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Comment by senloke | Hacker News Reader

An actual Esperanto speaker here. I need to correct this. It was never intended to be a "diplomatic" language, as such a language only spoken by diplomats between their kind. So the language of a small elite, which does not want to deal with the average man on the street. That sounds like a story which was said about the predecessor of Esperanto: Volapük.

Esperanto was at some point in time the "workers latin", because the less educated worker could learn it as a means to talk with people from other nations. That ended with pushing English or other "more practical languages" in schools to this day.

Esperanto still is a working living language with a working worldwide community.

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Zamenhof stated multiple times that he wanted to create an universal second language, as opposed to an universal first language. I don't think this distinction makes much sense, had any effect on any design decision, but probably it was important for the marketing of the language. In this sense it was indeed intended to be a "diplomatic" language, so that diplomats can use a single language. (As well as international organizations, merchants, tourists etc.)

I think that view of you is wrong. The distinction is an important one.

By saying you create a diplomatic language, you are marketing towards the elite, as I wrote in my post.

By saying that everybody speaks it as a second language, which is indeed what Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, wanted is a different focus. The first is focusing on an elite, the latter focuses on the people.

It's like the distinction between "computers for knowledge workers" and "personal computers", the first is only for a small elite, the latter is for everybody. Or the distinction between "politics for a couple of few" and "politics elected by everybody", the first is called a form of dictatorship, the latter democracy.

Right, Esperanto wasn't created for the elite, or only for diplomats. That wouldn't make much sense. Also I don't think GP intended to suggest it, but you clarified it anyway, so all's good.

That doesn't sound logical to me. If Zamenhof didn't intend for it to be a primary language, one you learn from birth, then why couldn't it be used by random people still? There has been trading between countries for much longer than Esperanto exists for, especially in border regions or small countries but also across oceans and continents.

Esperanto is from 1887. I was curious what holidays were like at the time:

> According to Stowe (1994), “many nineteenth-century Americans traveled, and many more participated vicariously in the experience of travel by reading travel letters, sketches, and narratives in newspapers, magazines, and published volumes” (p. 3). Similarly, the appetite for travel in the U.K. was also voracious --https://regrom.com/2020/08/26/regency-travel-traveling-abroa...

So also a goal Zamenhof could intend. I don't know how you get to the conclusion that, because it wasn't intended for my mom to use while I was a baby, it wasn't intended to be used by my mom or me on holiday if we're not "diplomats", unless you call any tourist an international diplomat

Western Europe is very different from the Europe that Zamenhof grew up in.

You get so many internationalist movements out of Russia because it already was in many ways international internally. Lots of languages and land, but both travel and speech were restricted by authorities, secret police seemed to hover invisibly everywhere. The language of everything important, the language of rulers, was Russian. Vacations were in-country, if they happened at all.

Looking to the UK, France, and the US is in this case misleading.

Frankly, this is why despite my admiration for Esperanto, I do not engage in it.

Posts like these are the 'no fun allowed' of constructed languages, and it pops up most often with Esperantists. Like a diplomat, you refuse to let people use words carelessly, or loosely.

Toki Pona is in itself a reaction to that. It's an exploration in wordplay, puns, and local culture.

EDIT: You also left like... a wall of text explaining why Esperanto is far superior to Toki Pona? That isn't fun to read or talk about. If the idea is to replace English as a language of the world, we don't have to bring the stern attitude of an English teacher along with it.

The sister post got my intent well.

> Posts like these are the 'no fun allowed' of constructed languages, and > it pops up most often with Esperantists. Like a diplomat, you refuse to > let people use words carelessly, or loosely.

Wtf? What 'no fun allowed'?! In the community is fun allowed how and why are you making that stuff up based on what actually? What interpretation are you constructing, which is not based on any reality? We have wordplays, puns and local culture. People do these all the time and annoy the more grammatically inclined people with it all the time. These conflicts inside the community are normal any community will develop people who need to care about the language more and people who care less about any language. That's how new concepts are generated.

> EDIT: You also left like... a wall of text explaining why Esperanto is far > superior to Toki Pona? That isn't fun to read or talk about. If the idea is > to replace English as a language of the world, we don't have to bring > the stern attitude of an English teacher along with it.

The wall of text tried to answer the question sincerely of how they compare. Also it included my personal bitterness of about people who constantly piss on Esperanto for the wrong reasons. Like such as exactly this post of yours. And that's also why I stopped writing it. I wrote that it's lacking "functionality", that makes Esperanto more complex. Toki Pona is minimalist, it can't be the best language in the world for everything. But that does not make it bad. People enjoy learning it and despite what you try to make people in the Esperanto-community look like, there are a bunch of them speaking that language too for its value of minimalism, its value in playing around with the sapir-whorf-hypothesis regarding depression (it's after all the language of good), its value in finding a community, etc.

You see something, interpret it wrongly and then piss on it, for the wrong reasons.

> Toki Pona is in itself a reaction to that. It's an exploration in > wordplay, puns, and local culture.

That a niche of people who are inclined to perfectionism, down-beating and snobbishness are also inclined to favor Toki Pona is shown by your comment.

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