I think it might be good to have a universal language, but I think it’s vanishingly unlikely that Esperanto or any other deliberately manufactured language will become one. The way languages get (anything like) universal is by being widely used, and the way languages get widely used is by being widely useful. I don’t see any plausible way for something like Esperanto to achieve that. English might become a universal language. Maybe, depending on how the world goes over the next few decades, Chinese or Russian or something. But it won’t be Esperanto. Pretty much everyone whose knowledge of Esperanto would make learning Esperanto valuable already speaks English.
Human augmentation may radically lower the difficulty of learning a new natural language. Maybe they’ll give us a drug that puts our brains back into child mode for language acquisition.
If that happened, then the market for conlangs might look interesting.
Child mode for language acquisition is a myth. It only helps with pronunciation. For every other aspect of language acquisition that has ever been studied, adults learn faster.
Edit: I mean adults learn faster per hour of effort, which is the relevant axis. In practice, children often learn faster per calendar year because they have nothing better to do.
I must admit that every linguist and developmental psychologist I have talked to has insisted that this is wrong, but they have not given me a single source. I believe that they correctly quote the textbooks, but that the textbooks repeat the myth without evidence. Here is a survey. (ungated pdf, but large)
Ooh there’s a cool idea, I hadn’t thought of that.
Another angle is the possibility that vastly-improved directly-implanted translators—a babelfish, basically—might make the whole thing moot. You learn your first language and then have absolutely no need, ever, to learn another. Language could be more or less frozen wherever it stands at the time. That’s if the technology is universally available—things get even more interesting if it was only available to the wealthy, or to citizens of wealthy nations.
Language could be more or less frozen wherever it stands at the time.
No it wouldn’t—language is for signaling, not only communication. There would probably be a common language for business and travel, but languages would continue to develop normally, since people would still want to use language to determine how they present themselves.
You’re right, that was a little overbroad. I was thinking specifically in terms of the death or spread of individual languages.
If I have a device that translates anything said to me and renders it into my own language in real time—Pierre says something to me in French and I “hear” it in English—I never have to learn language other than my first, and my first—whether it’s English or Tagalog or Swahili—is no more or less useful, no more or less universally comprehensible than any other.
So you’re right that languages would still develop internally—English speakers would still speak to other English speakers and alter the language among themselves as they do now—but the cross-pollination of languages and their growth or decline over time would be affected.
The native language of my own country is almost dead—on life-support, so to speak—because English was more useful. English was what you taught your kids if you wanted them to have any chance of success. If you could, you taught them English as a first language. With a universal translator that pressure would be removed. Why would anyone go to the trouble of always speaking to their children in their second language so that the children acquire it as their first?
The number of people who learned any given language as their first would be pegged to the population speaking that language at the point when the technology was introduced. So the only reason for a language to die would be if that population declined over time due to to emigration or low birth rates.
Of course this is all pretty woolly, given that it’s an imaginary technology, possibly centuries away from even being possible.
A babelfish is probably never going to be good enough to fully replace actually knowing the language; to start with due to different word order in different languages you’ll get something delayed and awkward. It will probably never capture slang and punning properly. Some languages can express some concepts very well, others struggle with those concepts and are awkward.
Babelfish are coming, and they will be very useful, but I kind of expect them to accelerate the drive towards everyone knowing a bit of English.
English has the advantage that England is no longer a very powerful country and I don’t think many important countries hate us that much. Therefore it feels more politically neutral to speak English.
I think Mandarin is the only realistic competition, but it will be hard for people outside of the far east to learn. And much of the far east currently feels like China is trying to dominate them, so they would rather use English.
I don’t see how those numbers, even if correct, mean that I’m being too pessimistic about Esperanto. I didn’t deny that some people speak it, or that it’s easy to learn. I said I don’t see any plausible pathway by which it becomes widely enough used to be a lingua franca.
The most interesting of those figures is the one about how many hours it takes to learn various languages. The link you gave doesn’t offer any direct support for the startling claim you make (apparently saying that Esperanto is 10x easier to learn than English); rather, it quotes someone else describing a study apparently done by the University of Paderborn’s Institute of Pedagogic Cybernetics. (On French students, so part of what this is measuring is similarity to French; that will no doubt be why German is alleged to be harder than English. I remark that Esperanto is more like French than English is—though probably not more like French than Italian is.) Unfortunately I can’t readily track down more information about this (it’s cited in an article by Flochon in a book by Guy Gauthier but, at least as quoted in the Grin report, doesn’t give any specifics about the study). I would want to know more before believing that the ratio is so very large.
Also it’s not about being similar to French and I don’t know why you think that. I’ve learned Esperanto and French and didn’t notice any similarities. Actually the Chinese were one of the biggest supporters, though that may be trending down.
It would be easy to grow Esperanto quickly. It would require some concerted effort, but there is a solid though small base around the world and there only needs to be some push to make it happen. Becoming the official language of the EU is one plausible avenue, but another one might crop up in the next few centuries.
it’s not about being similar to French and I don’t know why you think that.
Because (1) the study mentioned in the Grin report was conducted on francophone students and (2) while Esperanto is a proposal for a universal language, its structure and vocabulary are very decidedly European and indeed Romance. It is much more like French than Japanese or Mandarin or Korean, or even Sanskrit. Or, in fact, German.
