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Esperanto a waste of time? | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Esperanto |  | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5801 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 209 of 351 18 January 2010 at 9:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Focussing on diacritics, there is a very compelling reason now to eliminate diacritics from Esperanto that didn't exist in Zamenhof's day: computers. There are many different keyboard layouts out there. Some of them support diacritics, some do not (US). Those that do support them only support a subset. Keyboards designed for Germanic, Celtic or Romance languages do not support the breve, and those that support the circumflex only support it on vowels. The modern ideal for an international language would be to use the 26 letters of the English alphabet, as I believe almost every personal computer in the world is capable of producing them out of the box. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Aineko Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5238 days ago 238 posts - 442 votes Speaks: Serbian*, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 210 of 351 18 January 2010 at 9:09pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
and if you are not? :) Also, there are other dead languages that people learn :). and what about the other category I mentioned, those spoken by very small number of people you are very unlikely ever to meet? I just don't understand the statement that 'one shouldn't learn "useless" languages' (or, if one does, it's a bad hobby)...
The Lobster Quadrille, from Alice in Wonderland, translated to Esperanto. Don't know who did the translation, sorry. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| davidwelsh Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5319 days ago 141 posts - 307 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, Norwegian, Esperanto, Swedish, Danish, French Studies: Polish, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Pali, Mandarin | Message 211 of 351 18 January 2010 at 9:10pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Esperanto is a living language, and evolves in the same way other languages do, by changes spreading through the speaker community, not by language planners decreeing arbitrary and controversial changes. Anyone is welcome to suggest "improving" Esperanto by changing the tense system for example - just don't expect anyone to pay any more attention to you than if you suggested changing the tense system in German or Hindi. This article by Claude Piron provides a good overview of the ways in which Esperanto has evolved and adapted naturally over the last 132 years. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 6934 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek | Message 212 of 351 18 January 2010 at 9:18pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Aineko, I don't think learning Esperanto, or for that matter any language, it at all a "bad" hobby. And for the record, I don't think that only "useful" languages should be learned, and I would never seek to discourage anyone from learning any language that sparked an interest -- indeed, in my view, personal interest trumps supposed utility just about every time -- although I do think that one should be realistic about how much time and effort it takes to learn a language, and what the various "payoffs" may be.
But since the original question that started the thread was whether or not learning Esperanto was "a waste of time", that brings in the question of utility, however defined, as opposed to sheer intellectual or aesthetic pleasure. Each individual has to judge independently how to spend his/her own time, and what amounts to a waste of time versus what's a productive use of that time, and Esperanto enthusiasts evidently find cultivating an interest in Esperanto a satisfying choice to make. That's fine, and in my view, no different from someone else's finding satisfaction in studying Latin, or Old Church Slavonic, or Gothic, or for that matter Klingon, or Volapuk, or... you name it. My objection is to the "marketing" of Esperanto as "the international language", which is a status it simply has never had, and probably never will. Its enthusiasts seem to believe that it should have this status, and given its undeniable simplicity, there may even be some theoretical argument for this. But that doesn't change the fact that, in the real world, it's little more than a hobby-horse for people who frequent internet fora such as this one. So by all means learn it, recite its poetry, and enjoy it as much as you can. But -- this is only my personal opinion, mind you -- I suspect that your English, which is already very, very good, as well as the other languages you're interested in, will, if you persist in them, in the long run not only be much more "useful" to you, but also will probably provide you much more potential for enjoyment in your life, than Esperanto will. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5776 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 213 of 351 18 January 2010 at 9:44pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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As I said, it's currently true that you're not going to find random Esperanto speakers on the street most of the time. I think we all know this by now. But I think if you investigate the history of Esperanto as an "official" international language, then it's harder to say things like "it will never happen". There have been several votes by major international bodies on whether to use Esperanto as one of the "working languages", and although they haven't passed yet, one can see that Esperanto has gathered significant support. In fact, it might have already gone through at the United Nations if not for the power of the French at the time.
For now, the task of Esperanto speakers is to continue building that critical mass that allows such votes to be proposed. As for "usefulness", please recall the studies showing that learning Esperanto as a 2nd language will assist with the learning of a more difficult 3rd language. Students who studied Esperanto for 1 year and then French for 3 years actually learned more French than the students who studied only French for 4 years. This shows that it might be possible to have a negative "opportunity cost" of Esperanto, where it helps you learn whatever else you set out to learn. In this regard, Esperanto could be quite a beneficial teaching language regardless of the state of any international governing bodies or whatever. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Aineko Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5238 days ago 238 posts - 442 votes Speaks: Serbian*, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 214 of 351 18 January 2010 at 10:04pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
OK, I just reacted to your statement which seemed to me was implying that it is some kind of a bad hobby.
No doubt.
I can't really agree on this one. Maybe because I don't see enjoyment as something you can quantitatively measure. For example: yes, there is much more, lets say, poetry written in Spanish or Russian, but I enjoy one in Esperanto in a totally different way (as I enjoy every language in a different way). I hope it's clear what I'm trying to say here :). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6946 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 215 of 351 18 January 2010 at 11:35pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
This argument reminds me a bit about the line used by some computer science instructors that it'd be preferable for students even in 2010 to learn computer programming first with Turing or Fortran before moving onto more widespread or practical languages such as C++ or Java. However what these instructors fail to mention is that Turing is ignored outside academia notwithstanding the advertised "ease" or "power" of Turing while Fortran's use in industry has fallen to the point of being relegated to handling legacy applications since it has been supplanted mainly by Java or C++. In response, wouldn't it be more efficient to start teaching C++ or Java from day 1? (unless there's some kind of pedagogical inertia about Turing or academia is still trying to recoup the sunk costs of computer labs loaded with Turing and Fortran). On a related note about this negative opportunity cost with Esperanto, I'm sure that I could substitute 1 year of study of Esperanto with 1 year of study of Italian/Spanish/Portuguese/Romanian/Romansch, and still get virtually the same benefit of accelerating the learning process of French (NB On a similar note I can attest to how easy it was for me to get a handle on Slovak as my second Slavonic language after having taken one academic year of Polish classes. By analogy to the example of "Esperanto to French", it's uncertain at best whether I would have had an even greater advantage when learning Slovak if I had first learned the artificial Slavonic language Slovio instead of Polish. As a nice bonus, I've been able to read classic Polish literature in the original, and meet plenty of Polish speakers worldwide - but not through Polish-language conferences/camps or Polish-only services like a hypothetical Polish version of "Pasporta Servo" (on this last note, BeWelcome, Couchsurfing, and Hospitality Club have been broader and more than accommodating as the membership pools are much vaster than anything Pasporta Servo has mustered so far. Those three aforementioned groups are each united by a overarching bond of love for travelling irrespective of which language(s) you can speak). If you insist on or follow through with the strategy of learning language AA in order to accelerate acquisition of language AB, then I gather from this thread and related ones that you'd see a stronger tendency from non-enthusiasts (i.e. the majority) and even some enthusiasts from this forum to choose 1 year's study of a cognate natural language over that of a somewhat related artificial/constructed one. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5801 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 216 of 351 19 January 2010 at 12:23am | IP Logged | ||||||||
As I've said, there are studies showing that learning anything as a second language helps in the learning of anything else as a third. But how many Esperanto speakers do you know who did learn it as a second language? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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