Esperanto is finding new life online
theverge.com
theverge.com
Last night I finished reading Vikitmoj (Victims) by Julio Baghy. The book is a semi-autobiographical story of the author's experiences in a Siberian prisoner of war camp after WWI. It's a fascinating glimpse into life in these camps and how the different populations (POWs, soldiers, peasants, Jews, bolsheviks, etc.) all interacted with each other. As an example, one practice Baghy writes of is a kind of "duel" that the POWs would sometimes engage in between each other. (In the book it came out that one of the POWs had been sleeping with the wife of another of the POWs back before they had been captured.) They weren't allowed weapons, so they had to be a little creative. They would draw lots and the loser would have to provoke the soldiers on one of their marches so that the soldiers would beat him (sometimes to death).
If you learn any national language, you'll be able to read people in a handful of cultures write about themselves in their own words. But one of the unique features of Esperanto is that after you learn it, you can read the works of people in cultures all across the globe without the need of a translator as intermediary. (Of course the subset of people in a culture who write in Esperanto is not representative of the general population, but it's better than nothing!) In particular, many of these works haven't been translated into English (or any other language for that matter), so you would have no way to read them otherwise anyway!
http://www.amazon.com/Marvirinstrato-Originalaj-noveloj-Espe...
Se vi volas pli facile legeblaj libroj, mi rekomendas Faktoj kaj Fantazioj de Marjorie Boulton. Ĝi ne estas tro malfacila, sed tre amuziga!
There's also http://lernu.net, probably the most well-known source of Esperanto news, lessons and other stuff.
Amuziĝu!
Duolingo is fantastic and I am addicted to keeping my streak alive. However, I find the lack of variety and relative rigidity of the sentences to be offputting over time. I've nearly completed two trees, and have been a pretty consistent user over the past 3 years, so sometimes the monotony of the sentences drags me down. I have to imagine that we (collectively) are very close to having a sentence generator that can throw together a pertinent and sensical verb phrase and noun phrase that differs just slightly from the curated/created sentences, at least for the Indo-European languages.
Latin is bound to an ancient culture (and a religious one).
Even Klingon and Quenya are bound to the universes and cultures created by their authors & fan bases.
But I don't see any culture associated with Esperanto. I'm wondering if things might be different if its proponents started associating with a niche culture (be it business) and then expand out to encompass things from everyday life. I don't know what the answer is…
Esperantist and conlanger William Annis (on the Conlangery podcast) said something to the effect that, if you go to a Esperanto congress, you should start with the default assumption that everyone you meet is a gay vegetarian. [1]
I cannot speak to the truth of this myself ;)
It's a language of only seven (7) words in its entire vocabulary. Here's what I got so far:
- All seven words in the vocabulary are a negative. A word means "everything but that word. Words are then "stacked" to be more "anti-specific"
- 7erb is completely present-tense. Past and future are not acknowledged
- Anything in this world that can be evaluated in various ways depending upon arbitrary conditions are generally avoided in 7erb. 7erb is a language of reality, not subjectivity and opinion. There are no words in 7erb that function as adjectives
- However, vocal pitch and tonality can indicate degrees of closeness, height, intensity etc. In written form, this can be expressed with bold text, underscoring etc
If anyone is interested in developing this new language, please contact me (see my profile).
"A group of European secondary school students studied Esperanto for one year, then French for three years, and ended up with a significantly better command of French than a control group, who studied French for all four years."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Third-language_acquis...
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20040301110515/http://www.educati...
If all you're going to do is make high schoolers take a year of foreign language in a classroom, they'd get a lot more from a year of Latin or Esperanto.
Edit: The Klingon Duolingo course should be pretty awesome, though.
Dead languages like Latin and Old Greek don't add lives. You don't even speak them.
More seriously: I'm all for offering Latin, Greek, and even Esperanto but why would you give up teaching modern foreign languages? Why do you think they'd get a lot more from a year of Latin or Esperanto?
They won't be speaking Latin either, but at least some written knowledge of Latin will be useful. The basic paradigm of classroom language education started when Latin was commonly taught... and since it focused on teaching passive, literary use of the language (rather than active, oral use), that was entirely appropriate.
But superficial, passive, literary understanding of modern national languages doesn't help anyone much more than it would of Latin.
A superficial literary understanding of Latin gives you middle class bragging rights and a substantial step towards being able to parse the original text of a literature which has been exhaustively translated into English, complete with notes on shades of meaning. (And an even more limited grasp of some of the fundamentals of Spanish, I suppose) And since the source material is all ancient texts, you can't even pep the teaching up with some relevant and modern material or motivate the students by the prospect they can use it to backpack in Peru or do language exchange in Madrid.
