> He said that if he could have chosen a language, instead of English, to be the world’s shared second language, then it would be Swahili or colloquial Indonesian. He said both of these languages have been learned by millions of people as their second language, so all the weird edge-cases have worn away, and they are as smooth and beautiful as a river stone. No weird grammar. No weird tones. No exceptions.
I have no knowledge of Swahili and perhaps it really is all that but this statement makes no sense - English, French, Russian, Arabic and plenty of other languages have been learned by millions of people as their second language yet they still have plenty of weird grammar, exceptions, and edge-cases.
Swahili and Indonesian are primarily second languages, used as lingua francas amongst large and diverse populations, so linguistic changes are mainly driven by non-native speakers, as opposed to the languages you listed
A clarification comment here to help explain what is going on here- re: the 'non-native' part of the comment above.
Swahili specifically is a second language to a population speaking a very very diverse set of first / primary languages.
Swahili is spoken in East Africa - Burundi, Congo, Kenya, Uganda, Somalia ( southern tip) Rwanda, Tanzania.
Kenya and Tanzania have the largest part of speakers and in Tanzania, there are over 20 'first' languages and in Kenya , there are at least 20 'first' languages as well.
Also important to note that Swahili is formally taught in primary / grade school, alongside either English or sometimes French, to a population that already speaks a different first language used by a much smaller population.
The point here is that there are many many first languages that are sources for "borrowing" into Swahili but that borrowing has to be adopted across all Swahili users who will not share that first language.
This means that only the 'easiest' / 'lowest friction changes' make it through over time into Swahili as all words also have to be accepted by speakers having other "first' aside from the ones that each word or language component was 'borrowed' from.
Swahili and Indonesian were primarily second languages, in the 20th century. But now they are very much first languages as people are learning them from childhood simultaneously with their ethnic language.
perhaps we should qualify the claim by pointing out that 20th-century swahili and indonesian are simpler than creoles, but have now been replaced by more complex creoles
Most people who speak Swahili speak it as a second language. This process - when the majority of speakers of a language are non-native - tends to simplify a language. For example, Swahili has a much simpler set of sounds than most other Bantu languages, many of which are tonal (Swahili is not tonal), and many of which have three or four way contrasts in their stop consonants (Swahili has two), and some of which have click consonants (Swahili has few "unusual" sounds).
This. Spanish it's almost dumb simple, widely spoken; and Iberian Spanish has few exceptions (the c/z/s spelling split avoid spawning a nazi grammar every two paragraphs as it happens in South American Spanish), and yet, he chose... Indonesian.
At Iberia, Spanish was almost the lingua franca between the Occitan branch speakers, the Galician-Portuguese speakers and the Leonese/Asturian ones in the Middle Ages and beyond. It had five vowels compared to the seven ones from the Catalan/Valencian or the 7-8 (if not more) of the Galician-Portuguese. And it got loanwords from all the Iberian romances overtime (and a bit later French and Italian).
Spanish is easy except for those pesky conjugations.
But, do you know how hard it is to fluidly conjugate into 50 verb forms in spoken speech?
Plus, people gloss over this fact, but Spanish is highly inflected. After you choose 1 out of 50 conjugation for your form, you have to choose a gender for your noun, and inflect your adjectives by number and gender. Conceptually, it’s not difficult. But if you open your mouth and starting try to talk this way you’ll mess up for about the first 5 years.
I can do it. But of course a language which I know seems easy to me!
But point taken that most languages have conjugations + all that other stuff, too.
Yes but conjugations is not something you have to worry about, especially at the beginning.
In a language with articles, you can do mistakes in conjugation, yet if you use the article people will understand what/who is the subject and still understand.
When you learn a language, focus on present tense. By using words like before/after/yesterday/tomorrow you can keep using present tense and be understood by a native speaker and you are likely to learn quickly the past and present tense by listening to their answers. People usually understand that you are learning and don't mind you using present tense.
This. Also, you don't need to use compound conjugations at first. This might be wrong for the Spanish Iberian dialects the same way it's a bit wrong too in English, but if you don't say "I've just eat" instead of "I ate" everyone will understand you fine.
