Time to draw some attention to contracted languages (i.e. Esperanto). It would be a much more unbiased and time-saving choice for the world community.
Moving to Esperanto would not save time at all, and would be significantly more difficult for the many people that now have to learn yet another very Euro-centric language with complicated. And, there's really very little benefit to switching.
Making up a language won't gain traction. Even most programmers can't figure out how to write/read decent programming languages Why on earth would we think the rest of humanity will accept it for spoken language? And at any rate, it'd have to be a lot better than Esperanto or alternatives for it to be worthwhile.
I agree here! It's so much easier to learn for English or Spanish speaker. But still Chinese or Japanese speaker will learn Esperanto 10 times faster then English. Huge improvement.
> E.g. no non-gender pronoun, for some reason.
Well, most languages including English doesn't have non-gender pronoun. Yet in Esperanto officially you can use "ĝi" (it) or "tiu" (that person) for referring to the person of unknown/unspecified gender. But people seem not to use it often.
>Use of diacritics and extra pronunciation rules are also a negative.
Majority of languages use diacritics or non-latin writing system and steel doing fine. It's not that hard. But as a trade-off you get one sound - one letter philosophy.
> Moving to Esperanto would not save time at all, and would be significantly more difficult for the many people that now have to learn yet another very Euro-centric language with complicated. And, there's really very little benefit to switching.
Moving to Esperanto is like moving from Latin numbers to Arabic. Yes, sorry, it will require at least some learning to use.
> Making up a language won't gain traction. Even most programmers can't figure out how to write/read decent programming languages
We don't need most to create something good.
> Why on earth would we think the rest of humanity will accept it for spoken language?
I don't thing so. But there are good reasons mentioned in this comment.
> And at any rate, it'd have to be a lot better than Esperanto or alternatives for it to be worthwhile.
It's pretty awesome, really. I was skeptical too until I tried.
Besides, once you've learned Chinese, any European language with an alphabet looks easy to learn.
Then again, there is a lot of grades of "easy" - like 10 months easy vs 5 years easy.
Well, there is the fact that Chinese children learn Pinyin (Chinese romanization) in school. Of course Pinyin attributes different sounds to the letters of the alphabet than Western European languages do, but at least they've already seen the characters when they start learning.
But it's possible over time. For instance, in Europe place of lingva franca took Latin, then French, then German, then English. English just happen to be lucky to arise in time of globalization and the internet.
I speak 3 languages and after trying Esperanto I saw that claims that it can be learned in 1/10th of time required to learn English (or 1/20th Chinese) are true.
Seems irrational to me that majority of the population wanting to join the world community have to learn language 10 times harder with having little chance of being fluent in it.
In actual fact, English as a lingua franca isn't all that bad. It's a creole (of sorts) and therefore has a relatively simple grammar. The drawback to English is the fact that it's a Germanic creole and that Germanic languages have a comparatively large number of phonemes to work with. It would probably be more useful to most people in the world if a choice were made to go for a creole with a more reasonable number of phonemes, such as Swahili, Indonesian/Malay or Tok Pisin. Until that happens, however, using English is quite a reasonable thing to do.
You can call Esperanto ridiculous, but it's used in all aspects of life. It has a good poetry. I find its internet terms actually better then in some non-English languages. There are several native Esperanto speakers. For instance, George Soros.
> Esperanto is especially bad: it's just a jumble of Germanic and Romance languages
Well, English is a jumble of Germanic, Latin, and French. Doesn't make it bad though (I do love English very much, it's beautiful).
>... that is just as difficult for a native speaker of a non-Indo-European language to learn as the languages it steals from.
You are very wrong. See below.
> In actual fact, English as a lingua franca isn't all that bad. It's a creole (of sorts) and therefore has a relatively simple grammar. The drawback to English is the fact that it's a Germanic creole and that Germanic languages have a comparatively large number of phonemes to work with. It would probably be more useful to most people in the world if a choice were made to go for a creole with a more reasonable number of phonemes, such as Swahili, Indonesian/Malay or Tok Pisin. Until that happens, however, using English is quite a reasonable thing to do.
English is pretty hard language. It's harder to see this fact if you are a native speaker. But here are some benefits in learning of Esperanto vs English:
1) Much simple grammar with no exceptions. For instance, no irregular verbs. 2) Phonetic spelling. https://www.google.com/search?q=english+fish&safe=off&client... 3) Consistent word forming. For instance, compare: tree/forest/gamekeep vs arbo/arbaro/arbaristo, where 'aro' means collection, 'isto' means professional. 4) Tons of other goodies, I won't write it here.
Now I'll grant you that the differences between Old English and Old French aren't that large, which probably accounts to English being relatively complex for a creole language, but if you compare English grammar and phonology to that of related non-creole languages such as German, Danish or French, you'll find in English they're much, much simpler. Not as simple as in Indonesian/Malay (which jumbles Arabic, Sanskrit and a bunch of Austronesian languages) or Tok Pisin (which jumbles English and a bunch of mutually unrelated Papuan tongues) but at least as Germanic languages go, English is fairly easy to learn.
