Esperanto

Discussion in 'Linguistics' started by Fraggle Rocker, May 5, 2010.

  1. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    I had the following PM exchange with a member:
    It would be a tragedy if all other languages became extinct. Each one comes with its own view of the world. Every time we lose one, we lose a way of thinking. The benefit of knowing two languages is that you can think two ways. You can test your thoughts for reasonableness by running them through a different language and finding out if they still sound as good. . . . . Human culture would be immeasurably poorer if we all spoke the same language. It's our duty to make sure that never happens.
    Why not Esperanto? It's so much easier. I learned it in six weeks. It used to be a bigger movement. When I went to Europe in 1973 there were lots of people who spoke it. English is too difficult. Esperanto was designed to be easy and it is.
    I decided to move this discussion back to the boards and make it open to everyone.

    Note to all members: If you have a question or comment for me that is not truly private in nature, please communicate with me here rather than by PM, so the maximum number of members can participate. Thanks!

    Esperanto was created 140 years ago by a scholar in Poland who was fluent in seven languages (English, German, Hebrew, Latin, Polish, Russian and Yiddish), yet was still constantly frustrated by his inability to communicate with the hundreds of millions of people who did not know any of those seven. He realized that the reason most people don't learn a second language is simply that it is too difficult.

    I can vouch for that. I spent decades assiduously studying Spanish in the American Southwest where I was never far from a native speaker... yet it's still hard for me to follow a conversation at normal speed and my fluency is still only 8 on my powers-of-three scale--10,000 words: a precocious student who could never qualify for a desk job. I threw myself into Mandarin, which is considerably easier to learn, and I even lived with a Chinese girlfriend for two years speaking it at home every day... yet while I'm always complimented for my perfect pronunciation I have the vocabulary of a four year-old.

    Esperanto was designed with one purpose: to be easy to learn. I learned it from a book in six weeks during the summer before my second year in high school. I immediately sought out pen pals in other countries and corresponded on a variety of subjects including science, history, current events and personal life. (I still keep in touch with my Japanese friend, fifty years later.) A few years later when I moved to Los Angeles and began attending Esperanto club meetings where I met foreigners who knew no English, I had no trouble at all communicating with them at conversational speed, despite my experience thus far being only in writing.

    The point of Esperanto is that you can learn it quickly and easily. Its vocabulary relies heavily on a set of universal suffixes and prefixes that reduce the number of words you have to learn by a factor of 20 or more. Its grammar is rigidly regular so there are no exceptions to any rule. Most people truly do become minimally fluent in a matter of weeks and can "speak like a native" in a few months.

    As to whether it is popular, well, not so much as it once was. In the 1920s there were several million speakers worldwide, today the figure is closer to one million. It's still enormously popular in Eastern Europe, where after a two-hour journey by auto or train in any direction you find yourself in a country where everyone speaks a different language. And of course it's never been terribly popular among Americans, who chauvinistically insist that every human being should either speak English or die. Although ironically, the only person now alive who was raised speaking Esperanto as a native language is financier George Soros, who was born in Hungary but is now one of the wealthiest and most influential Americans.

    To imagine a world in which there is one language which everyone can speak is surely a dream. I doubt that there will ever come a day when the majority of humans feel a need to be able to communicate outside of their own community. Homo sapiens is a pack-social species, and while many of us have expanded our pack to include people on the other side of the world (certainly everyone who is reading this post!), many others are content with a very small pack. (I'll bet every one of you knows a few people like that, perhaps in your own family!)

    But if you hold to a more achievable goal of a world in which the large and important segment of the population who wishes their communication with others were not impaired by national and linguistic boundaries, the fulfillment of your wish lies not in English, but in Esperanto. To learn English requires a lot of time, effort and other resources, and the results are often disappointing. To learn Esperanto takes a few months, even if there's no one to practice with, and the resulting fluency is astounding.

    If Esperanto were offered as merely an optional course in schools, or even made available in a club, the number of fluent speakers would increase by two orders of magnitude in a few years, and this inertia would probably propel it ahead of English within a generation.

    And no country would feel that its own national language was in jeopardy of being eclipsed by anyone else's.
     
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  3. Syzygys As a mother, I am telling you Valued Senior Member

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    Why not esperanto? Here is why:

    1. Pretty much nobody speaks it as a native tongue.
    2. Although it is simplified, it is still illogical. There are better artifical languages.
    3. By picking an already widespread language you make it easier to .5-1 billion people who don't have to learn it.
    etc.etc...

