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Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by Apocryphon on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @02:53PM (#27451624)
Shame there's no real-world interest in the powers that be to officialize Esperanto.
Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by mannerheim on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @03:02PM (#27451735)
What would be the point? Might as well make Klingon an official language.
Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by ben_w on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @03:16PM (#27451900)
One is designed to be easy to learn, to be regular and logical and use roots familiar to European ears, the other is designed to sound alien.

(Does Klingon have a word for bridge-of-a-ship and not bridge-over-water, or is that just an urban legend?)

Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by bawolff on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @04:15PM (#27452580)
https://www.kli.org/about-klingon/new-klingon-words/date/# says that QI is klingon for bridge over water.
Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by ben_w on Thursday June 10, 2021 @02:49AM (#27457631)
QI? Curiously, that’s the name of the TV show where I think I heard the claim. I wonder if it was added and given that form as a direct result of that appearance on that show? (The timing is plausible, but I don’t have a detailed enough memory to find which episode).
Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by chillacy on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @03:24PM (#27452001)
If Klingon were invented in Europe and designed to be a pan-european easy-to-learn language, sure. Otherwise, Esperanto has some desirable attributes as a universal second language.
Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by mannerheim on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @03:27PM (#27452040)
There are other, better-designed conlangs than Esperanto. Nobody speaks them, sure, but nobody speaks Esperanto either. And if we're going by popularity, might as well pick English anyway.
Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by leke on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @04:25PM (#27452739)
Esperanto has a pretty big, organised and active community. But you're right. I also think popularity should be the decider. If Esperanto thinks it should be the chosen auxiliary language, it will have to earn it.

Personally though, I prefer Ido over Esperanto.

Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by mnouquet on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @04:58PM (#27453138)
Define "pretty big".
Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by akvadrako on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @07:58PM (#27455011)
Around year 2000 there were about 2 million speakers. It's way above any other conlang.
Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by mannerheim on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @09:38PM (#27455756)
That's akin to being the biggest fish in a fishbowl. There are minor dialects of minor languages with more speakers.
Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by akvadrako on Thursday June 10, 2021 @04:03AM (#27458176)
The question was about conlangs, which have the advantage of being designed to be easier to learn.

Esperanto is so easy it can be learned in negative time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Espera....

Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by Avamander on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @04:10PM (#27452519)
"Easy-to-learn" is very subjective. There's a lot of different languages spoken in the EU and the accessibility of a language environment matters.
Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by hulug on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @07:52PM (#27454961)
> "Easy to learn" is very subjective

Not really. For example, a language that has no grammatical gender is inarguably easier to learn than a one that has.

Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by pyuser583 on Thursday June 10, 2021 @02:00AM (#27457279)
All other things being the same. English doesn’t have much grammatical gender, but is a mess.
Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by Avamander on Thursday June 10, 2021 @12:32PM (#27462575)
Yes really. About your example, what have you heard about the difficulty of learning Finnish and Estonian?

That aside, there's no way there's an universal easy-to-learn language. Language families are very different.

Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by mannerheim on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @07:59PM (#27455020)
Finnish has no grammatical gender. Is it easier to learn than Spanish?
Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by hulug on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @08:20PM (#27455194)
That was just one example but you win I guess. What I had in my mind was for a Spanish speaker it's probably easier to learn a hypothetical Romance language that doesn't have grammatical gender than say French.
Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by mannerheim on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @10:22PM (#27456022)
So first, I would say that the notion of ease of learning a language is a purely relative one, which is what GGP probably meant. It is easy for an Estonian speaker to learn Finnish, a Dane to learn Swedish, etc., but quite difficult for an English speaker to learn Finnish. As another example, Mandarin on its face should be an easy language to learn because the grammar is very simple - there are no tenses, no cases, no gender, no inflection whatsoever. There's tone, sure, but this isn't the difficult part of understanding Mandarin for a native English speaker. Regarding grammar specifically, despite Mandarin seeming to possess a nominally simpler grammar, speakers use patterns that would appear alien to most speakers of European languages. For example, from section on cleft sentences[0]:

