When I decided to Learn Esperanto I looked at All the Other Constructed Languages.

Today I saw a new one, Fasile
Fasile Was Advertising on Lernu ( Through Google) I'm not going to learn It, I need to be fluent in Eo First,

Fasile Link

It actually bothers me that you have to give your e-mail to get the "Course"

And Exactly How does He think He can Carry this language to the world?

What do you think?

And who actually thinks these are Real Problems with EO?

Looking at the list I see that it raises more problems in some areas for fasile than Esperanto.

It also bothers me too that you have to fill out a long form and give them everything short of a credit card number and a promise of your first born.

He also hangs himself by saying that Esperanto is mainly based in French and Eurocentric and says Fasile is worldwide.. BUT STATES that a good chunk is made of of ENGLISH.

Also:
" Want to discover secrets unkown by many linguists?" ← Sounds like a cult to me.

I do agree with a few points. Mainly that Esperanto does seem to be stuck in the past and doesn't move much.
I've read up a on a few proposes that have been rejected for what I feel are silly reasons.
"This word sounds close to that word. REJECTED" yet we have antaŭ and ankaŭ (mainly for gi or ri to be another form of 'it' for something of unspecified sex.)

Also the seeming rejection of -iĉ and making Esperanto gender neutral. (That's the one that really bugs me. If there is any 'movement' I support is the use of -iĉ and neutral gendering words...) I don't think I've read any (good) arguments as to, why not. Other than learning yet another suffix will make people's brains explode or something. (Think what I did read wandered off about words being innately male and never seemed to get back on track.)

That's a hilarious site. It looks more like a self-help book launch site (e.g. "How you can have success with women!") than a language site.

And he has tried to make it 'easier' than Esperanto, but, IMHO, he's tackled the wrong aspects of the language. It still has hard to pronounce letters and clusters for non-europeans, it makes it easier by 'getting rid of exotic letters' which means nothing, you're still gonna have to learn new pronunciations for existing latin letters if your first language doesn't have the same sounds as fasile.

Additionally, there's still reliance on final vowels carrying meaning which, while it's a smart idea, it's not entirely practical, especially if you come from one of many linguistic backgrounds where reducing vowels is the norm.

Overall, for me at least, it has taken the non important aspects of Esperanto, made them a bit easier, while leaving the bits which were hard or unnecessary and built upon them. And in some cases it's taken the easy parts of EO and made them harder. The language also seems biased toward English speakers in a bad way - I say 'in a bad way' because it's not like English enough to be useful to the odd billion or so people who know a bit of it.

It could be safe to say I just don't like it. If the author had presented it a bit differently instead of advertising it like some dodgy mail-order fitness DVD set, I would be a lot more sympathetic

IMHO there are things that make EO unideal for universal international communication (one of the best for good for technical writing though), and while the Fasile website does point out a few, it doesn't really address them well. Lingua Franca Nova does a much better job than Fasile of addressing the issues the author outlined.

A more analytical, pidgin/chinese grammar approach would have been better. I think I got a workable set down to 3 vowels, 8 consonants, and about 182 one syllable words where the ending can be either N or nothing (the more syllables, the more possible words - I think with 4 syllables being the limit you can have up to 1,262 possible words). Fasile, however, has an unnecessary amount of sounds for international communication (Esperanto too, but because of the sizable community it's no problem - and EO was also created in circumstances where this wasn't quite avoidable, as Zamenhoff did not have the internet to help his language creation)

In response to how he thinks he can carry the language to the world - I'm not actually sure. He mentioned an 'alpha version', maybe a proper site will be made then?

Argh Sorry for the essay, this got me typing too much.

ceigered:
A more analytical, pidgin/chinese grammar approach would have been better. I think I got a workable set down to 3 vowels, 8 consonants, and about 182 one syllable words where the ending can be either N or nothing (the more syllables, the more possible words - I think with 4 syllables being the limit you can have up to 1,262 possible words).

This may be a little off-topic from the thread (maybe we can just chat via email), but I'm just curious, what are the 3 vowels and 8 consonants that you mention? I remember you mentioning you were creating conlangs, and I wonder if you were creating any that were meant to be easier to pronounce than EO.

I myself have wondered about what's the minimum set of consonants and vowels that would allow a large number of distinct of syllables, and yet be easily pronounceable by most of the world. On the extreme end of phonemic simplicity, I've seen languages like Japanese (and to some extent, Mandarin even when tones are considered) that contain an enormous number of homophones due to the limited number of possible syllables. But on the other extreme, we have languages like Russian, which allows consonant clusters which may be unusual for most foreigners, and Arabic, which contains some of the rarest consonants in the world. My feeling is an ideal universal language should be somewhere in between those extremes, in terms of phonetic inventory, and rules concerning phoneme clustering.

I'll PM you eikored85 about the sounds I was playing around with. And yes I am trying to make a conlang that's easier to pronounce than Esperanto, infact I think 75% of conlangs I start are, but finishing them off or getting some small details done is hard - probably thats the reason there are so many conlangs that are amazingly similar to each other or based off of Esperanto .

I think though that Japanese has so many homophones due to the Chinese influence on the language and various sound shifts - for some reason Japanese, unlike many western languages, doesn't discard many archaisms or useless vocabulary in my experience. I might be wrong though

ceigered:for some reason Japanese, unlike many western languages, doesn't discard many archaisms or useless vocabulary in my experience.

Do you mean: like in english ?

(see that)

outs:

ceigered:for some reason Japanese, unlike many western languages, doesn't discard many archaisms or useless vocabulary in my experience.

Do you mean: like in english ?

(see that)

Yeah you can add English to the list with Japanese

I received a spam e-mail in my mailbox about Fasile. Strike number one. I HATE spam, telemarketing calls, junk mail, annoying solicitors at my door, etc. However, just for fun, I checked out the website.

The English on the website was horrible. Strike two. If someone is going to write a website in the English language, it should be written by someone whose expertise is English. I see virtually no English errors on Lernu. Therefore, Lernu's website appears professionally made.

The information presented on the Fasile website was very much like an infomercial on TV - very pushy and like a sales pitch. Strike three (refer to strike one for more info). I never saw any website like that about Esperanto. On the contrary, Lernu is very inviting and user friendly, and not pushy about the merits of Esperanto.

The whole website of Fasile reminds me of a religious cult looking for new members. In my opinion, neither the language nor the website will have much success worldwide.

I have never been impressed with "sales pitches" that bash their "competetors" in order to make themselves appear superior, carrying on about what's wrong with the other guy's product and what's so great about theirs. Strike four. That is a very immature way of marketing a product.

I was not impressed. I'll stick with Esperanto.

Not only was the site so unprofessional as to appear to be some kind of a scam, but I also noticed that on the comparison table with Esperanto, they actually listed Fasile's professionalism as a strong point compared to Esperanto. Fasile has one very poorly designed website. Unfortunately, it seems that its creator also can pay for a lot of ad revenue, because I keep hearing about it.

If it looked like a good solution, I'd probably just dismiss it like I have all the other new wave internet auxlangs like Aiola/Ayola etc... I have even run across ones that are little more than a single PDF in English. Since this particular one is so push, though, I'm getting very annoyed with it.

EDIT:

Maybe it would be a good idea for someone to put up one of these "landing page" type sites about EO anyway, just to get all the foolish people who aren't persuaded by our normal methods of publicizing our little language.

Actually, I think it's kind of a good thing how he keeps emphasizing 'easier than Esperanto'. In this way he clearly points out that Esperanto is easier than English and a serious candidate to consider.