Guys, it’s time to learn Esperanto.
Its hard to choose, interlingua, esperanto, lingwa de planeta, ido, uropi, lingua franca nova.
Personally I think its better to develop an international sign language.
It’s much easier to learn as you dont need to learn new spellings or alphabets (the sign for “a” can also be greek alpha for instance), or germanic or slavic or latin roots, it is only actions added to your own local word, so literally verbal monoglots can speak to any other monoglot. No matter how thick their accent is.
Plus it would greatly expand the deaf communities international reach, would not exclude the deaf, and I like the idea of children learning an international auxiliary language that can also help the hard of hearing.
And if you’ve ever been in a loud bar or nightclub or restaurant in a foreign country in europe it would make ordering much easier. Obviously unfortunately it does somewhat exclude disabled people with reduced mobility and wouldn’t work on the phone, but we all have videocalls now and we shouldn’t be on the phone while driving anyway. Also it’s quite fun. I’ve started in French Sign Language (Elix app on ios app store) and am pushing to have lessons for my colleagues as we work in medical training and I think its nuts its not offered let alone encouraged or compulsory.So I say we should develop Euro Sign Language.
I mean we all use the middle finger already, lets expand on that.
While I find it admirable to promote the use of Esperanto I don’t think that many people want to start learning another language. It might work to garner a nerdish interest from people who love languages - which will contribute to the number of competent speakers. But otherwise it’s hard to convince people to learn a language you still can’t really use in your daily life.
And at the moment I can only give you marketing ideas that will attract fringe groups: Bad Herzberg in Germany is the ❤️ of Esperanto - a great place for hiking. You can even consider it a kind of pilgrimage. William Shatner aka Captain James T. Kirk played in a film that exclusively uses Esperanto. He holds the rights to the film too. You can see snippets of this film in Blade Trinity (and they had to pay Shatner a pretty penny to use it) and there’s also a short dialogue in Esperanto in this film…
English is a European made language spoken by a lot of the world… 🤷♂️
This.
Sorry, that ship has sailed long ago.
Pick your fights wisely, this is a lost cause.
Language history shows that dramatic changes can happen at any moment. Languages can even return from the dead… If the situation with the US spoils to the point of US culture becoming disgusting to the average European… There’s no emotional attachment to English, and most Europeans speak it poorly. You can start speaking basic Esperanto within days.
Yeah, let’s replace English with something European. Let’s use Cornish, it’s more European than English. *g*
The English most Europeans learn and try to speak and feel familiar with is made in the USA.
In what way is English not a European made international language?
If I had to chose, I would rather speak Latin: amazing collection of work available to read from, and to discuss about.
But as others have mentioned English is not a US made language and they certainly do not own it. English comes from Britain but its rooted in old Germanic language. It’s also a mix of a few other languages (including my own French… which is also a mix btw).
maybe spanish as it has the most speakers around the world?
I could settle for Interlingua.
If I’d pick a global language I’d pick to return to Latin.
So do you want to learn it in 3 months or 3 decades? Tough choice.
Children pick up languages fast. Immersion is key.
Plus Latin is already taught at a lot of schools, Esperanto doesn’t have this advantage.
If I had to pick a constructed language, I think Ido or Lojba would be better. Or hell, Toki Pona if you only care about fast vocab.
The reintroduction of Welsh via primary schooling in Wales has been super successful, a really good example of how quickly kids learn and I used to know some couples who had young children that could speak Welsh and they didn’t and it really bugged them as they had no idea what their kids are saying. But pretty much in one or two generations of children, a very endangered language is coming back.
Esperanto has far more C2 level speakers than Latin. Teachers teaching Latin in European highschools generally can’t speak it themselves. It’s not taught as a living language to use on your life, it’s taught in order to understand ancient scripts.
Hell no.
Hell no… Because the Vatican mostly uses it? So… what do they speak in hell? Klingon?
