kaŝperanto:

mjhinds57:...

By the way, Chinese is not any harder than English. The article makes a good point that if Beijing controls the world, it will be more convenient for everyone to just use English, but should they choose Chinese, it could actually help the Esperanto movement—not because Chinese is hard, but because people think it is.

Are you talking about speaking Chinese or learning its writing system? ...

You are right. I was talking about speaking primarily, but you bring up a good point. You would be surprised at how many Chinese people cannot remember how to write lesser-used characters thanks to the pinyin input system for cell phones, though it does come in handy to know how to write, even for native speakers when traveling through the country as spoken variations can sometimes be mutually unintelligible. Reading isn't too bad after a while of associating certain shapes with certain meanings and using context to fill in the rest. I mean, most people do this in English. You don't read every letter, but rather the shape of the word. True, you can't just sound out new words like you can in English, so being literate (as opposed to fluent) is much more difficult.

kaŝperanto:I'd put my bet on binary being the only language used in 3015.

Haha, we'll all be plugged into the Matrix by then perhaps.

nornen:

robbkvasnak:English may not have a lot of declinations or grammatical gender (at least as expressed by articles) but - believe me! - it is very complex...

{{OFF TOP}} Completely off-topic but you made me wonder about the word "declination". Is this a synonym for "declension" or is this the American English variant?

Good observation. When I check the dictionary, the two words are unrelated with the very same meanings that you previously presumed. Granted, I would have made the same "mistake" as robbkvasnak as I did not realize that these were two separate words.

My hypothesis is that since English does not have declension, we don't ever really talk about it. Thus, when we hear the word "declension" for the first time, it sounds like "declination" so we register a new, separate meaning to the word that we have heard before and already know how to spell.

So in short, yes, "declination" is now a variant of "declension" because robbkvasnak and I are in the same community that uses this word in a non-standard way. (Bring us back around to some of the things the article was talking about maybe, lol)

Alkanadi:The Wall Street Journal mentions Esperanto in this Article

Do you think that English crushed Esperanto's chance of being the lingua franca of the world?

French has the "credit" for that.
Early in the 20th century the French government vetoed the adoption of Esperanto as an official language of the UN, because at that time French was the de facto International Auxilliary Language, and therefore there was no need for any other.

Bruso:

sudanglo:
And the author also sees the process of 'simplification' as a natural one.

I've always wondered how people like the author explain how languages got to be (supposedly) non-simple in the first place.

Yes Bruso, this is one of the great mysteries about language, and one that seems to be hardly addressed at all by academic linguists.

The closest I have come to seeing a beginning of an explanation is in The Language Myth where the theory of grammar as use is posited.

I imagine that in the beginning the scope of human language was relatively limited and the chaotic grammatical features, that many languages still retain, were not seen as imposing any particular burden. (If you only have 100 verbs, it's not a big deal if they are all irregular.)

As the languages grew, new bits were just tacked on to what was already established without too much concern about consistency or for any unwieldy complexity. The important thing was communication, and streamlining or rationalising the previous grammar would be seen as too disruptive.

You can imagine the howls of protest about invalidating established usage and the destruction of cultural heritage if any attempt were made now to revise English Spelling.

Zamenhof understood perfectly well that, if you want a language with a high degree of irregularity and without burdensome complexity, the only way of achieving this was to start from scratch.

I should say that with regard to English, that, in some areas, this business of just tacking on stuff has worked rather well - which is not to recommend it as desirable generally - and as an example I would cite the subtlety of the various ways English has about talking about the future.

Further to Sudanglo's theory I'd say languages pretty much always prefer to get more complicated. Foreign concepts and loan words add a whole bunch as they're imperfectly integrated (how does an English person pluralise ninja? Or gateau?). Slang and regionalisms tend to more complicated (the tag question "innit?" is "is not it?") and conceptual gaps are filled in more and more standardised ways (as, yes, the lack of a real English future tense has led to a whole range of methods to make up for the lack using auxiliary verbs).

There's a couple of ways languages are simplified; foreigners become common or prestigious speakers of it (this is the way English lost most of its complicated irregular plurals) or it starts to become written (where the complicated and confuddled mouth noises have to become writeable, and this sets a standard. Writing might be more formal than spoken language, but it's almost always grammatically simpler and more logical).

mjhinds57:

nornen:

robbkvasnak:English may not have a lot of declinations or grammatical gender (at least as expressed by articles) but - believe me! - it is very complex...

