‘Saluton’: the surprise return of Esperanto

Like some other languages, one of the two is both specifically male in some contexts, and generic in others (which is why vir- exists, to clear up confusion in otherwise-generic contexts). English even retains some irregular words of this sort, such as dog vs. bitch, where dog is male in contexts where gender matters, but bitch is female in all contexts (at least when it comes to dogs).

Only one gender can get the shorter prefix, and there are only so many vowels (many people say that Esperanto already has too many vowels). Real surviving cultures aren't so petty that they'd make all their words longer by two characters for the sake of "fairness".

As for -in* being two extra characters for explicit-feminine, it's just something you trade for regular conjugation with such restricted phonotactics.

Now, you could make the argument to ditch grammatical gender altogether, and I'd probably be on board with that. In most cases it does not shorten or clarify sentences.

"vir-" is a preëxisting masculating prefix. I would read patrulo as "A fatherly person", rather than a parent, as "-ul-" turns an adjective into a person embodying that adjective.

(ge- is the neuterizing prefix, but in my extremely limited dabbling, it's mostly seen in plurals: gepatroj for parents, but for a single parent, one generally says patro for father and patrino for mother.)

Male-by-default isn't sexism? What do you mean by sexism?

I don't know very much Lojban but (while I agree that the grammar is meant to be a realization of a formal logic), I'm a bit unsure of your specific example with "lo cmalu noltru":

First, I think "lo cmalu noltru" is a sumti (akin to a noun phrase) and not a complete sentence by itself.

Second, I'm not positive about the existential import of "lo". There are many reasons for this, but to take a kind of extreme example, the reform of the meaning of le and lo at https://mw.lojban.org/papri/BPFK_Section:_gadri#cmavo:_lo_.2... presents the example

lo pavyseljirna cu ranmi danlu gi'e simlu lo ka ge ce'u xirma gi lo pa jirna cu cpana lo mebri be ce'u

'Unicorns are mythical creatures that look like a horse with a horn coming out of their foreheads.'

This doesn't seem to imply that there exists X such that X satisfies the predicate pavyseljirna. Or to take another example, presumably Lojban can express using "lo" the notion that "Counterexamples to Fermat's Last Theorem were never discovered prior to 1993, despite extensive computer searches".

I do think that many Lojban utterances have formal existential import in many cases, and I don't know enough about Lojban to try to describe which ones. :-) (I seem to remember something about a bare gismu implying that the predicate is at some occasion true of something, like "tavli" by itself without arguments meaning something like 'speaking, it's a thing that happens at some point!'. But given the example of talking about unicorns, maybe even this is too strong somehow.)

Edit: ... by the way, what's the conlang with two speakers that you speak?

> machines like Parsey McParseFace can now accurately parse human universal grammar. unambiguous parsing was a big feature of lojban, so it's lost a major selling point.

Slow down there ... Most linguists (or a substantial minority) do not subscribe to the theoretical idea of universal grammar. Parsey McParseFace is only an incremental improvement in decades of statistical parsing. The problem of natural language understanding remains largely unsolved. Like other deep learning models, it is not hard to come up with adversarial examples that will confuse the parser but not any competent human language user. The parser is only as good as the data it is trained on; this data is expensive to acquire but there is never enough. Additionally there are a myriad other kinds of ambiguity in language beyond the sentence-level syntactic ambiguity which is resolved by a statistical parser such as Parsey McParseFace.

In my opinion Lojban provides a good illustration of just how hard it is to remove ambiguity from human language.

There are fluent speakers of Lojban as can be seen in Lojban groups on Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/BLVsYz20Boixl0xN-0TrPw and https://t.me/joinchat/BLVsYz3hCF8mCAb6fzW1Rw

Here's a review of one of the studies in the Wikipedia article I wrote some time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14848019

It appears that a certain jcranmer was also in that thread. Hi!

To summarize: low sample size, confounding factors and mixed results mean that there's no strong evidence to suggest learning Esperanto helps more with learning another foreign language than directly starting to learn that language.

They've disproved the strong Sapir-Whorf. At least according to Wikipedia there's some evidence for the the so-called weak version.

