I speak Esperanto fluently, and I really wish it could replace English as a standard communication language. But I see it as a coordination problem that is almost impossible to solve.
Learning English as an international language seems like an insane waste of resources. Why not use a language you could learn 10x faster? But the trick is that the costs are not same for everyone. Specifically, for native English speakers, Esperanto would be more costly than simply using the language they already speak fluently. And because the international language is chosen by people who have most economical power, of course their preferences are going to have greater impact. (And the same thing would happen if e.g. 20 years later English is replaced by Chinese. Then again, everyone except for Chinese would have a reason to prefer Esperanto, but the Chinese wouldn’t care, so the rest of the world would have to learn Chinese.)
Even a hypothetical situation where e.g. four languages with most economical power would be perfectly balanced, wouldn’t necessarily mean that people would adopt Esperanto (or any other neutral language). Most speakers of these four languages would have little to gain by learning another language, so they wouldn’t bother. And for the speakers of smaller languages it would be more profitable to learn one of the four languages (the specific choice depending on their geographical and political situation).
Essentially, most people don’t even want to communicate internationally. They mostly learn a foreign language if they believe it will help their careers. Which usually means they learn a language of an economically more powerful group. But that means that the other side doesn’t have an incentive to learn a foreign language. The few hobbyists don’t have enough purchasing power to matter on the large scale.
It would have to be a completely fragmented world, where almost every city would speak a different language, that would create a strong need for a neutral language. But after the invention of mass media, such situation is not going to happen.
I agree with all this (except that I happen not to be an Esperanto speaker myself) except for this:
Why not use a language you could learn 10x faster?
I am sure Esperanto is easier to learn than English. I do not believe it is 10x easier in any useful sense. Were you exaggerating for effect, or was that a serious claim, and in the latter case could you point me at some evidence?
This is a wild estimate based on my personal experience. May be a different number for other people, of course, either depending on their personal characteristics, or how much their native language is already similar to English or Esperanto.
My Esperanto exposure:
reading two textbooks
spending a week in an Esperanto-speaking environment, maybe 10 times
spending an afternoon in an Esperanto-speaking environment, maybe 50 times
My English exposure:
5 years at elementary school, 4 years at high school, 4 years at university
reading dozens of English books
translating three books from English
reading English web articles practically every day for two decades
spending a week in an English-speaking environent, once
spending an afternoon in an English-speaking environment, maybe 100 times
The resulting skills are not so different. Mostly, in Esperanto I don’t have a sufficiently wide vocabulary, so e.g. when I want to make a lecture on some topic in Esperanto, I need to take a dictionary and prepare a list of domain-specific words, try to memorize them, and use a cheat sheet as a backup. And I need about an hour to “warm up”; but that’s mostly because I recently use Esperanto about once in a year.
Esperanto is simply much more regular than English, so spending the same amount of time will allow you to learn more. You don’t have to learn the pronounciation separately. You don’t have to memorize a long list of irregular verbs. You don’t have to separately learn how to say “to see” and “visible”; you just say “see-able” and that’s the canonical form. (And there are many words where the similar principle applies.) It may sound like it’s not a big deal, but when you put all these things together, it makes a huge difference in how quickly you learn something and how easily you will remember it.
In a 48-hour intense course people are able to learn Esperanto at a very basic conversational level (textbook, example lesson), which allows them to have very superficial conversations.
But it depends on what your native language is. For example, if it is German, then half of your words already are almost the same as in English, only with different pronounciation. I believe Esperanto would still be easier, but the difference would be smaller.
Interesting—thanks. Did you learn Esperanto before English or after? (I’d guess a second foreign language is easier to pick up than a first, unless the first is learned in childhood and the second not.) Is your native language more like English or more like Esperanto or roughly the same in each case?
It’s certainly true that Esperanto is much more regular than English. (My impression is that English is unusually irregular even among natural languages, but I’m not sure how true that is.)
visible [...] see-able
Of course, if you say “see-able” in English then everyone will understand you. The only trouble is that you won’t be speaking English like a native speaker. That’s not really a question one can raise about Esperanto, since there are no native Esperanto speakers. (Well … allegedly there are ~1000 “native speakers”, which I think means “people brought up bilingually in Esperanto and some other language”, but that doesn’t constitute an actual linguistic community.)
