Makes me sad, really. The idea of esperanto is wonderful. I like the ease of pronunciation and the grammar rules seem fairly easy to learn as well. I just don't think it'll ever catch on. It's time has come and gone, imo.
Posts: 22497 | Registered: Sep 2000
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posted
Its a good idea that is fundamentally flawed.
The reason to learn language is so that you can communicate with people. Inventing a language that is easy to learn but which no one actually speaks as a native tongue, is an exercise in utility.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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All language changes, so a language intended to be perfectly regular seems to be a bit optimistic. I guess for this generation it would be relatively easy to learn. Still, it's written with mostly Romance language lexicon and grammar, maybe draws from some other Indo-European languages, so I don't know why people don't just bother to learn French, English, German etc-- basically, a similar language but with an actual cultural and literary referent and is top 15 of first and second languages in the world.
Posts: 484 | Registered: Feb 2006
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Seems a little silly to me to create a language that no one speaks when you could just as easily pick a widely spoken language and have everyone learn that.
The problem isn't that we need a created language (Why not make Sindarin or Quenya the international language?), it's that in too many countries, there is little exposure to widely spoken languages. Most everyone speaks English, so we find little excuse to learn any other language in America. Most everyone speaks Mandarin in China, so it's the most widely spoken language. India has probably a dozen local dialects, but how many of them learn anything NOT spoken on the subcontinent?
Cripes, most people don't even speak Spanish in America, the one language it's probably most beneficial for us to know (I'm learning some from the cooks at work). I think we'd be a lot better off in the future of there was a reward system of some sort set up for the learning of foreign languages. Mandarin, Arabic, and Farsi are languages we need a lot of translators for, especially with the way the world is moving, but there is little or no push to create new translators. They need to be able to read and write in the that system too. Otherwise we're at a disadvantage in business, and all our fancy intel and technology is worthless if we don't know what we're intercepting.
Requiring everyone to take a year or two of French in high school is nice on the books, but offering a rewards system, say in the form of scholarships, guaranteed job opportunities or whatever else, would be a great way to prod America into securing some help for its future.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: Its a good idea that is fundamentally flawed.
The reason to learn language is so that you can communicate with people. Inventing a language that is easy to learn but which no one actually speaks as a native tongue, is an exercise in futility.
posted
Hey! Hold on there! You changed that quotation. The Rabbit said it's an exercise in utility!
Anyway, I totally agree that without a bunch of people to communicate with, the incentive for learning a language is small. People will still do it (there are people who speak Klingon, for example), but not many.
Posts: 22497 | Registered: Sep 2000
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Interesting thoughts. The nice thing about Esperanto is that it is quite easy to learn (at least for native speakers of Indo-European languages) and would be much easier to learn than for Americans to learn [Spanish, Portugues, Mandarin, Arabic, and some dialect of Hindi]. In fact, Espranto seems much easier to learn Spanish. It would be easy for everyone to learn one language and to be able to speak with everyone else. I know, everybody should just learn English, right? Good luck! (At least here in the western USA where many people only speak Spanish.)
So everybody here thinks it's dead? Posts: 89 | Registered: Jul 2005
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I wouldn't want to dissuade you from learning a new language, but I will point out: the most widely-spoken constructed language is, in fact, Klingon.
"Conlangs" are in interesting field of study, but the most-developed ones these days seem to have been constructed by nerds for fiction projects (e.g., "Lord of the Rings" and "Star Tracks").
Esperanto is mostly a historical curiosity, important for widely disseminating the idea of universal language and getting people to think about language in a forward-looking rather than backward-looking fashion... but yeah, it's dead.
Posts: 196 | Registered: May 2005
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I think for it to be dead, it would have to have been considered living first. Maybe call it "stillborn."
Though I will grant that it was surprisingly easy to follow on Hiatus, where it was used for the Venture's ship announcements. I guess context helps.
(On a side note, some Klingon consonants are great for use in hacking up phlegm. That, and "nuqDaq yuch Dapol?" are about all I got from my study of the language.)
Posts: 884 | Registered: Mar 2005
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I love esperanto. But I agree, it's totally doomed. Outside of a few websites on the internet and, of course, Red Dwarf, you never see it/hear it spoken...
posted
And come on, if people actually started using it I'd have to switch my confusing/little-known linguistics jokes
Really I have to agree with Shmuel on the stillborn thing, while the thought was there I don't think I'd ever have considered this a live language to start with (just a hair more living than Klingon or one of Tolkein's elvish dialects)
Posts: 1038 | Registered: Feb 2006
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quote:The nice thing about Esperanto is that it is quite easy to learn (at least for native speakers of Indo-European languages) and would be much easier to learn than for Americans to learn [Spanish, Portugues, Mandarin, Arabic, and some dialect of Hindi].
I disagree.
I would never have been able to learn Portuguese as well as I did if I hadn't lived in Brazil and been surrounded, 24-7, by people who were speaking only Portuguese.
That option is not available for someone wanting to learn Esperanto.
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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I like my Esperanto Grande-sized, with extra cinnamon and whip cream.
What?
Oh.
Um.
Nevermind.
Orincoro, could you give me a lift out of this thread?
PS It was best described in the "Riverworld" saga. THe idea was not only to create an easy to learn language, but to remove all traces of nationalism, regionalism, and tribalism from a language to create a universal one. Very popular in Sci-Fi of the 60's and 70's.
Posts: 11895 | Registered: Apr 2002
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wait, please tell me that this had no relation to Riverworld, the Sci-Fi channel original movie... that was arguably the worst piece of cinema I've ever seen, and I've seen some terrible movies.
Posts: 1038 | Registered: Feb 2006
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SciFi channel's Riverworld is based on/inspired by the Riverworld book series, just as the movie Starship Troopers was based on/inspired by the book of the same name.
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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mph: My point was as dis-similar as the starship movie was from the wonderful heinlein classic of a book.... The Riverworld movie seemed even more dis-similar to the point I wondered how they got away with calling it riverworld.
Posts: 7085 | Registered: Apr 2001
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quote:(On a side note, some Klingon consonants are great for use in hacking up phlegm. That, and "nuqDaq yuch Dapol?" are about all I got from my study of the language.) [/QB]
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