Fastest C1 Ever

Ongoing language-learning challenges, and team challenge logs (but not individual logs)
Sprachprofi
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Re: Fastest C1 Ever

Postby Sprachprofi » Sun Nov 06, 2022 8:28 pm

Thanks, Le Baron!

lavengro wrote:That is an extraordinarily generous offer on your part Sprachprofi. I would be very interested in taking up the challenge (to my detriment in life, I can rarely say "no" to a challenge, bet or dare), but I am in the process of learning Spanish and am still at a relatively early stage with that. Do you think it would present a disadvantage to my Spanish learning if I were to concurrently throw a couple of hours of Esperanto per week into the mix?


There will probably be some interference between Esperanto and Spanish vocabulary at first, but I have found that such interference goes away once one of the two languages reaches a good level. From your profile, I'm guessing that you haven't reached fluency in any foreign language yet? Then this Esperanto challenge can be really helpful for you, because you'll no longer be "stabbing in the dark" when it comes to developing fluency in your other languages; you'll know how it's supposed to feel and how to get there; your brain will have created the necessary pathways. The first language is always the hardest, so you might as well pick an easy one. If you embark on this, your Spanish will probably suffer until January because of the interference and then improve faster than before from February because of the synergy effects.

Iversen wrote:Esperanto may be more lenient on its users than most other languages, but I remember it was hard for me not to use an ungrammatical compound perfect (*Mi havas farito ion) when I first started to learn it. All the words exist, but you are told to use the simple past instead (mi faris) - so even Esperanto doesn't allow everything. I wonder whether it was Zamenhof's Slavic background that made him outlaw the compund perfect or he just thought that it didn't really fit into his triple layer temporal system with i, a and o (plus u).


"havas" is not an auxiliary verb, that's why it doesn't work. However, "estas" is an auxiliary verb and people can and do say "mi estas farinta ion", which is the compound perfect you were looking for, except that it's considered pedantic to overuse this. Just like deviating from SVO, there should be a good reason for using compound tenses, something extra that you want to draw someone's attention to, e.g. if you're telling your wife "stop nagging me, I've already done this!" that would be a perfect occasion to use "tio jam estas farita" or "mi estas jam farinta tion". It's still correct to use "faris" - complicated verb forms are optional and for emphasis only or for the odd cases where simple tenses are not enough to convey the order in which things happened.

And I'm not happy at all with the idea that mal- should be used to cut the number of adjectives down to less than half. The problem is that for me "juna" (young) stops at something like 20-25 years, and English "old" only starts at maybe 60 or so - so it grieves me to have to use "maljuna" for old, and "antikva" is for me older than old (and mostly relevant for things). I simply lack a word for old that doesn't include the 'mezaĝojn'. My feeling is that "maljuna" starts where "juna" ends, but that's apparently not something that bothers the samideanojn. I would prefer having to learn a few more words and then be able to be more precise.


I wouldn't say that "maljuna" starts where "juna" ends, neither in Esperanto nor in English. This is the scale I'd use:

junega, juna, juneta, nejuna, [mezaĝa,] maljuneta, maljuna, maljunega

The same scale exists for every adjective and every standard textbook of Esperanto teaches this kind of scale (often with a continuum from malvarmega via nevarma to varmega). The ne- prefixed word is the true neutral: neither young nor old.
Last edited by Sprachprofi on Sun Nov 06, 2022 8:52 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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rdearman
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Re: Fastest C1 Ever

Postby rdearman » Sun Nov 06, 2022 8:34 pm

Le Baron wrote:
Iversen wrote:My feeling is that "maljuna" starts where "juna" ends, but that's apparently not something that bothers the samideanojn.

But isn't this the same in any language? There are young people and 'old' people (depends on your view) and the people in-between seem to have no designation as to whether they are young or old or whatever.

