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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I think it's extremely unfair how much of an advantage us native anglophones have in the scientific realm. Doing anything interesting enough to get published is hard enough as it is, and I have to assume that it's substantially harder for people who are also fighting a language barrier as well.

A part of me wants something like Esperanto to take over this space.

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Esperanto just creates the same language barrier for everyone.

English is an easy language to learn. I'm ESL and it's no big deal.

There’s probably a distinction between speaking/writing as a fluent and idiomatically interesting well-versed native writer and competent prose for a paper—which is fine for most purposes; an editor will fix you up. Most native speakers aren’t great writers either. Trust me. It’s a lot of my job these days.

> Esperanto just creates the same language barrier for everyone.

Yes, that's kind of what I was getting at; I think everyone should go through the same hurdles instead of creating a huge advantage for about ~400 million people while the remaining 7.6 billion people have to do extra work.

If we chose a language that isn't really spoken natively, then in theory we could create a system that doesn't give an inherent advantage to any one group.

Obviously that can't be strictly true in practice; a language like Esperanto would give advantages to people more used to European languages, and other conlangs or abandoned languages would have other issues.

> English is an easy language to learn. I'm ESL and it's no big deal.

Is that true? I've always heard that English is a hard language to learn.

No one cares about abstract let’s make everything equally hard fairness And, as you say, Esperanto is still Indo-European and probably Romance so why not just go back to using Latin or French.

That's fair! I was just using Esperanto as an example; I'm not opposed to going back to Latin.

And absolutely no one is going to do that so that things are more fair—and they won’t be for the large Asian populations anyway for whom Latin is at least as alien as basic English.

Yeah, maybe I didn't think this position through. Thanks for pointing out some issues!

English has some niceness to it that modern Latin derivatives lack. Specifically, the ability to verbificate anything, the lack of having to learn everything’s made-up gender, and the lack of a centralized authority which allows slang to propagate quickly and usefully.

Noun gender is really a non issue. It's something native anglophones complain about when learning other languages. ESL people are more likely to complain about just how many verb tenses English has.

> ESL people are more likely to complain about just how many verb tenses English has.

Also the completely irregular spelling. You need to learn every word twice, first how to write, then how to speak. You can't just infer the sounds from the written word. Languages like Esperanto or German are better in this regard, you learn how to write a word and the odds are you'll know how it sounds as well.

I grew up with francophone parents in the suburbs of Montréal, which is in the majority french speaking part of Canada. The context is special in that I live within an hour's drive of the border of places where english is the official language and that bilingualism is fairly standard in Montréal, I have loads of friends with whom conversation involves seamlessly switching between english and french. I got my first experience of full immersion at age 4 a few afternoons a week in pre-school, at age 7 I was in an hockey exchange with a new england family for a weekend, miming and pointing at things to communicate with people when my limited vocabulary didn't cut it, at age 12 started streaming TV shows in english and by age 14 I was reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

There's something to be said about my educational privilege and the geographic context of my being ESL. Obviously it's probably harder to learn english if your first language isn't that of a country that has colonized England at one point and you don't grow up within walking distance of the USA, but considering that billions of people have english as a second language and totally manage to convey whatever idea they want when they speak or write it I don't think my point that it's no big deal to learn it is outlandish. It's the most spoken language and it's speakers are all over the globe, there isn't a language that's as accessible to practice as english.

I think levelling by the bottom by forcing everyone to learn a second language (which would become a lot of privileged kids' first language after a few generations anyway) isn't a very interesting idea.

English is hard to pronounce and speak correctly. But it's pretty easy to obtain basic proficiency in English - and given how widespread it is, no language beats it in value per time invested.

Not all ESLs have it equal, both due to differences in standardised education, and how close your primary language is to English.

For example, a Japanese person probably would find learning English to the level required to publish academic papers to be a “big deal”.

I've heard it said that "English is an easy language to speak badly and still be understood". Most Europe, even the French, muddle through in a sort of ESL because it's the most common intermediate language.

If you're Dutch, you're not going to learn Italian just to holiday in Rome.

> I'm ESL and it's no big deal.

Not everyone would be learning English as a second language. In many parts of the world you may need to know some regional language in addition to your native one, so English would be your third, not second language.

Maybe you should let that part of you say its piece and move on.

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