself in that category. Actually it requires from me an effort to write this comment!
Thanks to my programmers job, otherwise I would probably not writing this comment. Surprisingly, learning Esperanto opened doors for me to access other languages resources : the Esperantists native languages. Exchanging with them allow me to learn their language and in return I have the opportunity to help the other learn my language. And all the exchange is done with the bridge that represent Esperanto. Finally, I use Esperanto because it gave me tools I didn't have before.
I use it for all the reasons mentioned above and the most important thing, I use it because I don't feel that I have to make excuses in advance for the possible mistakes I may do when I speak or write to someone else just because I'm pretty aware that my interlocutor is by far more agile with the language used.
I feeling that I don't get when I speak to someone in Esperanto! Alternate title: "Here are my widespread anti-Semitic generalizations based on my own cherry-picking logic about the people speaking this language and how I hate them and how English is a such better language there's no point. Donovan, are you a Brit by any chance? I have noticed that Brits have a tendency to falsely present themselves as experts and pontificate endlessly on subjects they know nothing about.
This is what you have done here. At best, you are describing Esperanto as it was more than a hundred years ago and has no relevance at all to the very different Esperanto world of today. The language is far different today too and has effectively become a natural language complete with native speakers and evolving according to the laws of natural languages. Zamenhof spent his whole life starting from puberty developing his international language project, a total of perhaps 15 years.
He had a strong knowledge of linguistics and would have been delighted to become a professor of philology in a university but such an aspiration was impossible for a Polish Jew born in Czarist Russia and he had to make do with becoming an eye doctor to earn his living. He originally developed a complicated language with a big vocabulary and an elaborate grammar but came to realize that no one man could create a whole language by himself.
He spent many years stripping down his language to the bare bones, creating the sketchy, schematic version he published as the "International Language Project of one Doctor Esperanto. He decided not to create a whole language but instead a sturdy framework that the users of the new language could use to construct a full language on.
This is roughly what happened but it was a long and often stormy road. The Esperanto that Zamenhof used 30 years later at the end of his life was far more elegant and polished than the early version he published in the First Book.
Since the beginning, it took more than a century to fully develop Esperanto and create the living language of today, a language you know nothing about. But you Sir, know effectively nothing about the real Esperanto. You basically accuse it of not being a national language, which Esperanto was never intended to be so you are belaboring at great length a complete irrelevancy.
I am amazed that you feel qualified to pontificate at length on a subject you are so obviously abysmally ignorant of, but that seems to be a thing Brits do nowadays.
The same point holds true of Justin B. Rye's silly rant. I am sorry to have to confront you with this Donovan but ignorance does not constitute knowledge and never will. You are no expert on Esperanto and your ill-informed opinion has no relevancy and substance. You seem to regard English as the great solution to International communication. Based on my experience, if we try to base the International Language on English, it will be some debased kind of pidgin English.
Such a language is already forming and is called "Globish". It is an awful travesty of the noble English language, the language of Shakespeare, Shelly and Hemingway. I fear it will eventually contaminate the English of native speakers if it gets too widespread. The fact is, English was never designed to be an international language and it is too difficult for the great majority, with the exception of native speakers of Germanic languages.
To master English requires studying it or practicing the language for several hours a day for ten full years and you need to live at least a couple of years in an English speaking country. This is well beyond the means of most people. The result is that English is and will doubtless remain the ;language of big business, finance and diplomacy, the language of a privileged and much envied elite but will remain inaccessible to the great majority.
Esperanto was designed from the ground up to be an international language and it works brilliantly for this purpose. It is the international SOCIAL language, the language of those who want to make friends across language barriers and enjoy the culture of others. It is the language of the rest of us, those who are not of the elite.
Another useful purpose for Esperanto I think would be to help stabilize and define English. Esperanto fully has the precision and logical rigor of the Classical languages and is well suited for this purpose. Latin used to be used for this purpose, but it is so intractably difficult that hardly any ordinary student gains any real mastery of the subject and it has been abandoned for the most part.
