Nord.pubWhy settle for an American dialect when you could be speaking a European made international language?
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bossitoGuys, it’s time to learn Esperanto.
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If I had to chose, I would rather speak Latin: amazing collection of work available to read from, and to discuss about.
But as others have mentioned English is not a US made language and they certainly do not own it. English comes from Britain but its rooted in old Germanic language. It’s also a mix of a few other languages (including my own French… which is also a mix btw).
maybe spanish as it has the most speakers around the world?
I could settle for Interlingua.
Yeah, let’s replace English with something European. Let’s use Cornish, it’s more European than English. *g*
The English most Europeans learn and try to speak and feel familiar with is made in the USA.
I (German) learned British English in school, but due to movies and online content I adapted more and more to the American variant. But still, teaching a significant number of people a whole new language with no real added value seems delusional to me.
The added value can literally be decided by decree. Make it official in the EU and off you go.
Esperanto is super Euro-centric, though, which can alienate people from Asia and other places. Esperanto did have something of a brief boom here in Japan, but the barrier to entry is also high since it shares no vocabulary (outside of some loans into Japanese and Korean, though some of those don’t retain the same meaning, and basically very few in Chinese from what I understand), has different grammatical structure, etc. Chinese is basically SOV like many European languages, from what I gather, but Japanese and Korean are generally SVO.
There’s also a whole high-context vs. low-context language issue.
“Countering a common criticism against Esperanto, the statistician Svend Nielsen has found no significant correlation between the number of Esperanto speakers and the similarity of a given national native language to Esperanto.”
Wikipedia describing the results of this paper: https://svendvnielsen.wordpress.com/2017/09/24/explaining-the-density-of-esperanto-speakers-with-language-and-politics/
In the context of this sub being Eurocentric is not really a disadvantage.
Yeah, I debated. The community is BuyFromEU but this would also have ripple effects elsewhere so I went for it.
English very little overlap with Japanese either. It’s just popular because the US had a huge influence on the country after dropping two nukes on it. English is still “cool” there, so of course people insert it all over, but that doesn’t mean the languages have a lot of overlap.
Its hard to choose, interlingua, esperanto, lingwa de planeta, ido, uropi, lingua franca nova.
Personally I think its better to develop an international sign language.
It’s much easier to learn as you dont need to learn new spellings or alphabets (the sign for “a” can also be greek alpha for instance), or germanic or slavic or latin roots, it is only actions added to your own local word, so literally verbal monoglots can speak to any other monoglot. No matter how thick their accent is.
Plus it would greatly expand the deaf communities international reach, would not exclude the deaf, and I like the idea of children learning an international auxiliary language that can also help the hard of hearing.
And if you’ve ever been in a loud bar or nightclub or restaurant in a foreign country in europe it would make ordering much easier. Obviously unfortunately it does somewhat exclude disabled people with reduced mobility and wouldn’t work on the phone, but we all have videocalls now and we shouldn’t be on the phone while driving anyway. Also it’s quite fun. I’ve started in French Sign Language (Elix app on ios app store) and am pushing to have lessons for my colleagues as we work in medical training and I think its nuts its not offered let alone encouraged or compulsory.
So I say we should develop Euro Sign Language.
I mean we all use the middle finger already, lets expand on that.
Hmmm if only there was a commonly known European language that everyone already used.
For real though I found it hilarious how everyone in the comments is discussing what could be used as a common language, while all speaking English.
The problem is that broken English doesn’t really fuels a European identity (it’s spoken everywhere) it only places us in a submission position in relation to US culture. And that’s why we go on reporting on Oscars or Grammys while completely ignoring the awards and artists of the country next door. We’re consumers of US English culture and that’s that. Feeding the US market..
While I find it admirable to promote the use of Esperanto I don’t think that many people want to start learning another language. It might work to garner a nerdish interest from people who love languages - which will contribute to the number of competent speakers. But otherwise it’s hard to convince people to learn a language you still can’t really use in your daily life.
And at the moment I can only give you marketing ideas that will attract fringe groups: Bad Herzberg in Germany is the ❤️ of Esperanto - a great place for hiking. You can even consider it a kind of pilgrimage. William Shatner aka Captain James T. Kirk played in a film that exclusively uses Esperanto. He holds the rights to the film too. You can see snippets of this film in Blade Trinity (and they had to pay Shatner a pretty penny to use it) and there’s also a short dialogue in Esperanto in this film…
The thing is that i don’t even want everyone to speak the same language. You know what, i’m actually kinda appreciative that most people don’t speak english fluently so at least they are spared by the mind-boggling mental illness that is called “american culture” and that we’re exposed to through the internet.
If it was only the internet.. US content dominates TVs, cinemas, newspapers and bookshops all over Europe. And in big part that domination is made so easy because we all invest millions of euros to teach our populations how to speak English. L
No. Make German and French the lingua franca.
pls, I’ll show you the exit
Oh the famous friendliness and open mind-ness of the Fediverse.. Legendary
The language where a woman is a female man? I mean, no natural language is perfect but probably there are better constructed ones.
That’s not true. There is a femine sufix, but that doesn’t equate to “feminine man”. There are also alternatives within Esperanto, by very far the most popular constructed language with an unmatched number of speakers and cultural production. Persecuted by Nazis, soviets or the Iranian Islamic gusrds, it’s also a language with an incredible history of resistance. Very ironic (and very telling) that you try to take it down with some woke nonsense.
If woman is vir (root of viro, man) + ino (feminine suffix) how do you call that?
That’s not a virtue of the language, it’s a virtue of the intention. If there had been Volapükists in those contexts they would have been persecuted too because they would have been perceived as dangerous idealists.
Ah, the sunk costs. No matter whether natural, constructed or programming language, the “prophets” lashing out at any criticism because it feels like an attack on all those hours already invested into learning it.
I call it what it is, a sufix. Most languages have them, you don’t translate them separately from the word. German texts would be unandarstable if that was the way translation worked.
And as a living language, contrary to all other artificial languages, there’s a woke pack in Esperanto if you really want to. The wonders of a regular language, reform is very easy to implement.
No language is neutral, they have a history and a cultural luggage. Esperanto speakers can be proud of theirs.
I know that you know that I know what a suffix is. Do you get the difference between the pair Mann-Frau and the hypotetical Mann-Männin or are you being intentionally obtuse?
Speakers of a self purported international constructed language should be proud of a good construction, hailing cultural bias as a pride thing is weird, specially when advertising the language as a transcultural bridge.
Männin as a creation of yours just to make a point sounds weird indeed,but if it was used as currently as Professorin you wouldn’t bat an eye while saying it.
My point is precisely that Esperanto is way past the “constructed language” phase, it’s a living language and with a rich European history. It’s also constructed at origin and very easy to learn, besides stateless, which makes it an ideal lingua-franca for Europe.
A fraction of the budget used to teach English would be needed and with better results.
What do you think “hypothetical” means?
I would definitely bat an eye if somebody came to me with that shit for a language they constructed following an “interna ideo” of universality, peace, and whatnot. I would bat the other eye if besides they came to me saying that a Männin that just had a baby becomes a Väterin, la padra, the fathress, i pateraina.
A language with letters no other language has, and a sound repertoire that offers no improvement over English (even if we reduce the target population to Europe given the community we are in), is far from ideal.
… once a critical mass of teachers is achieved, together with native populations big enough to enable linguistic immersion for new learners. Sold separately.