Spanish has inflectional grammar, which is the one language feature most constructed languages do away with first (with weird exceptions like Volapük that are mostly known for their obscurity) because it's so hard to learn for newcomers.
no, 'inflectional language' means that different independent axes of meaning are encoded in a single word. french verbs are inflected for time (present, imperfect, simple past, simple future), mood (indicative, subjunctive, conditional, imperative), number (single, plural), and person (first, second, and third). so 'parler' can be realized as 'parle', 'parles', 'parlons', 'parlez', 'parlent', 'parlais', 'parlait', 'parliez', and so on
the crucial thing that distinguishes inflections from simple agglutination (where instead of the isolating 'will talk' that english uses, you write the future as 'willtalk') is that they interact. so, for example, second-person plural indicative present 'parler' is 'parlons'. second-person singular indicative present 'parler' is 'parles', pronounced [paRl]. second-person singular indicative imperfect 'parler' is 'parlais'. so you might guess that second-person plural indicative imperfect 'parler' is 'parlonais' or 'parlaisons', depending on which order the suffixes go in, but it's not, it's 'parlions'
that's a lot to memorize for a new language learner. there are 36 distinct forms of 'parler' in that page, and the reason 'parler' is used is that it's a regular verb; some verbs have even more
ok but as a native french speaker I find spanish much more intuitive than french. We french people have in common with german people in that we struggle with some sounds like the 'r' but that is the only real struggle when learning spanish. The rest is fairly easy. Everything is pronounced the way it is written.
However spanish people suffer much more than us when learning french because we don't pronounce words the way we write them in a reliable way and we have so many sounds that are so close to them spanish speaking people don't see the difference.
it's still a lot to memorize to get started, and as pointed out elsewhere in the thread, if your background is an isolating language like chinese, the entire concept of inflection is going to be an unnecessary obstacle
also, you're only talking about the most surface aspects of learning a language
in general pretty much every natural spoken language is equally difficult to learn, because if it's easier than what an average person can learn in their first five years of life, its speakers will invent new complexities that allow them to communicate more eloquently and efficiently. sometimes those complexities are very obvious like a larger inventory of phonemes (french has a lot of vowels, spanish doesn't), sometimes they're slightly more subtle (larger vocabularies, less regular inflection, phrasal verbs, higher segmental rate), and sometimes they're very subtle indeed (a larger inventory of idiomatic expressions, a greater cultural expectation that you will recognize literary allusions)
but about the same amount of complexity is are always there. conlangs and pidgins can avoid them (until they become native languages, as swahili and indonesian are, and i know someone who was raised speaking esperanto) and written languages aren't constrained by them because they don't rely on native language acquisition mechanisms
Sure, the FSI ranks Spanish as a category 1 language along with other Romance languages, Norwegian, Swedish, etc which means it's simpler for English-speakers to learn than most languages, but I'm not sure I'd describe learning any natural human language as "dumb simple" -- at least for me, Spanish was the hardest thing I ever attempted to learn by a wide margin.
After a couple thousand hours spread over twenty years I could read simple texts and communicate simple concepts as long as I maintained an exhausting level of concentration and stopped worrying about conjugating properly. I eventually gave up after realizing that improving would require a significantly larger time commitment than I could afford.
Spanish is not dumb simple. A friend transferred a PhD there and could never get to the level of comfortable conversations with her lab mates and had a hell of a time. Same with French or any European language not English to be frank (have German stories as well). So it’s perhaps not a great analogy, and folks who learned a language as kids or are polyglots should recuse themselves from commenting on how easy those languages are to others.
For instance people on reddit (or here?) aren't actually writing as they'd write texts in Alabama or lecture notes in Manchester. English used online tends IMHO to have less classical idioms and less respect (or more avoidance) of the weird rules.
And I assume at some point countries with english as first language sill backport massively crushingly popular memes as idioms and many irregularities will become pedantic instead of the norm. After all it's not that long that English became the linga france, we've yet to see more pronounced changes IMO.
Russian has a huge population of native Russian speakers who understand all lexical, grammatic and phonetic quirks of their language. Then they call the shots.
It's curious that the quote mentions both Swahili and colloquial Indonesian, but your reply only questions Swahili's fitness (without mentioning Indonesian at all).
