Mesaĝoj: 40
Lingvo: English
sudanglo (Montri la profilon) 2011-marto-22 11:45:18
I have given a reply, Dbis, to your Esperanto thread.
If we are talking about Gode's language project, even the inventor didn't see it as more than being used largely in written texts for scientific use.
Detractors of Esperanto like to say that nobody speaks it (despite all the evidence to the contrary). I imagine this is true in spades with regard to Interlingua.
In the older versions of Skype you used to be able to search any particular city to find people who had registered with Esperanto as their language.
Unfortunately, this was dropped in the newer version. However it is still not so difficult to find other Skype users to have conversations in Esperanto with.
The chance of this with Interlingua, I would think about zero.
If we are talking about Gode's language project, even the inventor didn't see it as more than being used largely in written texts for scientific use.
Detractors of Esperanto like to say that nobody speaks it (despite all the evidence to the contrary). I imagine this is true in spades with regard to Interlingua.
In the older versions of Skype you used to be able to search any particular city to find people who had registered with Esperanto as their language.
Unfortunately, this was dropped in the newer version. However it is still not so difficult to find other Skype users to have conversations in Esperanto with.
The chance of this with Interlingua, I would think about zero.
ceigered (Montri la profilon) 2011-marto-22 13:20:22
Well, it's not like Interlingua speakers don't exist. But if we were to use an EO anology with English, EO is English, and Interlingua is Welsh. Just divide by a whole lot of numbers 
(actually Welsh might be a bit too much still, not so much because Interlingua's doing badly (by conlang standards) but because Welsh is doing rather well now isn't it?)
Spanish, and then EO, those two in that order will be the easiest to find speakers of. A potential speaker of Interlingua should know that they'll be dealing with a tighter community, thus having more attention drawn to them by merely participating, and being in "closer proximity" with people they may or may not like, as with many small language-driven communities.
(actually Welsh might be a bit too much still, not so much because Interlingua's doing badly (by conlang standards) but because Welsh is doing rather well now isn't it?)Spanish, and then EO, those two in that order will be the easiest to find speakers of. A potential speaker of Interlingua should know that they'll be dealing with a tighter community, thus having more attention drawn to them by merely participating, and being in "closer proximity" with people they may or may not like, as with many small language-driven communities.
sudanglo (Montri la profilon) 2011-marto-22 22:01:07
The analogy doesn't work Ceiger. Not because the numbers are wrong, but because Welsh is actually spoken, though of course there are plenty people in Wales who don't speak Welsh.
As I said before you must distinguish between a language and a language project.
It is not enough to invent some idea for a language. It doesn't then automatically become a language.
Languages depend on a social consensus - on there being a community who agree on meaning and what counts as being well-formed in the language. This doesn't happen overnight. It takes years and depends on a firm foundation of usage.
As I said before you must distinguish between a language and a language project.
It is not enough to invent some idea for a language. It doesn't then automatically become a language.
Languages depend on a social consensus - on there being a community who agree on meaning and what counts as being well-formed in the language. This doesn't happen overnight. It takes years and depends on a firm foundation of usage.
KittyCat711 (Montri la profilon) 2011-marto-23 03:03:37
sudanglo:I don't know the numbers (I think they are pretty small) who speak Interlingua, but they do have small conferences in Europe, just like Esperanto. I can't find the YouTube link right now, but I did find a rather annoying one with cats if you would like to peruse it here.There were 274 hits when I searched YouTube for Interlingua, and 6720 hits for Esperanto.
As I said before you must distinguish between a language and a language project.
It is not enough to invent some idea for a language. It doesn't then automatically become a language.
Languages depend on a social consensus - on there being a community who agree on meaning and what counts as being well-formed in the language. This doesn't happen overnight. It takes years and depends on a firm foundation of usage.
Anyhow, I have been lurking on this forum for sometime now, and I have noticed that you really don't care for other conlangs. Why? I am genuinely curious.
dbiswinner (Montri la profilon) 2011-marto-23 05:40:04
I don't want to discriminate against other conlangs, but I do think that there is some sentiment that Esperanto is the superior conlanguage. I believe it is, anyway, and there is a good argument for it: as far as auxiliary languages go, Esperanto pretty much "won." Correct me if I'm wrong, but it is the only conlang formally recognized as a living language. It has the largest body of literature. And there are people who speak it in nearly every country, albeit in small numbers. It will almost certainly never be the universal second language Zamenhof envisioned, but it does appear to be gaining speakers relatively quickly.