I'm not persuaded that the inadequacy of languages teaching is an argument for the same time to be devoted to devoted to something which is even further removed from being useful and the teacher is even less likely to be adequately equipped to teach.
Latin may not be a living language, but it remains very widely used in scientific terminology, law, religion, and elsewhere. Like the prestigious national languages, it is a mark of erudition and social status; the demonstration of which is itself a purpose of education.
I took four years of high school French, and got decent grades. I recently started reviewing and learning more through flashcards in Anki. On the one hand, the fours years of "study" put enough French in my head that I'm making progress this way... on the other hand, as I continue making what is frankly a great deal more progress with the spaced-repitition than I ever made in school I still can't help but notice I still can not fluently read much of anything, let alone speak or hear it.
Now, as it is common on the Internet to confuse saying something is true with advocating for that fact, let me say that A: I still think learning a language is a good idea, I just don't think what we have now can actually be called "learning a language" and B: if we were ever allowed to change The Holy Curriculum [1], there's probably more effective ways to teach a foreign language. I can't help but notice that my Anki-based studies are wildly more effective than what I tried to do in school. (They're also still inadequate on their own so far. No contradiction there... my schooling was even more inadequate, you see.) Four years of a properly-researched and developed language program, with proper software support, might have produced someone at least capable of using the language at the end.
[1]: A phrase I am settling in on to indicate my contempt for the idea that we need to deeply reform education, but we must do so under the constraint that nobody is ever allowed to remove, add, reorder, or change anything we do, ever.
1) My parents and I recently took my 5 year old nephew with us on vacation to DC. He tends to sing at that age. We were in an elevator and he started in on a song and a couple from Spain started asking me questions about it. I really could only say he was being taught Spanish at his school.
2) I just cannot do a guttural with my voice. It sounds like I'm coughing. I have such a low voice anyway that it sounds wrong all the way around. At least I learned from a male instructor, that's a bit important as the sexes speak differently in Dakota. My old boss, a female, learned to speak from her uncles and her aunts thought she "spoke like a man".
3) I still do server names in Dakota. wanca is my #1 server.
The dual-language immersion programs are really awesome; I've seen kids from monolingual English families learn to do all their math work in Spanish by the end of kindergarten. Teaching kids language in that way is so much more effective, I hope those programs only become more popular.
There are large cognitive benefits to bi- and multilingualism, but for these it doesn't actually matter what language you speak: a heritage or minority language is as good as anything else.
But the classroom model of the United States isn't actually designed to make people multilingual; if anything, it's the opposite. The default language policy of the United States is mostly to shift people to English monolingualism, no matter their circumstances, heritage, or language rights.
The supposed economic value from learning modern national languages is wildly overstated, for English monolinguals. It's better to learn languages because learning languages is valuable for its own sake, and pick the language you learn simply because you like it.
There is a huge disconnect between our implicit goals for language learning in this country and the effort we expend upon it.
I strongly believe in the value of language education, but given the amount of time and money we're willing to spend on it, we'd get as much or more benefit from making them study Latin.
With Latin, all the people who want to learn a Romance language would get a leg up on it, and all the people who want to study biology would get a leg up on that, and people who are fine with just speaking English will get more insight into their own language.
What's wildly overstated is the benefit learning Latin has on anything other than taking the SAT. Studying French is much more beneficial to speaking French than studying Latin and I shouldn't have to explain why that is the case.
Let's be honest here - nothing of value is lost.
The opportunity costs of even one year of any non-English language for American HS students makes it simply not worth it.
If you buy the critical period hypothesis anyway, which I do not.
The "mandatory one year of foreign language in high school" is a relic of decades past when Latin and Greek were widely taught, and that is what they are mostly what they are suited for. It is just as much a relic as Latin is.
There's nothing on the scale of full-time immersion, nor is there likely to be, but there's now a small minority of Latin teachers who are presenting Latin as a spoken language, including using Latin as the language of instruction and attempting to apply modern language pedagogical techniques like Total Physical Response. So even some Latin teachers might agree with your criticism of the less-holistic teaching styles and the distance they put between students and the language.
Edit: I didn't notice that you were also advocating teaching Latin further up in the thread.
Why teach Latin, Greek, or Esperanto badly? How does that help?
And if you can solve the "badly" problem, why not teach something that can be used day-to-day?
The "badly" problem is actually a really huge one.
