[HN Gopher] To learn Klingon or Esperanto: What invented languag...
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To learn Klingon or Esperanto: What invented languages can teach us
Author : pseudolus
Score : 41 points
Date : 2022-01-01 12:42 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (knowablemagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (knowablemagazine.org)
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| Is computer language invented?
| bradrn wrote:
| Yes, it is, though strictly speaking it's not a 'language' in
| the traditional sense.
| gxonatano wrote:
| Esperanto is widely miunderstood by the general public. It's
| often lumped together with fictional languages (languages from
| fictional books or movies) like Klingon or Elvish. But there's a
| very important distinction. Fictional languages like Klingon are
| created to appear as if they're natural languages--reflecting
| their fictional cultures' customs, idioms, and ways of thinking.
| They often have a level of complexity comparable with that of a
| natural language, but lack the vocabulary and expressivity of a
| non-fictional language. Esperanto, on the other hand, is better
| described as an international auxiliary language.
|
| As an international auxiliary language--and by far the most
| successful, with upwards of 5 million speakers worldwide--
| Esperanto has a number of notable features:
|
| 1. It's arguably the easiest language to learn, for speakers of
| European and non-European languages alike. It requires an order
| of magnitude less effort to learn. That makes the best candidate
| for a bridge language. Imagine that speakers of two difficult,
| mutually incomprehensible languages need a common means of
| communication. They could either attempt to learn one another's
| languages, or they could learn a bridge language, that would save
| them a lot of time. English is a terrible candidate for such a
| language, since it takes 10-20 times more time to learn to
| fluency, and is full of idioms, irregularities, nonsensical
| spelling, and other difficulties.
|
| 2. As a language with a history of almost 150 years, there is a
| rich body of literature in Esperanto, which you won't find in any
| other constructed language. Sure, you can find translations of
| Tolkien books in Elvish (unsurprisingly), and other token
| translations, but the largest Esperanto-language libraries have
| over 30,000 volumes. Many of these are available for free online.
| Learning Esperanto is thus not just an intellectual exercise, but
| a means of unlocking a whole wing of the library.
|
| 3. As a largely unidiomatic language, Esperanto just makes sense.
| If you can think of a way to express something, that's usually
| the correct way of expressing it. That isn't true of most natural
| languages. (Have you ever been a language learner, surrounded by
| native speakers, asking them if you're saying something right?
| Why do we ride _on_ busses but _in_ cars? It 's because English
| is impossibly idiomatic.) Thus, Esperanto is a fantastic
| candidate for an international scientific or academic language,
| since it's just easier to say what you mean, and to be
| understood.
|
| There are so, so many reasons to learn Esperanto, in particular,
| and those get glossed over when you're lumping it together with
| other smaller languages. Check out https://lernu.net/ and start
| learning it.
| jiaminglimjm wrote:
| The fact that these are available on Duolingo but not Bengali is
| a mockery to Bangladeshi people.
| nkrisc wrote:
| How so? Duolingo is not some authoritative list of "languages
| that are important" where any language not included is, by
| definition, unimportant.
|
| Sometimes my name isn't included in those souvenirs that have
| lots of different names on them, yet it is not a mockery of me.
|
| It probably should be included, but is it really a mockery if
| it's not?
| gvv wrote:
| The fact that these are available on Duolingo but not [INSERT
| MISSING LANGUAGE] is a mockery to [INSERT NATIONALITY] people.
| causality0 wrote:
| More Duolingo users are interested in learning Esperanto than
| Bengali.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| It comes down to demand and whether someone takes the time to
| create the lessons.
| felipeqq2 wrote:
| Duolingo has a platform where volunteers can contribute to
| develop new courses. If you are fluent both in Bengali and in
| English, you should definitely consider signing up.
|
| https://incubator.duolingo.com
| yorwba wrote:
| Yeah, that Duolingo is a for-profit company that relies on
| volunteers to develop their courses is probably a mockery of
| _someone_ , but it also explains why nobody has gifted them a
| Bengali course yet. On the other hand, people who learn a
| conlang are self-selected for willingness to spend a lot of
| time on something that's unlikely to gain them any material
| reward, so it's unsurprising some of them worked on a
| Duolingo course.
|
| There are also almost three times as many Wikipedia articles
| in Esperanto as in Bengali, despite the Esperanto Wikipedia
| having less than a third the number of active users:
| https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias/Table2
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Somebody has to pay the costs of running the system.
| auvi wrote:
| considering that there are about 300 million native Bengali
| speaking people in the world (mostly in Bangladesh, and West
| Bengal which is a state in India).
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| It's not how many people speak it. It's how many people want
| to learn it as a second language. How many people would be in
| a position to want to learn Bengali if they don't already
| live there?
| [deleted]
| pseudolus wrote:
| The podcast "Imaginary Worlds" featured an episode that dealt
| with constructed languages "conlangs" (Klingon and Dothraki).
| It's available at:
|
| https://www.imaginaryworldspodcast.org/episodes/do-you-speak...
| tigerlily wrote:
| In Monsters and the Critics by Tolkien, there's an essay titled
| "A Secret Vice" in which he intimates his love of inventing
| languages. To my delight he mentions his enjoyment attending an
| Esperanto conference in Oxford the previous year.
| popcube wrote:
| ah, fans language is a good experiment for protecting languages!
| aent wrote:
| If you are interested in conlangs and world building
| https://www.youtube.com/c/Artifexian/videos?view=0&sort=p&fl...
| is an awesome channel for that.
| tdeck wrote:
| I also like this channel which has a series called "conlang
| critic" where the creator describes various conlangs and ranks
| them.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/c/HBMmaster
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