What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier?

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

Postby arpee » 2011-04-07, 19:14

linguoboy wrote:
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.


Asking "How would you dick around with Esperanto?", is not the same question as "How would you make Esperanto easier?". Why does a specific goal have to be in mind in order to do something? Ok, let's say if you were making Esperanto easier for yourself personally, how would you change it to make it easier, and please don't say "It's already easy" or something like that because I'm not asking, whether or not it's easy. I'm asking in what ways could it be made easIER.

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

Postby Lenguas » 2011-04-07, 19:34

Simple. Make it more similar to your native language.

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

Postby linguoboy » 2011-04-07, 19:43

arpee wrote:Asking "How would you dick around with Esperanto?", is not the same question as "How would you make Esperanto easier?". Why does a specific goal have to be in mind in order to do something?

Because it's inherent in the definition of "easy".
OED wrote:III. Causing little discomfort or obstruction. a. Of the means, method, or object of an action: Presenting few difficulties; offering little resistance. Const. inf. (act., less freq. pass.) or of followed by n. denoting the action; also with the nature of the action contextually implied: of books, language; = easy to read, understand; of the soil; = easy to cultivate, etc.
You can't say something is "easy" without implying some goal. For "language", the OED suggests "understand" for the goal, but obviously other objectives are possible, e.g. teaching, learning, machine parsing, etc.

arpee wrote:Ok, let's say if you were making Esperanto easier for yourself personally, how would you change it to make it easier

I have already answered that question. [In Esperanto: I haveas alreadye answereda thatan questionon.]
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Re: What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier?

Postby Lenguas » 2011-04-07, 19:52

How about compromising and making it slightly easier--not the easiest it could be and not just be essentially English.

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

Postby linguoboy » 2011-04-07, 20:11

Lenguas wrote:How about compromising and making it slightly easier--not the easiest it could be and not just be essentially English.

Do whatever you want. I care more about the formula for Coke Zero than I do about the grammar of Esperanto.
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Re: What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier?

Postby Lenguas » 2011-04-07, 20:18

That's one of the nice things about artificial aux languages--one is allowed much freedom.

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

Postby linguoboy » 2011-04-07, 20:30

Lenguas wrote:That's one of the nice things about artificial aux languages--one is allowed much freedom.

I would say that's IALs are the one class of artificial languages that's not true of. Nobody cares what you do with your own conlang, but the entire point of an IAL is to provide a neutral means of intercommunication and that's obviously incompatible with each speaker monkeying with the standard as they see fit.
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Re: What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier?

Postby Lenguas » 2011-04-07, 20:34

I disagree. They can still be quite comprehensible evem when modified (well depending on how much you modify them.) And besides, if you make it to divergent, you can just call it a different language--e.g. Ido, Romanica, Old Church Slovanic Slovianski, etc.

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

Postby Lenguas » 2011-04-07, 20:39

The whole reason I got interested languages in the first place was I liked to make up languages based on other languages. When I was 11, I made up an artificial language based on Italian.

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

Postby linguoboy » 2011-04-07, 20:45

Lenguas wrote:And besides, if you make it to divergent, you can just call it a different language--e.g. Ido, Romanica, Old Church Slovanic Slovianski, etc.

But then they're no longer IALs! How can a language be properly called "international" when the only speaker is you?

This is like claiming that you can come up with your own international system of weights and measures. Sure you can--but you can't honestly the result an "international auxiliary system".
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Re: What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier?

Postby arpee » 2011-04-08, 23:53

linguoboy wrote:
Lenguas wrote:And besides, if you make it to divergent, you can just call it a different language--e.g. Ido, Romanica, Old Church Slovanic Slovianski, etc.

But then they're no longer IALs! How can a language be properly called "international" when the only speaker is you?

This is like claiming that you can come up with your own international system of weights and measures. Sure you can--but you can't honestly the result an "international auxiliary system".


Well, you can find speakers. Esperanto didn't exactly start off as being "international" it was the intention behind it.

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

Postby mōdgethanc » 2011-04-09, 2:25

Yeah, and it's still not international.
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Re: What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier?

Postby linguaholic » 2011-04-09, 7:05

It is.
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 linguoboy » 2011-04-09, 15:03

arpee wrote:
linguoboy wrote:
Lenguas wrote:And besides, if you make it to divergent, you can just call it a different language--e.g. Ido, Romanica, Old Church Slovanic Slovianski, etc.

But then they're no longer IALs! How can a language be properly called "international" when the only speaker is you?

This is like claiming that you can come up with your own international system of weights and measures. Sure you can--but you can't honestly the result an "international auxiliary system".

Well, you can find speakers.

Can you? I've met several Esperantists over the years. How many speakers of Ido or Slovianski have you ever talked to?

Esperanto's success may be modest when contrasted to its creator's intentions. But it's still recognisably successful in a way that these other languages simply aren't. It has enough visibility to be a common punchline; the others can't even claim that.
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Re: What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier?

Postby Lenguas » 2011-04-09, 15:11

Well, Ido could be considered a dialect of Esperanto, that is mutually intelligible with it. As for Slovianski, it's more designed to exploit its asymmetric mutual intelligibility with the Slavic languages, and to facilitate communication with people that speak other Slavic languages rather than to communicate with other people that only speak it and no other Slavic language.

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

Postby linguoboy » 2011-04-09, 15:36

Lenguas wrote:Well, Ido could be considered a dialect of Esperanto, that is mutually intelligible with it. As for Slovianski, it's more designed to exploit its asymmetric mutual intelligibility with the Slavic languages, and to facilitate communication with people that speak other Slavic languages rather than to communicate with other people that only speak it and no other Slavic language.

I repeat the question.
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Re: What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier?

Postby Narbleh » 2011-04-09, 16:37

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

It is a real language.

I'll echo linguaholic's point that it's always the people who know the littlest about Esperanto that suggest the most sweeping changes or who make the broadest generalizations.

Also, Ido isn't mutually intelligible with Esperanto, at least not to me.
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Re: What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier?

Postby mōdgethanc » 2011-04-09, 16:38

It's a constructed language.
linguaholic wrote:It is.
Got anything to back that up?
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Re: What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier?

Postby Narbleh » 2011-04-09, 16:39

So if your definition of "real language" is "natural language" then your argument is kind of pointless, isn't it? :P
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Re: What would you change about Esperanto to make it easier?

Postby mōdgethanc » 2011-04-09, 16:45

I don't understand what you mean, but I don't really care either way, so I'll leave you Esperantojvom or whatever in peace.
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