I’ve learned Esperanto and French and didn’t notice any similarities.
That surprises me. Let’s try a little experiment. Go to the Wikipedia page on Esperanto (selected just because it’s an obvious thing to select, so you know I’m not cherry-picking) and find the first substantial quantity of Esperanto text. It’s this:
En multaj lokoj de Ĉinio estis temploj de la drako-reĝo. Dum trosekeco oni preĝis en la temploj, ke la drako-reĝo donu pluvon al la homa mondo. Tiam drako estis simbolo de la supernatura estaĵo. Kaj pli poste, ĝi fariĝis prapatro de la plej altaj regantoj kaj simbolis la absolutan aŭtoritaton de feŭda imperiestro. La imperiestro pretendis, ke li estas filo de la drako. Ĉiuj liaj vivbezonaĵoj portis la nomon drako kaj estis ornamitaj per diversaj drakofiguroj. Nun ĉie en Ĉinio videblas drako-ornamentaĵoj, kaj cirkulas legendoj pri drakoj.
The very first word (en) has approximately the same spelling, pronunciation and meaning as a French word. This is not a coincidence. The next word doesn’t (I think). The next (lokoj) is in fact cognate with French lieux with the same meaning. Next (de): French also has a word “de” with the same spelling and similar pronunciation, and a closely related meaning. Then Ĉinio; corresponding French is Chine, similar spelling, similar pronunciation. Maybe half the words in this passage have close French cousins. The sentence structures are very similar too. The writing system is almost identical—same repertoire of letters, similar set of accents, more or less the same punctuation.
If you took the same text and wrote it in, say, Tamil, it would be very much more different.
It would be easy to grow Esperanto quickly.
Easy for whom? What’s the actual sequence of events that would lead to it happening?
Becoming the official language of the EU is one plausible avenue
I think we may have different ideas about what constitutes plausibility. I agree it’s possible but I’d put the probability well below 1%.
Sorry, but the idea that Esperanto is somehow only easy for French speakers is plainly wrong. I don’t think you’ll find anyone who has learned it and another language who’ll disagree.
Actually Esperanto is in the same language family as many Asian ones:
Given the current status quo, it is impossible. However, I can imagine the political world developing into an atmosphere where Esperanto might be made the lingua franca. Imagine that American and British power continues to decline, and Russia and China and German, and maybe India, become more influential, leading to a new status quo, a stalemate. Given sufficiently long stalemate, like decades, Esperanto might once again become a politically viable situation.
Well, anything’s possible. But I’m struggling to imagine a halfway-plausible scenario in which this actually happens. In the situation you describe, what’s the actual mechanism by which Esperanto becomes widely used? I mean, let’s say we have a bunch of roughly equal Great Powers (perhaps they’re the Trump States, the Islamic Caliphate, the United States of Europe, China and Russia, with favoured languages The Best English, Arabic, German, Mandarin and Russian). Within each power’s sphere of influence its favoured language (or languages) will be dominant. So now imagine someone in, say, the Trump States. Obviously they need to know The Best English. They might want to learn Spanish in case their military service is at the Wall; or Russian, of course. But what’s going to make Esperanto more useful to them than those?
Are you thinking that Esperanto might be imposed as a lingua franca? That there’d be some sort of international treaty where all these mutually-mistrustful Powers agree that they will use Esperanto as a second language, or for negotiations, or something? Why would any of them do that?
I speak Esperanto fluently, and I really wish it could replace English as a standard communication language. But I see it as a coordination problem that is almost impossible to solve.
Learning English as an international language seems like an insane waste of resources. Why not use a language you could learn 10x faster? But the trick is that the costs are not same for everyone. Specifically, for native English speakers, Esperanto would be more costly than simply using the language they already speak fluently. And because the international language is chosen by people who have most economical power, of course their preferences are going to have greater impact. (And the same thing would happen if e.g. 20 years later English is replaced by Chinese. Then again, everyone except for Chinese would have a reason to prefer Esperanto, but the Chinese wouldn’t care, so the rest of the world would have to learn Chinese.)
Even a hypothetical situation where e.g. four languages with most economical power would be perfectly balanced, wouldn’t necessarily mean that people would adopt Esperanto (or any other neutral language). Most speakers of these four languages would have little to gain by learning another language, so they wouldn’t bother. And for the speakers of smaller languages it would be more profitable to learn one of the four languages (the specific choice depending on their geographical and political situation).
Essentially, most people don’t even want to communicate internationally. They mostly learn a foreign language if they believe it will help their careers. Which usually means they learn a language of an economically more powerful group. But that means that the other side doesn’t have an incentive to learn a foreign language. The few hobbyists don’t have enough purchasing power to matter on the large scale.
It would have to be a completely fragmented world, where almost every city would speak a different language, that would create a strong need for a neutral language. But after the invention of mass media, such situation is not going to happen.
I agree with all this (except that I happen not to be an Esperanto speaker myself) except for this:
Why not use a language you could learn 10x faster?
I am sure Esperanto is easier to learn than English. I do not believe it is 10x easier in any useful sense. Were you exaggerating for effect, or was that a serious claim, and in the latter case could you point me at some evidence?
This is a wild estimate based on my personal experience. May be a different number for other people, of course, either depending on their personal characteristics, or how much their native language is already similar to English or Esperanto.
