sudanglo:

chrisim101010:mi volas ĉiom
kaj mi volas ĝin nun

creedelambard:Sed kien vi metus ĉiom, se vi havus ĝin? (Mia edzino diras: "Ĉien!" )

You wouldn't necessarily need that much space to store ĉiom. It depends da kio it is ĉiom. On the other hand storing ĉion might be a problem.

Ĉiom means all of it, rather than everything, though the word is so infrequently used that its meaning in practice is perhaps not well defined.

Du eŭrojn kaj kelkajn cendojn! Tio estas ĉiom, kiom mi havas ĉe mi en la nuna momento

Yeah, I read chrisim101010's post as "I want it all and I want it now" instead of "I want all of them and I want them now." Would have made more sense responding to "ĉion" rather than "ĉiom."

Legu antaŭ klaki "Sendi."
Legu antaŭ klaki "Sendi."
Legu antaŭ . . .

creedelambard:

razlem:I would say that many people do learn EO because of its design, and that its design is one of the biggest factors in its success.

Well, I would agree that Esperanto's design is a huge factor in its success, and that the design makes it easier for people to learn and use. But learning Esperanto because it has a rational correlative table or because of the way verbs are conjugated? That's what I mean by "design."

Then again this may be six of one, half a dozen of the other.

What i was trying to get at, is the difference between the overall design, usability of something, and the small technical details that makes it work.

For Esperanto:
1) Overall design: Consistent rules of grammar
2) Usability: Familiar to natural languages
3) Technical details: The rules and methods used to achieve the above two

Lojban has the following:
1) Overall design: Consistent rules of grammar
2) Usability: Based on logic
3) Technical details: blah blah blah

Perhaps this is just the way my engineering mind works, but it seems to apply with machines; the further down the list, the less people seem to care. No doubt there are other entry's to the list, but im not going to bother to write them down
In my experience, 80% of the technical design amounts to about 20% of the care factor to the end user, while the remaining 20% of the design consists of about 80% of the care factor. This is why Apple can restrict their products so much, but still be market leaders.
Perhaps if the constructed language leaders from 100 years ago realized this fact and, instead of continuously arguing with each other, they focused on the presentation of a single language (for example, Esperanto), then we may have had a true universal language today.

chrisim101010:In my experience, 80% of the technical design amounts to about 20% of the care factor to the end user, while the remaining 20% of the design consists of about 80% of the care factor. This is why Apple can restrict their products so much, but still be market leaders.

I'm trying to tread carefully so not to provoke any kind of "Apple vs PC" debate here, and also to keep this on-topic.

I think you have a point but the analogy needs refinement. For example, Apple is certainly a market leader in portable music devices and tablet computers - they have a significant market share for both of these categories. In laptop computers, I think they have a relatively small percentage of the market. And in smartphones, we all think of them as being very dominant, but in fact it has been some time since Android outpaced Apple in market share, and if I remember correctly, Samsung as a company may have surpassed Apple in market share, if we're going to compare company-to-company.

What does this mean for Esperanto?

Apple is a company whose products are seen as aspirational. Apple actually does *not* have a dominant market share in many categories of computer products, but Apple seems to care about that only to a limited extent, because they're making massive profits, and because their "mental market share", if you will, is much greater than what numbers on a page say. For example, you say "smartphone" and someone pretty much instantly thinks "iPhone", even though most people with a smartphone have one of another brand.

Apple products are seen as having certain key features that everyone seems to think about ("It looks so pretty!" "It is really easy to use!" "It just works, you don't have to mess with it a whole bunch", etc). These are subjective measures but people believe them without necessarily having proof one way or the other.

I wonder sometimes how it would be possible for Esperanto to take a page from Apple's book and market itself so that:
- even if Esperanto's 'market share' remains small, people believe it to be important in many categories of use, even perhaps more important than it actually is
- people will generally know about it and have a positive opinion of it, even if they don't speak it themselves
- people will think of it in that positive aspirational way - perhaps they feel somewhat 'less cool' because they don't speak it, and they wish they could take the time to learn it one day
- people will think that on balance, the plusses (easy to use! it just works! it sounds nice!) will outweigh the minuses (It "costs" something - that is, time to learn it).

Bottom line - people regularly go out and buy an expensive piece of electronics, Apple or otherwise, without having actually physically tried the alternatives. Maybe they read some reviews, etc. but it really comes down to hearsay, you're believing what some person you've never met has said about a product. I think people look at features before buying, but I also think that many people just say "Obviously the iWhatever is the best, and it looks so pretty, and it's really cool, so I'm just going to buy it" (without actually comparing it to competing products).

I think that this is how people are. I think that of the people who speak Esperanto, it's really a minority who looked at its grammar in detail before deciding to learn it; I think that most people just believed the "It's easy!" propaganda before learning it, and didn't take time to explore Esperanto's 'competitors' (other international languages).

Many people probably started learning Esperanto without even having heard of its competitors.

People are sheep, and they'll do a lot for "cool", and it would be great if we were able to extend that to encouraging them to learn a language.

erinja:I wonder sometimes how it would be possible for Esperanto to take a page from Apple's book and market itself so that:
- even if Esperanto's 'market share' remains small, people believe it to be important in many categories of use, even perhaps more important than it actually is
- people will generally know about it and have a positive opinion of it, even if they don't speak it themselves
- people will think of it in that positive aspirational way - perhaps they feel somewhat 'less cool' because they don't speak it, and they wish they could take the time to learn it one day
- people will think that on balance, the plusses (easy to use! it just works! it sounds nice!) will outweigh the minuses (It "costs" something - that is, time to learn it).