    I never really understood the logic behind making esperanto. They could have just simplified an already simple language. Let's say you throw out the stupid stuff from English and there you have a rather easy to learn and use language.
     
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  5. Syzygys As a mother, I am telling you Valued Senior Member

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  7. jmpet Valued Senior Member

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    Being an American who speaks "American English" (in other words, after seeing enough foreign english films as to be convinced we are a different dialect), I feel American English should be the dominant language on Earth.

    Why? Mostly for convenience's sake. By and large, the biggest thing we- the lone superpower we are- export is our culture and the mass media friendliest way of doing that is with American films, which reinforce/stereotype American values- - bottom line- that kid trying to impress in Bangkok is acting like James Dean, not Jackie Chan.

    I also like American English (or English) because there's over 300,000 words in the language, yet the average person's lexicon in 15,000 words.

    I also like it because an ethical law system- Democracy- is written in English, and has 200 years of precedent on record.

    I like the fact that cool Chinese teens wear American-made Levis, smoke imported Marlboros and know American slang- that's worth a lot.

    The Internet's roots are in English and the Englishly-written New York Times (the paper of record) is written in English.

    I feel that English should be taught worldwide- we sure have enough English B.A.s to teach it and there is clear incentive to learn it- America is the world's melting pot.

    But then again, I am an American.
     
  8. Mr MacGillivray Banned Banned

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    I seriously doubt that any levis pants are made in America. Unless it is the continent America, since there might be some sweat shops in mexico or further down south.

    The internet wasn't written in English.
    ---

    Would esperanto be suitable for scientific communication? How well can you express logic with it?
     
  9. jmpet Valued Senior Member

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    Yes but they still have that MADE IN THE USA spirit to them. To some kid in Taipei at least... they ain't made down the block (get it?).

    No- it was written in binary. Wow- you won the "nerd of the month" award!

    THE RESPONSE WAS NOT WRITTEN FOR YOU.
     
  10. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    That's actually an advantage. There will be a tremendous backlash against the establishment of an international language that is a cultural relic of a specific people.

    Look at India. It would be quite logical for Hindi to be the standard language for the nation. It has the largest number of speakers and it is the language of the region in which the capital city is located, so most of the people who work in the government speak it. Yet because it is the language of one region, it was rejected. They would rather learn English, the language of their conquerors, than to give an elevated status to the people of the New Delhi region.
    Obviously Zamenhof could have done a better job. He may have been a polyglot but that didn't qualify him as a linguist. It has a feminine suffix but no masculine, it has an accusative case, adjectives have to agree with their nouns in both number and case, and those are just my own three major gripes. Nonetheless Esperanto has inertia, a large community of speakers who have spent more than a century adapting it to actual usage in real life and working around those problems. A "better" language is still going to have unforeseen problems and it will take decades to sort them out once the community of speakers reaches critical mass.
    If you do the math on that you'll find that it will take twenty times as much total human effort to teach the remaining six billion people English as it would take to teach all seven billion of us Esperanto.