Not to say the other language are useless; I can certainly see the advantage of Interlingua, particularly for someone of a non-Western linguistic background. It could be a great foundation for learning a natural Latinida (though not so much for us of a Western language), particularly for literacy. Slovio could probably serve a similar purpose for learning a natural Slovak language, or perhaps for tourists to have a little bit more to go on than just a phrasebook alone.
Daniel,
Sin duda, español será muy difícil lengua aprender bien, pero soy muy ambicioso, y tengo mucha tiempo para apenderlo. I know that I'll make lots of mistakes (for example, I never learned proper adverb placement. is it supposed to follow the verb? what about adverbs that modify an adjective?), but I am convinced in my desire to learn and speak it well. After all, it should be my duty as an American to learn my country's second language, yes? And it is a beautiful language to the ear.
Not to say the other language are useless; I can certainly see the advantage of Interlingua, particularly for someone of a non-Western linguistic background. It could be a great foundation for learning a natural Latinida (though not so much for us of a Western language), particularly for literacy. Slovio could probably serve a similar purpose for learning a natural Slovak language, or perhaps for tourists to have a little bit more to go on than just a phrasebook alone.
Daniel,
Sin duda, español será muy difícil lengua aprender bien, pero soy muy ambicioso, y tengo mucha tiempo para apenderlo. I know that I'll make lots of mistakes (for example, I never learned proper adverb placement. is it supposed to follow the verb? what about adverbs that modify an adjective?), but I am convinced in my desire to learn and speak it well. After all, it should be my duty as an American to learn my country's second language, yes? And it is a beautiful language to the ear.
razlem (Montri la profilon) 2011-marto-23 05:58:58
dbiswinner:Correct me if I'm wrong, but it is the only conlang formally recognized as a living language.Citation requested.
ceigered (Montri la profilon) 2011-marto-23 06:48:32
@Dbiswinner:
I'd agree that Esperanto practically takes the "living language" title, or is the best candidate out of all conlangs (there may be other valid candidiates, thus why I use "best" and not the only one
). However I don't know if there is a formal source for that, e.g. if the UN have some thing listing "active languages" or whatnot.
RE Slovio, well, Slovio is somewhat discriminated against in the panslavic conlanging scene, since it's not very useful for panslavic purposes as it uses alien grammar when none is needed, even for non-slavic speakers, a more slavic grammar is better. I would recommend to those hunting down stuff about Slovio to instead look up Slovianski, Slovioski, Interslav(ic) etc, since they are now being more or less merged into something much more natural and authentic, while being easier.
Who knows though if it will take of (I hope so just for fun's sake); with Slovake.eu online, maybe we'll see even more of us westerners speaking "slave" (and no, I'm not meaning slave in English!)
I'd agree that Esperanto practically takes the "living language" title, or is the best candidate out of all conlangs (there may be other valid candidiates, thus why I use "best" and not the only one
). However I don't know if there is a formal source for that, e.g. if the UN have some thing listing "active languages" or whatnot.RE Slovio, well, Slovio is somewhat discriminated against in the panslavic conlanging scene, since it's not very useful for panslavic purposes as it uses alien grammar when none is needed, even for non-slavic speakers, a more slavic grammar is better. I would recommend to those hunting down stuff about Slovio to instead look up Slovianski, Slovioski, Interslav(ic) etc, since they are now being more or less merged into something much more natural and authentic, while being easier.
Who knows though if it will take of (I hope so just for fun's sake); with Slovake.eu online, maybe we'll see even more of us westerners speaking "slave"
(and no, I'm not meaning slave in English!) sudanglo (Montri la profilon) 2011-marto-23 11:53:34
Dbis, the Esperantist position isn't exactly that we feel that Esperanto is superior (on structural or other grounds), it is rather that none of the other conlang projects appear to have made any substantial progress towards the point where they might be reasonably be awarded the term language.