I took Latin in high school and felt that I wasted four years I could have spent learning (rudimentary) Spanish, or at least something that had any cultural relevance at all. You have to find a way to make kids care about it as well as justifying its utility.
I see Latin and Greek education as historical relics, akin to how we used to emphasizing testing students' ability to construct shapes with compasses and straightedges, or their ability to memorize bible verses.
The United States is largely monolingual in English for a thousand miles, and the language ideology here causes immigrants to want their children to shift to English monolingualism as quickly as possible. And thus bad Latin is more useful than bad German.
I've visited Mexico with my Spanish-speaking wife (semi-natively) and while the locals loved to hear her speak their language, we communicated mostly in English if we wanted to be easily understood.
The struggle is real for Americans, or for native English speakers as a whole. For Americans, there is no other language spoken for thousands of miles like you mentioned (Mexico and Quebec (to a limited extent)), and even then, most of the people we interact with on vacation will speak English.
I put serious effort into maintain my German, and she puts serious effort into maintaining her Spanish. But we rarely have the chance to actually use it, even if we're in a country that speaks the language. English has won.
I have been learning Chinese in China for about 7 months, and have a functional command of most conversations because I never ever use English during those conversations. English will always win if you keep biking with the training wheels on.
When I lived in Cambodia for an even longer time I didnt learn nearly as much Khmer because I was constantly speaking in English, even though I diligently listened to Khmer conversations and researched the language. Like programming, language learning is much slower as a spectator sport.
In my travels, I've yet to run into someone who I really need to talk to who only speaks their native (non-English) language.
And feel free to drop me a mail and have a call if you want. :)
There's this common argument that prescribes utility to studying Latin via the value you gain by understanding biological, legal, and religious terminology.
I think that the net utility that you gain through this mechanism is approximately zero. Or rather, the net utility over other, more direct methods of acquiring this knowledge is zero. I think you could gain the requisite understanding of Latin to gain 99% of this utility in a few weeks of study, and that if understanding these roots is so important it should be material in our English classes, not in a long-term study of the Latin language itself.
Besides the "it helps you to know roots" argument, the study of a language gains utility largely in being able to speak the language, make do when traveling to places where the language is spoken, or consume the literature and media in the language. Moreover, the utility you gain from the language increases exponentially - a year of (half-assed, high-school-level) study is pretty useless, but after a few years of it, especially with higher (college-level?) standards, it's immensely useful because it opens you up to whole new worlds.
I think the best argument for teaching languages in high school is that this exponential growth starts earlier and is more likely to ever happen (especially for people who don't go to college or don't study languages there) if we start earlier.
Granted, there's utility gained from appreciating the culture of the language even as you learn the beginnings of it in high school, but I think that's dwarfed by the long-term potential for useful bilingualism and having the ability to more more easily experience new cultures.
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also, anecdotally, my bad Latin has given me essentially 0 utility in my entire life since high school. Perhaps I got a few novelty realizations here and there, like identifying that "tractor" came from "trahere" and "et" means "and" in "et cetera", but those are trivial. Maybe my experience was unusual and others gained more from it. Also, admittedly, I can't really quantify or remember whether it improved my SAT scores or whatnot, but my overall assessment is that my Latin study was negligible.
Arguably, you could say that about many bodies of knowledge as much as Latin. The question is really: What percentage of people take that mandatory one year minimum of high school language and really build it into something valuable? I think it's pretty low. And,
bad German < bad Latin < good Latin < good German
U.S. school systems generally are simply unwilling to invest the resources needed to get kids really bilingual.
I do think that if all language programs are bad at a school then bad-Spanish would still have a higher utility than bad-Latin.
My high school was heavily focused on Latin and ancient Greek. We spent the first two years grokking grammar and semantics. Then, in liceo (the last 3 years) we would study history by translating and studying poems, speeches, plays...
Teacher and students used to discuss for hours about the meaning and context of this or that sentence. It was a wonderful way to understand our ancestors' mindset. Dead languages are the best tools for a deeper appreciation of history.
Picking up latin as an italian seems far simpler (and probably more useful) than as an english, as you can guess large part of the lexicon and you will be exposed to "volgare" (transitional latin-italian) when studying early italian literature.
But would studying Old English be of any use for italians? I am not sure.
German has specific prepositions I recognize as equivalent to each main Greek preposition as defined in that chart, except maybe the distinction between εις and εν, which German would handle by a noun case distinction (ancient Greek εις την θαλασσαν → German ins Meer (accusative, < "in das"), ancient Greek εν τῃ θαλασσῃ → German im Meer (ablative, < "in dem"). German breaks up some meanings differently -- "among" is unter (shared with "beneath" rather than "between") -- but anyway there are other languages with a pretty nice set of prepositions!
