Comment on Non-smart smart move
trxxruraxvr@lemmy.world 2 months agoWhat 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.
Comment on Non-smart smart move
trxxruraxvr@lemmy.world 2 months agoWhat 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.
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 2 months 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.
That is also true.
Boppel@feddit.org 2 months 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 2 months 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.
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.
timestatic@feddit.org 2 months ago
Not really possible to make a language everyone is familiar with as languages globally are so different.
acockworkorange@mander.xyz 2 months ago
So the solution would be to have Esperanto but with the phonetics of, say, Hawaiian?
Mac@mander.xyz 2 months ago
I personally think we should use grunts and gestures
Boppel@feddit.org 2 months ago
one could of course try to make an easier or better suited language but calling it a poor tool is harsh critique considering that esperanto is the most sucessful attempt for an artificial global language today and already avoids many hard to learn features from other languages.
trxxruraxvr@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Even just within the EU, interligua would be a much better alternative. That one has specifically been designed for use in the EU though, and not for global communication.