    There's a friction point at which people will simply refuse to spend the time and energy on something with such a long-term payoff. Once you decide to study Esperanto, you can start reading Esperanto websites in a month, you can talk useful pidgin to people in two months, you can conduct a relationship in three months, and you can participate in a professional conference in six months. For English you can multiply those figures by a factor of five to ten, depending on your aptitude. Most people simply don't have the patience and determination to do something like that. The average American gives up on his marriage after fifteen years.
    Zamenhof wanted to avoid using a language that was associated with a specific nation, for the reason I mentioned above. Nonetheless it's still obviously an Indo-European language, but since it's not specifically English or French or Russian or German, people in the rest of the world don't really object to that.
    Nothing controversial there. American English, British English, Australian English, South African English and Indian English are recognized as distinct dialects. They're not just accents, the same words pronounced differently. We use different words and even different grammatical constructions. Even Southern American English is arguably a separate dialect, although the differences are being leveled by television and it will soon be only an accent. There are certainly multiple dialects within the U.K. Scots, Brummie and Cockney are barely mutually comprehensible.
    They used to say the same thing about French culture. Before that it was Roman culture and Greek culture. You can't predict confidently that America's star will continue to rise. There are many people in other countries who make a good case that it has already started to set. China is standing up to us, and so are the world's one billion Muslims. How long will it be before they start exporting their culture along with the attitude? In many ways American culture has begun to stagnate, recycling old motifs. We're making movies out of old comic books and rock and roll, the music of youthful rebellion, has "classic" radio stations.
    You're not going to convince someone to learn a language with 300,000 words. Because Esperanto is an agglutinative language that builds compound words from a set of roots, a working vocabulary is only a few thousand.
    Precise legal language is easy to translate. It's poetry and nuanced literature that are difficult. Besides, the concept of democracy is Greek, the Brits did a lot with it long before they sailed to the New World, and the Enlightenment, which put the finishing touches on it, was as much French as American.
    You can't overcome the problem that it is a very difficult language to learn. Not that many others aren't even harder, but English is really tough. The phonetics are abominable. We have so many different vowels that most people can't tell them apart.
    And that's your problem. You won't convince anybody that your own language is any better than theirs. Refer back to my comments about the rejection of Hindi in India.
    Esperanto is a very logical language, so science is perhaps what it's best at. Its small vocabulary makes it difficult to write fancy poetry because you have to keep using the same roots in different combinations. And its deliberate paucity of synonyms, while making it easy to learn, makes it less than ideal for literature and philosophy. It's not easy either to express subtle shades of meaning or to be deliberately obtuse or ambiguous. This makes it great for science, business and casual friendships, but perhaps not for romance. That's why I think it would probably never take over as a vernacular language and displace the national languages.

    Nonetheless there have been Esperanto-based romances between people from different cultures. George Soros's parents spoke it at home and they managed to have a baby.

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    But I'm only advocating Esperanto (or any candidate) as a second language for commerce and other international affairs. I don't want to displace the national languages. They are treasures that we need to maintain.
     
  11. s0meguy Worship me or suffer eternally Valued Senior Member

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    Esperanto may be easy to learn but can it be used as more than a diplomatic language? Can it be used in casual conversations (in depth conversations about the weather, causes of my hypothetical daughter's migraine or abnormal behavior of her pet turtle, computer or car engine problems with technical terms, joke about how that funnily walking chick must've taken it up the ass yesterday night) I imagine that since it's a constructed language, it's a lot more efficient than English but does it have enough words to describe everything that you can describe with for example English?

    also you may have learned it easily but didn't you already know some of the languages that it is based off of

    I think he's talking about the lack of technical terms, not about whether the language is logical...
     
    Last edited: May 6, 2010
  12. Syzygys As a mother, I am telling you Valued Senior Member

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    >If you do the math on that you'll find that it will take twenty times as much total human effort to teach the remaining six billion people English as it would take to teach all seven billion of us Esperanto.

    I call bullshit on this one. First of all, the whole world will never talk one language, so that is a dream only. We probably must be concerned with the educated world, so that cuts it down to maybe 2 billion people. A large % of it already speak English, which is the natural choice, because beside other things, the easiest to learn among the top 20 most widespread languages.

    Now for a Chinese or Asian learning esperanto isn't much easier than learning English, since the basic vocabulary (Spanish,English, Latin words) is not known for them. So no advantage here.

    The average English speaker is using a 500 words or so vocabulary, that can be learnt in a few months also. No advantage for esperanto here either.

    This whole debate reminds me a computer translator program where there were 8 languages and before translating from one to other it was first translated to a machine code computer language. Instead of that they could have named one of the 8 languages as the main translator and translate it to that languages and then to the final translation. They could have saved time and computing power with this approach just like not using esperanto but naming one simple and well spread language as the translator language.

    There is simply no logical reason to use an artifical language instead of a simplified but well spread language...
     
  13. Although I don't know Esperanto I think these things can be dealt with in time. (well maybe not the illogical part but everything else) But here's I have for anyone who knows Esperanto and English. Is it really as flexible as English. Meaning; could you everything in Esperanto when doing somethings such as describing something?
     
  14. s0meguy Worship me or suffer eternally Valued Senior Member

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    lol @ all the random pull-out-of-your-ass numbers
     
  15. Syzygys As a mother, I am telling you Valued Senior Member

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    Those numbers were the result of 3 years hard research...
     
  16. jmpet Valued Senior Member

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    Okay- so how do we start? Do we teach both parents Esperanto- ignoring their native tongue- and they in turn raise their children on Esperanto? Is that the plan?

