i agree that linguistic imperialism is a major issue, but we can't solve it by swapping one imperial language out for another. instead of making everyone learn an auxiliary language, we should devote time and resources to reviving endangered languages and promoting awareness of indigenous languages. the English hegemony is a symptom of the linguistic imperialism problem, not the cause of it.
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2022
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Esperanto is still eurocentric. That is, it is only easy to learn because you already know English, and perhaps another European language. Lojban or toki pona would be a better option.
That is false. Esperanto is eurocentric. Thats true. But the reason it is so easy to learn is not because it is a merge of european languages. Rather it is because it is consistent and its many elements which by design makes the language easy to learn.
- All present tense words ends in -as, all subjectives ends with -o.
- The letters are always pronounced the same.
- The morpheme 'mal' is used a lot which creates the antonym of a word. Varma and malvarma means respectively warm and cold. Sana and malsana means respectively healthy and sick.
- Esperanto gives the speaker the -n suffix which is marking the direct object. In essence, this grants more flexibility to switch around on sentences to better fit how you want to speak the language.
In contrast, english is consistently inconsistent and thus makes it very hard to learn. The pronounciation changes depending on the words. The morphemes are inconsistent.
Lojban also has all these nice features, but better. It's a newer, more sophisticated effort to do basically the same thing. It has some important good features that esperanto lacks.
There is a serious argument to make lojban the lingua-franca of the EU, to replace English. This would abort the erosion of the local languages. If the EU mandates that everybody learns lojban at school instead of english, it becomes a common second-language to everyone and a first language to no-one. Much more satisfactory situation.
I think it is great that you bring up lojban. This brings more nuance to the discussion.
I have not looked into lojban, could you describe some of the features you like that esperanto lacks?
I'll look into it myself to get some impressions.
But that being said, constructed languages like these are very easy to learn. I don't necessarily believe that we should only embrace a single conlang. Each language might have their own unique advantage over other constructed languages.
There is a serious argument to make lojban the lingua-franca of the EU, to replace English. This would abort the erosion of the local languages. If the EU mandates that everybody learns lojban at school instead of english, it becomes a common second-language to everyone and a first language to no-one. Much more satisfactory situation.
Could you give an article on this? Sounds potentially very interesting.
It's a more modern attempt to do the same thing. I can skim wikipedia to find the main differences:
- It's vocab was designed by computer to be familiar to speakers of all major languages (not just europeans).
- No diacritics.
- It doesn't use prefixes and suffixes to indicate parts of the sentence. It uses word order.
But TBH it doesn't matter which one is chosen. The important thing is to agree on one constructed language, and create a large international body of speakers - larger than the body of English speakers.
Later on, it will be easy to refine the language, or switch to a different one.
And here is an actual list from the lojban wiki:
Lojban:
- is designed to express complex logical constructs precisely.
- has no irregularities or ambiguities in spelling and grammar (although word derivation relies on arbitrary variant forms). This gives rise to high intelligibility for computer parsing.
- is designed to be as culturally neutral as possible.
- allows highly systematic learning and use, compared to most natural languages.
- possesses an intricate system of indicators which effectively communicate contextual attitude or emotions.