他昨天买的是菜

Literally, this means 'He yesterday buy of is vegetable', but the meaning is 'What he bought yesterday is vegetables'. The way the grammar in this sentence corresponds to its meaning may seem unusual to you, but it is effortless and natural to a Mandarin speaker. And these sorts of invisible grammatical features exist in every language. Most European languages descend from a common ancestor, so it is not so noticeable, and instead we notice the grammatical features that are different between languages: cases, gender, tenses, etc. And Esperanto, being based in these languages, also inherits these unnoticed grammatical biases. A Mandarin speaker learning Esperanto would have the same difficulty as an English speaker learning some Mandarin-derived conlang that 'simplified' certain visible grammatical features. Esperantists tout success in speakers of Asian languages learning Esperanto, but there are many more cases of speakers of Asian languages learning English.

Anyway, I don't think things like gender matter so much when it comes to the practical aspect of learning a language, or even mistakes in semantic grammatical features like case or tense. A native speaker isn't going to be unable to understand you because you flub some of the grammar such as the gender of some noun. Consider when you hear non-native English speakers make mistakes - are you unable to understand sentences like 'I go to bank' or 'Yesterday I eat restaurant'?

So these are the two flaws of Esperanto:

1. Esperanto's grammar is still very much Romance + Germanic-like, so ease of learning it is relative to familiarity with languages in those families.

2. To the extent that Esperanto's grammar is simpler, it doesn't particularly matter from a language acquisition perspective.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_grammar

Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by akvadrako on Thursday June 10, 2021 @04:33AM (#27458372)
Esperanto is still one of the easiest languages for Chinese to learn and the grammar is not very European; it also has elements mostly found in Asian languages:

https://www.translationdirectory.com/article715.htm

The Chinese are actually one of the biggest supporters of Esperanto too, offering degrees in it from major universities, regular broadcasts on official radio and some years ago teaching it in primary school.

Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by leke on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @04:28PM (#27452781)
True. I struggled with Esperanto for 10 years, only to give up and try Ido.
Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by beebeepka on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @05:30PM (#27453490)
What's your native tongue? I guess that would make non insignificant difference
Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by leke on Thursday June 10, 2021 @01:11AM (#27456886)
English and a long time Finnish learner/speaker (because of migration).
Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by tdeck on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @03:06PM (#27451786)
Esperanto is considerably easier to learn than Klingon.
Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by kergonath on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @03:59PM (#27452378)
Quenya would be a much better sounding option.
Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by Semiapies on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @05:06PM (#27453232)
Too many people actually speak Klingon, and it was invented in the US. Non-starter.
Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by Apocryphon on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @05:18PM (#27453351)
It would be a cool sci-fi reference, yep.
Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by w0de0 on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @05:51PM (#27453728)
A language with no literature or culture has no business in the halls of state. Such a language is arguably not even a language in the real sense, but a code. A vernacular is needed - language must live and evolve.
Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by mannerheim on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @06:43PM (#27454275)
Esperantists have tried, creating a pale imitation of the real thing, as if culture were something you could bootstrap by mixing the right ingredients as you would some sort of cake.
Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by ben_w on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @03:09PM (#27451808)
Si. Esperanto havas problemojn, kaj tio estas la plej gravan.
Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by leke on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @04:33PM (#27452838)
Esperanto havas problemojn. La Ido estas la solvo :P
Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by ben_w on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @06:42PM (#27454253)
To some of them, sure. But even fewer have heard of it.
Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by Koshkin on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @06:36PM (#27454197)

  Se ti sabir
  Ti respondir
  Se non sabir
  Tazir, tazir
Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by saati on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @08:28PM (#27455256)
That would be even less practical, as almost no-one speaks esperanto.
Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by Koshkin on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @06:33PM (#27454161)
No... We don't deserve this (not yet).
Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by mumblemumble on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @05:12PM (#27453280)
Doing so strikes me as being impractical in the extreme. English would still be the the lingua franca in every other domain, so it would just mean that Europeans would have one additional lingua franca to have to learn. It doesn't matter how easy that language is to learn, it's still an extra, and almost certainly redundant, effort.

I'm not going to bother finding the hyperlink for the relevant xkcd comic, because we've all seen it before.

Re:French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’ by leke on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @04:19PM (#27452639)
Or Ido.