Comment on Why do some languages use gendered nouns?
Droggelbecher@lemmy.world 8 months agoI thought this was a discussion about languages people speak.
Esperanto is an interesting case though but it wasn’t designed to be as simple as a language can be (since that is highly subjective). It was designed to have as many similarities as possible to major European language in order to make it easier for speakers of those European languages to learn.
Not really. Your description fits Interlingua a lot better than Esperanto.
For example the word for “legalize” looks like legaliz- in lots of European languages, but in Esperanto it’s “laŭleĝigi” (laŭ = according to, leĝ = law, ig = cause to be, i = verb infinitive). There are many more examples like that, even the Internet is called Interreto in Esperanto.
amio@kbin.social 8 months ago
Maybe not literally the simplest possible, but simplicity was certainly an important guiding principle. The idea was just to not make it too taxing to learn, since natural languages have a lot of arbitrary complexity in them.