Of course Esperanto is a jumble as well, but it's a jumble that is entirely artificial. I'd argue that a natural creole such as English or Swahili is superior: it's developed over dozens of years by a large number of speakers of widely differing skill levels whereas Esperanto was thought up by a small number of highly skilled language experts.
I'll agree with you that for native speakers of Indo-European langues (like mine, which isn't English, by the way), Esperanto is easy to learn and use. But my point is it is not easy to learn for people who aren't native speakers of an Indo-European language and that if you're going to make these people learn an Indo-European language anyway, you might as well just make it English.
(1) technically speaking, that's a pidgin, of course. But once the pidgin starts having native speakers, it becomes a creole, so the point still stands
edit: typo
English may be easy for e.g. German speakers but English is not simple. Its rules are complex.
English grammar is not simple. It has what (12?) tenses. (on the contrary Russian has basically 3 tenses) And it's full of exceptions. Why 'I see', but I'm looking at you. There's simply no reason. It's an exception. Thousands of them.
> ...and the phonology converges on what is pronouncable by all speakers of the new language (and therefore is reduced in complexity as well.
Let's just take 2 sounds. Th as in this: "This sound, and its unvoiced counterpart, are rare phonemes. The great majority of European and Asian languages, such as German, French, Persian, Japanese, and Chinese, lack this sound."
Th as in "thing": "Among the more than 60 languages with over 10 million speakers, only English, Standard Arabic, Spanish (Spain only), Burmese, and Greek have [it]"
> Of course Esperanto is a jumble as well, but it's a jumble that is entirely artificial.
Artificial != bad. We have tons of artificial things in our life that are awesome!
> it's developed over dozens of years by a large number of speakers of widely differing skill levels whereas Esperanto was thought up by a small number of highly skilled language experts.
That what happens when you let naturally develop: "In general, English spelling does not reflect* the sound changes in the pronunciation of the language that have occurred since the late fifteenth century."
> I'll agree with you that for native speakers of Indo-European langues (like mine, which isn't English, by the way), Esperanto is easy to learn and use. But my point is it is not easy to learn for people who aren't native speakers of an Indo-European language and that if you're going to make these people learn an Indo-European language anyway, you might as well just make it English.
Esperanto is several times faster to learn than English for anybody (given similar conditions). Linguists say it and I second that based on experience.
This is actually not such a great example. Yes, English can express 12 tenses, but it doesn't have them in the sense that Russian, Italian or Czech do with affixes and declensions and what have you.
> Let's just take 2 sounds. etc
In this, of course you're right, but I didn't dispute this fact: English is a Germanic language and as such has a much larger number of phonemes than most other languages in the world (though it has far fewer than other Germanic languages, such as Dutch, Swedish and Norwegian, which have an - by global standards - insane number of vowels). Like I said, English isn't ideal, but it could have been worse. German, Polish or French (which has the added bonus of written French and spoken French being essentially two entirely different languages)would have been much worse. Indonesian/Malay, Tok Pisin or Swahili would have been much better in this regard, but alas, we have English.
> "In general, English spelling does not reflect* the sound changes in the pronunciation of the language that have occurred since the late fifteenth century."
Right. The ortography of English is atrocious and difficult to learn, even for native speakers. So there's that. It's definitely a point against English and it's a matter of taste whether this detracts significantly from its good points.
> Artificial != bad. We have tons of artificial things in our life that are awesome!
This, I think, is our true bone of contention. My argument is Esperanto brings very little to the table an organically developed Western European creole doesn't already have. You're free to disagree, of course, which brings me to:
> Esperanto is several times faster to learn than English for anybody (given similar conditions). Linguists say it and I second that based on experience.
Do you have sources for this? I'd be very interested to see the research on this. I would think the chief difficulty in learning a language that is wildly different from your native language is the fact that it's, well, wildly different from your native language, but I am very much open to evidence that learning a language from an entirely different language family than your own becomes easier if that language is rigorously structured and cleaned up instead of being merely an example of a worse is better organic jumble.
I agree. Of course it could've been more complex. But it could be also so much easy. (BTW, I love English as it is. including sound, grammar and pronunciation).
> Do you have sources for this? I'd be very interested to see the research on this. I would think the chief difficulty in learning a language that is wildly different from your native language is the fact that it's, well, wildly different from your native language, but I am very much open to evidence that learning a language from an entirely different language family than your own becomes easier if that language is rigorously structured and cleaned up instead of being merely an example of a worse is better organic jumble.
Ok, now I see your point! Regarding evidence, first let me assure you that whoever has been learning second language and spent just a week looking into Esperanto will need no evidence of the mentioned fact. You don't need much evidence that it's more easy to add Arabic numerals than Roman. After my introduction to English I tried study German, and then Esperanto. When I read the latter's grammar rules and word formation rules I just thought "wtf, can a language be so straightforward?!".
Maybe because it's so obvious for anyone spending week of learning Esperanto I haven't heard of experiments trying to prove it. But were experiments to confirm interesting effect that "studying Esperanto for one year and then, say, French for three results in greater proficiency in French than studying French for four years" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant...
Here is interesting video regarding simplicity of Eo by credited expert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YHALnLV9XU
Here's just how Chinese Monk speaks Eo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZcwpCgzMUk