Introduction of Esperanto: 1887 Formation of the International Alliance of Women: 1904 Women's suffrage in the US: 1920
I think this kind of dismisses the claim that Esperanto cannot have historical baggage.
For Esperanto one could even claim that it is a way of making it easier by having neuter and masculine to be identical - just for like most other languages on could interpretations that make it equal, pro men or pro women ("they have their special form").
However I agree that a neutral form would probably even make it easier to talk/communicate in many situations.
One also has to differentiate Ido and Esperanto there. While Esperanto sees the language as set into stone it's most famous and related competitor, Ido is evolving, so one could pick that up in such a case and still be pretty good with Esperanto.
And one last thing: What's important about a standard is that there is one that people use an not that it's perfect. See UTF-8 vs competitors and similar. Esperanto is also primarily meant as an auxiliary language, which I think has the strong point of not manipulating society through language.
Many Esperanto speakers are actually in deference of other and especially not widely used languages, also because of the reason of especially the mother tongue defining how people think.
Disclaimer: I am not an Esperanto speaker, even though I was interested as a teenager.
Actually, consonants are pretty discrete. You can move your tongue further and further back and it is still perceived as the same fricative (for example), but move it just a bit further back and the quality of the sound changes completely to another fricative.
Vocals, on the other hand, are continuous, so that miniscule changes in your jaw-tongue configuration makes it sound differently.
That's why you usually recognize non-native speakers by their vowels. It takes many years to get vowels right.
1) The native consonants of Finnish (h j k l m n p r s t v ng/ŋ) and the vowels of Arabic (a u i), as a compromise between not having too many sounds that could be difficult to produce or even distinguish to some, and not having so few that you can't have recognizable loanwords.
2) Syllables CV or CVC
3) No grammar features such as tenses, cases, moods, or even number, because many Asian languages lack them, like classical Chinese for a very literary example, plus they are just an unnecessary detriment to learning and speaking. I'm not sure what the grammar that is left should look like but it should be minimal.
4) Vocabulary sourced from Estonian, since it won't be too terribly mangled by the reduced alphabet, as a Uralic language is equally obscure to everyone else yet has an extensive living vocabulary, and since nobody is likely to go "well why don't I then just learn Estonian instead", especially if they've tried to read an Estonian grammar book.
In practice, these requirements are obviously at odds with each other. You have to balance the freedom available to a speaker with the mental capacity of a listener. If you want to accomodate speakers of languages that allow free word order due to case marking, as well as languages that have a fixed word order, you might end up with case marking and marks to indicate a specific fixed word order. But then all of these markings would have to be understood by the listener, who'd have trouble keeping the various forms straight.
However, you might be able to quantify the learning effort required and optimize for that. This is obviously hard for grammar and semantics, but could be done for phonetics.
Instead of trying to intersect the phoneme sets in use, or giving up and choosing arbitrarily, you could collect statistics on the ability to produce and distinguish various phones, and then optimize for communicability. A speaker can pronounce a phoneme as well as the allophone that is easiest to pronounce for them, a listener can distinguish a pair of phonemes as well as the most similar combination of allophones from them. Then calculate the expectation over all pairings of speaker and listener, maximize the bandwidth accounting for the required error correction, and you get your perfect phoneme set. I'm actually interested what the result might look like, whether there will be a few, clearly separate phonemes, or a huge number with potential overlap, that needs to be compensated by unambiguous vocabulary.
It also occurred to me that this might somehow apply to constructing programming languages, but I'm hazy about the details. Maybe something like Python's "one way to do it" vs other languages supporting a variety of styles?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant...
Even citing from the same Wikipedia page:
>According to the results, preliminary Esperanto study led to a 25% improvement in acquiring Russian, 30% for German, 40% for English, and even 50% for French.
It seems to clearly show a greater similarity with French (a romance language) than the others.
I'm French myself but I must say that I never really got the appeal of Esperanto. Sure, I might be able to learn it relatively easily. I could also learn Italian pretty easily and I'd gain access to around 64million native speakers and a very rich culture.
If you want an international lingua franca then there's already English and if you think that's too difficult to learn there's Spanish. Not as easy as Esperanto? Maybe, but call me when Esperanto reaches half a billion speakers.
Also the "10x easier than English or German for French speakers" surprises me because it seems to say that English and German are roughly equally difficult to learn for French speakers while it seems pretty obvious to me (having studied both languages at school for many years) than German is very significantly harder.
English has many cognates thanks to the large influx of French words in past centuries, a very simple grammar for the most part (trivial conjugations in particular), no real case system (only a few leftovers like in Romance languages), no gendered nouns. The only thing that's a bit more difficult in English as far as I can tell is the pronunciation.
Add in there a greater load of multi-word expressions compared to other languages, and painstaking word order rules (like if there's more than one adjective then those have to follow each other in a specific manner), and many other downplayed hardships.
Adjective order however is not really a problem IMO, it's irrelevant while consuming the language (unless a text tries to convey some meaning by purposefully miss-ordering the adjectives) and in general getting it wrong while producing English will make you sound foreign but shouldn't hurt comprehension too much. Saying "the red big house" instead of "the big red house" will raise some eyebrows but should remain understandable.
> "10x easier than English or German for French speakers" surprises me
145 hours of Esperanto = 1500 in English = 2000 in German
> I could also learn Italian pretty easily
Can you learn Italian with less than zero effort? No. Yet in a number of studies listed, those who learned Esperanto and another target language (including Japanese) became better at the target than those who learned only the target.
And once I get fluent enough I have access to a wealth of resources to keep studying: movies, tv shows, radio, videogames, newspapers, philosophy books, plays, operas... I can go anywhere in Italy and practice with people in all kinds of situations. I can even get a job there where I'll speak Italian all day long.
Esperanto is an interesting experiment but I find it really hard to invest the time necessary to learn the language.
>Yet in a number of studies listed, those who learned Esperanto and another target language (including Japanese) became better at the target than those who learned only the target.
Did they check if people performed worse when taught, say, 150 hours of Spanish before the target language? It's not really a surprise that learning a language can make it easier to learn other languages, if only because it gives you a certain discipline and mental framework.
And if it does turn out that learning 150hours of Spanish has the same benefits, wouldn't it make more sense to do that instead even if the level of proficiency reached is lower? The practical uses of (even basic) Spanish dwarf that of Esperanto.
The Australian study [1] that is cited in the Wikipedia article compared pupils that learned Esperanto, Indonesian, German or Japanese, respectively, in primary school and then went on to learn a possibly different language in secondary school.
Let me note a few problems with that study up front:
- There was apparently an additional class per week by a professional Esperanto teacher (the other Esperanto teachers were learning on the go).
- The Japanese teachers in the comparison rated themselves 0.25-0.5 on a number of 5-point scales (Esperanto: 1.6-2.4, German 4.5-5, Indonesian: 2-3). This is essentially a plus for Esperanto (easy to learn for the teachers), but taints the comparison since the Japanese teachers were basically incompetent.
- Due to attrition of study subjects, their evaluation after one year of secondary school has only 21 students of Esperanto. (306 students in total)
- They do not differentiate by (or even talk about) the languages learned in secondary school.
Now to the findings (on a 5-point scale [1,2,3,4,5], rated by the secondary-school teachers, given as percentages in each category):
- Motivation to learn the language (presumably the new one): Esperanto [0, 5, 10, 67, 19], others [ 13, 9, 22, 24, 31]. This one is difficult to analyze, since their motivation might change due to liking the new language better (or worse), or due to a general effect on motivation to learn any language (the authors claim the latter). I'll just point out that both the lowest and the highest scores are rarer among Esperanto students.
- "attainment level" (no idea what that specifically means): Esperanto [0, 4, 26, 61, 9], others [10, 9, 23, 26, 32]. Again, both the lowest and the highest scores are rarer among Esperanto students. The striking resemblance to the motivation results is interesting.
- speaking ability: Esperanto [0, 0, 48, 43, 10], others [12, 8, 46, 27, 6]. This is the only measure where Esperanto seems to be a uniform improvement.
In my opinion, this study mostly shows that this specific Esperanto course did not completely kill off the students ability to learn a foreign language, unlike apparently some other courses. The improvement in speaking ability could be caused by the focus on an immersive classroom experience, but it did apparently transfer to other languages, which is a plus.
The study definitely doesn't show anything like "those who learned Esperanto and another target language (including Japanese) became better at the target than those who learned only the target." (Since they didn't test any such thing.) In fact, my best guess at explaining the higher rate of perfect motivation/attainment scores for students of other languages is that they continued studying the same language they had already had in primary school. If this were the case, it would pretty clearly show that learning Esperanto before learning Japanese is not going to help someone learn Japanese faster overall.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20040215074307/http://www.educati...
We already know that language acquisition is going to be driven in large part by motivation on the learner's part, as well as competency on the teacher's part, and it's all too easy to construct a study that self-selects motivated students and competent teachers for Esperanto and unmotivated students and marginal teachers for other languages.
Another major question that's completely unanswered to me is the effect of pedagogy on teaching (and, perhaps to a lesser degree, to assessing competence in the learned language). One of the studies Wikipedia cites claims that you can learn the grammar of Esperanto in ~5 hours, which is "impossible" for other languages. That instead screams to me that Esperanto is taught as a detached grammar course in early instruction, whereas other languages will tend to start with a phonological crash-course combined with basic phrase acquisition, instead spreading grammar out over several hundreds of hours of instruction.
I don't think many people have to learn esperanto at school or for work, clearly it heavily biases towards people who are interested in learning languages and esperanto in particular. You have to be very careful while creating your samples to compensate for that I think.
>One of the studies Wikipedia cites claims that you can learn the grammar of Esperanto in ~5 hours, which is "impossible" for other languages. That instead screams to me that Esperanto is taught as a detached grammar course in early instruction, whereas other languages will tend to start with a phonological crash-course combined with basic phrase acquisition, instead spreading grammar out over several hundreds of hours of instruction.
That might be true but on the other hand imagine teaching English students a "detached" French grammar for instance. I think the students would give up within the hour, it's too dense and quirky to be palatable. If Esperanto's grammar is really simple and regular and can be integrated in 5 hours it's a good point in its favor.
I believe the "a" sound in English "father" is universal. But otherwise yes.
Invented languages are like social networks, it's all about reaching that critical mass where the network effect is self-sustaining. Getting there is extremely hard however, especially if, like the parent points out, it's incredibly difficult to actually make a language "objectively" superior to the hundreds of existing languages which already have millions of speakers.
Phonetics is the easiest thing to find a universal subset for--there's basically only so many ways you can physically structure your mouth to make sounds (although it does operate rather on a continuum basis). We can also objectively say that some sounds are easier to produce than others. Even then, the intersection of all languages' phonemic inventories is probably empty. The basic structure of a dozen or so consonants (m, n, b, p, j, s, z, k, g, d, t, w, h, say) with 5 basic vowels structured in a strict CV syllable format, with no diphthongs and vowel length, aspiration, and tone all being non-phonemic is the basic outline for how to design the phonotactics of a universal language.
Moving beyond phonemes is virtually impossible, however. Trying to design a basic lexeme for the language obviously runs into problem of where you source the lexemes (particularly since borrowing from several different languages tends to make it completely incomprehensible to everybody, although you may find that more tasteful than prejudicing one language's speakers as having an easier time mastering the lexeme). But even choosing which words to make root lexemes and which ones to make compounds is difficult. Should blue and green be separate lexemes? What about blue and azure? Should right be "not-left" but south not be "not-north"? Languages often attach multiple meanings to the same word, and these meanings don't always match up across languages.
Grammar is even worse. It's hard to find any grammatical structure that's truly universal across languages; maybe the separation of function between nouns and verbs, but the proclivity to verb nouns is so common in languages that it's questionable how fundamental the distinction actually is. Even the basic meaning of things like mood, aspect, and tense can be hard to settle, since the forms that exist in languages can partially overlap certain combinations (past/present+future versus past+present/future forms being the most well-known). Having to mark cases that don't exist in your native language can be difficult; English users' trouble with the subjunctive is well-known.