Esperanto, why bother?

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Cainntear
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Re: Esperanto, why bother?

Postby Cainntear » Thu Mar 16, 2023 7:20 am

lowsocks wrote:
Cainntear wrote:Printers on mainland Europe eliminated diacritics from capitals because doing so saved them money and time. The Italian printers replaced the diacritics with apostrophes, a habit that survives to this day (eg E' instead of É). My recollection is that the elimination of accented upper-case started in France, but I imagine that there would have been a pushback on the commercial companies seen to be "degrading" the language by doing so.
I always assumed it was to avoid possible interference with the line above. (Or to avoid having to increase the space between the two lines, which could be unpleasant to the eye.) But I am no expert on typesetting.

The way I remember it (from reading about it, not alive at the time!) the reason people dropped accented upper-case was because upper-case letters are all in the minority, and while there was a reasonably high chance of having an accented miniscule in a text, there was often a low enough chance of having accented majuscules in a text that you would very often have none on a page.

However, one of the principles of typefaces is that you have enough characters in the set that you can realistically hope to print anything.

Tangent: the term "lower case" for minuscules and "upper case" for majuscules comes from the fact that movable type typefaces came in a two part box -- it was opened by shifting the top part of the box (the "upper case") further from the operator to provide access to the bottom part of the box (the "lower case").
The upper case deliberately had the less frequently used characters (capitals, punctuation, numbers) because these were statistically less common than miniscule letters, and the principle was that if it was further from the typesetter, it would take them longer to get to it and put it in the press. Miniscule is more common than majuscule, so the miniscules were in the lower case.

So, the French (IIRC) type foundries realised that their typefaces were dead slow to use, because they had to include multiple copies of Û É Ç etc -- even though there were lots of pages that had none of them, there was the possibility that some random page might need four or five És. This meant that the French typefaces have loads of additional characters, making them much more expensive to purchase and much slower to use that English and Dutch ones. The end result was noticeable difference in price between books written in French and books written in English. IIRC, it was the printers that made a decision to switch to the new typefaces with no capitals with diacritics, because it gave their books a competitive advantage over their competitors (lower price).

I think I've talked about this in the past and got shot back with the fact that French has capitals with accents.... yes, now. I don't know when French printers switched conventions, but I'm pretty certain I've seen French books with unaccented capitals... possibly only in my grandmother's collections -- she was a French teacher, but I don't really think it was restricted to her. (In fact, I think it was explicitly stated in my Scottish school that the unaccented capitals were a feature of print, and we had to include capitals in writing. I suspect that reversion to É etc was probably a combination of the advancement of technology reducing the time cost of having the larger set of glyphs and the Académie getting shirty as schoolkids were probably affected by the typing conventions.

Italian E' for example is used almost exclusively, having transferred from a mere printing convention to a feature of writing and typing, right through to today when it's typed on computers that way. If you try using É, you will be corrected to E' because it is has just become *that* common.
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Re: Esperanto, why bother?

Postby Cainntear » Thu Mar 16, 2023 7:37 am

Henkkles wrote:I don't think the problem has been diagnosed correctly in this thread. I think the original problem is having such a large phonemic inventory that writing it requires either diacritics or digraphs. A language that is supposed to be an easy and international language has no business having full sets of oppositions between voiced, alveolar and post-alveolar, and affricated sibilants. Basically only Polish has this entire set in Europe (to my knowledge) and globally having 8/8 of this set is incredibly rare.

It was something I was trying to point out, but maybe left it too far into my messages.

Yes, Esperanto is pretty hard to pronounce because it has too many distinctions.

Zamenhof was presumably into the leading theory that language tends towards degradation and that a low phoneme count would have made his language degenerate, hence his decision on a high phoneme count that made his language difficult to learn.

