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Comment by bigbubba | Hacker News Reader

The value proposition of Esperanto never made sense to me. If the goal were merely to get everybody speaking the same language to achieve world peace, then the efforts of pragmatists would go towards teaching more people English, since that language is the closest to the finish line. Of course that would be contentious in some political philosophies, it doesn't surprise me that some people drawn to the 'universal language for world peace' idea find the promotion of English unacceptable. However it seems to me these people are relinquishing any hope for success in order to remain principled.

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I agree it doesn’t make sense in the context of today, but in 1887 when it was invented, there was no internet, and you couldn’t translate between languages with a computer. The globalization hadn’t happened yet where everyone had to learn English, and learning some easier to use intermediate language made sense as an easy adoption for translating at a time that machine translation was inconceivable.

Think about newspapers as a concept of information dissemination. It would be a lot lower effort to create a single newsletter and distribute it globally than to have a network of translators who can recreate it, redo the layout, and reprint it. Or think about travelers, where your queries are simple and someone could learn a language in a couple of weeks and be a tour guide for travelers from all places.

At this point, English makes far more sense, but I get why they invented Esperanto, and at some point I could carry light conversations in it, though that has faded since it’s fairly useless.

My grandfather had a story from when he was travelling around Europe between the wars: he tried to have a conversation with someone in a youth hostel but they had trouble finding a language they had in common ... until they tried Latin!

As a native English speaker, I don't like English being the world language because I'm at a significant disadvantage because

1. I have zero incentive to learn another language

2. I do not have a secret/family language that I can switch into for strategic purposes

3. It gets watered down for the purposes of internationality to the point that we lose even our productive affixes. We can't even create meaningful names within English anymore. It loses its richness.

> It gets watered down for the purposes of internationality to the point that we lose even our productive affixes.

I have no idea what you're talking about. Nobody in English-speaking countries is changing the way they speak "for the purposes of internationality." And the way a bunch of languages are importing scores of English words wholesale isn't much richer in my view.

There have been studies, and I know this also anecdotally from native speakers, that e.g. "business English", at least in non-English countries, becomes its own, more restrictive variant of English because of the high percentage of non-native speakers. I know that some such native speakers have said that they feel their English got worse after living abroad for a while.

Of course, overall, this is a very slow process. People don't stop applying the rules or simplify vocabulary over night or even within the span of a couple of years, but there is growing evidence in general that the more speakers a language has, the more it tends to simplify structurally, e.g. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.181274

Sure, and materials produced by the government or for wide consumption are written in very simple language. But this is somewhat outside what "typical" native speakers are using.

Nothings stops you from learning whatever second language you want.

I think having English as a native language actually gives us a huge advantage: we can travel to a large chunk of the world and have a pretty good chance of being understood. We can work in globally relevant jobs with no language barrier. And so on.

> Nothings stops you from learning whatever second language you want.

A lack of incentive is what stops most.

> we can travel to a large chunk of the world and have a pretty good chance of being understood. We can work in globally relevant jobs with no language barrier. And so on.

You described the benefit of knowing English, not being a native English speaker.

The advantage of being a native English speaker is that you do not have to waste years of your life learning English as a second language. You could spend the same amount of time learning a different language... but you probably can find a better use for that time.

In the time I spent learning English -- which is still far from perfect, especially in spoken form -- I probably could have learned quantum physics instead. Except, I realistically couldn't have, because good textbooks on this topic do not exist in my language, I wouldn't be able to learn more online, etc.

Now imagine removing an equivalent amount of knowledge from your life -- that is the price you would have to pay for not being a native English speaker.

(The idea of Esperanto as everyone's second language is that instead of some people spending 10+ years learning the common language, and some lucky people spending 0, everyone would spend 2 years instead. Until people would hopefully realize that private languages are useless, and then it would be 0 for everyone.)

> Nothings stops you from learning whatever second language you want.

You're right, nothing is stopping one from learning a second language; unfortunately not only do most english speakers lack incentive, but also they lack the ability to practice in the way most other languages do. Most of the time when you run into non-native english speakers, they would rather practice their english with you, even when in their country of origin.

Additionally, there's very little lingual diversity in the US as it stands. Sure, there are plenty of spanish speakers, but early education doesn't really focus on teaching spanish with any sort of fluency as a true end-goal.

So situationally it just makes learning a second language that much more difficult. Nonetheless, I do agree with you that there are obviously huge benefits to it; the few that you mention, along with many others.

At the same time you have a major advantage by most of the internet being (language wise) accessible to you from the get to go.

I can just say that if I would have been able to speak english in my teenage years it would have majorly influenced my life in a likely positive but at least more interesting direction. Sadly back then I neither had any reasonable english skills nor was I aware of how much it would help me.