{{OFF TOP}} Completely off-topic but you made me wonder about the word "declination". Is this a synonym for "declension" or is this the American English variant?

Good observation. When I check the dictionary, the two words are unrelated with the very same meanings that you previously presumed. Granted, I would have made the same "mistake" as robbkvasnak as I did not realize that these were two separate words.

My hypothesis is that since English does not have declension, we don't ever really talk about it. Thus, when we hear the word "declension" for the first time, it sounds like "declination" so we register a new, separate meaning to the word that we have heard before and already know how to spell.

So in short, yes, "declination" is now a variant of "declension" because robbkvasnak and I are in the same community that uses this word in a non-standard way. (Bring us back around to some of the things the article was talking about maybe, lol)

Since "decline" is the verbs, "declension" and "declination" both seem like fine abstract nouns to me; but the latter is actually closer to the latin "declinatio". ^_^ But yeah, few English people are gonna know what it means. Even among the English teachers where I work, who are well aware of linguistic jargon generally, declension is not something they know.

Okay, so I made a mistake with the word "declension' - probably due to the fact that I use several languages every day and English is, indeed, very complicated. Get over it and let's talk about the meaning and not the minor vocabulary confusion.
My point is/was that English is not less complicated simply due to the fact that there are fewer morphological changes at the end of words to indicate their (the words' ) meaning in a sentence - be it a declension or a conjugation or else wise. Languages are not "simple" or "complex" due to whether they are analytic or synthetic, whether there are inflections or not. Besides that, languages are always changing, so the expression 'you better....' is replacing 'you'd better'(you had better), using the word "better" in a verbal position, so that one day even the most prescriptive grammarian will simple accept "better" as a verb (since we use that system of grammatical terminology). This is in respect to SAE (Standard American English) - I do not know how this is panning out in the Englishes of other countries and regions.

sudanglo:
I imagine that in the beginning the scope of human language was relatively limited and the chaotic grammatical features, that many languages still retain, were not seen as imposing any particular burden. (If you only have 100 verbs, it's not a big deal if they are all irregular.)

As the languages grew, new bits were just tacked on to what was already established without too much concern about consistency or for any unwieldy complexity. The important thing was communication, and streamlining or rationalising the previous grammar would be seen as too disruptive.

Where I'm from a fella can say, "Eader ya bes on dh right road or ya bain't" an' eez awl bes' kin' 'cause neder soul wrote ihn down, but oI 'low's ya never dh loik twigged english'd be after bringin up 'n such a packin state as dat.

Sudanglo, you might be the only one here who has a prayer of getting that, but the point is that when left be, entropy seems to be the rule. In my historical linguistic studies I have always been completely amazed at how complicated the languages get the farther we go into antiquity. You would figure the ancients would be simpler than us fancy moderns. I was forever inclined to doubt the etymological research of my seniors but was constantly hit with the fact that every single less developed, less modern culture spoke languages with grammars that I could only dream of gripping. It is true that the linguistic geniuses are the children.. like Nicaraguan sign language.. the kids are amazing and the grown ups are rather dull. But adults got the clout.

sudanglo:You can imagine the howls of protest about invalidating established usage and the destruction of cultural heritage if any attempt were made now to revise English Spelling.

Yep, in those days there was no spelling, and nobody keeping tabs on the irregular complications, right?

sudanglo:I should say that with regard to English, that, in some areas, this business of just tacking on stuff has worked rather well - which is not to recommend it as desirable generally - and as an example I would cite the subtlety of the various ways English has about talking about the future.

Yep, English has done well not just because the Yanks got cash.. the language is very malleable and accepting of new words.. irregular foreign plurals, spellings etc... English will take it all and hammer it out.. not all langs can do that.

The lack of future tense is kinda general across the Germanic languages and appears to be the result of a particular world view.. Yggdrasil and all that, the future was shaped by the present and the past, thus it is spoken of with present and past tenses. Kinda cool. Reminds me of how western sign languages show the future as a gesture IN FRONT of the signer as they imagine they are heading INTO the future, but other deaf cultures, particularly in the South Pacific sign the future BEHIND them. The past is before them.

vejktoro:Yep, English has done well not just because the Yanks got cash.. the language is very malleable and accepting of new words.. irregular foreign plurals, spellings etc... English will take it all and hammer it out.. not all langs can do that.

