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Esperanto: The artificial language that aimed to unite humanity (bigthink.com)
submitted 8 months ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to c/linguistics@mander.xyz
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[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Esperanto is perhaps the most successful constructed language of the "batch" that popped up between the 1860s and the 1940s. The text mentions Volapük, but was also Universalglot, Latino sine flexione, Idiom Neutral, plus a bunch of conlangs derived from Esperanto.

It's easy to look at those projects nowadays and say "nope! [feature] is the wrong way to go!"; for Esperanto this would be probably

  • rather convoluted phonotactics
  • large consonant set
  • a "masculine is unmarked" approach to derivation (NB: the feminine -in- was there since the start, the masculine -iĉ- is a recent development)
  • the small case system being a bit of the worst of both worlds (less syntactic freedom than a full-fledged case system, still added complexity that one needs to learn)
  • the vowel alternations not working so well in practice

But Linguistics back then was barely a science, and those guys like Zamenhof were doing things by gut instinct.

And, more importantly, those conlangs were part of a historical context, where you got a bunch of factors making the intellectuals believe that one language was the solution for everything:

  • Nationalism was already well established as a political meme, creating conflicts; with linguistic identity being often seen as synonymous for national identity.
  • Increased communication across speakers of different languages. Steam locomotives would "kick in" around 1830, but their social impact would be felt later on.
  • War. I don't think that it's a coincidence that the "batch" of conlangs that I mentioned popped up between the Franco-Prussian War and the Second World War.

Once you "glue" those factors together, the idea of a language not tied to any national identity, for the sake of peace, pops up naturally.

Specifically in the case of Esperanto, there's also the fact that Zamenhof was ethnically Jewish. That would make him a direct target of nationalism, and perhaps give him the "insight" to split apart ethnic identity and language (as you have the ethnic identity being associated with Hebrew, not with Zamenhof's native Yiddish).

[–] csolisr@hub.azkware.net 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Esperanto would be more solid if it weren't so Eurocentric. Idolinguo, one of its forks, solved a few of the issues Esperanto had in regards to grammar, but the Eurocentrism is still there.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Currently Esperanto is in a weird "double dilemma":

  • it's weakly designed, but languages with a better design barely have speakers;
  • it's spoken by a relatively low amount of people, but the other options are all languages associated with national identities.

With the Eurocentrism being part of the first dilemma - yes, it could be solved by better design, but every Esperantido (including Ido, that you mentioned) has only a fraction of the L2+ linguistic community behind Esperanto.

While not everything, I feel like a lot of issues can (and should) be addressed by its linguistic community; I see the -iĉ- masculine suffix as an example of that (addressing the "males are default" social issue that "leaked" into the language).

[–] senloke@lemmy.blahaj.zone -1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I generally have a problem with it the statement that Esperanto is poorly designed. When considering that it does enough things right. That it uses internationalisms, that it can be sung, that it gives enough expressivity, that it's mechanical enough to be learnt by it's grammar, etc.

It always sounds as if Esperanto is Latin with a thousand of exceptions, designed like french with spoken language does not equal the written text of the language, etc.

When in fact the opposite is the case. People then point to one of the current language projects, which are supposedly "better" in one dimension or another. That's just optimizing to some standard of perfect.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 points 8 months ago

By "poorly designed" I'm conveying "full of sub-optimal decisions that introduce unnecessary complexity and unintended consequences". Justin B. Rye has a full rant on that; I'd like to pick specifically the following issues:

  • excessively large consonant set, full of uncommon distinctions like /w/ vs. /v/, /x/ vs. /h/, /ts/ vs. /tʃ/
  • almost no concern for phonotactics
  • over-reliance on vowel alternations to convey morphological distinctions
  • case marking and articles at the same time, requiring you to learn two systems when one could do

In special, Esperanto as defined in the 16 rules is full of assumptions on how a language works that boil down to "you should know it, because it works like in European sprachbund languages". And sometimes those assumptions break even for those European languages.

Later auxiliary constructed languages show a lot of improvements in this regard. And while they do focus often on one or another aspect, as you hinted, often the result is cleaner.

That it uses internationalisms

The source of the internationalisms is often a disputed point on itself. It relies for example a lot on Romance and Latin vocab, even when it doesn't make much sense (e.g. "sango" comes to my mind).