This isn’t just a quibble; my point is that if Esperanto became an actually widely used language, I bet it would start acquiring irregularities that one would have to know in order to speak it “like a native”. You’d still be able to say “see-able” and everyone would know what you meant, just as you already can in English, but you’d need to know “visible” to sound truly fluent. (Of course I don’t mean that this specific example would turn out to be an irregularity. But I bet there’d be some.)
Mind you, what I say about irregularities is sheer guesswork: it just seems like the sort of thing one should expect. I wonder whether there’s any research on this sort of thing? (E.g., when pidgins turn into creoles, do they become more or less irregular?)
Languages I speak, in chronological order of starting to learn, are: Slovak, Hungarian, English, Russian, Esperanto. (Of these, Hungarian and Russian remain on the level of “I am able to read a text slowly, but I need to use a dictionary, and my vocabulary is so limited I can’t speak fluently, and my grammar is horrible, but if you give me time to find the right words in the dictionary, I will be able to communicate the meaning.”) So you could argue that more languages make learning another language easier.
However, after Esperanto I also tried learning Spanish, Japanese, and German, but didn’t get very far. Of course, it’s not like I spent the same amount of time and attention on each, so it’s not a fair comparison. But I believe that if German would be as easy as Esperanto, I would be already speaking it fluently.
With regard to similarities, Slovak is similar to Russian, and I learned Russian 4 years at school, and read a few books. I spent much less time learning Esperanto.
I don’t know how to compare difficulty of languages, because different languages are complicated in different ways. For example in English there is the complicated pronounciation, and irregular verbs. On the other hand, German has gramatical genders, and declination. Not sure which one of those is more complicated. Slovak and Russian have probably the same kind of complexity as German, only worse. Hungarian seems mostly regular, but has the definite vs indefinite verbs (not sure I am calling that properly).So, it seems like natural languages evolve complexities in different places.
I suspect there might be a “law” that keeps complexity of languages within certain limits: too complicated languages become difficult to speak properly, so some parts get simplified, but beyond certain level the knowledge of the complexities of language becomes a matter of signalling (the smarter and more educated people are more likely to get those complexities right), which creates a social pressure against further simplification. For example, in Slovak langauge we have two letters that are pronounced exactly the same (“i” and “y”), the reason for having them is historical: thousand years ago they were pronounced differently. Children spend a lot of time at school learning proper rules which one of these letters should be written in which situations; the rules are complicated, require memorizing long lists of word roots, and you still have many exceptions afterwards. But proposals to simply use one of those letters and just forget the other one are met with horrified reaction “but that would seem stupid!”; i.e. today the ability to write “i” and “y” properly is perceived as a signal of intelligence and education, so writing “i” everywhere pattern-matches being stupid and uneducated. And of course we wouldn’t reform our language towards a state that feels stupid for us today. Essentially, wanting to remove a useless complexity makes you seem like complaining that you are too stupid to memorize it properly.
Of course, if you say “see-able” in English then everyone will understand you.
Yes, but it wouldn’t work in the opposite direction: I would not understand when someone else says “visible”… or “audible”, or “comprehensive”, etc. But in Esperanto I can often understand words I never heard before, such as “see-able”, “hear-able”, “understand-able”, simply because I am already familiar with the root and the suffix.
This happens very frequently in Esperanto, because even words that would be considered “obviously independent” by an English speaker are considered “related” by an Esperanto speaker. An example that horrifies many people are opposites: instead of “dark” you say “un-light”, instead of “short” you say “un-tall”. With this simple hack you have removed a need to learn hundreds of words. There are more such hacks; instead of “knife” you say “cut-tool”, instead of “hospital” you say “un-healthy-person-place”. Nouns / verbs / adjectives / adverbs differ by the last letter, so you don’t need to learn “fast”, “speed”, “quickly”, and “hurry” as four independent word roots; and instead of “accelerate” you say “make-more-quick”.