Certainly, it is not just due to the English language as such, although a structurally somewhat analytic language like English can perhaps more easily accept forms than more rigidly synthetic or agglutinative languages. However, I think it is also due somewhat due to attitude. I am not a fluent French speaker, but I think that language could adopt and adapt more "foreign" forms than it does. But the Académie française goes ballistic, as do some language purists. On the other hand, native anglophones as peoples seem to be much more willing to accept borrowings in the first place, albeit that the language requires fewer modifications.

Concerning Esperanto, Rule 15 of the Sixteen Rules encompasses acceptance of otherwise unassimilated terms, but I think one of the geniuses of the language is that many new words do not need to be adopted as such, as many of them can be supplied by Fundamenta wordbuilding. (Of course, there are two matters: some composite words can become so complex that they become puzzles to be decoded rather than aids to communication, and items or concepts to be used may not readily be accessible by wordbuilding.)

bartlett22183:

vejktoro:Yep, English has done well not just because the Yanks got cash.. the language is very malleable and accepting of new words.. irregular foreign plurals, spellings etc... English will take it all and hammer it out.. not all langs can do that.

Certainly, it is not just due to the English language as such, although a structurally somewhat analytic language like English can perhaps more easily accept forms than more rigidly synthetic or agglutinative languages. However, I think it is also due somewhat due to attitude. I am not a fluent French speaker, but I think that language could adopt and adapt more "foreign" forms than it does. But the Académie française goes ballistic, as do some language purists. On the other hand, native anglophones as peoples seem to be much more willing to accept borrowings in the first place, albeit that the language requires fewer modifications.

Concerning Esperanto, Rule 15 of the Sixteen Rules encompasses acceptance of otherwise unassimilated terms, but I think one of the geniuses of the language is that many new words do not need to be adopted as such, as many of them can be supplied by Fundamenta wordbuilding. (Of course, there are two matters: some composite words can become so complex that they become puzzles to be decoded rather than aids to communication, and items or concepts to be used may not readily be accessible by wordbuilding.)

I suppose as native English speakers its hard for us to notice just how many foreign words we have incorporated. Now things seem to be working the opposite way: other languages are incorporating English terms for new technology. Esperanto seems to be fairly accepting of English words when there isn't already a sufficient esperantigo, such as with "duvet", which translates as "kovrilsako" or "lanugajxo", both which do a better job of describing the thing than "duvet" does.

Also:

"Do you know what a duvet is?…It’s a blanket. Just a blanket. Now why do guys like you and me know what a duvet is? Is this essential to our survival, in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word? No. What are we then?…We are consumers. We’re the byproducts of a lifestyle obsession." - Tyler Durden

Leke:If China get to become the world's largest economy it might just get to call some of the shots. Speaking English only serves to strengthen the economy of English speaking areas, so perhaps The Chinese might suggest the more neutral and proven groundwork of Esperanto for communication and international commerce.

I think the most likely future of Esperanto is that it will carry on exactly like it is today: spoken by an interested, and/or idealistic minority, yet within that community quite vibrant and dynamic.

However, what Leke mentions is what I think is the only real chance for Esperanto to burst forth on the world scene in a heretofore unprecedented way. If the Chinese government got behind Esperanto in a very major way: like, requiring it in school from an early age- it would be a complete game changer. And the interesting thing, is that I believe it is possible. Not likely, but possible. The Chinese government, if they decide they want an alternative to a lingua franca that is not English, that is simple, and can be used to support scientific, technical, and commercial communication between speakers of the many different dialects of Chinese, and with the world at large, might just make Esperanto an official language. Two years of nation-wide Esperanto instruction in school would result in a vast number of people who not only *could* use it, but *would* use it in daily life when presented with situations where their dialects/languages are not mutually comprehensible (a Mandarin speaker and a Tibetan or Uigher speaker, for example), as well as offering the benefit of paving the way for students to master more difficult languages Western such as English. As it stands now, the government has attempted to make Mandarin that lingua franca, but with only partial success. It's not well accepted by many minorities, whereas Esperanto would be a politically neutral alternative, perhaps more palatable to many non-Han Chinese. Esperanto offers a lot of benefits to China, with very few drawbacks, so it just might happen.

This is an interesting point. I would be interested in the responses of any Chinese participants (of whom there are several) here in lernu! I am not familiar these days with the sponsorship and, if any, governmental support, of El Popola Ĉinio, but if the Chinese government would choose to promulgate Esperanto, the world would most definitely have to sit up and take notice. I would consider it a good idea.