Esperanto, why bother?

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Re: Esperanto, why bother?

Postby Cainntear » Fri Mar 17, 2023 10:05 pm

Factoid wrote:
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?

I don't think that was ever golyplot's claim, though.

The claim was that if Zamenhof was Chinese, Zamenhof would have been predisposed to argue that the Chinese script was easier.

I think the point was basically that the claimed easiness of the script is not exactly backed by a rigorous justification.
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Re: Esperanto, why bother?

Postby Sae » Sat Mar 18, 2023 12:45 am

Cainntear wrote:
Factoid wrote:
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?

I don't think that was ever golyplot's claim, though.

The claim was that if Zamenhof was Chinese, Zamenhof would have been predisposed to argue that the Chinese script was easier.

I think the point was basically that the claimed easiness of the script is not exactly backed by a rigorous justification.


I feel like a Chinese Zamenhof would not agree. Even as a native speaker, it would be hard to argue that a script with 1000's of characters is easier than a script with 10's of characters.

Korea had a sister script to Chinese and their current writing system was invented to be simpler to improve literacy, which to me indicate they recognise it's not so easy to learn even for natives. And this was long before Zamonhof was about as Hangul was invented in the 1400s.

I feel like a Chinese Zamonhof whose goal would be to make things simpler to learn would recognise that Chinese script isn't easy. And China has alphabetic systems and did at the time Esperanto came about as China wasn't just made up of Han Chinese (especially during the time) and not all groups used the official Chinese script (and the ruling class of Manchu had their own alphabetic one).

And if he wouldn't go for one of the other writing systems present at the time (maybe for political reasons), I feel like he'd have more likely followed in the footsteps of Korea if his goal was to make things easier to learn, even if not directly, because that's what Korea ended up doing when they had a need for a simpler script, Zamonhof would problably also seek to simplify the script. Just the difference is Korea's goal was for literacy and Chinese Zamonhof's goal would be to make it easier for people in other countries to learn.

Although actual Zamonhof stuck closer to what he knew, but what he knew is pretty easy as far as scripts go. If Latin and its variations were as complex as the Chinese character system, I feel like actual Zamonhof would have tried to simplified the script.
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Re: Esperanto, why bother?

Postby golyplot » Sat Mar 18, 2023 1:42 am

Sae wrote:I feel like a Chinese Zamenhof would not agree. Even as a native speaker, it would be hard to argue that a script with 1000's of characters is easier than a script with 10's of characters.


It's not that hard to argue. There are many purported advantages of Chinese characters - they make it easier to see etymology even when pronunciation shifts over time, they let you guess the meaning of unknown words just from the characters, they are already in use in the major languages of the area and can theoretically convey meaning independent of language, etc.

If you're going to make everyone learn 900 roots anyway, you might as well pick 900 common characters to represent them, to give already literate people a head start. It's not that different from choosing Romance and Greek vocabulary to make the language more familiar to Europeans. Having roots and modifiers as separate characters rather than a jumble of letters smushed together arguably makes the grammar more transparent as well (though Chinese!Esperanto would probably lean a lot less heavily on inflection in the first place).
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Re: Esperanto, why bother?

Postby Sae » Sat Mar 18, 2023 3:13 am

golyplot wrote:
Sae wrote:I feel like a Chinese Zamenhof would not agree. Even as a native speaker, it would be hard to argue that a script with 1000's of characters is easier than a script with 10's of characters.


It's not that hard to argue. There are many purported advantages of Chinese characters - they make it easier to see etymology even when pronunciation shifts over time, they let you guess the meaning of unknown words just from the characters, they are already in use in the major languages of the area and can theoretically convey meaning independent of language, etc.

If you're going to make everyone learn 900 roots anyway, you might as well pick 900 common characters to represent them, to give already literate people a head start. It's not that different from choosing Romance and Greek vocabulary to make the language more familiar to Europeans. Having roots and modifiers as separate characters rather than a jumble of letters smushed together arguably makes the grammar more transparent as well (though Chinese!Esperanto would probably lean a lot less heavily on inflection in the first place).


There are some advantages to the Chinese script, sure, like consistent meaning between symbols between languages. But an alphabet is definitely easier to learn.