No, because it’s an unnecessarily complicated language that doesn’t even have that many speakers. There’s basically the same amount of people who would have to learn it as for Esperanto (knowing some Latin and speaking it fluently are very different), and learning Latin to the level of fluency would take much longer than Esperanto.
Yeah and English is well established, most people already know some of it.
Still, I like languages, so Latin seems interesting to me. :D
In that case read Lingua Latina per se Illustrata by Hans Orberg. I now read quite well in latin thanks to his self teach books, but theyre really interesting - they teach using the natural method… ie there is no english or french or anything - the entire book is in latin. The first lines are :
Roma in Italia est.
Italia in Europa est.
Italia et Francia in Europa sunt.And then you have to figure out (with the help of cryptic annotations) that est (is) is singular and sunt (are) is plural. No going back to your own language, no phrases. By the end of the first chapter you are beginning to decline nouns and adjectives. Puella pulchra est, Puellae pulchrae sunt. And you have no idea you are doing it. No boring rote learning of declensions, its like you’re learning as you would as a child.
And now I can mostly understand reading romance languages I don’t know well(romanian, spanish, etc) thanks to learning latin (Also, I am a fluent french speaker) and other people have copied his method into loads of languages so I collected lots of natural method books for german and italian etc.
pls, I’ll show you the exit
Oh the famous friendliness and open mind-ness of the Fediverse… Legendary
The language where a woman is a female man? I mean, no natural language is perfect but probably there are better constructed ones.
That’s not true. There is a femine sufix, but that doesn’t equate to “feminine man”. There are also alternatives within Esperanto, by very far the most popular constructed language with an unmatched number of speakers and cultural production. Persecuted by Nazis, soviets or the Iranian Islamic gusrds, it’s also a language with an incredible history of resistance. Very ironic (and very telling) that you try to take it down with some woke nonsense.
That’s not true.
If woman is vir (root of viro, man) + ino (feminine suffix) how do you call that?
Persecuted […] resistance.
That’s not a virtue of the language, it’s a virtue of the intention. If there had been Volapükists in those contexts they would have been persecuted too because they would have been perceived as dangerous idealists.
woke nonsense
Ah, the sunk costs. No matter whether natural, constructed or programming language, the “prophets” lashing out at any criticism because it feels like an attack on all those hours already invested into learning it.
I call it what it is, a sufix. Most languages have them, you don’t translate them separately from the word. German texts would be unandarstable if that was the way translation worked.
And as a living language, contrary to all other artificial languages, there’s a woke pack in Esperanto if you really want to. The wonders of a regular language, reform is very easy to implement.
No language is neutral, they have a history and a cultural luggage. Esperanto speakers can be proud of theirs.
I know that you know that I know what a suffix is. Do you get the difference between the pair Mann-Frau and the hypotetical Mann-Männin or are you being intentionally obtuse?
Speakers of a self purported international constructed language should be proud of a good construction, hailing cultural bias as a pride thing is weird, specially when advertising the language as a transcultural bridge.
Männin as a creation of yours just to make a point sounds weird indeed,but if it was used as currently as Professorin you wouldn’t bat an eye while saying it.
My point is precisely that Esperanto is way past the “constructed language” phase, it’s a living language and with a rich European history. It’s also constructed at origin and very easy to learn, besides stateless, which makes it an ideal lingua-franca for Europe.
A fraction of the budget used to teach English would be needed and with better results.
as a creation of yours
What do you think “hypothetical” means?
Professorin
I would definitely bat an eye if somebody came to me with that shit for a language they constructed following an “interna ideo” of universality, peace, and whatnot. I would bat the other eye if besides they came to me saying that a Männin that just had a baby becomes a Väterin, la padra, the fathress, i pateraina.
ideal lingua-franca
A language with letters no other language has, and a sound repertoire that offers no improvement over English (even if we reduce the target population to Europe given the community we are in), is far from ideal.
A fraction of the budget
… once a critical mass of teachers is achieved, together with native populations big enough to enable linguistic immersion for new learners. Sold separately.