An English speaker who has never learned another language is as unaware of the soft mushy walls of the English language as a fish in an aquarium is aware of the water it swims in. If you study Esperanto seriously on the other hand, you become vividly aware of the foggy, ambiguous nature of the English language, It will force him to recognize the need for rules and discipline to give English the clarity it needs to be effective.
I learned long ago when I read Esperanto to stop trying to translate it into English. I run all the time into words and expressions that have no equivalent in English although I understand them perfectly well. Translating from English, I am forced to work out the precise intended meaning that I need to express in the much clearer and more precise Esperanto. This sort of exercise would be of great value in teaching native speaking English students to use English with the clarity and precision it needs to be effective.
I find it interesting that you harp so much on culture, though in a way that is illogical and entirely inappropriate. An international culture is beginning to develop, especially in Europe. This culture reaches its fullest development in the Esperanto community.
The Esperanto community is the only genuine multinational, multicultural community because it is the only one that has a common language to bind them.
You think you can give an informed opinion on Esperanto culture based on knowing little to nothing about it. Such a thing cannot be. All that results is you show the deceitful sophistry of a lawyer arguing a case in court.
It is not a way of reaching truth or genuine insights. I notice how much you do this in your arguments both in the original essay and your responses to others. You should know that relatively little information is available in English and it tends to be hopelessly antiquated anyway.
Most of the information, especially contemporary information, especially about the modern language, is only available in Esperanto itself. Since somebody linguistically sophisticated like yourself could go through a beginning course I highly recommend the 3rd Edition of "Teach Yourself Esperanto" and acquire a basic reading knowledge of the language in about a month. With the aid of a good 2 way dictionary I highly recommend the most current edition of Weil's 2 way dictionary, it even includes some of the dirty words in the Esperanto part you should be able to access this literature for yourself, a good part of which can be found on the Internet if you look hard.
But to understand the current Esperanto community and it's place in the world, you need to learn to actually speak the language and fluently. That takes about a year of consistent daily study. First, I would go to the learning materials on lernu. No need to join up, just use it as a resource. Alternatively, try Facila Vento and SimplaVortaro. It details the many pitfalls English speakers stumble across in mastering correct Esperanto.
These pitfalls are due to 2 reasons. One is the large number of "false friends" in the vocabulary of Esperanto for English speakers. The only other language with a comparable number of "false friends" is Brazillian Portuguese. The other problem is that Esperanto strongly reflects the shared contemporary usage patterns of the major languages of Western Europe and English does not, which creates significant problems for English speakers learning these languages.
Anyway, Jordan's book is an excellent and much needed learning resource. Afterwards, you should pay attention to developing speaking and listening abilities. Go to Vinilkosmo and listen to the samples of fine Esperanto music there and become familiar with some of the groups performing fine original Esperanto music.
Vinilkosmo is the major source of Esperanto music CD's and you can purchase them by credit card. For free music, go to YouTube and look up the same names you found on VinilKosmo for music videos of mostly their older music and listen to some every day. This will be great for attuning your ears to the sounds and rhythms of the authentic spoken language. There are 3 terrible accents to have in Esperanto; Russian, French and English.
Make a real effort to get rid of your English accent, or at least keep your vowels pure, trill your R's and dont overly aspirate voiceless stops. This will make your speech much more agreeable to other Esperantists' ears.
This is a high quality completely professional language learning text lavishly illustrated in color. It takes months to work through it but it will really enhance and polish your Esperanto. An interesting point is that it presents many things from the point of view of the Russian Esperanto community. Eastern Europe has always been the homeland of Esperanto and the Russian community have played a core part. After all this, by all means go to an international meeting.
I am not impressed by the ones I have seen in the U. You will feel awkward for the first couple of hours but if you keep on speaking you will soon find yourself speaking Esperanto with an unselfconscious fluidity and ease you will probably never attain in any other language other than your native English. You know nothing of contemporary Esperanto culture so you think it doesn't exist. Does it? Well you will have to find out for yourself. You won't be able to do that if you can't speak the language.