Through I guess by now it has become quite obvious how use-full english is (wrt. IT/CS).

I’m sure that it is better to learn English from a young age, yes. But as it stands currently, you have an advantage over me.

I think that the advantages of being a native speaker in the end outweigh the disadvantages. You are exposed to the dominant economic and cultural ecosystems easier and much earlier. You may lack some ability to switch context and reframe things for different cultures, but it's not generally a practical necessity in life.

On the other hand, you may sometimes be harder to understand for non-native speakers, especially if you speak some non-mainstream dialect or pronunciation. (Even standard British, in normal speech, is probably harder for me to process than American: depends on what you've been exposed to.) Coming from some other Latin script language, you'd probably have a better feel for oddities in English pronunciation (like 'thumb', or 'pseudo', etc.) and can easier adapt some more consistent 'euro' way of pronouncing as needed. Sometimes people won't understand you otherwise.

>You are exposed to the dominant economic and cultural ecosystems easier and much earlier.

I don't think that early induction into specific ideologies as something to be described as blanket good. This kind of monolingualism certainly hasn't helped the intellectual life of the average American or its society writ large.

In the big picture perhaps, but I tend to think about the raw economic and having-a-say-in-the-world status of an individual. In that sense, it's statistically better to be at the center and the mainstream. You can luck and hack your way into something from the periphery but it's harder. The wider benefits of cross-pollination is another discussion.

While you might have a slight disadvantage if you ever really needed to talk about someone while they are standing next to you, I personally feel like I have a much bigger disadvantage since English is not my native language.

My English is at a C2 level, and as such I am able to understand and explain complex concepts with ease, however my debating and small talk skills are nowhere nears as good in English as they are in my native language. I find it much harder to convince people using English. I know that the only thing that will make it better is practice, but this takes a lot of time and effort.

Re. Point 2

Move to glasgow if you want to be able to switch into a "different" language

Have you tried Brummie? Non-native speakers often have significant trouble with England's non-RP accents.

Back in the day, French was the dominant language for international communications. As such, France was the only major League of Nations (might have been a different group) power to vote against Esperanto being pushed for international communications at that time. The USA was supportive at the time. Now the tables are turned and native English speakers have a significant advantage on the world stage, so the US and UK would not benefit as much.

In recent years, Esperanto has pushed itself as more of an international auxiliary language. If it's much easier to learn than English, than everyone can continue speaking their national language and use Esperanto as an intermediary language. It's an interesting idea, but I figure we'll just move towards fewer and fewer major languages until only 5-10 are widely spoken (Ex: english, spanish, mandarin, Hindi...etc).

It's because Esperanto is much easier to learn. Teaching everybody English will take thousands of hours of every persons life.

It's about a 10x difference. You can actually learn it with negative time investment if you use it as precursor to learning English:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant...

I'm not particularly familiar with Esperanto, but I imagine the idea is that it's much easier to learn than English. English is stupidly complicated—not necessarily more-so than other languages, but well above what an intentionally-designed language could achieve.

Esperanto (and all the other intentionally designed languages) are simple and logical only because nobody actually speaks them as a native language. They're consistent because everyone learned them from the same miniscule corpus of available books and the occasional film.

If any of the intentionally designed languages were to actually come into common use, it would immediately be subject to the same kind of regional pronunciation differences, usage drift over time, coining of neologisms and idiomatic phrases, etc. that make real languages so complicated.

Updating the ortography once in a while would take care of most of the problems. There are real languages that have successfully made "updates" to reflect the shifts in pronunciation, or the usage of additional sounds (compared to Latin), unlike English.

> "updates" to reflect the shifts in pronunciation,

Which pronunciation will you choose? If you are a prescriptive linguist from Newcastle you will presumably expect everyone to use a short a in 'castle' but someone from the south would use a long a. And which language do you have in mind when you imply that there are languages that are pronounced in the same way by all of its speakers?

Anyway, there is no Academy in charge of English so if you want to get started on spelling reform just go to it. Promote your revised spelling amongst your friends and colleagues. Or should that be: 'Promoat yor rivized speling amongst yor frends and koleegs.'?

> Which pronunciation will you choose? If you are a prescriptive linguist from Newcastle you will presumably expect everyone to use a short a in 'castle' but someone from the south would use a long a.

It occurs to me that in an alternate universe, the answer could be "both spellings are correct", because logically speaking, if both pronunciations are correct, shouldn't the same apply to the written version?

Come to think of it, the idea that a word with many correct pronunciations has only one correct spelling is actually totally weird! Why should writing be more prescriptive than speech?

I don't want to read your words in your accent, I want to read them with my internal monologue.