This is probably difficult to get across, because when I just use “see” and “visible” as an example, you probably feel like “yeah, so there is this one weird example, but there still remains 99.99% of the language to learn”. But Esperanto is more like taking a language and throwing 75% of words away because they can be derived from other words, and making the remaining 25% regular. So with the same energy you would learn 100 English words you can learn 150 Esperanto words (because they are more regular), which you can start putting together like a Lego and create maybe 1000 Esperanto words. Realistically speaking, you are not going to do this systematically, so it will feel like you only know 150 Esperanto words, but there are the potential 850 other words that you don’t know you know, but when you meet them for the first time, your brain goes “oh, I actually know what this means”.
(By the way, the composed words are usually not too long, because the common prefixes and suffixes are typically monosyllabic. Or, as an Esperanto speaker would say, “one-syllable-y”.)
allegedly there are ~1000 “native speakers”, which I think means “people brought up bilingually in Esperanto and some other language”, but that doesn’t constitute an actual linguistic community.
Some of them are raised bilingually, with Esperanto as a second language; but some of them are actually trilingual, coming from mixed marriages where parents use Esperanto to talk to each other. They are very rare, and I have no idea which model is more frequent.
my point is that if Esperanto became an actually widely used language, I bet it would start acquiring irregularities
I agree that this is quite likely. Maybe it wouldn’t happen under the “Esperanto as everyone’s second language” scenario, but it certainly is a risk with the “native speakers”. (And various signallers, who believe that Esperanto needs more word roots because it e.g. allows better poetry. Sigh. Priorities.)
EDIT: In another comment, you say how Esperanto is much easier to learn for a French speaker than for e.g. a Tamil speaker. That is certainly true. But if you give the Tamil speaker a choice between learning English and learning Esperanto, in both cases the language will be completely unfamiliar, but in one case there will be the advantage of greater regularity and “Lego system”. So while the Tamil speaker would complain that speaking Esperanto gives an unfair advantage to the French, they would still prefer Esperanto to English (if the advantages of learning either language would be the same, which is obviously not the case.)
This is actually an objection frequently made against Esperanto. People are familiar with the concept of “some languages are similar to each other, some are completely different”, but unfamiliar with the concept of “Lego languages are much easier to learn”, so of course they are going to attribute everyone saying “Esperanto was easy for me” fully to the former. Yes, it plays a role, but the regularity also plays a role. Esperanto has also fans outside Europe/America.
Native English speaker here. I studied Spanish for a few years in High School, and Japanese for a year, and Esperanto for about 6 months of weekly extracurricular sessions. I managed to learn spoken and written Esperanto about as well as I learned spoken Japanese, in roughly 1⁄10 the hours spent.
That’s not strong evidence that learning it to fluency and communication comfort is 1⁄10 as hard, but learning the basics and a few thousand words is really quite easy for someone who already knows a romance or germanic language. I’d very much believe 1⁄2 to 1⁄3 of the effort required to fluency in a second natural language.
That said, I don’t think “ease of learning” is enough. There is no path to a designed language becoming universal. Network effects of language fluency are HUGE—the value to knowing a language is so dependent on who already knows it that there is simply no believable adoption rate for any minor language to become dominant.
My hope is that AR + machine translation get good enough in the next era that it doesn’t matter too much. And since the future isn’t evenly distributed, the “base” language is likely to be one that’s very popular today, I’d bet on English, Mandarin (with simplified alphabet-based writing), or Hindi in that order.
I managed to learn spoken and written Esperanto about as well as I learned spoken Japanese, in roughly 1⁄10 the hours spent.
That’s not a fair comparison. If you know English + Spanish, you should expect Esperanto to be much easier than Japanese; but similarly, if you know English + Esperanto, you should expect Spanish to be much easier than Japanese. Esperanto is very much more like English or Spanish than it is like Japanese, and it will have been easier for you for that reason completely independent of whether it’s more learnable than other Latin-derived languages.
True—unfair and no reason to believe that learning the basics is all that well correlated to fluency. Still, a bit of evidence that it’s plausible that Esperanto is that much easier.