My Esperanto exposure:
reading two textbooks
spending a week in an Esperanto-speaking environment, maybe 10 times
spending an afternoon in an Esperanto-speaking environment, maybe 50 times
My English exposure:
5 years at elementary school, 4 years at high school, 4 years at university
reading dozens of English books
translating three books from English
reading English web articles practically every day for two decades
spending a week in an English-speaking environent, once
spending an afternoon in an English-speaking environment, maybe 100 times
The resulting skills are not so different. Mostly, in Esperanto I don’t have a sufficiently wide vocabulary, so e.g. when I want to make a lecture on some topic in Esperanto, I need to take a dictionary and prepare a list of domain-specific words, try to memorize them, and use a cheat sheet as a backup. And I need about an hour to “warm up”; but that’s mostly because I recently use Esperanto about once in a year.
Esperanto is simply much more regular than English, so spending the same amount of time will allow you to learn more. You don’t have to learn the pronounciation separately. You don’t have to memorize a long list of irregular verbs. You don’t have to separately learn how to say “to see” and “visible”; you just say “see-able” and that’s the canonical form. (And there are many words where the similar principle applies.) It may sound like it’s not a big deal, but when you put all these things together, it makes a huge difference in how quickly you learn something and how easily you will remember it.
In a 48-hour intense course people are able to learn Esperanto at a very basic conversational level (textbook, example lesson), which allows them to have very superficial conversations.
But it depends on what your native language is. For example, if it is German, then half of your words already are almost the same as in English, only with different pronounciation. I believe Esperanto would still be easier, but the difference would be smaller.
Interesting—thanks. Did you learn Esperanto before English or after? (I’d guess a second foreign language is easier to pick up than a first, unless the first is learned in childhood and the second not.) Is your native language more like English or more like Esperanto or roughly the same in each case?
It’s certainly true that Esperanto is much more regular than English. (My impression is that English is unusually irregular even among natural languages, but I’m not sure how true that is.)
visible [...] see-able
Of course, if you say “see-able” in English then everyone will understand you. The only trouble is that you won’t be speaking English like a native speaker. That’s not really a question one can raise about Esperanto, since there are no native Esperanto speakers. (Well … allegedly there are ~1000 “native speakers”, which I think means “people brought up bilingually in Esperanto and some other language”, but that doesn’t constitute an actual linguistic community.)
This isn’t just a quibble; my point is that if Esperanto became an actually widely used language, I bet it would start acquiring irregularities that one would have to know in order to speak it “like a native”. You’d still be able to say “see-able” and everyone would know what you meant, just as you already can in English, but you’d need to know “visible” to sound truly fluent. (Of course I don’t mean that this specific example would turn out to be an irregularity. But I bet there’d be some.)
Mind you, what I say about irregularities is sheer guesswork: it just seems like the sort of thing one should expect. I wonder whether there’s any research on this sort of thing? (E.g., when pidgins turn into creoles, do they become more or less irregular?)
Languages I speak, in chronological order of starting to learn, are: Slovak, Hungarian, English, Russian, Esperanto. (Of these, Hungarian and Russian remain on the level of “I am able to read a text slowly, but I need to use a dictionary, and my vocabulary is so limited I can’t speak fluently, and my grammar is horrible, but if you give me time to find the right words in the dictionary, I will be able to communicate the meaning.”) So you could argue that more languages make learning another language easier.
However, after Esperanto I also tried learning Spanish, Japanese, and German, but didn’t get very far. Of course, it’s not like I spent the same amount of time and attention on each, so it’s not a fair comparison. But I believe that if German would be as easy as Esperanto, I would be already speaking it fluently.
With regard to similarities, Slovak is similar to Russian, and I learned Russian 4 years at school, and read a few books. I spent much less time learning Esperanto.
I don’t know how to compare difficulty of languages, because different languages are complicated in different ways. For example in English there is the complicated pronounciation, and irregular verbs. On the other hand, German has gramatical genders, and declination. Not sure which one of those is more complicated. Slovak and Russian have probably the same kind of complexity as German, only worse. Hungarian seems mostly regular, but has the definite vs indefinite verbs (not sure I am calling that properly).So, it seems like natural languages evolve complexities in different places.
I suspect there might be a “law” that keeps complexity of languages within certain limits: too complicated languages become difficult to speak properly, so some parts get simplified, but beyond certain level the knowledge of the complexities of language becomes a matter of signalling (the smarter and more educated people are more likely to get those complexities right), which creates a social pressure against further simplification. For example, in Slovak langauge we have two letters that are pronounced exactly the same (“i” and “y”), the reason for having them is historical: thousand years ago they were pronounced differently. Children spend a lot of time at school learning proper rules which one of these letters should be written in which situations; the rules are complicated, require memorizing long lists of word roots, and you still have many exceptions afterwards. But proposals to simply use one of those letters and just forget the other one are met with horrified reaction “but that would seem stupid!”; i.e. today the ability to write “i” and “y” properly is perceived as a signal of intelligence and education, so writing “i” everywhere pattern-matches being stupid and uneducated. And of course we wouldn’t reform our language towards a state that feels stupid for us today. Essentially, wanting to remove a useless complexity makes you seem like complaining that you are too stupid to memorize it properly.
Of course, if you say “see-able” in English then everyone will understand you.