    And in the larger regard, how can you dismiss a language of 300,000 words to which you can live your life on only 15,000: 5% of the words??? And what would Esperanto poetry look like? Something Data composed, in my opinion.
     
  17. CutsieMarie89 Zen Registered Senior Member

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    There are people who consider English easy to learn? Even native speakers trip over English on a regular basis.
     
  18. Syzygys As a mother, I am telling you Valued Senior Member

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    Wait until you try German or Chinese and I won't even mention East European languages.

    English grammar is rather primitive....
     
  19. skaught The field its covered in blood Valued Senior Member

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    No joke there! I took three years of German in high school. It was a very hard language, but I got it down pretty well at the time. Now I am trying to learn Russian and it is immensely difficult! I have almost gave up a couple of times!
     
  20. superstring01 Moderator

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    Which is why, like the USA, the world will only have a de facto offical language. . . until such a time has come where all other languages have just fallen out of usage. This may be sad, may be a loss. . . but is ultimately inevitable.

    It's obvious that--for better or worse--English is the world's prime language, especially in business, education, science and international relations. In fact, I can't think of a single industry that English doesn't dominate. Even Finish bands like HIM, and French cinematic production companies like Canal+ know that in order to make money, the product has to be made in English. This does irk me a bit considering the hefty cost I bore in living and studying in Spain for over a year and a half, but the momentum is obvious and inexorable at this point.

    English's status is reinforced in almost every nation by the requirement to learn English from almost 1st grade on up. I've been to a good number of first, second and third world nations and in every single one of them--even France--people knew that English was the [amusingly enough] lingua franca and leaped at the opportunity to practice it with me (especially in Spain, Morocco and Central America).

    While the loss is great when a language dies, ultimately the benefits outweigh the losses when the world knows and uses a single primary language. This is not to say, that people shouldn't proudly conduct their local business in whatever language they want. The French and Chinese are a good 150 years from giving up their languages, but the displacement can already be seen in many countries (i.e. Israel, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, India, etc). I have a number of Benelux friends who's primary languages are--well--not English (Luxembourgish, Flemish/Dutch and French) who's parents had intentionally displaced their native language with English to give their children an edge in the global market (the Dutch/Belgians being who they are, don't seem to have a passionate attachment to their native language like--say--the French or Italians). The same thing happens in many nations where English plays second or fourth fiddle (India, South Africa, Srilanka, Singapore, Malaysia, UAE and Mexico where many well educated families speak English in the house to help their children practice).

    My best friend in Spain married a woman from Flanders who speaks English with a perfect London accent. Her parents labored intensely to speak English at home an send her to London every summer. While she speaks German, English and Spanish quite fluently, she openly admits that even amongst her friends they intentionally socialized in English to practice as much as possible and as a result her Flemish and French is secondary at best.

    I think this trend, ultimately exists for most of the upper classes in every nation on Earth. Fluency in English has long displaced French as the language of the educated class and is--therefore--set to trickle down to everybody. Even the former poorer people who've climbed the social ladder and finally "made it" succumb to the trend and send their children abroad to the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the British Isles to learn English. One can imagine that within 50 years people will be going to India and the Benelux nations to learn English from schools and on the streets as unremarkably as they do to the primary English speaking nations of today.

    ~String
     
    Last edited: May 7, 2010
  21. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    As I noted earlier, Esperanto is more suitable as a second language than a primary language, which is--off and on--the topic of this thread. Nonetheless, I've been in international groups in which Esperanto was the only language they had in common, and I was impressed with how well it served as a vernacular. At its peak it had around ten million speakers, which is a good-sized community. They have developed slang, imported new words without waiting for the understaffed Esperanto Academy to keep up with changes in technology and politics, and discarded grammatical forms that are elegant and logical but not convenient. George Soros's parents were not the only idealists in the heady era between the World Wars who adopted Esperanto as their primary household language, and it did work. It's not like trying to conduct your life in Klingon or Sindarin.

    This is exactly what the Israelis did with Classical Hebrew. For more than two thousand years it was strictly a liturgical language, with a limited vocabulary scavenged primarily from a single book that was written in the Bronze Age, suitable only for arguing over the meaning of the passages in that book. Today Modern Israeli Hebrew is as suitable as any language for discussing nuclear physics, Jungian psychology, integrated circuits, hip-hop music, or dating and romance. Many years ago there was an upscale department store in Tel Aviv named Dizengof's, right across from a nice park. Retired men used to sit on the benches and watch the young women walk out of the store in their spiffy new outfits. A new Hebrew verb was coined for that form of retirement: to dizengof.

