this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
64 points (95.7% liked)
Asklemmy
43893 readers
897 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I spent 90 days immersing myself in Esperanto on Duolingo and was blown away what I could understand about a Buddhist monk tell me about his life in Esperanto on YouTube by the end of that period.
Of all the claims Esperanto has, I think "one can easily learn it" is the one that has most ground to stand on. It's been a while since I've dabbled in the language and I can still read and listen to it without much trouble (save for having to look up some of the more specialized vocabulary).
Om mani padme hum.
So do I have it right that gender is mostly neutral? One of the things that kills me about FR (and SP) is the need to clutter my limited brain space with useless gender nonsense.
Esperanto has no grammatical gender, indeed. However, it isn't as gender neutral. For example, the word for "woman" (virino) derives from the word for "man" (viro). Lots of other words referring to females (humans or otherwise) can be derived that way. Examples include:
This is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it helps with the learning of the language by making it easy to derive words from existing ones, but it also makes it easy for someone ascribe sexism in the language. There's also no agreed-upon way to make words gender-neutral. There's a lot of proposals such as listed in this wikipedia article on Esperanto gender reform but I don't think there's been a consensus other than "don't change it!"
Thanks for explaining. So I guess that kind of thing is an artifact of the language being originally designed... what, ~100yrs ago? Still, since the main point is ease of learning and simplicity, maybe this is just something worth putting up with for the time being, no?
Yeah, as far as I've seen, that's the vibe: Esperanto isn't perfect, it can be improved, but it works and changing it would introduce confusion and would make it harder to learn.
I also sense this unease among the Esperanto-speaking community with regards to changing anything in the language. That allowing any one of the proposed changes will lead to a slippery slope of accommodating any and all proposed changes.
And then there's the fact that not many of these changes have gained foothold amongst the community (perhaps due to the aforementioned unease in changing anything about the language).
Thank you for these thoughts & interesting perspective. :-)
I can’t recognize that phrase you’ve used there, it doesn’t seem to be Esperanto. It’s been some years since I’ve studied and used it, but as I recall there is only one definite article, “La”. In use, “La vetero estas varma”, meaning “the weather is warm”.
Oh, sorry. It's a classic Sanskrit Buddhist mantra. I was switching gears there.
Anyway, good to hear about "La," thanks.
Oh got it! I’m not Buddhist and was quite confused. The monk in the video spoke more about his life and living conditions and toured the video producer around to explain their daily lives. It was quite fascinating.