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Non-smart smart move (thelemmy.club)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/historymemes@piefed.social
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[–] 86 points 4 months ago (29 children)

Note to self: do not make a language intended for global communication by just mixing 3 European languages and taking the hardest to learn features from them.

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  • [–] 41 points 4 months ago (26 children)

    What do you mean by hardest features? It's been ages since i looked at Esperanto, but back then I didn't find it particularly hard to learn.

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  • [–] 44 points 4 months ago (25 children)

    Let me guess: your native language is Germanic, Romance or Slavic.

    Esperanto's phonetics, phonotactics, vocabulary and grammar are all overly Eurocentric and twice as complicated as they should be for a language that is presented as a tool for global communication. And don't even get me started on diacritics.

    Anyone who grew up speaking a non-Indo-European language is going to have a hard time even getting the hang of the alphabet and all the sounds.

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  • [–] 20 points 4 months ago (22 children)

    esperanto is ridiculously easy to learn, even from a global linguistic perspective. the grammar, in particular, is predictable and avoids irregularities. you're probably referring more to familiarity than ease of learning. of course it is even easier to learn if you come from europe since it adopts many european words, but that doesn't change it's general simplicity.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (20 children)

    That still makes it a poor tool for global communication. Within EU, maybe. But not global. More than half of global population is going to have to learn a dozen of new sounds and distinctions in pronunciation to even start.

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  • [–] 18 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    I personally think we should use grunts and gestures

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  • [–] 20 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    hrmpf 👍

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I've been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I'm the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You're fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that's just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little "clever" comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn't, you didn't, and now you're paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You're fucking dead, kiddo.

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago* (6 children)

    one could of course try to make an easier or better suited language but calling it a poor tool is harsh critique considering that esperanto is the most sucessful attempt for an artificial global language today and already avoids many hard to learn features from other languages.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    What can I say, the bar isn't high. It avoids some hard to learn features but introduces others, mostly in the phonetics and orthography.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    i guess i can agree on that. i still would like an artificial easy to learn global language.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago

    Oh, don't get me wrong, I still think Esperanto was an amazing attempt at a global communication tool. It just didn't age that well, in my opinion. And the whole concept of an artificial global language is still something that should be pursued.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    Why even make a language, if there are plenty of existing languages to choose from?

    Just pick the most widely understood one and you're done.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    One problem in international relationships is that native speakers of the language that is used will always be able to express themselves better than others and will thus have an advantage in debates and discussions. The original idea was that everyone should learn Esperanto as a second language which would level the field and improve international relations.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    So the solution would be to have Esperanto but with the phonetics of, say, Hawaiian?

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Toki pona is an interesting example, though it's not an international auxiliary language. But it still relies on a simplistic phonetic inventory and limited core vocabulary to make communication as easy as possible.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    not an international auxiliary language

    Hasn't stopped people from trying to hammer it into one (i.e kokanu)

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    I'm just saying that's not the author's intention, it's more of an experiment to see how minimalistic you can make a constructed language. On the other hand, simplicity is good for an international language, so who knows, maybe something derived from toki pona can actually do the job.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    I’m not convinced that the consistent grammar and spelling is actually a feature of Esperanto. I think it’s just a feature of being a language that nobody uses so it hasn’t had a chance to inevitably evolve like actual languages people use.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    I maintain that the most realistically usable artificial global language would be something inspired by toki pona, but with actual effort put into picking words that are maximally understandable and pronounceable by as many people as possible and is designed to be incredibly difficult to mangle beyond intelligibility.

    No even remotely complex rules, nothing fancy whatsoever, just an engineered caveman speech that literally anyone can learn from a pamphlet and reliably use to communicate basic normal things with anyone else. Like the way you end up talking when you just barely know a language and need to communicate "i'm allergic to shellfish, can you guarantee that my food won't have touched any part of an animal with a shell?"

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