Yes, but it wouldn’t work in the opposite direction: I would not understand when someone else says “visible”… or “audible”, or “comprehensive”, etc. But in Esperanto I can often understand words I never heard before, such as “see-able”, “hear-able”, “understand-able”, simply because I am already familiar with the root and the suffix.
This happens very frequently in Esperanto, because even words that would be considered “obviously independent” by an English speaker are considered “related” by an Esperanto speaker. An example that horrifies many people are opposites: instead of “dark” you say “un-light”, instead of “short” you say “un-tall”. With this simple hack you have removed a need to learn hundreds of words. There are more such hacks; instead of “knife” you say “cut-tool”, instead of “hospital” you say “un-healthy-person-place”. Nouns / verbs / adjectives / adverbs differ by the last letter, so you don’t need to learn “fast”, “speed”, “quickly”, and “hurry” as four independent word roots; and instead of “accelerate” you say “make-more-quick”.
This is probably difficult to get across, because when I just use “see” and “visible” as an example, you probably feel like “yeah, so there is this one weird example, but there still remains 99.99% of the language to learn”. But Esperanto is more like taking a language and throwing 75% of words away because they can be derived from other words, and making the remaining 25% regular. So with the same energy you would learn 100 English words you can learn 150 Esperanto words (because they are more regular), which you can start putting together like a Lego and create maybe 1000 Esperanto words. Realistically speaking, you are not going to do this systematically, so it will feel like you only know 150 Esperanto words, but there are the potential 850 other words that you don’t know you know, but when you meet them for the first time, your brain goes “oh, I actually know what this means”.
(By the way, the composed words are usually not too long, because the common prefixes and suffixes are typically monosyllabic. Or, as an Esperanto speaker would say, “one-syllable-y”.)
allegedly there are ~1000 “native speakers”, which I think means “people brought up bilingually in Esperanto and some other language”, but that doesn’t constitute an actual linguistic community.
Some of them are raised bilingually, with Esperanto as a second language; but some of them are actually trilingual, coming from mixed marriages where parents use Esperanto to talk to each other. They are very rare, and I have no idea which model is more frequent.
my point is that if Esperanto became an actually widely used language, I bet it would start acquiring irregularities
I agree that this is quite likely. Maybe it wouldn’t happen under the “Esperanto as everyone’s second language” scenario, but it certainly is a risk with the “native speakers”. (And various signallers, who believe that Esperanto needs more word roots because it e.g. allows better poetry. Sigh. Priorities.)
EDIT: In another comment, you say how Esperanto is much easier to learn for a French speaker than for e.g. a Tamil speaker. That is certainly true. But if you give the Tamil speaker a choice between learning English and learning Esperanto, in both cases the language will be completely unfamiliar, but in one case there will be the advantage of greater regularity and “Lego system”. So while the Tamil speaker would complain that speaking Esperanto gives an unfair advantage to the French, they would still prefer Esperanto to English (if the advantages of learning either language would be the same, which is obviously not the case.)
This is actually an objection frequently made against Esperanto. People are familiar with the concept of “some languages are similar to each other, some are completely different”, but unfamiliar with the concept of “Lego languages are much easier to learn”, so of course they are going to attribute everyone saying “Esperanto was easy for me” fully to the former. Yes, it plays a role, but the regularity also plays a role. Esperanto has also fans outside Europe/America.
Native English speaker here. I studied Spanish for a few years in High School, and Japanese for a year, and Esperanto for about 6 months of weekly extracurricular sessions. I managed to learn spoken and written Esperanto about as well as I learned spoken Japanese, in roughly 1⁄10 the hours spent.
That’s not strong evidence that learning it to fluency and communication comfort is 1⁄10 as hard, but learning the basics and a few thousand words is really quite easy for someone who already knows a romance or germanic language. I’d very much believe 1⁄2 to 1⁄3 of the effort required to fluency in a second natural language.
That said, I don’t think “ease of learning” is enough. There is no path to a designed language becoming universal. Network effects of language fluency are HUGE—the value to knowing a language is so dependent on who already knows it that there is simply no believable adoption rate for any minor language to become dominant.
My hope is that AR + machine translation get good enough in the next era that it doesn’t matter too much. And since the future isn’t evenly distributed, the “base” language is likely to be one that’s very popular today, I’d bet on English, Mandarin (with simplified alphabet-based writing), or Hindi in that order.
I managed to learn spoken and written Esperanto about as well as I learned spoken Japanese, in roughly 1⁄10 the hours spent.
That’s not a fair comparison. If you know English + Spanish, you should expect Esperanto to be much easier than Japanese; but similarly, if you know English + Esperanto, you should expect Spanish to be much easier than Japanese. Esperanto is very much more like English or Spanish than it is like Japanese, and it will have been easier for you for that reason completely independent of whether it’s more learnable than other Latin-derived languages.
True—unfair and no reason to believe that learning the basics is all that well correlated to fluency. Still, a bit of evidence that it’s plausible that Esperanto is that much easier.
In any case, I ran across a bit of evidence just today that it won’t matter: Pilot Translation Kit claims it’ll ship in May.
Are people here is interested in having a universal language, and have strong opinions on esperanto?
