Esperanto: the language that never was

The drive for unification in Italy was big in 1800. The language a unified Italy would speak was decided long before because poets and writers already standardized on one of the language of Tuscany, the one of Florence. That was the "standard Italian" since 1200. Not that many people spoke it. Everybody spoke the language of it's area, sometimes not. All those languages derived from Latin but people could not easily understand each other, especially over long distances (even 30 km.) Only priests and literates had lingua francas, Latin and standard Italian.

Some samples from famous authors:

Ariosto, 1500, can be read quite easily nowadays [1]

Petrarca, 1300, is a little more difficult and it takes a little to get accustomed with. [2]

Dante, 1200, is also difficult sometimes but high school students read it with little help. [3]

[1] http://www.orlandofurioso.com/testo-completo-dei-canti/1706/...

[2] http://www.italica.it/canzoniere.html

[3] http://www.filosofico.net/ladivinacommedia.htm

Both are constructed, and not just bits and pieces, though they were constructed from "natural" elements.

Bokmål came into being through a series of drastic reforms of a combination of Danish (which was the administrative language until the dissolution of the union with Denmark in 1814) and urban Norwegian dialects, which were heavily influenced by Danish.

The reforms were aimed at removing a lot of the Danish influence, and continued well into the 20th century (well, in a sense they are still continuing, though making Bokmål less Danish is no longer an explicit goal). Many of the changes took decades to take root as most adults didn't really change but school children were taught and graded on the new forms.

E.g. the change from Danish word-order in numbers ("fireogtyve" - 24 - "fire-og-tyve = four and twenty") to uniformity with less formal spoken Norwegian dialects ("tjuefire" - "twentyfour") is one that was still for all intents ongoing at least well into the 80's (you'll still find older people using the old forms today) despite being introduced by a language reform in 1951. My parents learned the new form in primary school in the late 50's yet still regularly reverted to the old form around me while I was growing up in 70's and 80's, and as a result I used to switch back and forth between the two at least into my 20s (in the 90's)

(Incidentally these reforms also means that for Norwegians learning German, spending some time reading old Norwegian books is highly helpful to get used to German word order and even recognizing vocabulary, as the reforms that moved Bokmål away from Danish also moved it further away from German)

Nynorsk, meanwhile, was explicitly created as a form of unification of a number of very different rural Norwegian dialects. This included synthesising a grammar, creating a bunch of new words that tried to find forms that were "close enough" to the widest possible range of dialects, and combining a lot of other elements from different dialects.

Bokmål is used as the written language of the vast majority, despite most spoken dialects probably in many ways being closer to Nynorsk (though more so in some parts of the country than others - Norwegian dialects are extremely varied). In some parts Bokmål - particularly spoken Bokmål - has a tendency to be seen as more refined, as a remnant of their historical origins. An unofficial dialect - Riksmål - is basically Bokmål sans a number of the reforms, and remains much closer to Danish. It sees very little use, though well into the 80's one of the largest conservative newspapers stuck to a lot of the Riksmål forms.

Bokmål and Nynorsk are mutually intelligible, and successive language reforms over more than a century have aimed to bring them closer (largely by creating optional forms of many words that are consider valid in both languages), but having to learn both is a frequent cause of discontent at Norwegian schools (it annoyed me immensely, because unlike most Norwegians I speak very close to pure Bokmål, and a relatively conservative form of it, as a legacy of my dads upbringing and reading a lot of old books growing up, which made Nynorsk harder)

While the reforms do take into account natural language shifts to some extent, large parts of the current modern structure of both languages was effectively created by academics.

Simplified Characters are another example. A lot of the simplifications had been around for a very long time, so they existed as part of a natural language, but saying, X is traditional, Y is simplified, and standardizing the simplified version, is fundamentally the act of language construction. [The lack of such a deep history is probably why https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_round_of_simplified_Chi... never caught on.]

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

Interlingua

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

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

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

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

So what about esperanto? (One my languages).

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

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

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

There are plenty of studies of consonant and vowel frequencies in human languages. We know, for instance, that [p] [t] [k] are found in virtually all languages, that most languages have at least one liquid, one nasal consonant (which can be realised as [n], [m] or [ŋ] depending the position of the consonant that follows it is). Most languages also have [ʔ], but you never notice it as most only allow it initially and exclude it when spelling: if you were to choose any word in English beginning with a vowel in isolation, you will almost certainly start it with a glottal stop.

As far as vowels go, the classical five-vowel system is very prevalent: some approximation of it is used in lots of languages, and there are very few languages that use simpler systems, though Modern Standard Arabic, with its three-vowel system ([a], [i], [u]) is a widely-spoken counterexample. If you wanted to include more consonant clusters, you could add schwa as a epithetic vowel: in our hypothetical language, the word _plum_ could be phonemically /plum/, but phonetically [pəlum] for speakers who have difficulty with that initial consonant cluster.

Still, knowing what sounds people can pronounce is only half the battle: a good IAL would also have well designed _phonotactics_. That's a bit of a rabbit hole though!

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_Not

What about all of the American continent?

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