Newcomers to Esperanto that's not necessarily John often find ways they think the language could be changed, not realizing that even though it is a constructed language, it is not under construction. Also, they often complain that it is too Eurocentric. They claim that it isn't international, because it isn't international among enough nations.
Some, run out and try to improve Esperanto, paradoxically producing a Romance language, making it even more eurocentric. You know how widespread and popular Ido is. Zamenhof knew about but could not speak English, and the only Romance language he knew was French, though he admired the sound of Italian. The opera is probably the only place he heard it. Esperanto has tons of German words, a few from English but not pronounced as in English , but most are from Latin and French. The prepositions are from Latin modifying "in" to "en" to avoid a collision with the -in suffix taken from German , expressions of time are from German, but most of the vocabulary is Romance even though the first grammar of Esperanto was printed in Russian.
Romance vocabulary is familiar to people who speak Germanic and Slavic languages, but the reverse is not true. Choosing mainly Romance words makes it more international.
All those vowel endings mislead people into thinking it is a Romance language, but the phonology is Slavic. If you try to make a language that takes its vocabulary from all languages, in proportion to their size, and borrow grammatical features from all, you create a monstrosity that no one can speak.
Someone already tried. The Kiwanis Club is international. It has chapters in the US and Canada. Esperanto is much. Not even the United Nations includes all the nations of the world. Most people think that a language consists of a bunch of words. They see European words and say, "Ha! It's a European language! Esperanto's grammar is agglutinative, which is not how European languages work. It is how Asian languages work.
The grammar is very familiar to Asians. Asian languages are generally not related to each other, so even if they learn the language down the street, they have to learn a whole new vocabulary. Esperanto's grammar is easier, and the vocabulary is no harder than any other language. That's why there are so many Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Esperantists, and why China Radio has an Esperanto section of their web site, including even recipes.
Of course it is true that it hasn't been developed over time like other languages did. But just focusing on this fact will also not make it possible to create a culture. Esperanto will never be like other languages that grew over time. But it could have a good chance and we all don't know how our brains would work if we would use Esperanto instead of english f. I don't say it needs to be Esperanto, but it would be great to have a language that is simple to learn and use for everybody.
I am also convinced that everybody can learn everything so it would take more time but you'll learn it anyway if you want.
Like everything. But wouldn't it be maybe more effective We would start seeing whats good on it after using it and stoping to look only on the negative parts. I am not going to discuss a lot. You wrote: "The Internet is basically unusable without English too. There are about 3 billion people who use the internet, but even the most optimistic estimations about the number of English speaking people do not exceed 2 billion and not a lot of people believe in such estimations, at least not for the number of people being able to use English websites It seems to me that a lot of other assertions you make have the same level of truth Well, it seems we have a different understanding of the word "sources" I would prefer scientific sources that back the assertions you are making.
Do you know any? If so, please give them. Ok then what solution do you give to have a neutral language? Why do I have to learn your language and not you mine? We need a solution, many times when I speak with English speakers that only speak one language English I think they are stupids or illiterate.
Esperanto at the moment is the only solution more extended. I understand where you are coming from. It reminds me of a recent visit I had to a Unitarian Church. They were having a book sale and the workers were in full ideological ego mode calling Trump supporters fascists and everything under the sun.
I just have a low tolerance for what I consider to be bad manners. I would have to really build up my aura to stay in an environment that is like that. I happen to like Esperanto as a language.
Based on your experience, it makes me feel less motivated to attend a congress. I have spent time in an Ashram, and things can get very murky there with people going off on "spiritual" tangents. I guess some people are just looking for authentic connections, and maybe they are more sensitive and they tend to really feel overwhelmed in these environments where people's egos are flaring.
There is something I didn't understand: On the one hand you wrote, "Esperantistan is an ideologically homogenous landscape". So at least at NASK there are three groups, "some great people", "people willing to argue without getting offended" and "a whole bunch of extreme far leftists".
Furthermore I would like to draw your attention to the fact that one regular Esperanto meeting can't be taken as a proof for a homogenous landscape in the Esperanto speaking language community. A regular meeting is a bit similar to a circle of friends, to a party - and such circles tend to be a bit more homogenous as society in general. If someone is a leftist, he or she can live with the fact that the guy next door is not. But an Esperanto meeting with about 50 participants with whom you share the whole day for some days or even a week or more is something different.