I feel like if you're creating an international language to connect multiple cultures with the design philosophy of "easy to learn" that your script is going to be biased to something as complicated as Chinese because not everybody you'd be aiming to connect would be people literate in that script. China and East Asian has more diversity in language and script than that, even at the time. Like your Northernmost territorities would probably resonate better with something similar to Manchu (who were the ruling class) because Mongolic script, Uyghur script and Oirate script are all related to Manchu script (Old Uyghur is the common ancestor). But you also have Tibet, you have Hmong & others and neighbours South of China that have their own systems.

I know Zamonhof had a European bias, but he didn't have a Polish or Russian bias. I feel like a Chinese equivalent wouldn't be biased to China, but Asia in general, or even just East Asia. And I think for that to work, he'd need a different writing system to stay compatible with the philiosophy/approach. Zamonhof was a polygot and used his knowledge of languages across multiple cultures, I think it's fair to say Chinese Zamonhof would do the same.
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Re: Esperanto, why bother?

Postby Cainntear » Sat Mar 18, 2023 7:48 am

Sae wrote:
Cainntear wrote:I don't think that was ever golyplot's claim, thou

The claim was that if Zamenhof was Chinese, Zamenhof would have been predisposed to argue that the Chinese script was easier.

I think the point was basically that the claimed easiness of the script is not exactly backed by a rigorous justification.


I feel like a Chinese Zamenhof would not agree. Even as a native speaker, it would be hard to argue that a script with 1000's of characters is easier than a script with 10's of characters.

I deliberately didn't include my own views in my post. The reason for that is that I myself thought golyplot was taking things far too far, but I was effectively dumbfounded by that, because I realised I was effectively projecting. I do not know Zamenhof and I can't speak for him, and golyplot wasn't trying to speak for anybody as far as I can see. In saying:
golyplot wrote:If Zamenhof had been born on the other side of the world, perhaps you'd be touting Chinese characters as the "obvious" neutral universal writing system now.

golyplot made no specific claim that he would have, but was basically sowing a realistic question that cannot be realistically answered. Notice how your response has frequent "I feel" qualifiers. While that's an honest approach (which I would have been likely to take), it is a tacit admission that you don't know. I was wrong in what I wrote because I misrepresented golyplot's point:
me wrote:The claim was that if Zamenhof was Chinese

...but there was no claim.

While I find the ensuing discussion interesting and productive. The thing that stopped me in my tracks was that the claim was no more that "we can't know what Zamenhof would have considered normal if born elsewhere", and there really isn't an argument against that. It caught me so off-guard that I hadn't been able to fully process it myself at the time.

And I would also further qualify this previous statement:
me wrote:I think the point was basically that the claimed easiness of the script is not exactly backed by a rigorous justification.

The point that I was missing when I wrote this is: well whose claim is it anyway?

Did Zamenhof ever say that Latin characters were easier than Cyrillic? What did Zamenhof himself write about his choice of character set?

All I've seen is other people trying to justify his choice after the fact.
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Re: Esperanto, why bother?

Postby Sae » Sat Mar 18, 2023 10:18 am

Fair.

Whilst aye, there is no guarantee on what a Chinese Zamonhof would do but you can at least ascertain what is likely based on his philosophy. They're not directly comparable scenarios.

As for Zamenhof's opinion on Latin vs Cyrillic on ease of use, I'm not sure, and I think a case could be using either system, because Cyrillic isn't hard to learn either, but it can be confusing when Latin is your native script but even that is not difficult to overcome. Maybe he got a glance of cursive Cyrillic and "noped" right out of there. :p

Throwing Chinese script into the mix creates a more difficult to compare scenario because it is grossly different. He can get away with sticking to what he knows when the script isn't difficult to learn and is already so wide spread.
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Re: Esperanto, why bother?

Postby Cainntear » Sat Mar 18, 2023 5:05 pm

Sae wrote:Fair.

Whilst aye, there is no guarantee on what a Chinese Zamonhof would do but you can at least ascertain what is likely based on his philosophy. They're not directly comparable scenarios.

But what was his philosophy? What we've seen here is other people's assumptions and assertions of his philosophy, not references to what he actually said and why.