I actually got to do lots of creative problem solving somehow, but I understand how many did not. Coding is where that really took off but I did math contests and stuff when I was younger.
But these utilities really don't justify the classes and resources on their own... If we want high school to produce the greatest amount of utilons, we should be explicit about that, but then many many things will need to change. I believe English should be the world language, there's no practical reason to teach anything else at the expense of other more practical things to teach (like programming), especially in English speaking countries. If we want high school to more approximate what Universities used to represent, such as encouraging more Intellectualism (which I don't think is all that great, at least society-wide, from a utility perspective...), we should be explicit about that too, and again things will change. You might want to have students study French, Greek, Latin, Lojban, etc. for at least 2 years each because of Intellectualism -- but you may also want to balance that with more modern things like deeper computer science or math or physics, which won't help most people in their future lives either but can at least be fun and intellectually interesting for people who want their Intellectualism a certain way. Or we can try for a mix, but I'd propose that our current system is a mix, and other mixes will inevitably resemble the current system by being one-size-fits-all and not work too well. So if we want both, separate. Bring back trade schools and let young teenagers wholly uninterested in purely intellectual pursuits get to doing more interesting things like building a house or building JavaEE applications, and let the intellectuals do their thing without constantly having to waste time and energy rationalizing some vague utility and relevance to their proof-carrying code research.
I have used some Esperanto textbooks to learn a bit of Esperanto, and I have read whole books about the artificial language movement and the development of Esperanto over time. If we take Esperanto to be a hobby, like stamp collecting, then I say "More power to you" if you are interested in Esperanto. But if we take Esperanto as a serious proposal to produce a practical "interlanguage" for worldwide communication, then we have to count Esperanto as a failure. Esperanto has had fewer speakers (to a given level of proficiency) and fewer readers (likewise) in all time than either English or Chinese gains in one year simply by natural increase and extension of education to the masses.
As I studied Esperanto, along with studying human languages such as Chinese (four modern Sinitic languages and also ancient Literary Chinese), Russian, German, Japanese, Biblical Hebrew, Attic Greek and Koine Greek, and assorted other languages, I was struck by how many design bugs Esperanto has. Many of the decisions made by Ludwik Zamenhof as he designed Esperanto reflected exactly the languages he knew in childhood in Russian-occupied Poland, but didn't reflect at all what makes a language easy to learn or to use as a second language with speakers of varied backgrounds. I used to think that I would have to do a write-up about the flaws of Esperanto myself, but then in the 1990s I discovered an online description of Esperanto by a sophisticated student of constructed languages,[1] and I see by checking the link again that that description has been continually updated over the last two decades.
The statement in the article kindly submitted here that "Esperanto is an artificial language, designed to have perfectly regular grammar, with none of the messy exceptions of natural tongues" is demonstrably false, and the link I have shared here will show the statement to be false. What ultimately turned me off to Esperanto as a movement and even as a hobby was seeing frankly incredible statements about Esperanto and about other human languages made by Esperanto-hobbyists who thought they were proposing a practical tool for world communication. If Esperanto is your hobby, more power to you. But if you propose Esperanto as a world interlanguage, you had best acknowledge the reality that Esperanto has always failed in that role, and always will.
Yes, definitely, depending on what language the learner has as a native language, and especially if active speaking and listening is included as part of the test of language proficiency to an equivalent level.
Compare English: Britain spread it throughout a global empire for centuries. America is the world's fourth most populous country, possibly the most powerful and prosperous country in the history of the world, and nearly entirely monolingual in English. India is the world's second most populous country, where English is the major language of intercommunication. Nigeria, the Philippines, and other large countries use English in an official capacity. English is now the dominant language of science, and increasingly the language of intercommunication in Europe.
And yet for all that power, prestige, and influence, English only has 1.2 billion first- and second-language speakers, and is far from the world's only interlanguage.
So by those standards, English is a "failure" as the world interlanguage.
Edit: To be sure, Esperantists can be pretty off-putting. They are nothing if not...enthusiastic!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#Geographical_...
When I first read about Esperanto decades ago, I was immediately put off by it only using languages from the Indo-European language family as a source for vocabulary and grammar. Any good constructed language intended for worldwide use as a universal second language would also need to source vocab and patterns from Arabic, Swahili, Turkish, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Indonesian, all of which are from different language families, not to mention less numerically used language families.
I really wish Reformed Esperanto had usurped Esperanto, which fixed a lot of the bugs.