You don't want to hear a group there say that your political opinion is bullshit. If you hear this, you may not want to go there another time. So after some times every Esperanto meeting has a special character and a special group of people whose opinion is not very divergent - but this does not say that the Esperanto community as a whole would be so homogenous as you seem to think.
You should read some discussions in great Facebook groups or in the comments of big news sites to understand this By the way: There are a lot of different religious groups, catholic, protestant, atheists Can you really imagine that a language community has at least half a dozen of religious groups, but is "ideologically homogenous"?
How would you explain such a contrast? Just to condense the arguments, here is what I posted in the group "Stop talking down Esperanto":. Maybe he didn't get the fact that it's just a language everyone may use as he or she wants. There is a language community. It's interesting to know what Zamenhof wanted - but everyone can use the language for any purpose. It's free, as was stated in already. To see this, it's enough just to have a look at all the ideas outsiders link with Esperanto; this is not homogenous.
But, yes, for the moment being, the political landscape in Esperantoland is probably less wide than that of big language communities. Why should I feel sorry about this? No language can give you everything. And every Esperanto speaker has his or her own culture.
So, where is the problem? I am really sorry. But why should I stop speaking Esperanto because of them? Do I stop speaking English for some guys? Is the same true about "Esperanto speakers"? Or is it just that those who write in forums are those who are more convinced and more evangelistic.. How about getting a good sample?
Helmar Frank and others published about this. He wrote: "The Internet is basically unusable without English too. The highest estimations about the number of English speakers is two billion people. More than three billion people are linked to the internet What do they do there without English?
But I would like outsiders to present the language and the language community as they are - not just as they think they are Esperanto scales. English does not. The scalability of Esperanto is why Esperanto will ultimately prevail as the international auxiliary language. Those who believe otherwise trying to build perpetual motion machines are just spitting into the wind.
Here in Brazil, the Esperanto language has a religious end, more specifically a Spiritism end, because there are many material this religion made in Esperanto. This is the secret, you make material in this language that refute or persuade that ideia or thought. Something you didn't touch on directly, but is implied is, that Esperanto is the single most boring language I've ever had the misfortune to encounter.
Now that's just my personal opinion. And my experience, as someone who had to learn 3 Indo-European languages and one Niger-Congo language as a child is different from most Let's just say, I'm comfortable with complexity.
But real languages and Esperanto is Not Real develop an expressiveness that brings feelings of satisfaction as people play with grammar, simplify, introduce complexities, and develop the subtleties of expression that give users in the living community those little tingles of pleasure.
Think about how the black community in the United States have developed an English accent and a style that reflects their shared experience and attitudes, or the fact that Scottish people still have an accent that reflects the pronunciation of Gaelic. I've heard Esperantists great neolgism BTW rail at the fact that English has diverged to the point where someone from Kentucky can barely understand someone from Edinburgh.
That's not even the worst. An Arabic speaker from Syria can barely understand what an Arabic speaker from Morocco is saying. Thanks for a thought provoking article. I especially enjoyed the discussion it led to on how far Esperanto is a political movement. As a learner of Esperanto, however, my main concern is whether learning Esperanto helps with the learning of other languages.
I took French and German for years at school and ended up with a great sense of failure as I felt that I would have great difficulty in carrying on a conversation in these difficult languages. Also, I have not had the opportunity to live where I get the chance to practise them and so improve. I think your analogy with learning music was flawed. You said, I think, that, if someone wanted to play the violin, time spent learning to play the guitar first was not a good idea, as the time would have been better spent on the violin.
But what about spending time on learning a simpler musical instrument first? What about the recorder - the block flute as it is called in some countries? Some schools start young children off on the recorder for that reason. And even if they do not go on to learn any other musical instrument they have the joy of being able to play one instrument.