Now that's interesting. I too wonder what we can do to make that happen (and make people forget the cliché “oh, that language project that failed?”)

erinja:I'm trying to tread carefully so not to provoke any kind of "Apple vs PC" debate here, and also to keep this on-topic.

Oh come on, flame wars are so much fun.

marcuscf:Now that's interesting. I too wonder what can we do to make that happen (and make people forget the cliché “oh, that language project that failed?”)

If there's one thing America is good at, it's selling stuff. We sell sugary flavored water, toothpaste, cars, Snuggies and ideas about ourselves to people all over the globe. If we can sell rocks as pets, it seems like we should be able to sell Esperanto as a cool language.

It seems like if we could get the American advertising industry on board with promoting Esperanto, they could find a way to make it desirable and something people would want to do. The problem is, other than people like us Esperanto has no "marketing department" and certainly no marketing budget. There isn't any immediate short-term profit in teaching people what is at the moment an obscure foreign language, and while we're good at selling things, we are not so good at doing so for purely altruistic reasons.

There's also no guarantee that such a push would succeed. Try as they might, the best salesmen in the world couldn't sell New Coke, they couldn't sell Americans on the idea of a dollar coin or Sarah Palin as vice president, and they couldn't sell Americans on switching over to the metric system in the 70s. Why that is, other than sheer stubborn American inertial resistance to change, I don't know, and would probably be way off topic to speculate. (Granted, Esperanto is a much better product than most of the above, but still, the point is there are a lot of factors to overcome in "selling" Esperanto.)

Many people probably started learning Esperanto without even having heard of its competitors.

Nicely argued commentary, Erinja. But of course Esperanto doesn't really have any competitors in the constructed language field.

We effectively have that market place to ourselves, and the more people join the bandwagon the harder it is for any 'competitor' to catch up. It's a winner takes all market.

But the real issue is not competition in that market place. The real issue is why learn Esperanto when the world uses English (and if you are a non-native you can enhance your earning prospects to boot).

The rational arguments have largely failed to convince. If they were a sufficient spur to action, the fina venko would be already here.

I agree things might be different if Esperanto had a cooler image. The only way I can see to achieve that is an 'ethnic' cleansing of the Esperantists. Take out all the 'stranguloj'.

However I am encouraged by the success of sites like Lernu and how often you hear that someone is learning Esperanto but has never met any Esperantist or been to a congress. But you never know maybe all these isolated learners are 'stranguloj' in waiting.

Yes, I have heard the argument that we are all stranguloj in our own way, but I've never believed it.

erinja:People are sheep, and they'll do a lot for "cool", and it would be great if we were able to extend that to encouraging them to learn a language.

Is that a good thing? There's only so far anything beyond a consumer object can be pushed by public relations. At some point the reality of something like learning a language comes down again to old-fashioned work and practice and even if a million people were pulled in by the allure of cool, only a tiny percentage ever stays when it comes to putting in effort. People who probably would have been there without the cool.

The early Esperanto enthusiasts had better ideals than pop culture 'inclusivity' driving them. I'd venture to suggest that about a hundred more times as many people are drawn to learning e.g. French or Japanese for reasons of coolness, but never make it past the early hurdles when it comes to the meat of learning.

Have I got completely the wrong end of the stick in terms of what you were suggesting?

Vestitor, I don't think that "cool" is the answer to all of our problems, so to speak.

The point of my Apple analogy is that Apple has a certain reputation, even among people who don't own its products (for whatever reason - cost, features, whatever). That reputation is generally positive - an innovative company that is always coming up with market-changing ideas (or else, developing a workable version of someone else's market-changing idea). This reputation is partially linked to "cool", but it's also linked to a high level of respect (whether it's justified or not, actually it doesn't matter in this context) that people have for Apple's products.

I think that it would be a huge boost for Esperanto if it were to have similar positive connotations. Not necessarily "cool", but innovative, useful, a new way to solve an old problem. I think that Esperanto is usually seen in a negative light; the most common impressions seem to be that it's (a) a failed project, or (b) a funny joke, a weird idea from the past that never made it, that we should make fun of. [disclaimer - Esperanto isn't new! But it's new, and possibly revolutionary, to someone who hasn't heard of it before]

I think that just getting Esperanto to be seen in a positive light, as something to aspire to, would be a huge jump forward. True, most people probably wouldn't learn it, because it takes time and effort. But I think that even increasing the number of people who do one Esperanto lesson would be a positive step, even if they mostly don't follow through with it. Most people do *zero* Esperanto lessons in their life, so just getting lots of people to do one lesson is already an improvement, because a few of them might stick with it.

Or else I could put it this way - if I put a lot of time and effort into learning to speak fluent Swahili, I think a lot of people would be incredibly impressed. I can't imagine being made fun of for it. Yet if I put a lot of time into becoming fluent in Esperanto, the reaction is more like "oh cool", but the jokes about it come later. "Haha, funny, she speaks this weird langauge fluently". Frankly study of any 'nacilingvo' seems to get much more respect than study of Esperanto, and I think it would be a massive step forward if Esperanto were just treated the same as these other languages - 'cool' or not.

I think that just getting Esperanto to be seen in a positive light, ... would be a huge jump forward

I think you are absolutely right, Erinja.

It may even be a sine qua non, to getting Esperanto taught in the schools. And it is that step which would transform Esperanto's prospects, since it would lead in the space of a single generation to claims about millions of speakers being actually soundly based.

Should that happen the 'pri-mokantoj' would then find themselves in an uncomfortable position.

I did get the wrong end of the stick!

What you wrote Erinja, seems sound to me. If anything needs a PR makeover then Esperanto probably does. I'll freely admit that even before doing a single lesson I was already aware that Esperanto is generally jeered at, though maybe not among the youth.