erinja:

Alkanadi:...I have a lot of faith in people to be discerning.

Wow. You look over the scope of world history and you see what masses of people have done based on encouragement from advertising or propaganda...

In history, information was centralized North Korean style. In the modern world, information is decentralized. If you give people free access to information, they will make good decisions.

Bruso:Sure, if you have to learn Devanagari just for that one word.

But for the research, students had to learn more than one word. Imagine that you have to learn thousands of words that look like this पक्षी or you have to learn thousands of words that are from a neo latin language. I won't be surprised if it required 200 times the effort.

Alkanadi:

Bruso:Sure, if you have to learn Devanagari just for that one word.

But for the research, students had to learn more than one word. Imagine that you have to learn thousands of words that look like this पक्षी or you have to learn thousands of words that are from a neo latin language. I won't be surprised if it required 200 times the effort.

You're confusing what words look like (in a script unfamiliar to you, and them) with what words sound like. Whilst I think it's true that scripts like the above are probably more difficult for achieving literacy, the example of how Turkey adopted a simpler alphabet shows it has nothing to do with the word forms themselves.

Vestitor:You're confusing what words look like... with what words sound like.

Am I confusing the two?

Alkanadi:In history, information was centralized North Korean style. In the modern world, information is decentralized. If you give people free access to information, they will make good decisions.

I don't think this is completely true. What does "in history" encompass? Information about what? Literacy was kept under wraps for a long time, but the truth is that many people with power were also not all that literate either. Shaping of official events and occurrences? For the majority in villages, up to at least the early 19th century, it likely didn't matter a jot anyway.
Prior to the 19th century there was much more 'local' knowledge or skills and crafts etc, distributed among those you might consider as 'disenfranchised'. Not too dissimilar to the mediaeval guild system, the modern world still locks away a lot of knowledge which is made available only in exchange for payment of one form or another. That's really payment for guidance.

In this internet age there is a lot of potential knowledge floating about, but has it really made everyone more discerning in their decisions, or more accurate thinkers, or better judges of events around them? There's a mountain of information demonstrating that e.g. the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is claptrap, but that doesn't stop hordes of people reading and believing it. Wide dissemination of scientific enlightenment hasn't wiped out superstition.

In this 'information age' how can it be possible for a large number of people to think that Donald Trump is their political saviour? I'm sorry to say that a great deal of thought and behaviour is still based upon emotion and tribalism and ideology and perhaps even ignorance when a person is positively drowning in information, which may be the most important point.
You don't necessarily need a mountain of information to learn something.

Alkanadi:In history, information was centralized North Korean style. In the modern world, information is decentralized. If you give people free access to information, they will make good decisions.

Information was never centralized. Word of mouth, rumor, newsletters - people did these things to spread information and it wasn't necessarily true. People still use those methods now, only it's online and it spreads faster than it did the old way.

If you had to learn thousands of words in devanagari script, it would not be 200 times harder than learning thousands of words in a Latin script. It all depends on how close the words are to languages that you speak. Obviously you would spend some time at the start to learn the script. However, the words themselves are what makes it hard, not the script. I would find "päällystakki" to be a harder word to learn than "پالتو" ["palto"] or than "ओवरकोट" ["ovarakot"]

Of course I'd need to learn the Persian form of Arabic script to learn a thousands words like پالتو, or learn devanagari to learn ओवरकोट, but Persian and Hindi are Indo-European languages, so the words are going to be much easier to memorize than Finnish words like "päällystakki", which are not Indo-European in origin. Given that I speak English and Esperanto, and therefore I already know "overcoat" and "palto", the words "ovarakot" and "palto" (simply in a different alphabet) are way easier than "päällystakki".

Alkanadi, here are many languages categorized by the difficulty to learn for English speakers. http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-...

As you can see, the languages in Category I require 575-600 hours of study in order to gain proficiency. Languages in Category V (the most difficult languages for native English speakers) require 2200 hours.

Even if we use Category V as our baseline, to say that Esperanto is 200 times easier would imply that proficiency can be gained in 11 hours. Does that sound right to you?

Esperanto is very regular, its script is an alphabet, its alphabet has one sound per letter, it has no grammatical gender, no tonal system, etc. I definitely believe that it is easier to learn than the vast majority of languages, potentially including all natural languages. But I doesn't seem at all feasible that a language could be 200 times easier than the "average" natural language, unless it goes the route of Toki Pona and intentionally leaves out what we could consider to be important features.

Now, I searched for the part of the study that suggested that Esperanto is 200 times easier, and it actually specified that the easiest language is "basic Esperanto", which was measured separately than Esperanto. That might be closer to the truth, but that's comparing a language subset against full languages.

Your link is definitely interesting, and I appreciate you sharing it. But, to echo erinja, it's not good for Esperanto to be promoted based on exaggerated benefits as opposed to its real ones, and I don't believe that "200 times easier" can be close to accurate.

zach404:...it's not good for Esperanto to be promoted based on exaggerated benefits as opposed to its real ones, and I don't believe that "200 times easier" can be close to accurate.

I certainly won't be telling anyone this fact because this study is very questionable. However, I am also open to the possibility that it may be true. We would have to know more about the experiment. Also, it should be peer reviewed and duplicated a few times in other labs.