In the same way children who learn Esperanto will know they can learn a foreign language, one that I think is worth learning in its own right as well as being a confidence booster. I'm one of those so-called circus freaks who learned the language as a child, So, thanks for that. It's never been about ideology for me.
It's been about community. I could care less about the Final Victory or other out-moded nonsense. You've got the wrong end of the stick, Donovan. Esperanto isn't a project, or an ideology, and whatever Zamenhof might have thought, he died a hundred years ago, and is history.
Esperanto isn't the solution to war or racism, although a lot of its speakers, including me, aren't too keen on that sort of stuff either. Esperanto is just a good idea. Learn all the other languages you want. I speak six languages fluently and can do basic touristy stuff in a dozen others. And at the end of the day, Esperanto is just another language, even if it's ten times easier to learn than any other, but You get a load of ordinary people from different countries and different language backgrounds together round a table and have them ALL participate as equals, as if there were no language barriers, then Esperanto is the ONLY way of doing it.
And then maybe you'll find that we are all different too. That's what's fun. Actually, it's quite an amazing experience. Sorry if saying that comes across as breathless and culty, because, honestly, I'm the LAST person who would be taken in by anything like that. It is sad that someone who know almost nothing of the history of Esperanto or the many cultural and philosophical strands that weave in an out of it, should choose so blithely to undermine it.
I will answer only one of the attacks, which it seems for you, as a christian, to be central to your opposition. From the rarely cited verse I have difficulty believing that anyone, save for a religious fundamentalist or a rabid nationalist, could find such sentiments objectionable.
Coming from a land of a great deal of intolerance and hatred I find the Movement in its many forms and with its many debates both intellectually challenging and inspiring. When perfection does not exist. I completely agree with every single word that you've mentioned in this article. Esperanto had been a failed project since it started. This Fake language Even does not have its own alphabet and uses latin ones instead. English is International language hands down.
Espereranto is the most popular conlang, and you find most people learn it instead of learning French or Spanish, which are more difficult, thinking that it's why to choose the most popular conlang if you are learning any conlang at all.
In fact, learning the most popular conlang immediately puts you into a trend-following reality, and that's what most of Esperanto is about: a trend. Instead, it would take more moxy to learn Interlingua, which has fewer speakers and is closer related to Spanish and Latin, making it instantly more useful with the large masses of Spanish speakers in the world today. Frankly, a lot of Russians speak Esperanto, and unless you want to talk to them and the wishy-washy Western European liberals, you are better off with Interlingua.
Good grief, you don't know Esperanto very well. I encountered Esperanto in , and the main web site I found was atheist and communist. It really turned me off, but I didn't realize it was an outlier. Then Esperanto popped up in YouTube in , and I discovered it is much more larger and more diverse community than I thought, and, in the aggregate, not ideological at all beyond being astonished "I can talk to people from other countries!
I have, for example, a quality paperback that is a translation of Sherlock Holmes into Esperanto, and an Esperanto Bible.
I don't think those are either communist or socialist. Maybe your exposure to the language is very limited. A lot of the reasons not to learn Esperanto have to do with what it used to be. It used to be a conlang invented by a Polish ophthalmologist with dreams of humanism and international harmony. However, a conlanger can think of lots of ways that he could have made it different, or even better. Zamenhof's goal was not achieved.
Esperanto as a conlang failed. However Esperanto has achieved that goal, not on the level of nations, but of common people. Esperanto hasn't accomplished Zamenhof's grandiose purpose. He designed his language to be a second language for everyone, and for most Esperanto speakers note: speakers, not hobbyists , it is.
However, it has developed native speakers, whom you can find on YouTube if its whacky search engine lets you. This is a development that Zamenhof did not want at all. There is a music company in France that has only sold Esperanto music for the last 20 years. There is an Esperanto public that is large enough to support vlogs on YouTube that are completely in Esperanto.
Most conlangs are small enough that all the proficient speakers can comfortably go out to dinner together. In some cases that would be a table for one. Esperanto, on the other hand, is the working language of an annual conference of up to 2, The last one was in Korea.
Conlangers critique Esperanto as if it were still , and if that were the case, their arguments stand up well.
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