In any case, I ran across a bit of evidence just today that it won’t matter: Pilot Translation Kit claims it’ll ship in May.
I speak Esperanto fluently, and I really wish it could replace English as a standard communication language. But I see it as a coordination problem that is almost impossible to solve.
Learning English as an international language seems like an insane waste of resources. Why not use a language you could learn 10x faster? But the trick is that the costs are not same for everyone. Specifically, for native English speakers, Esperanto would be more costly than simply using the language they already speak fluently. And because the international language is chosen by people who have most economical power, of course their preferences are going to have greater impact. (And the same thing would happen if e.g. 20 years later English is replaced by Chinese. Then again, everyone except for Chinese would have a reason to prefer Esperanto, but the Chinese wouldn’t care, so the rest of the world would have to learn Chinese.)
Even a hypothetical situation where e.g. four languages with most economical power would be perfectly balanced, wouldn’t necessarily mean that people would adopt Esperanto (or any other neutral language). Most speakers of these four languages would have little to gain by learning another language, so they wouldn’t bother. And for the speakers of smaller languages it would be more profitable to learn one of the four languages (the specific choice depending on their geographical and political situation).
Essentially, most people don’t even want to communicate internationally. They mostly learn a foreign language if they believe it will help their careers. Which usually means they learn a language of an economically more powerful group. But that means that the other side doesn’t have an incentive to learn a foreign language. The few hobbyists don’t have enough purchasing power to matter on the large scale.
It would have to be a completely fragmented world, where almost every city would speak a different language, that would create a strong need for a neutral language. But after the invention of mass media, such situation is not going to happen.
I agree with all this (except that I happen not to be an Esperanto speaker myself) except for this:
I am sure Esperanto is easier to learn than English. I do not believe it is 10x easier in any useful sense. Were you exaggerating for effect, or was that a serious claim, and in the latter case could you point me at some evidence?
This is a wild estimate based on my personal experience. May be a different number for other people, of course, either depending on their personal characteristics, or how much their native language is already similar to English or Esperanto.
My Esperanto exposure:
reading two textbooks
spending a week in an Esperanto-speaking environment, maybe 10 times
spending an afternoon in an Esperanto-speaking environment, maybe 50 times
My English exposure:
5 years at elementary school, 4 years at high school, 4 years at university
reading dozens of English books
translating three books from English
reading English web articles practically every day for two decades
spending a week in an English-speaking environent, once
spending an afternoon in an English-speaking environment, maybe 100 times
The resulting skills are not so different. Mostly, in Esperanto I don’t have a sufficiently wide vocabulary, so e.g. when I want to make a lecture on some topic in Esperanto, I need to take a dictionary and prepare a list of domain-specific words, try to memorize them, and use a cheat sheet as a backup. And I need about an hour to “warm up”; but that’s mostly because I recently use Esperanto about once in a year.
Esperanto is simply much more regular than English, so spending the same amount of time will allow you to learn more. You don’t have to learn the pronounciation separately. You don’t have to memorize a long list of irregular verbs. You don’t have to separately learn how to say “to see” and “visible”; you just say “see-able” and that’s the canonical form. (And there are many words where the similar principle applies.) It may sound like it’s not a big deal, but when you put all these things together, it makes a huge difference in how quickly you learn something and how easily you will remember it.
In a 48-hour intense course people are able to learn Esperanto at a very basic conversational level (textbook, example lesson), which allows them to have very superficial conversations.
But it depends on what your native language is. For example, if it is German, then half of your words already are almost the same as in English, only with different pronounciation. I believe Esperanto would still be easier, but the difference would be smaller.
Interesting—thanks. Did you learn Esperanto before English or after? (I’d guess a second foreign language is easier to pick up than a first, unless the first is learned in childhood and the second not.) Is your native language more like English or more like Esperanto or roughly the same in each case?
It’s certainly true that Esperanto is much more regular than English. (My impression is that English is unusually irregular even among natural languages, but I’m not sure how true that is.)