> He said that if he could have chosen a language, instead of English, to be the world’s shared second language, then it would be Swahili or colloquial Indonesian.
I've learned Swahili to a basic conversational level and my experience learning the language mirrors the author's time picking up Esperanto. Grammatically, everything seems to make sense especially the simplicity of the verbs, and as a native English speaker you can pretty much pronounce/hear all the sounds from the jump. However, once you get deeper into the language you have to worry about the extreme amount of noun classes (think genders). In Swahili there are 8+ depending how you count them. These noun classes change the prefixes on the adjectives and verbs around them which can cause major confusion. I've always thought if they condensed these noun classes to 1 or 2 then Swahili would be the simplest language in the world.
as a swahili speaker I'd say that the beauty of swahili is that it's commonplace to butcher these noun classes unless you're from Tanzania. Kenyans, Congolese, Ugandas do it all the time
I am fluent in Spanish having been born and raised in Sunset Park, Brooklyn in the mid-60s through the mid-80s, which had a large Puerto Rican and Dominican population. Being half-Irish and half-Ukrainian, I spent some time at the Irish Arts Center in NYC learning Irish in the 90s. Given there were about 200k speakers of Irish worldwide back then, and now only 68k I believe, it was more of a curiosity for me then. I spent 7 years in SE Asia, and I learned Indonesian (intermediate still), but my Indonesian wife learned English faster than I picked up Indonesian, and I gave in to speaking English. I lived in East Java for a year, and I love Javanese, which Bahasa Indonesian draws much of its influence from among the 500 to 800+ languages spoken over the 17,000 islands of the archipelago. I am currently learning Arabic, after spending 8 months there over the past 24 months. I like the script and some of the language such as the root-based, three-letter mainly, structure. Spanish has been by far the most useful to me still living in New York State, but I am trying again to push my Indonesian for the sake of my children and to better communicate with my in-laws who know Indonesian, but are more at home with Javanese. I have played with learning Koine Greek over Homeric Greek to be able to read Marcus Aurelius or other contemporaries. I wish I could be fluent in at least three more languages other than my native English and Spanish. Harold Bloom's the "Loom of Language" sent me down the rabbit hole when I was in High School. People complain about having to have learned either Latin or Ancient Greek back in the day in High School, but now literacy in math and languages, seems to be tenuous at best. What happened? I grew up poor and with strife in my neighborhood, but the curriculum seemed so much more demanding. I don't know why; it's not my field of study or interest, but I am curious.
Sadly, Esperanto is only easy to learn if you already speak a European language, and even then it helps even more if you speak one of the languages Zamenhof, its inventor, spoke.
> Zamenhof included in Esperanto every Polish phoneme with a consistently used letter or digraph of its own, leaving out only the ones that are harder to recognise as phonemes: the nasal vowels, “soft” (palatalised) consonants, and /dz/.
I think you might exaggerate this a bit. One of the beauties of Esperanto being constructed is that the letters only make one sound and not like 2-4 and there are a bunch of other tricks to keep vocabulary reasonable and grammar logical without a bazillion edge cases. It might be easier for an English speaker to learn than a Chinese speaker, but I guarantee it would be much easier for that Chinese speaker to learn Esperanto than English.
Teaching my kid to speak and then how to read and write has been a recent reminder of just how illogical English is. I would have massively struggled as a non-native speaker.
I'm not complaining about orthography, but phonology: How easy it is to spell a word matters little if you get your mouth in a tangle trying to pronounce it. Esperanto has sounds most languages don't, and it has them purely because Zamenhof was accustomed to them. A good constructed auxiliary language would have a phonological inventory taken from the most common sounds in all of the world's languages. This page makes that case a lot better:
This is partly a consequence of Zamenhof being first, sure: Relatively little was known about global phoneme popularity in the 1800s. But he could have done a bit better than copying his specific dialect of Polish.
Vocabulary difference is a huge issue though. Korean and Japanese grammar is very different from Chinese, but the shared vocabulary (of Chinese origin) makes it easier to learn one of them if you already speak another one. Also incentives and resources in a target language are very important.
Assuming you don't know a Slavic language (I don't), take a look Interslavic. I recognize zero words in the example texts. That might make sense to someone who knows one, but it's going to be an uphill battle for me. Honestly I'd rather invest time in something like Russian or Polish because it gives me access to a lot more native speakers, media and literature.
This is an exaggeration. It’s definitely not true of French, Spanish, or German. Honorable mention for languages like Chinese that don’t even have the concept of “letter”.
Spanish and German are far more consistent than English. Mandarin Chinese has Pinyin which is modern and quite consistent - Pinyin is very useful because you can type it and select the corresponding Chinese characters.
spanish orthography is regular and simple, though it preserves many sound distinctions that have been lost in the spoken language, so text to speech is easy, but speech to text sometimes is not
french orthography is regular, except for a few exceptions like 'fils', but not that simple
english orthography is neither; it's halfway to chinese
Chinese pronunciation is extremely regular though. Each character has its own pronunciation morphed only by a handful of regular tone rules. Both PRC and Taiwan have regular phonetic alphabets too.
english orthography is extremely regular at the word level too; there are only a handful of words like 'desert' which have multiple pronunciations for the same spelling. but, thus considered, the number of rules is extremely large, perhaps several thousand: a hundred or so for the words that do have regular orthography at the letter level, plus one for each exception: 'would', 'one', 'who', 'police', etc. there's a pretty good list in espeak-ng-1.51+dfsg/dictsource/en_list and espeak-ng-1.51+dfsg/dictsource/en_rules. en_list has about 5000 rules in it, things like
Tycho taIkoU
aperitif a#pEr@t'i:f
(wouldn't have to) ,wUd@-ntavt@5 $verbf $strend2
while the 7000 or so rules in en_rules are letter-level things like
_d) am (i eIm
und) am (en @m
_) am (en a#m
which specify how to pronounce a particular combination of letters in a particular context. i suspect you could probably reduce the 7000 down to 100 with a more expressive system; the schwa-reduction of [a] in "fundamental", the second example above from en_rules, is the same schwa-reduction applied everywhere to english low vowels in unstressed syllables
by contrast, es_rules (for Spanish) is 285 lines long, and then there are 391 lines of exceptions (mostly things like "thunderbird" and "software") in es_list
in chinese, instead of several thousand rules, you have several tens of thousands of rules, one for each character (which are not in a one-for-one correspondence with words but are roughly as numerous)
which rules and which other entirely different system are you referring to? or, which system do you think i am judging by the rules used to construct chinese?
i'm making a lot of effort here to express myself clearly and to understand your ideas, but i feel like you aren't really meeting me halfway
Spanish and German pronunciation are extraordinarily regular, German in particular. Its spelling is regularly updated, most recently just a few years ago.
If you are getting fixed up on the one letter = one sound designation (which could be interpreted just as well to apply to German, and almost to Spanish, where one combination of letter always gives the same sound), then this is disingenuous pedantry.
English is pretty unique in not having rigid rules for pronunciation as spelling is typically retained from loan languages.
> It might be easier for an English speaker to learn than a Chinese speaker, but I guarantee it would be much easier for that Chinese speaker to learn Esperanto than English.
Proposing such an obviously "white European" language as the global lingua franca is incredibly offputting to many people.
Yes, English may be the de facto lingua franca, but at least no one is pretending that it's "objectively best," as they are with Esperanto.
> Proposing such an obviously "white European" language as the global lingua franca is incredibly offputting to many people.
A random person on this planet hears about Esperanto: "Sounds easier than English, I guess."
A random woke American hears about Esperanto: "No, silly, let me get offended on your behalf. 'How dare you dream about the world peace, evil white male Zamenhof, how dare you!' Ok, now everyone go back talking English."
I have learned Esperanto using Duolingo and I made more mistakes in English (which was the language in which that Esperanto course was tought) than in Esperanto. Mainly because Esperanto is very regular without all those edge cases which English has.
BTW English is my second language, Czech is my first and I have some limited knowledge of German.
I like to think that Esperanto is easier, not necessarily easy. It definitely helps if you know e.g. a romance language, but it still is way more accessible than any other "regular" language (and, even for a romance language speaker, it requires effort to learn properly).
In China, for example, Esperanto was used to introduce western languages.
There's a whole word class (words ending in AŬ) which is essentially a "Wastebasket Taxon" for his vocabulary: There is no regularity to what ended up there, merely arbitrary choice. That's acceptable in a natural language, but Esperanto is Modern and Scientific and Regular As Oat Bran, right?
> In China, for example, Esperanto was used to introduce western languages.
Really? Do you have any evidence for this? I follow a blog which frequently discusses such things (language use in China) and it's never been mentioned:
I think it's technically true that someone in China at one point used Esperanto to introduce Western languages to a few other people, because around 1900 it was part of a package of futuristic Western ideas like overthrowing the Emperor and Communism.
But the claim omits how utterly unsuccessful Chinese Esperantists were at their goal compared to the revolutionary Communists. (Even though they were sometimes the same people, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hu_Yuzhi )
For comparison, a few years after Zamenhof started Esperanto, Paul von Möllendorf (a German aristocrat working as a customs official in Shanghai) suggested in his Manchu grammar https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Manchu_Grammar that Westerners should study Manchu as an easier introduction to the Chinese classics, the Chinese Emperor at the time being ethnically Manchu. Then the Emperor got deposed and by now the last native Manchu speakers have probably all died of old age. Learning Manchu in order to learn Chinese would be a collosal waste of time.
Chinese Esperantists that I know don't really seem to make fewer or different mistakes when using Esperanto than when using English. The marking of tenses with -is, -as, -os may be perfectly regular, but that doesn't help much when grammatical tense itself is a foreign concept to you. Someone who usually uses present tense in English when talking about the past will tend to also use present tense in Esperanto when talking about the past.
On the other hand, Esperanto is one of the languages featured by Radio China International (https://esperanto.cri.cn), and there's also an official support for the El Cxinia Popolo magazine, and maybe others I'm not aware of. I'm not sure one can generalize 1) the antagonism between the communist government and Esperanto and 2) the lack of skills of the Chinese Esperanto speakers.
There is no antagonism between the government and Esperanto that I'm aware of, more like disinterest. As I mentioned, there was originally a lot of overlap between people supporting either cause, but Esperanto simply never got as popular as Communism.
As for China Radio International, the inclusion of Esperanto among the forty-odd languages they translate content into is transparently intended to propagandize to foreign Esperantists more so than promoting the language.
I don't know. There are irregularities indeed, but they are so few that it's easy to simply memorize them.
> Really? Do you have any evidence for this?
Unfortunately I have no URL to share here. This has been discussed a few times in some of the meetings I attended in the local Esperanto club -- and it makes sense, given the language's propedeutic properties. The geopolitical context has probably played a role (even here, in Brazil, part of our youth refused to learn English for some decades after the US sponsored a coup and a dictatorship in the country, and Esperanto was presented as an alternative pursued by a few of us).
Also, the Chinese government supports Esperanto. There's esperanto.cri.cn and maybe others, although I'm not informed about the nature of the contracts involved.
> Esperanto is only easy to learn if you already speak a European language, and even then it helps even more if you speak one of the languages Zamenhof, its inventor, spoke.
That's a very common misconception about Esperanto. It's true that most of Esperanto's etymology is of European origin, but cognate vocabulary isn't all, or even most, of what makes a language easy to learn. Just to pick one example: in most languages, you need to conjugate verbs according to their subject; in a lot of others, you need to decline nouns, too, according to their cases. And then there are the exceptions: there are hundreds of irregular verbs in English, and thousands in some other languages. Esperanto has none of these difficulties. Even if we were just to consider vocabulary, Esperanto vocabulary is so much easier to learn, because it's agglutinative: it's made up of composable, modular parts that can be recombined into other words. That means, if you know fifty words, you actually know five hundred.
Just talk to Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Esperantists, and they'll tell you that Esperanto was a hundred times easier to learn than English, other European languages, and other Asian languages, too.
> His advice is to spend just a few weeks learning and having conversations in Esperanto, so that you can feel the experience of detaching from your mother tongue. Then you’ll be better-prepared to go learn the language you really want to learn.
Ah, the Paderborn method: [0]. If you only speak your native tongue, and you want to learn another language, first learn Esperanto, then learn your target language. You'll actually learn the target language faster than if you had studied it straight away!
> As a math major and lifelong chess player ... "cringy" is how I feel about so many math and chess people I meet. It sucks.
This feels like something many hobbies share. The more obscure, the more likely you are to run into the weirdos and "edge cases" who are, well, poorly socialized, I guess. But you also get to meet the weirdos and edge cases who are tremendously interesting!
> I wish I had spent my childhood on team sports instead.
I didn't do any team sports growing up, but I'm trying my best to make sure my kid does.
The comparison to Klingon is really short-sighted, though. Even though Klingon and Esperanto are both constructed languages, Klingon is a fictional language, created to mimic a natural language. Esperanto, on the other hand, is a mature, elegant language, designed to be easy and versatile. That's why Esperanto has a rich body of literature written in and about the language, and Klingon doesn't; why Esperanto has official offices at the United Nations; why UNESCO documents are translated into Esperanto; why Shakespeare has been translated into Esperanto.
> I feel bad saying that I liked the language but not its speakers. I feel like it’s my fault.
It is, in fact, his fault. Esperanto has an estimated 2–5 million speakers worldwide, but this guy goes to one conference, meets a handful of them, and decides the whole language and culture is stupid. Imagine you went to a French language meetup, and had a bad time, but then decided that the whole Francophone world was a bunch of nerds, and that French isn't worth learning. It's incredibly narrow-minded.
There are countless Esperanto-speaking communities around the world: clubs, online chatrooms, groups of friends, conferences, special interest groups. Check out telegramo.org for an idea of the diversity of interests that Esperantists have. If there isn't a chat room for your personal interest, don't write blog posts in English complaining about it—create one.
Even if Esperanto had no speakers at all, and even if they were all old and weird, (which isn't remotely the case, in reality), it'd still be worth learning, for the same reasons that people learn Latin: it's a beautiful language, a great mental exercise, and a rich literary language. There are tens of thousands of books written in Esperanto, many of which haven't been translated to other languages. And even if Esperanto had no books, stop complaining and write one already.
Not sure if OP is the author but my love of learning languages was also unlocked through Esperanto when I was a teenager.
Its possible that my journey has been a bit longer, I did eventually get around to studying Mandarin Chinese, From 2016 until present day I still study an hour every day. I also was able to live in China for a year which was a great help.
Going from Esperanto, a language designed as a second language, to Chinese, one that is absolutely not, is like going from Ruby on Rails development to writing a web server in Assembly. There is so much more practice and rote memorization required to attain any level of fluency.
After over 7 years of study I still speak with an accent and have trouble communicating on some topics. But at this point I can read just about anything which was always my primary goal :).
I started learning Mandarin in December with a Taiwanese teacher that teaches at a university in my tiny country. We have classes for an hour and a half every week online. She forces us to read the sentences in simplified characters, not just to know what the pinyin words mean. It's not easy.
I never had any interest in learning an invented language, other than those I use for programming.
For some reason the topic of language brings up a lot of folk theories, half truths, and downright errors. This is not a bad thing, I think a lot of people are fascinated by language and want to understand it on a deeper level. There are many excellent books on the topic.if you’re on Audible, I strongly suggest Mc Whorter’s Language Families course: https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/language-families-of.... He’s an expert on African languages and his coverage of those are excellent from an introductory pov.
“My language-teaching polyglot friend Benny Lewis said that if you’ve never really spoken another language, then the best strategy is to start with the easiest possible language to learn, which is Esperanto”
The advice here is very context dependent. Esperanto was based on European languages, so would be easy for a person already speaking one; if not than not. Also, the concept of “easiest possible language” of course is ill-defined and learner dependent. If you’re interested in artificial languages one interesting book is Eco’s The Search for the Perfect Language.
If I were pressed to pick an easy to learn language I’d say learn a creole language, which are relatively simplified. This is where Sivers was going with the Swahili idea, I think: although Swahili is not a creole language (https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/4lq80i/why_isn...) contact by different populations tend to simplify complex language features. Same can be said about English, perhaps, it’s grammar and gender system is ssiplified but of course there’s the notorious spelling problem.
This tracks roughly with my experience learning Esperanto. It's a very cool language with many interesting quirks, but there just aren't a lot of people who speak it, and nearly all of them speak English anyway. I don't regret learning it, but I would probably have been better served by learning another language.
I learned Esperanto years ago, not because I wanted to speak the language, but because I heard that students who learned it had an easier time picking up third languages, to the point that they'd surpass those who had been learning that 3rd language (as their second) the whole time! It seems that that strong of a claim has been since removed from Wikipedia, and I am skeptical about it as well. I wish I had spent the time just learning Italian from the get-go.
Also, like Derek, I was turned off by the community. I found them way too socialist-leaning idealists.
Yeah, but its mention on the main Esperanto page no longer mentions the details of the study where the Esperanto first group surpassed the 'Always English', and instead critiques the study.
> And oh my god! It’s fascinating! The language [Esperanto] is so well designed! Everything made sense and with each new thing I learned, I thought “That’s brilliant!”
^This seems to have been downvoted for tone. Fair enough, but I do encourage anyone with an interest in Esperanto to read the linked document. It is a classic post on the complexities of Esperanto that are not obvious to the casual learner, that contains quite a lot of insight.
The entire list is just one huge Nirvana fallacy. Okay, so Esperanto is not literally perfect, it has some flaws... and therefore we should reject it, and instead use some language that has 10x or 100x more of exactly the same flaws? How does that make sense?
Some of the objections, I am not even sure what the author tried to say. For example, point 01a, Esperanto has only 5 vowels, while English has 19. Uhm, interesting, but... are you saying that more is better? I guess that would be a subjective choice: more vowels allow words to be shorter, but are difficult to learn for people who do not have such vowels in their native language. So it is not obvious whether 5 or 19 is better; probably depends on whom you ask.
Point 01b, Esperantists from different countries pronounce the sound R slightly differently. Well yes, that is what you inevitably get when people from different countries try talking the same language. Do you think their versions of English are the same?
Point 02d, Esperanto has accented letters that do not exist on English typewriters. Sure, Esperanto and hundred other languages. What's your point? Is a language universal only when it uses English alphabet? Also, this is not a problem in practice, you either install a keyboard for the language (just like you do with every language other than English) or simply use the "x-method" (write accented letters as letters followed by "x").
But most objections are simply of the kind "I would do it differently". Cool, go ahead and design your own language. Then wait to see it reviewed by someone like you.
I tend to agree with your three specific objections:
- 5 vowels is actually a very good choice (although the diphthongs in Esperanto are notably odd)
- pronouncing the R differently is unavoidable and probably fine
- the x-method works okay in practice (although I subjectively don’t really like it)
The linked page is “the page” on the problems with Esperanto, and I still think that it has a lot of insight, even if I don’t agree with every point he makes.
For example, I had no idea how much East Slavic grammar influenced Esperanto, or how important word order was in practice for complex sentences.
I think it’s reasonable that a much better IAL than Esperanto could be designed today, given all the knowledge of linguistics that we now have, and all of the experienced conlangers. I don’t think that Esperanto is so good that surpassing it would be “one huge nirvana fallacy”.
But I also don’t expect anyone to ever make an IAL that is more successful than Esperanto, because Esperanto’s success was a product of its time.
Nowadays, with the status of English, and the availability of machine translation, an IAL is just less important than it once was.
On a positive note: I recommend the book “In the Land of Invented Languages” by Arika Okrent for a history of conlangs.
As a shibboleth, here is a sample of my own shitty conlang, whose design I will not attempt to defend:
anu, ʃamuti usli bisini uma kamlusu slapluŋwu ixla dwamuʒu aku pluŋwuslu bisana aku
pwanusu ʒapwunu aku pumuʃwu ixla bluŋusu ʃwutuŋu aku pluŋwuslu aʃa ʒubunlu
dimivi… azi ʃumuti ivwu sunwubi xubuŋu bisini uma ʒamigi ivwu vamidi idu bisini
bunluʒu xudwunu iza. ʒamigi ivwu vamidi idu bisini uma bisini sudumu fupumu fupumu
uta βubunu uta ʃutwumu itu tunuʒu ixla buʒunlu. kiŋliɣi ixla tiniʒi guŋuʒu iba: ʃamiti
kiɣiŋi uma mlupuʃu, iʒi igi vabwiŋli ʃubunu uta afu, iʒi xinlipi baʒinli mlupuʃu, azi
xunlapa usli bisini mlupuʃu. ʒlumlaga bisini ŋlagusu bisana ibi vwadluŋlu itu xunlapa
bisini ŋuguʒu, azi vaŋupa usli, iʒa zwuŋika ivwu suŋibwa bisini ŋladluvwu ixla ŋatuɣwu.