Compare Zamenhof's decisions for Esperanto with Lang's decisions for Toki Pona. She gave it 14 phonemes because (as far as I recall) she deliberately didn't want it to matter which accent the speaker used. Like, there is no R, because East Asian languages use R-like sounds as an allophone of an /l/ phoneme. Whether your language tells a T from a D based on a difference in voicing or aspiration doesn't matter, because Toki Pona only has T, not D (hence my Doggy Bone-a comment).
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Re: Esperanto, why bother?

Postby Henkkles » Thu Mar 16, 2023 8:18 am

Cainntear wrote:
Henkkles wrote:I don't think the problem has been diagnosed correctly in this thread. I think the original problem is having such a large phonemic inventory that writing it requires either diacritics or digraphs. A language that is supposed to be an easy and international language has no business having full sets of oppositions between voiced, alveolar and post-alveolar, and affricated sibilants. Basically only Polish has this entire set in Europe (to my knowledge) and globally having 8/8 of this set is incredibly rare.

It was something I was trying to point out, but maybe left it too far into my messages.

Yes, Esperanto is pretty hard to pronounce because it has too many distinctions.

Zamenhof was presumably into the leading theory that language tends towards degradation and that a low phoneme count would have made his language degenerate, hence his decision on a high phoneme count that made his language difficult to learn.

Compare Zamenhof's decisions for Esperanto with Lang's decisions for Toki Pona. She gave it 14 phonemes because (as far as I recall) she deliberately didn't want it to matter which accent the speaker used. Like, there is no R, because East Asian languages use R-like sounds as an allophone of an /l/ phoneme. Whether your language tells a T from a D based on a difference in voicing or aspiration doesn't matter, because Toki Pona only has T, not D (hence my Doggy Bone-a comment).

Okay I simply missed it in that case, but I think it bears repeating!

But that is interesting. I do remember that in the 1800s theories of degeneration were much in vogue. Are there any sources that go into Zamenhof's beliefs? Funnily enough trying to look for "Zamenhof" and "degeneration" I could only find ophthalmology papers about macular degeneration!
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Re: Esperanto, why bother?

Postby Cainntear » Thu Mar 16, 2023 9:21 am

Henkkles wrote:But that is interesting. I do remember that in the 1800s theories of degeneration were much in vogue. Are there any sources that go into Zamenhof's beliefs? Funnily enough trying to look for "Zamenhof" and "degeneration" I could only find ophthalmology papers about macular degeneration!

I'm running on the assumption that Zamenhof's writing on his decisions is going to be limited, as he would likely have been working towards what he was acculturated to believe about language, and likely would have been unaware that he was presuming that his cultural beliefs were right, despite an absence in corroborating evidence.
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Re: Esperanto, why bother?

Postby Sae » Thu Mar 16, 2023 9:46 am

I think Toki Pona does resolve some of Esperanto's goals better but of course with sacrifices, but then I don't think it is meant to be competitive and it's sacrifices were in aid of other purposes.

But I do like how it has approached its sounds and grammar, the grammar does feel kinda South East Asian, which given some of the links to Tok Pisin makes sense, but the good thing about the grammar of that part of the world is that it can be simpler, which I guess is the whole idea. But it does make for something quick to pick up and get started with given I have since tried and it has been a nice breath of fresh air.

However, the problem it has to get around is specificity, the approach is generally to establish context first, which you can do with a few descriptors and you may have to talk around something. This is where challenges might be found in Toki Pona, but the general attitude is that there is no "right" way as long as you're understood and your message is communicated.
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Re: Esperanto, why bother?

Postby Iversen » Thu Mar 16, 2023 10:15 am

I have just read a book about Volapük, which was invented by a Bavarian polyglot named Schleier in 1871, i.e. slightly later than Zamenhof's first sketches to Esperanto (1873) - but for some reason it got much more succes up through the 1880s (hundreds of clubs, books, magazines). However around 1890 its users began to quarrel about possible changes, and its speakers began to seep away until it was virtually stonedead around 2006 (with a short belated revival in the mid 20. century). And it was Esperanto that took up the role of Volapük, probably because it was much easier to learn and there were fewer alternatives around at the time (except a busload of variations on Volapük). The first book (literally called the first book, unua libro) about Esperanto was published in 1887, and the quarreling among the chief Volapükians really took off shortly after.

