> Zamenhof included in Esperanto every Polish phoneme with a consistently used letter or digraph of its own, leaving out only the ones that are harder to recognise as phonemes: the nasal vowels, “soft” (palatalised) consonants, and /dz/.
Teaching my kid to speak and then how to read and write has been a recent reminder of just how illogical English is. I would have massively struggled as a non-native speaker.
That's true of almost every language though, just not English.
This is an exaggeration. It’s definitely not true of French, Spanish, or German. Honorable mention for languages like Chinese that don’t even have the concept of “letter”.
French has nothing to do with the almost WYSYWYG spelling of the first...
french orthography is regular, except for a few exceptions like 'fils', but not that simple
english orthography is neither; it's halfway to chinese
Tycho taIkoU
aperitif a#pEr@t'i:f
(wouldn't have to) ,wUd@-ntavt@5 $verbf $strend2
_d) am (i eIm
und) am (en @m
_) am (en a#m
by contrast, es_rules (for Spanish) is 285 lines long, and then there are 391 lines of exceptions (mostly things like "thunderbird" and "software") in es_list
in chinese, instead of several thousand rules, you have several tens of thousands of rules, one for each character (which are not in a one-for-one correspondence with words but are roughly as numerous)
i'm making a lot of effort here to express myself clearly and to understand your ideas, but i feel like you aren't really meeting me halfway
If you are getting fixed up on the one letter = one sound designation (which could be interpreted just as well to apply to German, and almost to Spanish, where one combination of letter always gives the same sound), then this is disingenuous pedantry.
English is pretty unique in not having rigid rules for pronunciation as spelling is typically retained from loan languages.
This is partly a consequence of Zamenhof being first, sure: Relatively little was known about global phoneme popularity in the 1800s. But he could have done a bit better than copying his specific dialect of Polish.
Assuming you don't know a Slavic language (I don't), take a look Interslavic. I recognize zero words in the example texts. That might make sense to someone who knows one, but it's going to be an uphill battle for me. Honestly I'd rather invest time in something like Russian or Polish because it gives me access to a lot more native speakers, media and literature.
Proposing such an obviously "white European" language as the global lingua franca is incredibly offputting to many people.
Yes, English may be the de facto lingua franca, but at least no one is pretending that it's "objectively best," as they are with Esperanto.
A random person on this planet hears about Esperanto: "Sounds easier than English, I guess."
A random woke American hears about Esperanto: "No, silly, let me get offended on your behalf. 'How dare you dream about the world peace, evil white male Zamenhof, how dare you!' Ok, now everyone go back talking English."
BTW English is my second language, Czech is my first and I have some limited knowledge of German.
In China, for example, Esperanto was used to introduce western languages.
For example:
There's a whole word class (words ending in AŬ) which is essentially a "Wastebasket Taxon" for his vocabulary: There is no regularity to what ended up there, merely arbitrary choice. That's acceptable in a natural language, but Esperanto is Modern and Scientific and Regular As Oat Bran, right?
> In China, for example, Esperanto was used to introduce western languages.
Really? Do you have any evidence for this? I follow a blog which frequently discusses such things (language use in China) and it's never been mentioned:
I don't know. There are irregularities indeed, but they are so few that it's easy to simply memorize them.
> Really? Do you have any evidence for this?
Unfortunately I have no URL to share here. This has been discussed a few times in some of the meetings I attended in the local Esperanto club -- and it makes sense, given the language's propedeutic properties. The geopolitical context has probably played a role (even here, in Brazil, part of our youth refused to learn English for some decades after the US sponsored a coup and a dictatorship in the country, and Esperanto was presented as an alternative pursued by a few of us).
Also, the Chinese government supports Esperanto. There's esperanto.cri.cn and maybe others, although I'm not informed about the nature of the contracts involved.
But the claim omits how utterly unsuccessful Chinese Esperantists were at their goal compared to the revolutionary Communists. (Even though they were sometimes the same people, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hu_Yuzhi )
For comparison, a few years after Zamenhof started Esperanto, Paul von Möllendorf (a German aristocrat working as a customs official in Shanghai) suggested in his Manchu grammar https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Manchu_Grammar that Westerners should study Manchu as an easier introduction to the Chinese classics, the Chinese Emperor at the time being ethnically Manchu. Then the Emperor got deposed and by now the last native Manchu speakers have probably all died of old age. Learning Manchu in order to learn Chinese would be a collosal waste of time.
Chinese Esperantists that I know don't really seem to make fewer or different mistakes when using Esperanto than when using English. The marking of tenses with -is, -as, -os may be perfectly regular, but that doesn't help much when grammatical tense itself is a foreign concept to you. Someone who usually uses present tense in English when talking about the past will tend to also use present tense in Esperanto when talking about the past.
As for China Radio International, the inclusion of Esperanto among the forty-odd languages they translate content into is transparently intended to propagandize to foreign Esperantists more so than promoting the language.
That's a very common misconception about Esperanto. It's true that most of Esperanto's etymology is of European origin, but cognate vocabulary isn't all, or even most, of what makes a language easy to learn. Just to pick one example: in most languages, you need to conjugate verbs according to their subject; in a lot of others, you need to decline nouns, too, according to their cases. And then there are the exceptions: there are hundreds of irregular verbs in English, and thousands in some other languages. Esperanto has none of these difficulties. Even if we were just to consider vocabulary, Esperanto vocabulary is so much easier to learn, because it's agglutinative: it's made up of composable, modular parts that can be recombined into other words. That means, if you know fifty words, you actually know five hundred.
Just talk to Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Esperantists, and they'll tell you that Esperanto was a hundred times easier to learn than English, other European languages, and other Asian languages, too.