As for Zamenhof's opinion on Latin vs Cyrillic on ease of use, I'm not sure, and I think a case could be using either system, because Cyrillic isn't hard to learn either, but it can be confusing when Latin is your native script but even that is not difficult to overcome. Maybe he got a glance of cursive Cyrillic and "noped" right out of there. :p

I assume you're too young to have ever encountered cursive Latin script then...? :p

I was lucky in that Scotland was early to replace cursive with what we called "joined up writing", and other English-speaking countries didn't get it and created a false dichotomy between cursive and print.

The thing is that cursive was designed to be written with fountain pens, so there was no possibility to move the pen backward; the "print" handwriting style was copying typefaces letter by letter, so you could write "r" using two lines on a fountain pen.

Scottish joined-up writing was something that was just dead easy with a pencil or a fountain [edit]ballpoint[/edit] pen and you could write loads of letters really quickly.

Anyway, long story short: Russian cursive is a nightmare because it was designed when fountain pens were still a thing, and our cursive was equally as mental in Zamenhof's time. Can't find pictures of them, but words like "summer" and "number" were quite mental -- the Ns, Us and Ms disappeared into sequences of vertical lines, so imaging "sııııııııer" and "ıııııııber" isn't really a long way from what the cursive forms looked like.

Throwing Chinese script into the mix creates a more difficult to compare scenario because it is grossly different. He can get away with sticking to what he knows when the script isn't difficult to learn and is already so wide spread.

Doesn't make it an unfair comparison, though. Chinese characters are reasonably widespread compared to single-language scripts, so unless Zamenhof gave specific criteria as to why Latin, there's still plenty of space to argue that Zamenhof's decisions were culturally motivated.

Besides, the claim of Latin being widespread is very western-Europe centric -- Cyrillic was huge in the east of Europe and the caucuses, and pre-Stalin, we're talking about basically half of Europe (I grew up taking the word "Europe" to be everything west of the iron curtain, and even now I underestimate the amount of Europe that "Eastern Europe" accounts for).
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Re: Esperanto, why bother?

Postby tractor » Sat Mar 18, 2023 6:30 pm

Cainntear wrote:I assume you're too young to have ever encountered cursive Latin script then...? :p

I was lucky in that Scotland was early to replace cursive with what we called "joined up writing", and other English-speaking countries didn't get it and created a false dichotomy between cursive and print.

The thing is that cursive was designed to be written with fountain pens, so there was no possibility to move the pen backward; the "print" handwriting style was copying typefaces letter by letter, so you could write "r" using two lines on a fountain pen.

Scottish joined-up writing was something that was just dead easy with a pencil or a fountain [edit]ballpoint[/edit] pen and you could write loads of letters really quickly.

Anyway, long story short: Russian cursive is a nightmare because it was designed when fountain pens were still a thing, and our cursive was equally as mental in Zamenhof's time. Can't find pictures of them, but words like "summer" and "number" were quite mental -- the Ns, Us and Ms disappeared into sequences of vertical lines, so imaging "sııııııııer" and "ıııııııber" isn't really a long way from what the cursive forms looked like.

Cursive dates back to when people still wrote with quills.

Cursive, joined-up writing and print can all be written with pencils, fountain pens and ballpoints. Joined-up writing isn't faster than cursive.

The Germans were still using the Kurrent script at Zamenhof's time, and that's even less legible than Latin cursive scripts.
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Re: Esperanto, why bother?

Postby Sae » Sat Mar 18, 2023 7:24 pm

Cainntear wrote:
Sae wrote:Fair.

Whilst aye, there is no guarantee on what a Chinese Zamonhof would do but you can at least ascertain what is likely based on his philosophy. They're not directly comparable scenarios.

But what was his philosophy? What we've seen here is other people's assumptions and assertions of his philosophy, not references to what he actually said and why.


His purpose was to create an easy to learn & flexible language that serves as a Universal second language, without delving into anyhing else we know that much and I don't think we need to know more for my point to stand. Using the Chinese script would be contrary to this goal.