Huh, that's fair—I suppose if it was possible to wear earpieces that made others's accents match our own, perhaps we would! Writing actually makes it possible.

> And which language do you have in mind when you imply that there are languages that are pronounced in the same way by all of its speakers?

That is not a requirement for updating the orthography or even the spelling. It also wasn't a requirement for introducing the writing system, print, etc. I doubt English has ever been pronounced the same way everywhere and likewise for any other language. Regional differences in spoken language did not stop e.g. Germany from updating its textual representation.

Funnily enough, your example looks perfectly readable to me. I'd guess it would be about as hard to read for English native speakers as Dutch is. It needs a few fixes (rivized -- only the first one should be an i, etc), but something like that would definitely be an improvement over current spelling.

Another consequence of almost all Esperanto speakers having learned the language later in life and without spending a lot of time using it, is that a beginner is less likely to get negative feedback like "Lau Zamenhof cu estas malbona frazon." when they make a mistake like translating from their mother tongue too literally. The other person might just blame their lack of understanding on their own limited command of the language.

> If any of the intentionally designed languages were to actually come into common use, it would immediately be subject to the same kind of regional pronunciation differences, usage drift over time, coining of neologisms and idiomatic phrases, etc. that make real languages so complicated.

The drift would probably be much smaller than historically, because now we have the internet and global culture. And the common language would make the world even more connected.

If Esperanto would come into common use tomorrow, Hollywood would start producing movies in Esperanto, and people around the world would be watching them. That would already be a force acting against local drift. If people around you decide to replace X by Y, but 9 out of 10 movies keep using X, the change is less likely to stick.

Neologisms and idioms, I agree, but there is a chance they would spread to other countries.

English is stupidly complicated to speak perfectly, but it's stupidly easy to speak badly and still be understood because it's analytic rather than inflectional and relies so much on word order.

It's an easy language to do business in, but a very hard language to sound perfect in. It's also a hard language to read and write.

But English is so broken, from what I see there are consts for spelling where you could create a language with clear rules and no freaking exceptions based on the history of the word. Maybe if you could reform/refactor English to drop the historical stuff and write words exactly how they sound - we would rename this language to not cause confusion or outrage, like a clean refactor.

When you consider that words are essentially the same thing as sinograms (chinese characters), the spelling is not a big deal.

English spelling needs to remain the same because they are primarily visual. Native level English users just scan the general shapes of words and know the meanings in the same way that Chinese users just scan the general gists of the characters.

The nice result is that you can have 10 wildly different English accents / dialects that all use the same spelling. It keeps everyone bound together.

After all, if you went with phonetic spelling, which accent would you choose?

The comparison is generous to Chinese characters. Even the world's worst speller, confronted with an uncommon English word, could make a guess at the spelling that's probably decipherable. If you forget a Chinese character you may not even be able to put the first stroke to paper.

Yes, of course. But that was not the point I was making. Personally I find alphabets to be superior for that reason. But to be fair, I also don't know Chinese!

There's an unbelievable amount of woo and magical thinking floating around this subject. It definitely requires more effort to learn and remember. But yes, point taken.

Forget dialects, why is it possible in English that words sound different while being spelled the same way? Pronunciation is completely unpredictable, you have to know (guess) the etymology of every loanword and remember which of them have the original pronunciation and which of them the butchered one.

Why is scythe spelled with a C?.

Cynthia, cinder, cyrillic... I wonder why scythe is spelled with an S...

Yeah, it’s kind of crazy that we’ve come to pronounce ‘c’ (which often stands for the Greek ‘K’) as ‘s’...

In the Early Modern period, "scythe" was actually spelled "sithe". The spelling changed to resemble a (false) classical etymology.[1] A similar thing happened to the words "island", "ache" and "tongue", which were originally spelled "iland", "ake" and "tung".

See also "some" (originally "sum"), "friend" (originally "frend"), "delight" (originally "delite") and "could" (originally "coude").

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scythe

You use the official accent .

There isn't one. English is not imposed by an authority, it is pulled and pushed from all directions by schools, corporations, governments, history, fashion, misunderstanding, other languages, bloody mindedness, and more.

The one used on national UK TV for example and as I said it would be a fork, you don't want to force people to change, though something like Esperanto would cause less outrage then forking english it seems.

UK national TV has been featuring a multiplicity of regional accents since the 1970s.

OK, I give up on my idea, hopefully some linguists would popup in here and link some articles that would explore the topic. I think it would be interesting to plug some rules into an algorithm and have it search for the optimal language. We would not force it as a main language but a secondary one, like when you make a movie or book you provide a translation in this language too on top of the other popular languages you support. Since is a simple and perfectly defined language from it you could auto-generate translation to less popular languages.

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