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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rockerface@lemmy.cafe 3 weeks ago
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.
trxxruraxvr@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
- rockerface@lemmy.cafe 3 weeks ago
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.
trxxruraxvr@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I agree with you there, but I think the problem is that they took the wrong base languages to build Esperanto from, not that they took the hardest parts of those languages.
- rockerface@lemmy.cafe 3 weeks ago
That is also true.
Boppel@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
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.
ayyy@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks 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.
- rockerface@lemmy.cafe 3 weeks ago
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.
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
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?”
Yeah, toki pona phonetics are ideal for an international language, literally every phoneme is extremely common