Esperanto could of course have been even easier to learn, but compared to Volapük it must have seemed like piece of cake. The book I read last night also tells that around the time Schleier invented his language there were around 1000 other language projects around (I don't know where that number comes from), though only some 250 were completed enough to be made public (that number can probably be documented). Maybe Esperanto just drowned between all those other projects, but then Volapük showed the world what kind of organization and zealous users it took to establish a language movement, and when it had died out Esperanto was ready to take over, using some of the same tactics.
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Re: Esperanto, why bother?

Postby Le Baron » Thu Mar 16, 2023 2:44 pm

Lisa wrote:Those esperanto characters ĉĝĥĵŝŭ are a problem.

ĥ at least has long given way to 'k'.
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Re: Esperanto, why bother?

Postby Henkkles » Thu Mar 16, 2023 3:05 pm

Iversen wrote:I have just read a book about Volapük, which was invented by a Bavarian polyglot named Schleier in 1871, i.e. slightly later than Zamenhof's first sketches to Esperanto (1873) - but for some reason it got much more succes up through the 1880s (hundreds of clubs, books, magazines). However around 1890 its users began to quarrel about possible changes, and its speakers began to seep away until it was virtually stonedead around 2006 (with a short belated revival in the mid 20. century). And it was Esperanto that took up the role of Volapük, probably because it was much easier to learn and there were fewer alternatives around at the time (except a busload of variations on Volapük). The first book (literally called the first book, unua libro) about Esperanto was published in 1887, and the quarreling among the chief Volapükians really took off shortly after.

Esperanto could of course have been even easier to learn, but compared to Volapük it must have seemed like piece of cake. The book I read last night also tells that around the time Schleier invented his language there were around 1000 other language projects around (I don't know where that number comes from), though only some 250 were completed enough to be made public (that number can probably be documented). Maybe Esperanto just drowned between all those other projects, but then Volapük showed the world what kind of organization and zealous users it took to establish a language movement, and when it had died out Esperanto was ready to take over, using some of the same tactics.

This spawned an interesting thought. This is probably why there is a certain "orthodoxy" to Esperanto, because opening something for "official amendments" opens the floodgates if you will, because every part of the language is essentially "made up". So once something starts changing, everyone wants to change something, leading to fragmentation and the eventual loss of momentum. This makes it even more unfortunate that the fundaments of Esperanto are so lacking imo.
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Re: Esperanto, why bother?

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Thu Mar 16, 2023 6:46 pm

Le Baron wrote:
jeff_lindqvist wrote:I'm pretty sure that one of my textbooks in the language had all the circumflexes + breves added by hand before it was printed.

Good lord! I pity the person who had to do that! :lol:


The book I'm thinking of is Ek! Självinstruerande lärobok i esperanto (this) - it was published in 1974, so there is a big possibility that it was written on a typewriter (hence the added accents). As soon as I find the book, I'll take a snapshot.
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Re: Esperanto, why bother?

Postby Factoid » Fri Mar 17, 2023 9:29 pm

golyplot wrote:
Factoid wrote:And no, most of the languages of eastern asia don't use chinese characters... thai people have got their own alphabet, as koreans do, japanese use three different alphabets, and only one of them is based in chinese characters, malagasy also use their own alphabet...


Korean doesn't use Chinese characters today, but it did in the 19th century when our hypothetical alt!Zamenhof would be designing his "universal" language. Same with Vietnamese. And Japanese still uses Chinese characters even today. All that is beside the various languages using Chinese characters in China proper, which is almost like Europe in diversity just by itself (especially historically).


Do you really think the chinese writing is easy to learn?
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