I think it might be good to have a universal language, but I think it’s vanishingly unlikely that Esperanto or any other deliberately manufactured language will become one. The way languages get (anything like) universal is by being widely used, and the way languages get widely used is by being widely useful. I don’t see any plausible way for something like Esperanto to achieve that. English might become a universal language. Maybe, depending on how the world goes over the next few decades, Chinese or Russian or something. But it won’t be Esperanto. Pretty much everyone whose knowledge of Esperanto would make learning Esperanto valuable already speaks English.
Human augmentation may radically lower the difficulty of learning a new natural language. Maybe they’ll give us a drug that puts our brains back into child mode for language acquisition.
If that happened, then the market for conlangs might look interesting.
Child mode for language acquisition is a myth. It only helps with pronunciation. For every other aspect of language acquisition that has ever been studied, adults learn faster.
Edit: I mean adults learn faster per hour of effort, which is the relevant axis. In practice, children often learn faster per calendar year because they have nothing better to do.
I can definitely vouch for the pronunciation part, but is the rest really true? Source?
I must admit that every linguist and developmental psychologist I have talked to has insisted that this is wrong, but they have not given me a single source. I believe that they correctly quote the textbooks, but that the textbooks repeat the myth without evidence. Here is a survey. (ungated pdf, but large)
And very scary as well.
Ooh there’s a cool idea, I hadn’t thought of that.
Another angle is the possibility that vastly-improved directly-implanted translators—a babelfish, basically—might make the whole thing moot. You learn your first language and then have absolutely no need, ever, to learn another. Language could be more or less frozen wherever it stands at the time. That’s if the technology is universally available—things get even more interesting if it was only available to the wealthy, or to citizens of wealthy nations.
Second language might still be necessary for the cognitive development effect.
No it wouldn’t—language is for signaling, not only communication. There would probably be a common language for business and travel, but languages would continue to develop normally, since people would still want to use language to determine how they present themselves.
You’re right, that was a little overbroad. I was thinking specifically in terms of the death or spread of individual languages.
If I have a device that translates anything said to me and renders it into my own language in real time—Pierre says something to me in French and I “hear” it in English—I never have to learn language other than my first, and my first—whether it’s English or Tagalog or Swahili—is no more or less useful, no more or less universally comprehensible than any other.
So you’re right that languages would still develop internally—English speakers would still speak to other English speakers and alter the language among themselves as they do now—but the cross-pollination of languages and their growth or decline over time would be affected.
The native language of my own country is almost dead—on life-support, so to speak—because English was more useful. English was what you taught your kids if you wanted them to have any chance of success. If you could, you taught them English as a first language. With a universal translator that pressure would be removed. Why would anyone go to the trouble of always speaking to their children in their second language so that the children acquire it as their first?
The number of people who learned any given language as their first would be pegged to the population speaking that language at the point when the technology was introduced. So the only reason for a language to die would be if that population declined over time due to to emigration or low birth rates.
Of course this is all pretty woolly, given that it’s an imaginary technology, possibly centuries away from even being possible.
A babelfish is probably never going to be good enough to fully replace actually knowing the language; to start with due to different word order in different languages you’ll get something delayed and awkward. It will probably never capture slang and punning properly. Some languages can express some concepts very well, others struggle with those concepts and are awkward.
Babelfish are coming, and they will be very useful, but I kind of expect them to accelerate the drive towards everyone knowing a bit of English.
English has the advantage that England is no longer a very powerful country and I don’t think many important countries hate us that much. Therefore it feels more politically neutral to speak English.
I think Mandarin is the only realistic competition, but it will be hard for people outside of the far east to learn. And much of the far east currently feels like China is trying to dominate them, so they would rather use English.
I think you’re being too pessimistic about Esperanto:
There are about 2 million speakers worldwide [4]. For a language only 100 years old.
It was recently added to Duolingo [5], a great resource for learning.
The Esperanto wikipedia is ranked #32 in terms of number of articles. [1]
It’s taught in 69 universities in 24 countries, several offering bachelors or PhD degrees. [7]
Prominent people are fluent in Esperanto, like the president of Austria [8]
After Britain leaves, only Ireland will speak English in the EU, giving Esperanto an opening. [11]
Esperanto is so easy to learn:
-> 2000 hours studying German = 1500 English = 1000 Italian = 150 Esperanto [6]
-> you can get it for free if you learn it along the way of learning English [9][2][10]
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_Wikipedias
[2] http://www.aaie.us/wordpress/?page\_id=42
[4] http://www.esperanto.net/veb/faq-5.html
[5] https://www.duolingo.com/course/eo/en/Learn-Esperanto-Online
[6] http://www.ladocumentationfrancaise.fr/rapports-publics/054000678/index.shtml
[7] https://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto\_en\_universitatoj
[8] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/30/AR2007033000824.html
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic\_value\_of\_Esperanto
[10] ‘A language teaching experiment’, Canadian Modern Language Review 22.1: 26–28
[11] http://e-d-e.org
I don’t see how those numbers, even if correct, mean that I’m being too pessimistic about Esperanto. I didn’t deny that some people speak it, or that it’s easy to learn. I said I don’t see any plausible pathway by which it becomes widely enough used to be a lingua franca.
