Mesaĝoj: 34
Lingvo: English
razlem (Montri la profilon) 2012-januaro-26 23:42:33
erinja:Wikipedia says that 46% of the world's population natively speak an Indo-European language (next in the list: Sino-Tibetan, with 21%).Indo-European is a huge family. Very few roots have been carried from the proto-language to modern times, having been altered dramatically or replaced completely (I actually have a cool chart of which words have stuck around, it's awesome
). The grammar is a different story entirely.I'd calculate all the European language natives account for approximately 1.2 billion of the population (near 20%). That's Russian, English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, and the others. These are the people who can theoretically handle Esperanto's phonemic inventory. So you have 80% of the world's population that isn't accustomed to these sounds (more if you count English with hx or the trilled r).
I'm not convinced that Voludusupik (following the Japanese model) would have been any more understandable.Which is why the creator of an IAL would need to adopt words that flow easily, with a 'consonant-vowel' syllable structure. They might have to borrow non-IE words!!!!!!
marcuscf (Montri la profilon) 2012-januaro-27 00:26:54
razlem:I could be "Woldaspik" (ŭoldaspik), which would be fairly recognizable...Even so simple a move as declaring "no L or R" means that "international" roots suddenly lose their recognizability. That's how Volapuk ended up with totally unrecognizable "international" roots.Swapping similar sounds and cutting out letters are different things entirely. If it were "Voldspuek", for example, rather than the chopped-up "Volapuek", it'd be more recognizable/easy to learn. But if you look at a language like Japanese, which doesn't distinguish r/l, you'll find that some international words are quite recognizable: "テレビジョン - terebijon".
TatuLe (Montri la profilon) 2012-januaro-27 02:33:45
razlem:I'd calculate all the European language natives account for approximately 1.2 billion of the population (near 20%). That's Russian, English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, and the others. These are the people who can theoretically handle Esperanto's phonemic inventory. So you have 80% of the world's population that isn't accustomed to these sounds (more if you count English with ĥ or the trilled r).Another way of making such calculations is using this list in the UPSID database. For each phoneme in the list there is a percentage that shows how many of the database's languages have that phoneme. Here's how common the phonemes of Esperanto are in the languages of the world according to UPSID:
90%+: m
80%-90%: k, i, a, j, p and u
70%-80%: ŭ
60%-70%: b and h
50%-60%: g
40%-50%: n, s, ĉ, ŝ, e, o and t
30%-40%: f and l
20%-30%: d, ĝ, r, v and ĥ
10%-20%: c, z and ĵ
The most common phoneme is m (94.2% of the languages have it) and the least common one is ĵ (13.5%). I hope I extracted the data correctly.
RiotNrrd (Montri la profilon) 2012-januaro-27 05:19:26
TatuLe (Montri la profilon) 2012-januaro-27 13:50:37
RiotNrrd:I'm actually quite surprised that "z" falls where it does. That seems very counterintuitive to me. I would have expected that it would be considerably more common than that.Yes, "z" doesn't really seem like a sound that is hard to produce. I think there are many languages that have that sound without distinguishing it from "s", that is, they have "z" as an allophone to "s" (like in German). My native languages (Finnish and Swedish) don't even have an allophone z, only a seldom used letter z (the Swedish word zebra is pronounced [sebra])
razlem (Montri la profilon) 2012-januaro-27 14:52:10
It's just that you start getting into obscure isolate languages in Oceania and the Americas.
TatuLe (Montri la profilon) 2012-januaro-27 15:20:49
razlem:It's better to go by the number of speakers rather than the number of languages. "c" may be rare linguistically, but the languages that do use it (Chinese, English, Russian) have hundreds of millions of speakers.I agree, and I think for this purpose the most interesting list would be one that
It's just that you start getting into obscure isolate languages in Oceania and the Americas.
1) ranks languages according to how many phonemes they have in common with Esperanto
2) includes the number of speakers of each language.
That way we could get information like "500 million speak languages that have all the phonemes of Esperanto", "200 million speak languages that have all of Esperanto's phonemes but one" etc, which would give us a sum of how many people are already accustomed to the sounds used in Esperanto.
erinja (Montri la profilon) 2012-januaro-27 15:47:48
Esperanto has a certain set of phonemes. Some of those phonemes aren't shared with the majority of world languages. It doesn't really change anything to calculate the exact percentage of shared versus non-shared phonemes, because it's not like Esperanto is going to be changed as a result.
razlem:Which is why the creator of an IAL would need to adopt words that flow easily, with a 'consonant-vowel' syllable structure.I have to say that I just don't care at all. I'm not interested in some theoretical future IAL, I just want to speak Esperanto and enjoy it. Some people interested in IALs as a class seem not to understand that most Esperantists are interested in Esperanto for what it is, not in some potential future IAL with different attributes.
ReviewerOfTime (Montri la profilon) 2012-januaro-27 16:41:50
When I declared that I was setting out to learn Esperanto, I received surprise about why I would choose it. One person said, "So you're basically learning a combination of Spanish and Italian. Got it."
My primary motivation for exploring this language was because of its cultural neutrality and lack of national identity. I may (and likely will) move on to a "localized" one in the future, but I like the intent behind a language that unifies through neutrality -- a sort of diversity while not being diverse at the same time.
Also, learning a new language involves changing the way you "think" and practicing how you associate words with emotions and feelings. After all, we all feel the same emotions and impulses; we just use different oral sounds and drawings to describe them. I suspect that the very act of learning a new language is itself a skill that is practiced and improved the more it is done. So, it is my hope that after learning this language, I can apply the same strategies and mindset to others (since I would then have experience) to learn efficiently.
bartlett22183 (Montri la profilon) 2012-januaro-27 18:54:32