    Since the Esperanto community started out as a collection of idealists' clubs, a verb was invented to describe the activity of "speaking a national language in a situation in which Esperanto would be appropriate": krokidili. It obviously comes from the word "crocodile" and AFAIK it was coined by Slavic people, but I don't really know any more about how it happened.
    It's not really all that efficient. Zamenhof's primary language was (I guess) Polish or Russian. So it has a lot of unnecessary (from the perspective of a speaker of English or Chinese) inflections that lengthen words. Ten syllables in English or French come out as around fifteen in Esperanto, as they do in Spanish or Japanese. This is aggravated by the agglutinative nature: Instead of having a unique, short word for everything--resulting in a million-word vocabulary to be learned with great effort--compound words are built up from roots, which are then easy to understand but might have six syllables.
    It does of necessity. Many books have been translated into Esperanto and there are no blank spaces for words that don't exist. I think the language is losing momentum today but thirty years ago there were quite a few journals in various disciplines published in Esperanto. There are specialty dictionaries for professionals in information technology, etc.
    I learned Esperanto when I was thirteen. At that point I had had only one class in Spanish, and it was a seventh-grade class that didn't go into any depth. I recognized more of the Latin-based words from English than from my tiny Spanish vocabulary.

    And Esperanto's grammar is completely artificial. The inflections are entirely made-up. The fact that the grammar is simplified, logical and has no exceptions makes it a lot easier to learn than something vaguely resembling Italian or Russian grammar.
    Technical terms are easy. Since Zamenhof was a European, accustomed to languages that take all of their technical terminology from Latin and Greek root-words, Esperanto does the same thing. German is the only major European language that tries valiantly to avoid borrowing foreign words. Esperanto's scientific and technical vocabulary looks just like English, Portuguese or Czech, with different endings.

    My turn to call "bullshit." Chinese is the top among the top twenty and it is far easier to learn then English. The phonetics may be hard for us, but English phonetics are hard for practically everybody with its bewildering assortment of phonemes. The grammar is so simple that there's practically nothing to study. The syntax is invariable and almost as logical as mathematical formulas. It has no prepositions, articles, tenses, genders and numbers to trip up the foreign student. With its low syllable count it's spoken slowly, making it easy to follow.

    Sure, the writing system is a joke, but as I noted earlier, phonetic systems have already been invented and by the time Chinese is poised to become an international language the logograms will have been relegated to the history books.

    English is a big pain in the ass and it's excruciatingly difficult to learn to speak like a native. People don't appreciate being easily identified as secondary speakers of somebody else's native language. Again, look at the Indians' refusal to adopt Hindi. This is one of the reasons I don't believe that promoting one people's national language as an international language is going to be so easy.
    You don't understand the essence of Esperanto.
    • It's an agglutinative language so you don't have to learn as many words. 250 words of Esperanto will give you the same communicative ability as 2,500 in English.
    • The grammar is uncompromisingly regular, so you don't have to spend hours and hours memorizing all the exceptions.
    My Japanese friend said it was much easier to learn than English--and he learned Esperanto first without the advantage of a related language.

    My friends in Hungary and Finland (non-Indo-European) think English is preposterous, but find Esperanto easy.
    Don't be ridiculous. Even rap stars use a much larger vocabulary than that. A 500-word vocabulary won't even get you through the Sports Section, which is the dumbest part of the newspaper.

    As a linguist and an instructor, with a wife who has a master's degree in English, I estimate (most conservatively) that you can't get a high school diploma in the United States with less than a five thousand-word working vocabulary. And you'd better start augmenting that immediately if you expect to get anything but a menial job.

    In China you have to know 2,000 logograms to graduate from high school. Since Chinese is an agglutinative language and every root-word participates in compounds, that gives you a vocabulary equivalent to somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 English words.
    Now you're talking about Interlingua: Latine sine flexiones. The vocabulary is still too large and the grammar is still too complicated.