Cainntear wrote:
As for Zamenhof's opinion on Latin vs Cyrillic on ease of use, I'm not sure, and I think a case could be using either system, because Cyrillic isn't hard to learn either, but it can be confusing when Latin is your native script but even that is not difficult to overcome. Maybe he got a glance of cursive Cyrillic and "noped" right out of there. :p



I assume you're too young to have ever encountered cursive Latin script then...? :p

I was lucky in that Scotland was early to replace cursive with what we called "joined up writing", and other English-speaking countries didn't get it and created a false dichotomy between cursive and print.

The thing is that cursive was designed to be written with fountain pens, so there was no possibility to move the pen backward; the "print" handwriting style was copying typefaces letter by letter, so you could write "r" using two lines on a fountain pen.

Scottish joined-up writing was something that was just dead easy with a pencil or a fountain [edit]ballpoint[/edit] pen and you could write loads of letters really quickly.

Anyway, long story short: Russian cursive is a nightmare because it was designed when fountain pens were still a thing, and our cursive was equally as mental in Zamenhof's time. Can't find pictures of them, but words like "summer" and "number" were quite mental -- the Ns, Us and Ms disappeared into sequences of vertical lines, so imaging "sııııııııer" and "ıııııııber" isn't really a long way from what the cursive forms looked like.


I learned joined-up handwriting in school rather than cursive, but I know of cursive enough to be familiar with it, but had never seen anything comparable to what I've seen of Cyrillic cursive. Though my comment about Cyrillic cursive was mostly facetious and was kind of poking fun at it. But I except there may be latin cursive just as unreadable, but I've never seen any examples that are.

Cainntear wrote:
Throwing Chinese script into the mix creates a more difficult to compare scenario because it is grossly different. He can get away with sticking to what he knows when the script isn't difficult to learn and is already so wide spread.

Doesn't make it an unfair comparison, though. Chinese characters are reasonably widespread compared to single-language scripts, so unless Zamenhof gave specific criteria as to why Latin, there's still plenty of space to argue that Zamenhof's decisions were culturally motivated.

Besides, the claim of Latin being widespread is very western-Europe centric -- Cyrillic was huge in the east of Europe and the caucuses, and pre-Stalin, we're talking about basically half of Europe (I grew up taking the word "Europe" to be everything west of the iron curtain, and even now I underestimate the amount of Europe that "Eastern Europe" accounts for).


It is an unfair comparison, because latin is a relatively simple alphabet, Chinese is a logographic script that expands to 1000's of characters that isn't easy to learn. Whilst Chinese characters were widespread, it doesn't become easy to learn if you're born in a country native to it and there were still countries in East Asia with their own scripts and parts of China with their own scripts too.

Whilst Zamonhof may have had cultural bias for choosing Latin, which wouldn't contradict the purpose of Esperanto, there is much less incentive to not stray from a cultural bias.

Whereas, with the Chinese script, you'd have to have a pretty stubborn and unwavering cultural bias to not see that using it would be counter to the purpose behind the language you're creating. And I've not seen anything to suggest that Zamonhof was this. A Chinese Zamonhof would be aware there's simpler systems than the Chinese script.

But I think there is a fair argument to be made between chosing Latin & Cyrillic. I don't think me saying Latin was widespread is me having a Western European bias, it's more that Western Europe had colonized much of the world. But I myself would see Cyrillic just as viable as an option, and I don't think there is much in the way of technical advantages between them (whereas compared to Chinese, Cyrillic and Latin have a big technical advantage if 'ease of learning' is the goal)
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Re: Esperanto, why bother?

Postby Cainntear » Sat Mar 18, 2023 7:33 pm

tractor wrote:Cursive dates back to when people still wrote with quills.

Yes, and was still popular in Zamenhof's time because the fountain pen was an evolution of the quill.
Cursive, joined-up writing and print can all be written with pencils, fountain pens and ballpoints. Joined-up writing isn't faster than cursive.

Anything that requires an omnidirectional nib can't be written will with quill-based tech.
The Germans were still using the Kurrent script at Zamenhof's time, and that's even less legible than Latin cursive scripts.

The existence of a more difficult script than Latin is a side issue -- it doesn't say that Cyrillic was less suitable than Latin.
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