A language learners’ forum

I don't think the Chinese comparison really works as a counter.

From a historical perspective: during Zamenhof's time China was in the Qing dynasty, which was Manchu led. Manchu script might have been an option that occured to him, and Manchu is alphabetic, though I guess that would depend how kindly the ruling class would take to it. But there were (and still are) other writing systems within China that would be good alternatives. Mongolic, Uyghur, Phagspa, Tibetan etc. If his goal was to make things simpler, there would have been options within his own country.

From a practical perspective: Chinese characters aren't easy to learn, even for people native to the country, sure they have a greater advantage, but Korea had a sister script, Hanji and in an effort to improve literacy Hangul was invented and designed to be as simple as possible to learn. So whilst a Chinese Zamonhov could have kept to what he knows, it'd be in conflict with the purpose of the language, so if he weren't to adopt an alternative system already used in China, he might also take a leaf out of Korea's book and Hangul is one of the easier writing systems out there to learn, perhaps hypothetical Chinese Zamonhof could have created something simple too with that same motive.

Latin on the other hand was already a simple system to learn. It's not a lot to learn compared to many writing systems out there, even other alphabetic ones. So I doubt he'd have had much incentive to move from what he already knew.

Iversen wrote:Diacritics are simply a nuisance in any language, but it would not have been harder to make a font for a language that uses them (like Esperanto or Czech or Koiné Greek) than for one that doesn't - the problem comes if you try to use them for more than one language, for instance because of quotes.

My point is that if Esperanto had been based on the "lowest common denominator" of characters in Latin scripts, publishers in many countries would have been able to print books written in Esperanto using fount sets they already had, and wouldn't have had to buy new ones.

Zamenhof's stance was probably that an independent language needs an independent script, but he neglected to be pragmatic and he created a massive barrier to adoption, because the need for a new typeface made printing Esperanto books prohibitively expensive.

Cainntear wrote:Zamenhof's stance was probably that an independent language needs an independent script, but he neglected to be pragmatic and he created a massive barrier to adoption, because the need for a new typeface made printing Esperanto books prohibitively expensive.

Most languages have either some form of diacritic symbols or deviating letter forms (e.g. ß or ü in German), which means for any printer using a Latin alphabet you just acquire only those few differing typeface castings. It's no more expensive (or not expensive) to print Esperanto books than any other.

The people who published or printed Esperanto books or newspapers had this ability. Nowadays it's obsolete anyway with digital printing.

Cainntear wrote:Zamenhof's stance was probably that an independent language needs an independent script, but he neglected to be pragmatic and he created a massive barrier to adoption, because the need for a new typeface made printing Esperanto books prohibitively expensive.

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

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!

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.

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!

A somewhat related story, about the dedication people can show to a script: Some of you may have heard of Latex (or LaTeX, as some prefer), a typesetting system often used for mathematical and scientific papers. One nice feature is that it allows Greek letters to be used in formulas ("math mode", they call it), even if your keyboard does not have Greek letters. They are expressed as \{alpha}, \{beta}, etc. (This is for lower case. Upper case is \{Alpha}, \{Beta}, and so on.)

Well, it seems that in the earlier days of Latex, it did not support Greek text. (Though it probably does now.) But there were some Greek researchers who liked Latex, but also wanted to publish their paper in Greek. So you can probably guess what they did. They wrote their entire paper in math mode, spelling out each word using the above expressions. E.g., "kai" (which I think means "and" in both Greek and Esperanto), was typed out as \{kappa}\{alpha}\{iota}, and so on, for the whole paper.

Where there is a will, there is a way, it seems.


EDIT: A correction: "and" in Esperanto is actually "kaj", though it seems to have more or less the same pronunciation as Greek "kai". Presumably Zamenhof borrowed the word from Greek, and adjusted the spelling to fit Esperanto's system.

Those esperanto characters ĉĝĥĵŝŭ are a problem. I have the windows international keyboard software enabled, though I use an ordinary US keyboard; I can type all german and spanish characters (with e.g : o and ~ n), and most of the french (the only problem is oe); but those characters with diacritics are not supported (at least I haven't been able to find them). It is actually a serious block for me in considering esperanto.

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).

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.