    Chinese grammar is the best choice because it gives the language the greatest flexibility.
    No, it's not as flexible as English, which is why it takes more syllables to say something. But English is not as flexible as Chinese, which is a big kick in the butt to the people who insist that English is the best choice. The Chinese effortlessly come up with new terms to describe new ideas. We have to keep grabbing Latin and Greek words. We even had to invent a new grammatical paradigm, the noun-adjective compound: user-friendly, cable-ready, labor-intensive, fuel-efficient, risk-averse. Chinese has been building words that way for centuries.
    That's not my plan. I will fight to the death any plan to let the world's few remaining national languages die off. (There are only a couple of thousand left and many of them are on the verge of extinction already.) Each language contains a way of thinking and a way of relating to the universe. We can't afford to lose them.

    No, I'm looking for a neutral second language that everyone can use for communicating with people outside his own community. The way a Tamil and a Punjabi speak to each other in English, the way a Czech and a Bulgarian speak to each other in Russian, the way I write to my correspondents in Esperanto.
    I don't understand your question. People who make it their business to toss numbers around claim that English now has one million words. Most of them are pertinent only to a specific discipline. Look at the myriad specialty words in music or carpentry, much less chemistry or anthropology. There's no point in learning them if you don't work in that field, because you will NEVER use them.
    Try to stay with the program. I (at least) not only never suggested using Esperanto as a primary language, but have in fact advocated strenuously against it. Nonetheless people make it their mission to write poetry in Esperanto and it comes out just fine. Every language has its peculiarities. One of the biggest problems for poets in English is that because of the bewildering complexity of our phonetics, most words only have a handful of other words that they rhyme with. (And some, like "orange," have none.) So they cheat, or simply write blank verse.

    I've seen plenty of poetry translated into Esperanto and it's no harder than translating between two languages with completely different structures and philosophies, like English and Japanese.
    Chinese people think English is easier than most other Indo-European languages because our grammar, while not as simple as theirs, is far simpler than the others. For many people the single greatest problem in English is the phonetics. Cat/cut/cot/caught--those words sound the same to them. The TH sound (much less two of them!)--forget it. "Squirrel"--is that a word or did you just burp? "Disks"--my tongue just got stuck between my teeth.

    Yeah, I know the Slavic languages are even worse, with words like vstup ("entrance" in Czech), but most people don't like having to learn them either.
    Therefore it is within the realm of possibility that even after America's star has set (or been shot down), English may have the inertia to remain the world's lingua franca. As I noted earlier, Aramaic survived in that status for a couple of thousand years after the Aramaean people became extinct.

    Isn't it interesting that the term lingua franca is Latin, not French?

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  22. Syzygys As a mother, I am telling you Valued Senior Member

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    >My turn to call "bullshit." Chinese is the top among the top twenty and it is far easier to learn then English.

    Sure. It takes 5 years for a Chinese kid to be able to read the newspaper. And we want to read, right?

    >The grammar is so simple that there's practically nothing to study.

    Same with English...

    >English is a big pain in the ass and it's excruciatingly difficult to learn to speak like a native.

    Beside it is not true, the goal is not to speak it as a native, but to understand each other. By the way I am not against simplifying English phonetics. My point is that it is easier to mess with an already existing and rather simple language than making a brand new one.

    So let's simplify English and let's have it as world language...

    About the vocabulary I was off a bit:

    "An average educated person knows about 20,000 words and uses about 2,000 words in a week. " But don't tell me 250 words in Esperanto is enough.

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    > The vocabulary is still too large and the grammar is still too complicated.

    Just because there are plenty of words that doesn't mean you have to use it. You can say big instead of humongous...
     
    Last edited: May 7, 2010
  23. Syzygys As a mother, I am telling you Valued Senior Member

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    This is from an English speaker's perspective:

    Difficulty, according to Uncle Sam

    First, consider some cold facts. The U.S. State Department groups languages for the diplomatic service according to learning difficulty:

    Category 1. The "easiest" languages for speakers of English, requiring 600 hours of classwork for minimal proficiency: the Latin and Germanic languages. However, German itself requires a bit more time, 750 hours, because of its complex grammar.

    Category 2. Medium, requiring 1100 hours of classwork: Slavic languages, Turkic languages, other Indo-Europeans such as Persian and Hindi, and some non-Indo-Europeans such as Georgian, Hebrew and many African languages. Swahili is ranked easier than the rest, at 900 hours.

    Category 3. Difficult, requiring 2200 hours of study: Arabic, Japanese, Korean and the Chinese languages.

    P.S.: I hope you noted where Chinese is....

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