Of course, if you say “see-able” in English then everyone will understand you. The only trouble is that you won’t be speaking English like a native speaker. That’s not really a question one can raise about Esperanto, since there are no native Esperanto speakers. (Well … allegedly there are ~1000 “native speakers”, which I think means “people brought up bilingually in Esperanto and some other language”, but that doesn’t constitute an actual linguistic community.)
This isn’t just a quibble; my point is that if Esperanto became an actually widely used language, I bet it would start acquiring irregularities that one would have to know in order to speak it “like a native”. You’d still be able to say “see-able” and everyone would know what you meant, just as you already can in English, but you’d need to know “visible” to sound truly fluent. (Of course I don’t mean that this specific example would turn out to be an irregularity. But I bet there’d be some.)
Mind you, what I say about irregularities is sheer guesswork: it just seems like the sort of thing one should expect. I wonder whether there’s any research on this sort of thing? (E.g., when pidgins turn into creoles, do they become more or less irregular?)
Languages I speak, in chronological order of starting to learn, are: Slovak, Hungarian, English, Russian, Esperanto. (Of these, Hungarian and Russian remain on the level of “I am able to read a text slowly, but I need to use a dictionary, and my vocabulary is so limited I can’t speak fluently, and my grammar is horrible, but if you give me time to find the right words in the dictionary, I will be able to communicate the meaning.”) So you could argue that more languages make learning another language easier.
However, after Esperanto I also tried learning Spanish, Japanese, and German, but didn’t get very far. Of course, it’s not like I spent the same amount of time and attention on each, so it’s not a fair comparison. But I believe that if German would be as easy as Esperanto, I would be already speaking it fluently.
With regard to similarities, Slovak is similar to Russian, and I learned Russian 4 years at school, and read a few books. I spent much less time learning Esperanto.
I don’t know how to compare difficulty of languages, because different languages are complicated in different ways. For example in English there is the complicated pronounciation, and irregular verbs. On the other hand, German has gramatical genders, and declination. Not sure which one of those is more complicated. Slovak and Russian have probably the same kind of complexity as German, only worse. Hungarian seems mostly regular, but has the definite vs indefinite verbs (not sure I am calling that properly).So, it seems like natural languages evolve complexities in different places.
I suspect there might be a “law” that keeps complexity of languages within certain limits: too complicated languages become difficult to speak properly, so some parts get simplified, but beyond certain level the knowledge of the complexities of language becomes a matter of signalling (the smarter and more educated people are more likely to get those complexities right), which creates a social pressure against further simplification. For example, in Slovak langauge we have two letters that are pronounced exactly the same (“i” and “y”), the reason for having them is historical: thousand years ago they were pronounced differently. Children spend a lot of time at school learning proper rules which one of these letters should be written in which situations; the rules are complicated, require memorizing long lists of word roots, and you still have many exceptions afterwards. But proposals to simply use one of those letters and just forget the other one are met with horrified reaction “but that would seem stupid!”; i.e. today the ability to write “i” and “y” properly is perceived as a signal of intelligence and education, so writing “i” everywhere pattern-matches being stupid and uneducated. And of course we wouldn’t reform our language towards a state that feels stupid for us today. Essentially, wanting to remove a useless complexity makes you seem like complaining that you are too stupid to memorize it properly.
Yes, but it wouldn’t work in the opposite direction: I would not understand when someone else says “visible”… or “audible”, or “comprehensive”, etc. But in Esperanto I can often understand words I never heard before, such as “see-able”, “hear-able”, “understand-able”, simply because I am already familiar with the root and the suffix.
This happens very frequently in Esperanto, because even words that would be considered “obviously independent” by an English speaker are considered “related” by an Esperanto speaker. An example that horrifies many people are opposites: instead of “dark” you say “un-light”, instead of “short” you say “un-tall”. With this simple hack you have removed a need to learn hundreds of words. There are more such hacks; instead of “knife” you say “cut-tool”, instead of “hospital” you say “un-healthy-person-place”. Nouns / verbs / adjectives / adverbs differ by the last letter, so you don’t need to learn “fast”, “speed”, “quickly”, and “hurry” as four independent word roots; and instead of “accelerate” you say “make-more-quick”.
