Given that international auxiliary languages allow for more efficient cooperation; I think more people should consider using an easily learnable IAL, like Esperanto.
IALs would reduce the English dominance that gate-keeps software development to English persons; and hence allow more potential software developers to better develop software. The English language is mostly dominant in software development because of linguistic imperialism.
Esperanto is not a particularly easily learnable language to most of the world. It’s a very parochial language made by someone whose exposure to language was all European and very strongly focused on specifically East European languages both phonetically and grammatically. English, to take a horrifically terrible language at random, is not much harder to learn for, say, a Chinese speaker than Esperanto would be, but it would be a million times more useful given the rather pathetically small number of Esperanto speakers out there.
If you’re going to use a constructed IAL (as opposed to de facto lingua francas like have been historically the case), make one that isn’t filled with idiotic things like declension by case, by gender, by number, by tense, by … Or you’re going to have most people in the world ignoring it. Like you already have for Esperanto.
How so? I doubt English is any different.
English is not only European, but also Germanic. It spread through imperialism by the Anglosaxtons. How is English any different?
What’s wrong with Esperanto being derived from Europe? Do you expect someone to make a language which can easily combine all spoken languages into a universal one? That is a hard task to accomplish; given the diversity in all languages used by humanity.
How is that bad? Esperanto still works off European languages (which includes English). English specifically is Germanic, and not generally European, so it’s derived from specific language that most Europeans don’t speak.
I wouldn’t consider 1 million confirmed, and 2 million estimated, Esperanto speakers to be a “pathetically small” number. Esperanto got suppressed by Nazi Germany and Soviet Union; it would have likely been more popular if it didn’t get suppressed. Esperanto mostly spread through other speakers; so it’s impressive it survived its suppression.
There are a bunch of native languages that barely have speakers at all: Cherokee has under 2000 speakers.
Also, the most popular native language is Chinese; second most popular is Spanish; and English is only the third most popular. English is also only native in
54 (I miscounted) countries; not exactly fair to impose to the other countries to learn English just for the convenience of other imperialist countries; especially when most English speakers barely even attempt to learn other languages.I wouldn’t be surprised if Chinese overtakes English as the most popular language within a decade.
That is a sweeping generalization you made. How would Esperanto be harder for a Chinese person than English?
Not if there are non-native English speakers.
How are declensions by X idiotic? Also by what? You didn’t complete the list.
Is English declension idiotic too?
Sparky, here’s a tip: read what I actually wrote instead of whatever words were flowing through your brain from the voices. Then come back and actually address what I actually said. It’s amazing how much you wrote in response to material you understood so little of.
I did. Why do you think I quoted your text?
Then what did you actually say?
But I did.
Wow. That’s pretty insulting (to assume someone’s intelligence because they made a counterargument lmao).
You quoted text that said the exact opposite of what you then argued against. Read for comprehension this time.
Where did I do this? I don’t see what you’re talking about.
It’s rather obvious you don’t see what I’m talking about. Even when you QUOTE IT.
See that there, Sparky? That’s you claiming I said the precise opposite of what I said.
(Note, also, that I very clearly called English a “horrifically terrible language” yet the rest of your response to that was acting as if I said English were a good language. Another sign of not reading for comprehension, but rather reading to find some excuse to react even if you have to make up that excuse.)
So go back and re-read everything … EVERYTHING … I said for comprehension before you waste any more of my time. I’m tired of intellectually dishonest Esperantists.
Uh, how is that the opposite of what I said?Oh. I see. Yeah that was idiotic. However, don’t be so damn rude to me for making a mistake; because that dis-motivates me from trying to learn from a mistake.Still, by complexity, English would take longer to learn than Esperanto.
(Also, what’s a Sparky?)
All I said was:
I didn’t say anything about the English language being bad. How could that be implied to say that English is a bad language?
You said a whole lot more than that, Sparky. Goodbye.
Ĉu vi scias Esperanton? Esperanto ne estas perfekta, sed la Angla estas pli granda malordo. Mi vere dubas ke la Angla estus tiel facila kiel Esperanto.
Esperanto is ignored for political reasons, not because its bad.
Dude, I said English was harder. Seriously, try to keep up! I just said it’s not much harder and comes with the benefit of people actually speaking it so that learning it isn’t a waste of effort.
Further, Esperanto is ignored because it’s not much easier than natural languages to huge swathes of the world’s population, but at least has the benefit of being utterly useless to learn.
Learn a few languages from places that aren’t Indo-European ones. Learn how you can have grammars with little to no declension, for example: no verb tenses, aspects, voices, genders, cases … not even declining by count. Then consider:
On top of this:
PolishEsperanto.And I’m out of steam already. There are a whole lot of hidden linguistic assumptions in Esperanto that are alien to language speakers from outside of the Indo-European milieu, or difficult for such speakers to actually perform. To someone in steeped an Indo-European linguistic environment these are invisible. They’re “natural” or even “logical”. But they are absolute tongue-twisters and conceptual mountains for those coming from outside of those environs. And if you’re going to climb those conceptual mountains and twist your tongue in service of these phonetic horrors, where do you think it’s best to expend your efforts:
If you’re sane and value your time, you pick literally almost any natural language in the world for better return on investment, even though it may, in the case of some of those (coughIndo-Europeancough) languages, be a little bit more difficult than Esperanto. (Yes. A little bit.)
You raise some excellent points in your response, on every point besides 2 and 6 we are generally in agreement. 6 is outside of my experience, and so I don’t have a meaningful opinion. 2 is one of the things I like about Esperanto, though you might well be right. I intend to study Mandarin, and since you mentioned it perhaps that will change my opinion regarding #2.