The most interesting of those figures is the one about how many hours it takes to learn various languages. The link you gave doesn’t offer any direct support for the startling claim you make (apparently saying that Esperanto is 10x easier to learn than English); rather, it quotes someone else describing a study apparently done by the University of Paderborn’s Institute of Pedagogic Cybernetics. (On French students, so part of what this is measuring is similarity to French; that will no doubt be why German is alleged to be harder than English. I remark that Esperanto is more like French than English is—though probably not more like French than Italian is.) Unfortunately I can’t readily track down more information about this (it’s cited in an article by Flochon in a book by Guy Gauthier but, at least as quoted in the Grin report, doesn’t give any specifics about the study). I would want to know more before believing that the ratio is so very large.
You should better look at the wikipedia page I linked:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto
Also it’s not about being similar to French and I don’t know why you think that. I’ve learned Esperanto and French and didn’t notice any similarities. Actually the Chinese were one of the biggest supporters, though that may be trending down.
It would be easy to grow Esperanto quickly. It would require some concerted effort, but there is a solid though small base around the world and there only needs to be some push to make it happen. Becoming the official language of the EU is one plausible avenue, but another one might crop up in the next few centuries.
Because (1) the study mentioned in the Grin report was conducted on francophone students and (2) while Esperanto is a proposal for a universal language, its structure and vocabulary are very decidedly European and indeed Romance. It is much more like French than Japanese or Mandarin or Korean, or even Sanskrit. Or, in fact, German.
That surprises me. Let’s try a little experiment. Go to the Wikipedia page on Esperanto (selected just because it’s an obvious thing to select, so you know I’m not cherry-picking) and find the first substantial quantity of Esperanto text. It’s this:
The very first word (en) has approximately the same spelling, pronunciation and meaning as a French word. This is not a coincidence. The next word doesn’t (I think). The next (lokoj) is in fact cognate with French lieux with the same meaning. Next (de): French also has a word “de” with the same spelling and similar pronunciation, and a closely related meaning. Then Ĉinio; corresponding French is Chine, similar spelling, similar pronunciation. Maybe half the words in this passage have close French cousins. The sentence structures are very similar too. The writing system is almost identical—same repertoire of letters, similar set of accents, more or less the same punctuation.
If you took the same text and wrote it in, say, Tamil, it would be very much more different.
Easy for whom? What’s the actual sequence of events that would lead to it happening?
I think we may have different ideas about what constitutes plausibility. I agree it’s possible but I’d put the probability well below 1%.
Sorry, but the idea that Esperanto is somehow only easy for French speakers is plainly wrong. I don’t think you’ll find anyone who has learned it and another language who’ll disagree.
Actually Esperanto is in the same language family as many Asian ones:
http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/europeanorasiatic.htm
Given the current status quo, it is impossible. However, I can imagine the political world developing into an atmosphere where Esperanto might be made the lingua franca. Imagine that American and British power continues to decline, and Russia and China and German, and maybe India, become more influential, leading to a new status quo, a stalemate. Given sufficiently long stalemate, like decades, Esperanto might once again become a politically viable situation.
Well, anything’s possible. But I’m struggling to imagine a halfway-plausible scenario in which this actually happens. In the situation you describe, what’s the actual mechanism by which Esperanto becomes widely used? I mean, let’s say we have a bunch of roughly equal Great Powers (perhaps they’re the Trump States, the Islamic Caliphate, the United States of Europe, China and Russia, with favoured languages The Best English, Arabic, German, Mandarin and Russian). Within each power’s sphere of influence its favoured language (or languages) will be dominant. So now imagine someone in, say, the Trump States. Obviously they need to know The Best English. They might want to learn Spanish in case their military service is at the Wall; or Russian, of course. But what’s going to make Esperanto more useful to them than those?
Are you thinking that Esperanto might be imposed as a lingua franca? That there’d be some sort of international treaty where all these mutually-mistrustful Powers agree that they will use Esperanto as a second language, or for negotiations, or something? Why would any of them do that?
I speak Esperanto fluently, and I really wish it could replace English as a standard communication language. But I see it as a coordination problem that is almost impossible to solve.
Learning English as an international language seems like an insane waste of resources. Why not use a language you could learn 10x faster? But the trick is that the costs are not same for everyone. Specifically, for native English speakers, Esperanto would be more costly than simply using the language they already speak fluently. And because the international language is chosen by people who have most economical power, of course their preferences are going to have greater impact. (And the same thing would happen if e.g. 20 years later English is replaced by Chinese. Then again, everyone except for Chinese would have a reason to prefer Esperanto, but the Chinese wouldn’t care, so the rest of the world would have to learn Chinese.)
Even a hypothetical situation where e.g. four languages with most economical power would be perfectly balanced, wouldn’t necessarily mean that people would adopt Esperanto (or any other neutral language). Most speakers of these four languages would have little to gain by learning another language, so they wouldn’t bother. And for the speakers of smaller languages it would be more profitable to learn one of the four languages (the specific choice depending on their geographical and political situation).
Essentially, most people don’t even want to communicate internationally. They mostly learn a foreign language if they believe it will help their careers. Which usually means they learn a language of an economically more powerful group. But that means that the other side doesn’t have an incentive to learn a foreign language. The few hobbyists don’t have enough purchasing power to matter on the large scale.
It would have to be a completely fragmented world, where almost every city would speak a different language, that would create a strong need for a neutral language. But after the invention of mass media, such situation is not going to happen.
