What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier?

arpee
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What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier?

Postby arpee » 2011-04-04, 1:56

Me, I would get rid of suffixes altogether and fully use compounding. I would probably group adverbs and adjectives together and make verb conjugations much simpler, and get rid of some of those phonemes. What would you do?

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Re: What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier?

Postby Cosi » 2011-04-04, 10:08

Pli facila ol Esperanto estas??? :shock: ;)

Mi eliminus "ĥ".

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Re: What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier?

Postby linguaholic » 2011-04-04, 11:50

What I would love to change about Esperanto (to make it easier on my nerves) is the fact that there are billions of people who have only dabbled in the language but still think they can improve it and forget that its unity has given Esperanto its unique speaker community that makes it a living language (instead of a random conlang project).

On a more serious note, Esperanto has a lot of fricatives and affricates that are hard to distinguish for a lot of peopl (c, cx, jx, s, sx, gx, z - come on!). Also, a hard rule on when verbs are transitive and intransitive would make things easier. And in terms of orthography I would change jx to zx, as I find that more consistent.

Note that these are just what-ifs, i don't think that Esperanto as it is today would actually profit from these changes.
native: Deutsch / advanced: English, Nederlands / intermediate: Esperanto / forgotten: Français / fighting my way through: עברית מקראית / dreaming of: Čeština, עברית / admiring from a safe distance: فارسی

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Re: What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier?

Postby Milya0 » 2011-04-04, 14:07

I would make it more analytical. And cleanup in phonology.
Qroo₃₁ kaa₄ cro₂ kraa₃ kaa₄ qo₄₁ cra₄₁ ka₄ qoo₄₂ krá₄₂.

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Re: What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier?

Postby Lenguas » 2011-04-04, 15:05

it and forget that its unity has given Esperanto its unique speaker community that makes it a living language (instead of a random conlang project).

But what's wrong with having multiple fairly mutually intelligible varieties of it?

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Re: What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier?

Postby linguoboy » 2011-04-04, 16:10

arpee wrote:What would you do?

Bugger all. The relative success of a language has nothing at all to do with such aspects. If Queen Tamar has conquered Europe, we'd all speak Georgian, crazy features or no.
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Re: What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier?

Postby mōdgethanc » 2011-04-04, 16:15

On a more serious note, Esperanto has a lot of fricatives and affricates that are hard to distinguish for a lot of peopl (c, cx, jx, s, sx, gx, z - come on!). Also, a hard rule on when verbs are transitive and intransitive would make things easier. And in terms of orthography I would change jx to zx, as I find that more consistent.
We could just get rid of those stupid circumflexes so people wouldn't have to use workarounds like x. That is, if I actually wanted to learn Esperanto.
[ˈmoːdjeðɑŋk]

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Re: What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier?

Postby arpee » 2011-04-05, 3:17

linguoboy wrote:
arpee wrote:What would you do?

Bugger all. The relative success of a language has nothing at all to do with such aspects. If Queen Tamar has conquered Europe, we'd all speak Georgian, crazy features or no.


I never said it did, did I? I just simply asked this: "What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier"?

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Re: What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier?

Postby mōdgethanc » 2011-04-05, 8:54

Yeah, and he answered: It doesn't matter if you make it easier. That will have no impact on how many people want to learn it.
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Re: What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier?

Postby linguoboy » 2011-04-05, 14:45

arpee wrote:
linguoboy wrote:
arpee wrote:What would you do?

Bugger all. The relative success of a language has nothing at all to do with such aspects. If Queen Tamar has conquered Europe, we'd all speak Georgian, crazy features or no.

I never said it did, did I? I just simply asked this: "What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier"?

I'm generally not one to dick around with languages for no reason at all. If you don't have any real-world motivation for soliciting changes, then that makes this thread like ten times more pointless.
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Re: What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier?

Postby Lenguas » 2011-04-05, 14:58

I'm generally not one to around with languages for no reason at all.

I am. It is fun, interesting, and teaches you about languages and how they are put together and how they could be different.

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Re: What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier?

Postby linguoboy » 2011-04-05, 15:15

Lenguas wrote:
I'm generally not one to around with languages for no reason at all.

I am. It is fun, interesting, and teaches you about languages and how they are put together and how they could be different.

So does, you know, actually learning languages.
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons

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Re: What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier?

Postby arpee » 2011-04-05, 19:55

Talib wrote:Yeah, and he answered: It doesn't matter if you make it easier. That will have no impact on how many people want to learn it.


The question was this "What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier?". I didn't ask if it would have an impact on the amount of people learning nor did I ask if it mattered if the language was easier. So he didn't answer the question.

linguoboy wrote:I'm generally not one to dick around with languages for no reason at all. If you don't have any real-world motivation for soliciting changes, then that makes this thread like ten times more pointless.


Whether there is motivation for doing such, is irrelevant. Whether it is pointless to make it easier, is irrelevant. I'm only asking one question that you still haven't answer. In your opinion, what things could be changed about Esperanto to make it easier. That's it. I'm not asking about how it would affect the world so that is irrelevant.

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Re: What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier?

Postby linguoboy » 2011-04-05, 20:17

arpee wrote:Whether there is motivation for doing such, is irrelevant. Whether it is pointless to make it easier, is irrelevant. I'm only asking one question that you still haven't answer. In your opinion, what things could be changed about Esperanto to make it easier. That's it. I'm not asking about how it would affect the world so that is irrelevant.

You can't talk about something being "easier" without some ultimate goal in mind. Changes that make something "easier" for some applications (machine parsing, say) will make it less suitable for others.

If you want to ask the question, "How would you dick around with Esperanto?", then by all means ask that question. But don't ask it by pretending to ask something else.
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons

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Re: What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier?

Postby mōdgethanc » 2011-04-05, 20:27

Here's a fast and simple way to make Esperanto easier: Forget about it and learn a real language instead.
[ˈmoːdjeðɑŋk]

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Re: What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier?

Postby linguoboy » 2011-04-05, 20:34

Talib wrote:Here's a fast and simple way to make Esperanto easier: Forget about it and learn a real language instead.

Or, if that's too drastic: Simply add the Esperanto endings to English words. Nowu youi speakas Esperanton. Howu easya isas thato? Youi knowas allan thean vocabularion alreadye!
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Re: What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier?

Postby Lenguas » 2011-04-05, 20:37

Add the endings to Spanish.

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Re: What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier?

Postby loqu » 2011-04-05, 20:37

linguoboy wrote:
Talib wrote:Here's a fast and simple way to make Esperanto easier: Forget about it and learn a real language instead.

Or, if that's too drastic: Simply add the Esperanto endings to English words. Nowu youi speakas Esperanton. Howu easya isas thato? Youi knowas allan thean vocabularion alreadye!

Bravo !!! I loved that.
Нека људи уживају у стварима.
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Re: What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier?

Postby Ludwig Whitby » 2011-04-05, 20:37

loqu wrote:
linguoboy wrote:
Talib wrote:Here's a fast and simple way to make Esperanto easier: Forget about it and learn a real language instead.

Or, if that's too drastic: Simply add the Esperanto endings to English words. Nowu youi speakas Esperanton. Howu easya isas thato? Youi knowas allan thean vocabularion alreadye!

Bravo !!! I loved that.

:D

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Re: What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier?

Postby mōdgethanc » 2011-04-05, 20:42

I have an even better one: Next, remove the Esperanto endings from English. It's so much simpler!
[ˈmoːdjeðɑŋk]


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