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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

I say if you want a universal language everyone should learn Latin. Now you won't offend anyone. Except the French.

Joking aside, it's a shame Esperanto didn't catch on. One of its features is that it's fairly easy to learn, unlike something like Latin.

Well it's a growing movement, so it's still catching on. Who knows, it could become popular enough one day.

Growing for a century and a half, still spoken by fewer people than minor dialects of minor languages.

Time is not really a good measurement in this case. It was doing quite well until it was unfortunately nearly killed off by WW2. It's recent rise in popularity has been due to the tools people have been given to create and host various forms of media and learning platforms on the internet.

If you poll, you will find today that most people will not be aware of the concept of an international auxiliary language. This gives the adoption of one (not necessarily Esperanto) some kind of hope.

Latin is pretty easy to learn. That’s one reason it was a second language for so long.

Latin even has a large amount of texts written at a basic level. Works like Summa Theologica and the Vulgate Bible were written in extremely simple language.

It has a very small vocabulary. There are some weird edge cases (imperative plural, for example), but even they follow common rules.

In case there are any other French-reading Latin-philes out there: https://www.lefigaro.fr/vox/culture/et-si-la-langue-officiel...

Pretty offensive to me.

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