I agree with all this (except that I happen not to be an Esperanto speaker myself) except for this:
I am sure Esperanto is easier to learn than English. I do not believe it is 10x easier in any useful sense. Were you exaggerating for effect, or was that a serious claim, and in the latter case could you point me at some evidence?
This is a wild estimate based on my personal experience. May be a different number for other people, of course, either depending on their personal characteristics, or how much their native language is already similar to English or Esperanto.
My Esperanto exposure:
reading two textbooks
spending a week in an Esperanto-speaking environment, maybe 10 times
spending an afternoon in an Esperanto-speaking environment, maybe 50 times
My English exposure:
5 years at elementary school, 4 years at high school, 4 years at university
reading dozens of English books
translating three books from English
reading English web articles practically every day for two decades
spending a week in an English-speaking environent, once
spending an afternoon in an English-speaking environment, maybe 100 times
The resulting skills are not so different. Mostly, in Esperanto I don’t have a sufficiently wide vocabulary, so e.g. when I want to make a lecture on some topic in Esperanto, I need to take a dictionary and prepare a list of domain-specific words, try to memorize them, and use a cheat sheet as a backup. And I need about an hour to “warm up”; but that’s mostly because I recently use Esperanto about once in a year.
Esperanto is simply much more regular than English, so spending the same amount of time will allow you to learn more. You don’t have to learn the pronounciation separately. You don’t have to memorize a long list of irregular verbs. You don’t have to separately learn how to say “to see” and “visible”; you just say “see-able” and that’s the canonical form. (And there are many words where the similar principle applies.) It may sound like it’s not a big deal, but when you put all these things together, it makes a huge difference in how quickly you learn something and how easily you will remember it.
In a 48-hour intense course people are able to learn Esperanto at a very basic conversational level (textbook, example lesson), which allows them to have very superficial conversations.
But it depends on what your native language is. For example, if it is German, then half of your words already are almost the same as in English, only with different pronounciation. I believe Esperanto would still be easier, but the difference would be smaller.
Interesting—thanks. Did you learn Esperanto before English or after? (I’d guess a second foreign language is easier to pick up than a first, unless the first is learned in childhood and the second not.) Is your native language more like English or more like Esperanto or roughly the same in each case?
It’s certainly true that Esperanto is much more regular than English. (My impression is that English is unusually irregular even among natural languages, but I’m not sure how true that is.)
Of course, if you say “see-able” in English then everyone will understand you. The only trouble is that you won’t be speaking English like a native speaker. That’s not really a question one can raise about Esperanto, since there are no native Esperanto speakers. (Well … allegedly there are ~1000 “native speakers”, which I think means “people brought up bilingually in Esperanto and some other language”, but that doesn’t constitute an actual linguistic community.)
This isn’t just a quibble; my point is that if Esperanto became an actually widely used language, I bet it would start acquiring irregularities that one would have to know in order to speak it “like a native”. You’d still be able to say “see-able” and everyone would know what you meant, just as you already can in English, but you’d need to know “visible” to sound truly fluent. (Of course I don’t mean that this specific example would turn out to be an irregularity. But I bet there’d be some.)
Mind you, what I say about irregularities is sheer guesswork: it just seems like the sort of thing one should expect. I wonder whether there’s any research on this sort of thing? (E.g., when pidgins turn into creoles, do they become more or less irregular?)
Languages I speak, in chronological order of starting to learn, are: Slovak, Hungarian, English, Russian, Esperanto. (Of these, Hungarian and Russian remain on the level of “I am able to read a text slowly, but I need to use a dictionary, and my vocabulary is so limited I can’t speak fluently, and my grammar is horrible, but if you give me time to find the right words in the dictionary, I will be able to communicate the meaning.”) So you could argue that more languages make learning another language easier.
However, after Esperanto I also tried learning Spanish, Japanese, and German, but didn’t get very far. Of course, it’s not like I spent the same amount of time and attention on each, so it’s not a fair comparison. But I believe that if German would be as easy as Esperanto, I would be already speaking it fluently.
With regard to similarities, Slovak is similar to Russian, and I learned Russian 4 years at school, and read a few books. I spent much less time learning Esperanto.
I don’t know how to compare difficulty of languages, because different languages are complicated in different ways. For example in English there is the complicated pronounciation, and irregular verbs. On the other hand, German has gramatical genders, and declination. Not sure which one of those is more complicated. Slovak and Russian have probably the same kind of complexity as German, only worse. Hungarian seems mostly regular, but has the definite vs indefinite verbs (not sure I am calling that properly).So, it seems like natural languages evolve complexities in different places.
I suspect there might be a “law” that keeps complexity of languages within certain limits: too complicated languages become difficult to speak properly, so some parts get simplified, but beyond certain level the knowledge of the complexities of language becomes a matter of signalling (the smarter and more educated people are more likely to get those complexities right), which creates a social pressure against further simplification. For example, in Slovak langauge we have two letters that are pronounced exactly the same (“i” and “y”), the reason for having them is historical: thousand years ago they were pronounced differently. Children spend a lot of time at school learning proper rules which one of these letters should be written in which situations; the rules are complicated, require memorizing long lists of word roots, and you still have many exceptions afterwards. But proposals to simply use one of those letters and just forget the other one are met with horrified reaction “but that would seem stupid!”; i.e. today the ability to write “i” and “y” properly is perceived as a signal of intelligence and education, so writing “i” everywhere pattern-matches being stupid and uneducated. And of course we wouldn’t reform our language towards a state that feels stupid for us today. Essentially, wanting to remove a useless complexity makes you seem like complaining that you are too stupid to memorize it properly.