To build a language out of an idea for a language takes a lot of work, and we Esperantists have been beavering away for 120 years.
So, I think that most Esperantists would feel that to refer to these conlang projects as though they were languages is both unrealistic and disrespectful to the achievements of the Esperanto speaking community.
I think you are probably right in asessing Esperanto as entering an new golden age as regards the number of new learners, since the Internet has made the language so accessible.
However without the previous work of Esperantists the conditions wouldn't be in place to nourish this growth. There would be no online grammars, or dictionaries with citations, or searchable corpuses, or podcasts, downloadable literature, You-tube song videos, calendars of events, pasporta servo, Skypeable contacts and so on.
To build a language out of an idea for a language takes a lot of work, and we Esperantists have been beavering away for 120 years.
So, I think that most Esperantists would feel that to refer to these conlang projects as though they were languages is both unrealistic and disrespectful to the achievements of the Esperanto speaking community.
I think you are probably right in asessing Esperanto as entering an new golden age as regards the number of new learners, since the Internet has made the language so accessible.
However without the previous work of Esperantists the conditions wouldn't be in place to nourish this growth. There would be no online grammars, or dictionaries with citations, or searchable corpuses, or podcasts, downloadable literature, You-tube song videos, calendars of events, pasporta servo, Skypeable contacts and so on.
ceigered (Montri la profilon) 2011-marto-23 12:12:09
sudanglo:So, I think that most Esperantists would feel that to refer to these conlang projects as though they were languages is both unrealistic and disrespectful to the achievements of the Esperanto speaking community.Well that's a bit dramatic... Perhaps it's offensive to make the EO community seem so thin-skinned
I think in actual reality the only thing that annoys (an annoyance, not disrespectful conduct) the EO community as a whole is hearing "This language is X times better than EO and far more suited for the international language", or hearing about the latest Esperantido that's gonna "take the world by storm" (and never does). I *don't* think the average Espearntist really *cares* about whether something's a language or not, and probably refer to things like Interlingua as languages.
But to hear constantly "EO SUCKS THIS LANGUAGE CALLED MONDOGLOBOLANGLINGSPEAKNESS IS SOOOO MUCH BETTER AND WE ONLY HAVE -0.55553 SPEAKERS RIGHT NOW BUT WE'RE GONNA WIN NA NA NA NA NA", well, that's an irritation and a half. None the less, for those who do that, they're not being mannerless pigs, they're just being arses
T0dd (Montri la profilon) 2011-marto-23 13:00:08
sudanglo:Dbis, the Esperantist position isn't exactly that we feel that Esperanto is superior (on structural or other grounds), it is rather that none of the other conlang projects appear to have made any substantial progress towards the point where they might be reasonably be awarded the term language.I don't agree with this at all. As far as I'm concerned, the only meaningful boundary between project and language is whether people actually learn it and use it. Interlingua has been around for over half a century, and people learn it and use it, so it's a language. If anyone has information to the contrary, I'd be interested in seeing it. We might quibble about how many people have to learn and use it before something counts as a language, but I've yet to hear any remotely persuasive argument that Interlingua doesn't have enough speakers to have passed that threshold, whatever it is.
To build a language out of an idea for a language takes a lot of work, and we Esperantists have been beavering away for 120 years.
So, I think that most Esperantists would feel that to refer to these conlang projects as though they were languages is both unrealistic and disrespectful to the achievements of the Esperanto speaking community.
Yes, it takes a lot of work to get a project to the point of being a language. Much of that work is about generating enough content to give people a reason to learn the language. In the case of Interlingua, there is apparently enough content to have succeeded at some level, and new content is still being generated. (see these recent publications for example). I regard it as disrespectful and even provocative to ignore all this and declare that Interlingua isn't a language because it hasn't met some standard that has yet to be clearly stated.
The term "language" isn't "awarded". It's not a trophy. A language is a system of communication that has semantics, syntax, a lexicon, and speakers. Some languages are no doubt more robust than others, in virtue of having more speakers and resources. And there are indeed plenty of language projects that haven't made it past the project stage--and more in the making all the time. Interlingua isn't one of those.