In any event, languages at the extreme ends of the spectrum, like Toki Pona and Ithkuil, seem to show rather clearly how language can shape thought. Here's a fascinating point from an The Atlantic article, linked from the Toki Pona website:

   One student of the language [Ithkuil] claimed that it
   allowed her to “see things that exist but don’t have names,
   in the same way that Mendeleyev’s periodic table showed
   gaps where we knew elements should be that had yet to be
   discovered.” Tweak a single phoneme and arrive at a strange
   new variation of a thought. Tweak by tweak, a speaker could
   wander forever through an endless landscape of unique
   thoughts in a kind of linguistic dérive.

   -- https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/toki-pona-smallest-language/398363/

Perhaps a better, more obvious example is simply the languages of mathematics. There are many concepts that simply cannot be expressed with any substantial accuracy in vernacular language. No amount of metaphor suffices to convey quantum mechanical concepts in a useful, utilitarian way. Heck, didn't Richard Feynman literally invent a new language, Feynman Diagrams, to teach quantum mechanics? (I understand that mathematical languages are perhaps better described as notation, but notation doesn't convey the fact that the concepts often can't be translated into the vernacular.)

I'd argue that a corollary of Sapir-Whorf is that no language can express every possible concept. That, I think, is a far more agreeable claim.

Anki is pretty awesome. I spent about 1000h learning Japanese with Anki so far. Together with Yomichan it's pretty much the ultimate learning tool, imho.

Thank you. It's been a while.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Esperanto_speakers though...

Esperanto arose at a particular time and place where linguistic and ethnic divisions fractured communities and even families. We all know that English, German, and French were long used--and are still used--to project power. But where Zamenhof lived this aspect of language played out in a much more complex, violent, and personal manner. While the late 19th century was an unprecedented period of peace and prosperity for Western Europe, it was exceptionally violent for the lower-classes in much of Central and Eastern Europe.

The point of Esperanto wasn't just to be a shared language. Much more importantly to Zamenhof and early Esperantists, the point was a language that wasn't bound to provincial, ethnic, or religious identity. This backfired in the early 20th century as Esperanto became associated with, e.g., Jewish and Anarchist groups. But it seems like in the latter 20th century Esperanto reverted to an internationalist language without association to any distinct political movement. And in that sense it's once again a reprieve from and perhaps an antidote to provincial power dynamics, notwithstanding its European language bias.

I don't think it's any worse than other auxiliary languages (which I think are all doomed to failure if that's really their goal as opposed to just building a community). I don't know if you can really attack the languages for "problems" if it starts being adopted to the point that it evolves like a natural language (as Esperanto has done). Anything "inefficient" or the like about the language will be changed to the point that native speakers find it suitable.

It's not perfect, but practically it's still the best option. Of all the candidates for an easy to learn international language, it has by at least an order of magnitude the most speakers and materials. For example, the Esperanto wikipedia is larger than the Arabic one.

I also haven't seen any of the other conlangs demonstrate they can be both as expressive and easy to master.

I have young kids and watched Peter Pan recently. My kids actually thought nothing of it, even when I cringed. I think the offensiveness of it would never have been obvious to you as a kid.

"per tam-tam' disiĝas la kri'" should be translated "the cry [shout] is broadcast by tom-tom".

One thing I've noticed about the Esperanto community is that, owing to its small size, it is very easy to make one's voice heard. So you get a lot of, "rough edges" shall we say, in the published material. (Ex: I came across about a year ago at an Esperanto book sale a book of jokes or "ŝercoj". Unfortunately almost without exception the jokes were crude and sexist. I don't know why it was even up for sale, alongside works of much higher quality.)

Apart from the thing that another commenter has clarified about tom-toms, "sen Di'" is an abbreviation of "sen Dio" 'Godless'.

Edit: I just noticed that still another commenter also already clarified this part too.

"Di'" is a poetic rendering of "Dio", or God.

And additionally, the phonetics itself is more complex than needed. Spanish has only 5 vowel sounds, corresponding to the 5 vowels of the Latin alphabet, as does Japanese. English has 20. This is quite a big deal for learning when your native language has a smaller phonetic inventory. My English level is officially C2 (the highest level in the EU framework) and still, I have to think for a second or two before using the words "sheet" and "shit"...