udi ʒiŋiti biʒinli busini paŋuɸu xwaguŋu uŋwa ʒabunlu iʒi ʃumuti ivwu sunwubi xwuguŋu
bisini uma xanlipi bisini ŋuguʒu. dwinixi iba. iʒi xaŋiti bisini. diŋixwi ixla paŋiɸi xwagiŋi
vwiŋigi ivwu sinwibi guŋuʃu bisana, paŋiɸi uŋwa kaŋiɣli pamluzu.
> I think it’s reasonable that a much better IAL than Esperanto could be designed today, given all the knowledge of linguistics that we now have, and all of the experienced conlangers.
I think it is likely that many mistakes could be recognized and avoided.
The attempt would probably still fail, because after all the obvious mistakes are fixed, different opinions would still remain, and people would start fighting over that. Anyone joining the discussion would feel qualified enough to propose their own ideal language, and none of the proposals would get enough fans to create an actual community of speakers.
English is full of "all the weird edge-cases" because people want it that way.
Consider that we could use '-ed' as the past tense for all words: runned, sitted, drinked, eated, standed, twisted, cutted, turned, seeed, heared, beated, beginned, bended, digged, hurted, holded, selled, sended, shaked, singed, spended, standed, stinked, teached, telled, winned. My first reaction is that it sounds like babytalk, because the only place those are used is by children before they learn to speak 'properly'. They are understandable - if we wanted more regular language, we could just switch to speaking more regular English. Nobody could stop us. We don't, conclusion: we don't want that. The irregular cases are partly there because they have been worn into being that way, rather than having that worn away, like r/DesirePaths[1] are the paths people want to take instead of the paths prescribed for them. Worn through frequent use and it being shorter to say eat/ate than eat/eated.
We signal adultness, nativeness, in-group membership, social status, educational status by knowing and using the weird edge cases. Poor people say "baarff" instead of "bath", foreign people say "walk dog" instead of "walk the dog", educated people can spell and use Latin and Greek origin words. In a similar way that jelly and ice cream is famously a children's dessert while mouldy cheese on herb crackers is an adult dessert. Pop goes the weasel is a children's tune and Mozart is an educated adult's composer. Spot the Dog is a children's story, War and Peace isn't. A language which has "all the weird edge-cases have worn away, and they are as smooth and beautiful as a river" is also a Sistine Chapel where all the details have worn away and the whole ceiling is a smooth and beautiful brown, or a Mozart where all the distinct instruments have worn away and the whole tune is a smooth and pure sine wave. People would rather visit a landscape or a church than an empty warehouse - the mind likes details, something to grip on. The programming languages where everything is TokiPona, it's all parentheses, it's all CPU instructions, it's all stack primitives, it's all array transforms, are not the popular ones; when everything looks the same you have a hard time telling where you are or expressing things which are different, differently.
A centrally planned "people's language" is about as desirable as a centrally planned "people's car"; one generation after everyone speaks Esperanto, everyone would speak their own dialect of Esperanto with extra chrome, alloy wheels, turbo charger, cutdown exhaust, go-faster stripes, custom decals, fat tyres - the original language, the variant that's more flowery and poetic, the one that's more modern and refined, the one that's more minimal and purer, the one which is more casual and slangy and youthful and irreverant and less regular, the one with more regional or historic loan words, the one spoken by the upper classes or the famous people, etc.
I have no knowledge of Swahili and perhaps it really is all that but this statement makes no sense - English, French, Russian, Arabic and plenty of other languages have been learned by millions of people as their second language yet they still have plenty of weird grammar, exceptions, and edge-cases.