Yes, but it wouldn’t work in the opposite direction: I would not understand when someone else says “visible”… or “audible”, or “comprehensive”, etc. But in Esperanto I can often understand words I never heard before, such as “see-able”, “hear-able”, “understand-able”, simply because I am already familiar with the root and the suffix.
This happens very frequently in Esperanto, because even words that would be considered “obviously independent” by an English speaker are considered “related” by an Esperanto speaker. An example that horrifies many people are opposites: instead of “dark” you say “un-light”, instead of “short” you say “un-tall”. With this simple hack you have removed a need to learn hundreds of words. There are more such hacks; instead of “knife” you say “cut-tool”, instead of “hospital” you say “un-healthy-person-place”. Nouns / verbs / adjectives / adverbs differ by the last letter, so you don’t need to learn “fast”, “speed”, “quickly”, and “hurry” as four independent word roots; and instead of “accelerate” you say “make-more-quick”.
This is probably difficult to get across, because when I just use “see” and “visible” as an example, you probably feel like “yeah, so there is this one weird example, but there still remains 99.99% of the language to learn”. But Esperanto is more like taking a language and throwing 75% of words away because they can be derived from other words, and making the remaining 25% regular. So with the same energy you would learn 100 English words you can learn 150 Esperanto words (because they are more regular), which you can start putting together like a Lego and create maybe 1000 Esperanto words. Realistically speaking, you are not going to do this systematically, so it will feel like you only know 150 Esperanto words, but there are the potential 850 other words that you don’t know you know, but when you meet them for the first time, your brain goes “oh, I actually know what this means”.
(By the way, the composed words are usually not too long, because the common prefixes and suffixes are typically monosyllabic. Or, as an Esperanto speaker would say, “one-syllable-y”.)
Some of them are raised bilingually, with Esperanto as a second language; but some of them are actually trilingual, coming from mixed marriages where parents use Esperanto to talk to each other. They are very rare, and I have no idea which model is more frequent.
I agree that this is quite likely. Maybe it wouldn’t happen under the “Esperanto as everyone’s second language” scenario, but it certainly is a risk with the “native speakers”. (And various signallers, who believe that Esperanto needs more word roots because it e.g. allows better poetry. Sigh. Priorities.)
EDIT: In another comment, you say how Esperanto is much easier to learn for a French speaker than for e.g. a Tamil speaker. That is certainly true. But if you give the Tamil speaker a choice between learning English and learning Esperanto, in both cases the language will be completely unfamiliar, but in one case there will be the advantage of greater regularity and “Lego system”. So while the Tamil speaker would complain that speaking Esperanto gives an unfair advantage to the French, they would still prefer Esperanto to English (if the advantages of learning either language would be the same, which is obviously not the case.)
This is actually an objection frequently made against Esperanto. People are familiar with the concept of “some languages are similar to each other, some are completely different”, but unfamiliar with the concept of “Lego languages are much easier to learn”, so of course they are going to attribute everyone saying “Esperanto was easy for me” fully to the former. Yes, it plays a role, but the regularity also plays a role. Esperanto has also fans outside Europe/America.
(I don’t have much I want to say in response to this, but want to note that I read it and found it interesting and insightful.)
Thanks!
Fun fact: Esperanto was used by US army as a language of a fictional enemy, to “enhance intelligence play and add realism to field exercises”.
Native English speaker here. I studied Spanish for a few years in High School, and Japanese for a year, and Esperanto for about 6 months of weekly extracurricular sessions. I managed to learn spoken and written Esperanto about as well as I learned spoken Japanese, in roughly 1⁄10 the hours spent.
That’s not strong evidence that learning it to fluency and communication comfort is 1⁄10 as hard, but learning the basics and a few thousand words is really quite easy for someone who already knows a romance or germanic language. I’d very much believe 1⁄2 to 1⁄3 of the effort required to fluency in a second natural language.
That said, I don’t think “ease of learning” is enough. There is no path to a designed language becoming universal. Network effects of language fluency are HUGE—the value to knowing a language is so dependent on who already knows it that there is simply no believable adoption rate for any minor language to become dominant.
My hope is that AR + machine translation get good enough in the next era that it doesn’t matter too much. And since the future isn’t evenly distributed, the “base” language is likely to be one that’s very popular today, I’d bet on English, Mandarin (with simplified alphabet-based writing), or Hindi in that order.
That’s not a fair comparison. If you know English + Spanish, you should expect Esperanto to be much easier than Japanese; but similarly, if you know English + Esperanto, you should expect Spanish to be much easier than Japanese. Esperanto is very much more like English or Spanish than it is like Japanese, and it will have been easier for you for that reason completely independent of whether it’s more learnable than other Latin-derived languages.
True—unfair and no reason to believe that learning the basics is all that well correlated to fluency. Still, a bit of evidence that it’s plausible that Esperanto is that much easier.
In any case, I ran across a bit of evidence just today that it won’t matter: Pilot Translation Kit claims it’ll ship in May.