I did say that Esperanto isn’t perfect, truly it is itself flawed. Even besides the points you made, even in the foundation there are irregularities which exist which are scarcely justifiable:
…to name but the things that come to mind.
And certainly if we’re going by head-count there is little reason to learn Esperanto instead of a natural language. But there is more to a language then just the number of people who speak it, there is also the question of who your going to be talking to and why. In that analysis depending on the particulars, almost any language can be about equal, even a “toy” language like Esperanto.
But it must not be forgotten what the original subject is: the question of the future of software development. Arguing in favor of any national language is like arguing for the domination of a national system of measurement, instead of metric. Certainly you probably are right that the euro-centricity of Esperanto makes it ill suited as a international language at it’s very core, and in this you and I would be in agreement, but so too in that way no national language should enter into the equation.
You might like Claudepiron’s articles on Esperanto (here are some of them):
Any second language used only for programming purposes is going to be doomed from the outset anyway. I work in a Chinese engineering firm. They work with Chinese people (and me). They sell their products to Chinese firms. What possible incentive could they have to make all their engineers use a different language than Mandarin to communicate in? If they grow to the point that international markets are a concern, they’ll have to i18n their products anyway (because their customers won’t be speaking some conlang!) and given the costs of that, updating the design documents in another language is a minor cost.
Conlang IALs are a solution in search of a problem for an overwhelming number of professionals. They present a high-cost initial barrier of entry (the time it takes to learn the conlang to fluency) with a very low payout in the short- and medium-term for almost all involved people. And even if the engineers in question did learn the conlang do you genuinely believe they’ll use it when doing work among other speakers of their own language? Do you genuinely believe the conlang will be the primary communication tool?
Idealism is a good thing. A great thing. Provided that it is, in some fashion, compatible with reality. A conlang IAL for programming is not compatible with reality.
Not if it’s consistently used by everyone.
They don’t and that’s fine.
Yep, including conlangs.
In search of what problem?
Where’s your proof?
Learning English and Mandarin also has a high-cost initial barrier of entry; IALs are however better designed for inter linguistic speakers.
yes.
IALs, yes.
I used to think this, yoo, and made a similar comment on Reddit a year or so ago. I was challenged to back up my assertion, and presented with some studies involving Esperanto clubs/groups in China and Japan that suggest it’s not particularly difficult for non-Euro native speakers.
I wonder, are you referring to specific studies, or quoting common knowledge?
I’m referring to 16 years of experience teaching language and seeing where the pain points were in acquiring English from Mandarin speakers. The irregularity of English grammar was never a particularly difficult point. The Chinese just sat and memorized, something they’re good at from just their own orthography, given that it’s almost, but not quite, entirely devoid of system.
What were pain points were conceptual pain points. Most people couldn’t grasp articles and when they should or should not be used. (Esperanto has an article whose use case is bizarre.) Most people had a hazy grasp on verb conjugation, freely using whichever conjugation first passed their lips without subject/verb agreement. Declining for number was a pain point. Even the mildest amount of gendered language caused problems (“he” and “she” tend to get used interchangeably and fluidly, often switching between them in the same sentence). Verb tenses. Verb aspects. Both of these caused tremendous difficulty.
And Esperanto has all of them and more.
Would Esperanto be easier than English to learn? Of course! It’s far more regular than English. But the point here is that while easier than English, it’s not much easier than English because as a language at a conceptual level it is not that different from English. And then on top of that the consonant clusters (thank you Polish!) would render it nigh-impossible to pronounce. We’re talking about people for whom the word “lonely” is a tongue-twister because of the switch between ‘l’ and ‘n’. For whom the “str” in “string” is a pain point. And I’ve spotted Esperanto words with five-consonant clusters, four of them hard.
There is not much difference in terms of difficulty between learning English for Mandarin speakers and learning Esperanto because the difficulties come from conceptual levels, not practical. There are alien ideas in Esperanto (shared with English), and that’s where the hard part comes. So the choice of a Chinese speaker is to learn Esperanto and get (generously) a million people (of eight billion) to speak with, or get (equally generously) 1.5 billion people (of, remember, eight billion) to speak with.
When that stark calculus is presented, the choice is clear: spend the little bit of extra work it takes to learn English and ignore Esperanto.
I’d be very interested in seeing your mentioned studies, incidentally. Specifically seeing who performed them (and what their methodology was). My guess is that they weren’t professional linguists, and nor were they particularly rigorous (using things like self-selected subjects, etc.).
Do you also study linguistics or just teach? Also, have you studied Esperanto?
So anecdotal evidence. I’d like to see if any other linguistics teacher has the same or different opinions.
Also, your evidence is from Mandarin speakers; what about European speakers, or African speakers? Your assumption should apply to Mandarin speakers then; because otherwise you just assumed that Esperanto wouldn’t be more difficult than English for other unspoken groups (like the Vietnamese and African)
It’s kinda important to get anecdotal evidence with other groups so that you don’t make a hasty generalization.
Concepts aren’t the only factor that influence difficulty. Conceptually, glass is easy to make when learnt; but it is hard in practice to initially make glass, because the human body lacks experience. Likewise, English might seem easy to conceptually learn; but the English orthography can make English hard to speak, especially when there are letters that can have the exact same sounds as another letter (like C and K).
How so? What’s wrong with consonant clusters? English has them (such as c).
Or: Learn Esperanto anyway to make communicating easier for the rest of the world that doesn’t speak English. (6.5 billion) There’s barely even a cost to learning Esperanto.
and do you have any studies supposedly showing the negligent difficulty of English and Esperanto?
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