I’m a vegan. I’m into tabletop roleplaying. I study history, philosophy, and language. I dabble in programming and system administration.

💬 - English, Esperanto

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Joined 3 年前
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Cake day: 2021年3月20日

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  • To the point where I straight up leave the room if I see her.

    Have you considered the possibility that you are having anxiety attacks? I had a similar situation years ago where I was evading a friend I really wanted to talk to. I had a lot of really awful stuff going on in my life at the time, and trying to engage them in conversation would cause me to flee, and I went out of my way to try to often. In the end I had to resolve other sources of stress before I was able to talk to them again.










  • Why is it never framed…

    Because I do not speak those other languages, and -attempt- not to be so presumptuous as to speak beyond my experience. But those are also problems, greater problems than the one I mentioned, problems that have been troubling this world for decades now, forever even.

    Notice that I didn’t say that those projects should support English. I didn’t suggest there was anything wrong that they didn’t. And to be clear I don’t even mean to suggest that they must support any kind of IAL, even if one were agreed upon. The people of the world should be free to include others or serve their own… but I think generally people prefer to collaborate, and collaboration is something which should be facilitated.

    Even the way internationalists frame things is very telling.

    The way things are interpreted also says something about the reader. This is a sensitive subject for you, and I’d bet rightly so. You should take care of yourself. Try not to get so worked up.


  • 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:

    • words which are redundant
    • some root words which are simply difficult to pronounce for anyone
    • the difficulties that arise from certain combinations of word parts
    • constructed words which work one way in a certain set of cases, a different way in another
    • the confusing resemblance to unrelated word constructions which some root words have

    …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.


  • When I was looking at Mastodon Desktop clients a while back I came across Mikutter, which is only in Japanese. In their FAQ was a little gem which I feel may be relevant, the question “I am English speaker. Can I use Mikutter in English?” The response was in Japanese, here it is translated:

    After the defeat in the war, the Japanese were forced by GHQ to adopt Shift-JIS and JAP106, and as a result, they fell far behind in the development of information technology. When I was in elementary school, when I started programming, I was frustrated because I was lined up with English that I had never learned. Also, you have released many low-quality services that do not support anything other than ASCII, which even Japanese elementary school students would not create. This mikutter is a precious opportunity for you to relive how we have been oppressed for generations.

    How a programming language is written is a legitimate concern.



  • I have found myself thinking this more and more as well, with the rising number of projects which are being developed primarily by/for speakers of other languages, sometimes with terrible to non-existent english support. This is not a new problem, but the natural consequence of the world breaking free of english hegemony. Where as the pain was felt before by others, now it will be felt by us as well.

    Perhaps the problem could be offset somewhat by using software to translate the common symbols of the major programming languages (if, else, int, float, str, etc…). But generally speaking I think the time for a commonly accepted auxiliary language is now. Not necessarily Esperanto, which I think is an impressive accomplishment of it’s time (kaj kiun mi parolas), but I think a modern -and international- effort could produce a superior language.

    But we do need a better solution, and I think Esperanto is a better solution.