This is probably difficult to get across, because when I just use “see” and “visible” as an example, you probably feel like “yeah, so there is this one weird example, but there still remains 99.99% of the language to learn”. But Esperanto is more like taking a language and throwing 75% of words away because they can be derived from other words, and making the remaining 25% regular. So with the same energy you would learn 100 English words you can learn 150 Esperanto words (because they are more regular), which you can start putting together like a Lego and create maybe 1000 Esperanto words. Realistically speaking, you are not going to do this systematically, so it will feel like you only know 150 Esperanto words, but there are the potential 850 other words that you don’t know you know, but when you meet them for the first time, your brain goes “oh, I actually know what this means”.
(By the way, the composed words are usually not too long, because the common prefixes and suffixes are typically monosyllabic. Or, as an Esperanto speaker would say, “one-syllable-y”.)
Some of them are raised bilingually, with Esperanto as a second language; but some of them are actually trilingual, coming from mixed marriages where parents use Esperanto to talk to each other. They are very rare, and I have no idea which model is more frequent.
I agree that this is quite likely. Maybe it wouldn’t happen under the “Esperanto as everyone’s second language” scenario, but it certainly is a risk with the “native speakers”. (And various signallers, who believe that Esperanto needs more word roots because it e.g. allows better poetry. Sigh. Priorities.)
EDIT: In another comment, you say how Esperanto is much easier to learn for a French speaker than for e.g. a Tamil speaker. That is certainly true. But if you give the Tamil speaker a choice between learning English and learning Esperanto, in both cases the language will be completely unfamiliar, but in one case there will be the advantage of greater regularity and “Lego system”. So while the Tamil speaker would complain that speaking Esperanto gives an unfair advantage to the French, they would still prefer Esperanto to English (if the advantages of learning either language would be the same, which is obviously not the case.)
This is actually an objection frequently made against Esperanto. People are familiar with the concept of “some languages are similar to each other, some are completely different”, but unfamiliar with the concept of “Lego languages are much easier to learn”, so of course they are going to attribute everyone saying “Esperanto was easy for me” fully to the former. Yes, it plays a role, but the regularity also plays a role. Esperanto has also fans outside Europe/America.
(I don’t have much I want to say in response to this, but want to note that I read it and found it interesting and insightful.)
Thanks!
Fun fact: Esperanto was used by US army as a language of a fictional enemy, to “enhance intelligence play and add realism to field exercises”.
Native English speaker here. I studied Spanish for a few years in High School, and Japanese for a year, and Esperanto for about 6 months of weekly extracurricular sessions. I managed to learn spoken and written Esperanto about as well as I learned spoken Japanese, in roughly 1⁄10 the hours spent.
That’s not strong evidence that learning it to fluency and communication comfort is 1⁄10 as hard, but learning the basics and a few thousand words is really quite easy for someone who already knows a romance or germanic language. I’d very much believe 1⁄2 to 1⁄3 of the effort required to fluency in a second natural language.
That said, I don’t think “ease of learning” is enough. There is no path to a designed language becoming universal. Network effects of language fluency are HUGE—the value to knowing a language is so dependent on who already knows it that there is simply no believable adoption rate for any minor language to become dominant.
My hope is that AR + machine translation get good enough in the next era that it doesn’t matter too much. And since the future isn’t evenly distributed, the “base” language is likely to be one that’s very popular today, I’d bet on English, Mandarin (with simplified alphabet-based writing), or Hindi in that order.
That’s not a fair comparison. If you know English + Spanish, you should expect Esperanto to be much easier than Japanese; but similarly, if you know English + Esperanto, you should expect Spanish to be much easier than Japanese. Esperanto is very much more like English or Spanish than it is like Japanese, and it will have been easier for you for that reason completely independent of whether it’s more learnable than other Latin-derived languages.
True—unfair and no reason to believe that learning the basics is all that well correlated to fluency. Still, a bit of evidence that it’s plausible that Esperanto is that much easier.
In any case, I ran across a bit of evidence just today that it won’t matter: Pilot Translation Kit claims it’ll ship in May.