Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

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The downside of Esperanto is that very few people speak it and is harder to learn in some ways as there's far less media in the language – you got that 1960s William Shatner film that's entirely in Esperanto, and maybe 2 or 3 more, and ... that's it.

Meanwhile you can learn English from watching Star Trek, Time Team, SpongeBob, reading Harry Potter, The Hobbit, shitposting on Reddit, etc.

For better or worse, English already is the de-facto universal language, or the closest we have to it. We tried the Esperanto thing back in the 20s, and it didn't really work out as there was very little interest outside of a fairly sizeable but ultimately limited group of enthusiasts. I don't see how Esperanto or any other constructed language will take off in the foreseeable future.

Continued evolution of English pronunciation and spelling seems like a more realistic and better option – the language will change anyway, as all languages do, so might as well ensure it changes in a reasonable direction. Time spent advocating Esperanto is probably better spent on advocating more consistent English.

Sure, but my point still stands, it's unfortunate that English is the one that spread. Spanish would have been a better choice.

> I doubt that English is a good basis for a universal anything, due to the extreme inconsistency of spelling and pronunciation. There are some other disadvantages, as there are in any language, but having to learn how a word is spelled and pronounced entirely independently of each other, with no correlation, is a big drain on time. I imagine something like Esperanto would be much more suitable for the role.

Isn't that the same for many things [how something is vs learning something about it that isn't how it is]? Roman numerals still catch me out; I cannot work out some programming code; a highlighted corner in a spreadsheet hides a comment; I can speak German phonetically (easy pronunciation rules - wysiwys) without understanding a word understanding a word.

Yes, but I've had to learn both languages as an adult, and English was much harder.

Why is that? I'm not criticising, just curious. What makes it a better language?

It's much more phonetic, which removes a huge amount of work in learning to spell.

Spanish is too verbose and the gender feature is a pointless waste of time. Informal/formal also pointless.

Formality used to be very important in language in less egalitarian societies, so it's really an artefact. I have seen it argued that (in German at least) gender can help native speakers with word recognition - i.e. it's easier to differentiate die Brücke and der Bruder with the articles than without.

But it's interesting to speculate on what English does which could be considered pointless: * Gendered pronouns (he/she/it) - some languages e.g. Persian/Farsi do with a single pronoun for both. * Number agreement for 3rd person verbs - i.e. he goes but they go. * The continuous aspect. In many languages the expressions 'I run' and 'I am running' are identical. * Articles. 'A cat sat on the mat.' Many languages do without these words and rely on context. * Required tense marking. 'I speak', 'I will speak', 'I have spoken'. Some languages make the distinction optional - i.e. 'I speak' can mean 'Today I speak', 'Tomorrow I speak', 'Yesterday I speak'.

Or things which could be useful to introduce to English: * Animate/Inanimate pronouns - i.e. a formal distinction between 'it' (used for objects) and singular-'they' (used for humans and similar). * An actual second-person plural - like y'all, yous, etc. rather than 'You' functioning as both singular and plural. * A distinction between we (including the person to whom you are speaking) and we (excluding that person). 'We are going to the zoo tomorrow' - does that mean me and you, or me and my family? * A grammatically distinct future form - 'I walk' -> 'I have walked' in the past tense, changing walk to walked, but 'I will walk' in the future using the same form as the present.

Same as having to always mention the gender in English, ie "he said", whereas in Spanish it's just "said".

"They said" is good English, whereas in Spanish word endings change due to gender.

What is "he said" in Spanish, and what is "she said"?

My point is that, in English, it's possible to leave someone's gender entirely unstated, whereas in Spanish someone is either "el amigo" or "la amiga" with no other options.

Also, if you don't know Spanish, I'm not going to teach it to you.

It's only possible if you use neologisms like "they said", whereas in Spanish you can go entire sentences without referring to the gender.

Singular they goes back to the 1300s. Whatever it is, it is not neologistic.

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

This is one of those things that's both true and false at the same time.

It's true it goes back to 1300, but it had also fallen out off fashion and was considered "wrong" later on. Languages change, and don't do so in a linear straight-forward way. From our perspective, it's very much a neologism (although it's been a few decades, and arguably already passed the neologism stage).

I don't know, the sentence "by 2020 most style guides accepted the singular they as a personal pronoun" doesn't scream "it's been used like this for centuries" to me.

Does Spanish assign gender to inanimate objects?

It assigns linguistic gender, which isn't the same as people's gender.

Yes, I thought so. Isn't that unnecessary overhead? I think this disqualifies Spanish and other languages like it.

To me, it doesn't matter much, because there isn't much "extra" to learn. The gender is derived from the word suffix, and there are three or four rules to that, so it's both extremely easy to learn and to apply to unknown words.

This is unlike, say, German, where each word has a random gender and you need to learn it along with the word. There, I agree, that's unnecessary overhead.

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