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Ask HN: Esperanto and Hacker News

8 pointsLaPingvino12 comments

Saluton! Mi tre ŝatus scii ĉu estas aliaj Esperantistoj en HN, kaj kion ili pensas pri Esperanto por laboraj celoj.

For the non-Esperantists here (the most of the people here I guess): what do you think about Esperanto and about using it internally in a business (externally doesn't make sense, better use the native languages instead of the company vernicular).

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Interlingua gets less press than Esperanto, but I think Interlingua is a much better interlanguage -- interlingua is a latin-derived language that has some modern features and the corners squared off; people who know English or other european languages with a lot of latin influence can read Interlingua with remarkable comprehension without any training, take a look at...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_and_Interlingua_compa...

Current researchers believe that language influences thought to some extent, so speaking Esperanto in your business might be an interesting way to promote lateral thinking.

If you try it, you should share your results. Do your employees become more creative, do they treat customers differently? Or does it impede problem solving and employee retention?

Lots of really interesting info here on how language influences thought (and even a PG 'Blub' mention): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

On the background I am doing already quite some preparational work (and I can name you some organisations that work like this already) and it works out nice :)

Mi laboras ĉe internacia kompanio, sed (triste) ni ne uzas Esperanton por komuniki. La angla lingvo venkis. Mi ankoraŭ ŝatas paroli Esperanton por amuziĝi.

(I work for an international company, but (sadly) we don't use Esperanto to communicate. English won. I still like to speak Esperanto for fun.)

Is it a big company? I think you can move a lot more on this field in small companies.

Mi tre ŝatus scii cetere ĉu vi aktivas en aliaj interretaj forumoj, kaj kiunome... Mi ne trovis ajnan kontaktinformon en via profilo...

OT: I'm surprised how well I can read Esperanto, although I - of course - don't understand everything. (I speak some German, English, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.)

It's made to be easy, and part of the effort to do that is making the vocabulary as trivial as internationally feasible. There are languages made to be even more directly understandable, like Interlingua, but they are a bit harder to pick up as an actively used language as you have to learn a lot more words to be able to talk about things. Esperanto provides shortcuts to say a lot with just a basic vocabulary.

It's around 350 people at the moment, on every continent but Antarctica. I suspect that the talent pool of English speakers is larger than that of Esperanto speakers and that they didn't want to add an additional burden to the hiring process by asking people to learn another language. In fact, we have an internal list of who speaks what languages and there are only two of us listing Esperanto, and neither of us is fluent. (Though I could probably be there in 1-2 weeks of serious effort.)

Mi ne aktivas en multaj Esperantistaj forumoj... mi ne kredas ke mian Esperanton estas sufiĉa bona. :) Sed oni kapablas kontakti min ĉe launchpad.net. Mi estas 'fader' tie ankaŭ.

Mi estas administranto de la tradukteamo de Ubuntu en Esperanton en Launchpad.

Mi provu kontakti vin persone.

Likewise, I work for a small but international company, and am the only Esperantist here. With only ~100 employees, though, we speak ~20 languages (myself: en-us natively and eo with frequent mistakes and vortara uzado, plus a working knowledge of advanced classical la and basic es-mx).

Mi havis trovita ke Twitter estas bona ejo legi kaj lerni Esperanton kaj interrilati kun aliaj Esperantisoj.

Esperanto: An artificial language based as far as possible on words common to all the European languages. http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=esperanto

I don't speak Esperanto. Why would you use it internally while using some other language externally? Why not just speak one language and be done with it? It doesn't make any sense.

I speak 9 languages by now, and it helps a lot to get to the customers to speak their language. English-only communication fails to sell out of the safe borders of the English speaking nations.

Esperanto is just used as a communication tool, just like we use better or worse programming languages to get things done.

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