Повідомлення: 50
Мова: English
Vestitor (Переглянути профіль) 24 липня 2015 р. 23:32:46
Internet activity, such as signing up to a forum or course is no guarantee of a true count.
Tempodivalse (Переглянути профіль) 24 липня 2015 р. 23:32:53
seveer:I find this all very interesting but I am still curious about the original topic. Is there really nobody on these forums with any data on the trends in the number of Esperanto users in the last, say, twenty years? I would like to know if this number is growing in (a) nominal terms and (b) as a fraction of the population. No links? Old threads on this?It is notoriously difficult to provide any kind of accurate information about the number of Esperanto speakers, due primarily to the fact they're spread all across the globe, and not really included on most governments' censuses (censi?). Plausible estimates on the number of EO speakers over the past quarter century have varied from 100k to 2 million.
So for most of Esperanto's history, the only easily available metrics for such calculations was the volume of literature produced. If the volume increases, it stands to reason that the number of speakers has increased.
In the Internet age, we can also compare the size of Esperantonet to other languages' Web presence. So for example, if language X has 2 million speakers, and Esperanto has a similar Web presence as X, and (crucial point!) both languages' speakers have approximately equal Internet access/use, then Esperanto probably has around 2 million speakers also.
This is all hopelessly unsystematic, though.
seveer (Переглянути профіль) 24 липня 2015 р. 23:56:25
Vestitor:I think the answer to the question is common knowledge by now.OK...
Vestitor:It's not possible.I'm glad you aren't running NASA.
Vestitor:How can it be possible to count or even estimate Esperanto 'speakers' in the way this is done with other languages (usually by taking base population stats and making extrapolations)?This would strike me as entirely made-up if it weren't so hopelessly vague as to contain no information. Do you have some kind of reference to these methodologies? I have some background in statistics, although this is not my specialty, and I can tell you that they do things bordering on the magical. Believe me, it is possible. It is probably merely not lucrative. Also, "common knowledge" is a euphemism for "ignorance" in the sciences.
Vestitor (Переглянути профіль) 25 липня 2015 р. 00:09:41
Common knowledge is not a euphemism for scientific ignorance, it refers to people who ask questions that have been asked a hundred thousand times to which the answer is always more-or-less the same.
seveer (Переглянути профіль) 25 липня 2015 р. 00:10:55
Tempodivalse:[...] This is all hopelessly unsystematic, though.Interesting info, thanks. But, far from the official (political) purposes of censuses, a great deal of the statistics you see in the news (and academic journals, depending on the discipline) are from small but statistically significant samples of populations from non-self-selected surveys... [Actually, this is usually the BEST case scenario where certain alopecoid "news" agencies are concerned] It really isn't that big of a deal. Sure, getting a really low p value (high degree of confidence) might be difficult... but this is not a vaccine study, just an estimate of language speakers. I would not be surprised if Esperanto was amenable to precisely the same methods used for estimating natural language use, just that studying Esperanto is widely considered a fool's errand so no funding or prestige motivates a study. Even if other studies are using "official" numbers, do the numbers from the politburo or a banana republic represent an increase in statistical certainty compared to a study administered by field researchers?
Suzumiya (Переглянути профіль) 25 липня 2015 р. 00:27:32
Vestitor:Which is why I believe a kid should not be taught Esperanto and it should not be the mother tongue of anyone. People's mother tongues will already influence Esperanto, especially at a syntactical level, having it as your mother tongue where habits are a lot harder to kill because you learned to speak like the person who taught you and that’s embedded in your brain, will make things uglier and we’ll see even more variations. Esperanto is supposed to be an auxiliary language, not the native language of someone. Of course, I doubt there's any Esperanto monolingual speaker and undoubtedly their other mother tongue will always be stronger due to the place they’re raised in, plus they receive education in that language and mostly interact in that language, not in Esperanto.
He says he never learned to write Esperanto, until now, and that in his opinion people who learn it later tend to write it better. Probably because most people learn and work with Esperanto in written form. He also says his father had taught him mistakes - in using e.g. accusative -n - and they are hard to get rid of.
It seems to me that with varying levels of experience and usage - since the idea that everyone will learn and use Esperanto to grammatical perfection is patently wrong - variation is inevitable. Also that through local dissemination of such variations, Esperanto as a spoken language would/will differ from country to country and within countries. In fact, very much like languages always do, even when they have a unifying body overseeing them.
seveer (Переглянути профіль) 25 липня 2015 р. 00:45:07
Vestitor:Common knowledge...it refers to people who ask questions that have been asked a hundred thousand times to which the answer is always more-or-less the same.Common knowledge is people!
It's made of people!
Tempodivalse (Переглянути профіль) 25 липня 2015 р. 01:09:02
The cynical view is that Esperantists aren't thrilled about knowing the precise number, because it could very well turn out to be much lower than anticipated or desired. If I learned that there were only 100k speakers in the world (the most conservative of the commonly cited estimates), I might be a bit disappointed. Well, I'd probably get over it soon.
There are various indications, at least, that the 2 million figure cited by Ethnologue is too high. As I recall, there was one statistician who calculated that, assuming that Esperantists were more or less evenly distributed across Eurasia and North America, there should be X Esperantists in his home city (I think it was Munich?), but the actual number of Esperantists there was much lower. If someone knows more about this story, please do expound.
seveer (Переглянути профіль) 25 липня 2015 р. 02:00:47
Tempodivalse:...someone probably would have done it by now...I'm sorry, I hate to be a troll...
But:
Every year thousands of PhD candidates defend a thesis on something no one else has ever done. Period. You don't get a PhD in the hard sciences for "reinterpreting the race relations in the Wizard of Oz." People are out there discovering brand new things every day, and most of them aren't even that obscure. They are just things people have been too lazy or ignorant to look at. "Someone would have..." is just a patent absurdity made more absurd by the fact that, in academic circles, Esperanto is a taboo/laughing-stock as a topic of study for historical/cultural/irrational reasons. The number of Esperanto speakers is not exactly the vaccine for malaria...
The number of Esperanto speakers is not a particularly important question, but, just look at human history and try and tell me that the statement "someone probably would have done it" is even close to having a 50/50 chance at being marginally, with reservations, in the running for maybe being interpreted as a candidate for possibly being accepted as not completely untrue. Every year we discover that we were exponentially more ignorant the year before.
Doesn't Espero mean hope?
Tempodivalse (Переглянути профіль) 25 липня 2015 р. 02:15:35
Doesn't Espero mean hope?I don't subscribe to "Esperanto idealism". I speak the language and enjoy it on its own merits; that's about it. Sorry to be a downer
Anyway, my previous comment was made in light of innumerable attempts to quantify the number of Esperanto speakers. People have definitely tried this before, and none of them have been able to demonstrate anything definitively.
And despite each having plausible methods, they all end up with wildly different conclusions (e.g., Ethnologue @ 2 million vs Simon Payne's research @ well under 100k).
This doesn't mean that the task is impossible in principle, it just means that, if there's a straightforward way to do it, lots of smart people over a long time have missed it.
And actually, it's hard to determine the number of speakers of any language. Nobody really knows how many people in the world speak English. And how do you define "speaker"? Native speaker? That won't do it for Esperanto. Proficient? How proficient? ...
And there is a further epistemic problem - even if we satisfactorily define "speaker", and hit upon the right number, how can we be reasonably sure we are right? How could we test it against other estimates?
For these reasons, I think we are left with only the ability to make educated guesses within a wide range.