It is easy to tell if you are young or old. If you fall over and people laugh, then you are young.
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Le Baron
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Re: Fastest C1 Ever

Postby Le Baron » Sun Nov 06, 2022 8:36 pm

rdearman wrote:It is easy to tell if you are young or old. If you fall over and people laugh, then you are young.

Bugger....I'm on the bridge between young/old. Or people just like laughing at me.
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Re: Fastest C1 Ever

Postby Iversen » Sun Nov 06, 2022 9:16 pm

Iversen wrote:(...)I remember it was hard for me not to use an ungrammatical compound perfect (*Mi havas farito ion) when I first started to learn it. (...)

Sprachprofi wrote:"havas" is not an auxiliary verb, that's why it doesn't work. However, "estas" is an auxiliary verb and people can and do say "mi estas farinta ion", which is the compound perfect you were looking for, except that it's considered pedantic to overuse this.

Well, "havi" is not an auxiliary verb because the language is designed so that it isn't - but it could have been one, and there must be a reason for that choice. My guess is that it felt natural for Zamenhof to exclude it because the past tense in the Slavic languages typically is based on "esti" plus an active past participle (in Russian the verb has been lost, while Polish still attaches a verbal ending and Serbian has preserved the auxiliary) - and even possession is typically expressed without a 'to have'-verb.

In German and Danish we use to the auxiliary 'to be'-verb with some verbs (movement, to do etc.) so "tio jam estas farita" doesn't seem strange at all to me, but it is not really the compound perfect I was looking for, just something that at the end of the day has has more or less the same meaning (I'm more sceptical about "mi estas jam farinta tion"). However the point was that it felt strange at first to avoid the construction with "havi", but now I have become accostumed to it - fact of life, or something like that. Actually I also felt it strange to use adjectival perfects (with or without an auxiliary) in the Slavic languages in the beginning, but with time you learn to appreciate the differences between languages.

As for the graduation of root "jun-": the derivational possibilities of Esperanto are amazing (I already knew that), but I would still like to have one word for young and another for old, and then I could for that sake have described a youngster as 'mal-(old)' half the time just for fun. Luckily even Esperantists have a tendency to extend the boundaries of the language beyond the bare minimum of word roots...
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Re: Fastest C1 Ever

Postby Amandine » Sun Nov 06, 2022 9:36 pm

I never had any hostility towards Esperanto but also no particular interest in it until I read Akira Okrent's In The Land of Invented Languages (it might have been a different book along the same lines but I think it was this one). Placing the development and popularity of it in its historical context alongside a lot of other "humanist" trends of the time really made it come alive for me. I live down the road from Esperanto House in Sydney (which I hope they own outright because its prime real estate now in an inner city area that has gentrified enormously) and went a few times pre-pandemic. I also have and used Sprachprofi's excellent Complete Esperanto. I am very tempted to do this but just don't think I have the time to take it up seriously again. :cry: I am tempted though.
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Re: Fastest C1 Ever

Postby David27 » Sun Nov 06, 2022 10:42 pm

I would love to try the challenge at some point, but currently work and my other life goals are becoming a stressful balancing act, trying to add Esperanto at this point I think would be a recipe for disaster. It’s a language that one day I would love taking a 2 week trip to a gathering, take a month intensive course before and see what I can do after that ~6 weeks. I’m glad to see you here on the forum! I always liked reading your blog.
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Re: Fastest C1 Ever

Postby anitarrc » Mon Nov 07, 2022 8:47 am

Sprachprofi wrote:I don't get this raw hatred of Esperanto or the need to wear this hatred on your chest as if that somehow makes you a better polyglot.

Esperanto is in the top 10% of languages worldwide when it comes to number of speakers, literature, and Youtube content available in it. Roughly a quarter of all participants at the Polyglot Gathering or Polyglot Conference have studied it, which places it in the top 0.3% of languages for polyglots.

.


I fully agree with you, there never should be any discrimination against ANY language.

But I REALLY can't figure out where you found the " top 10%".

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anexo:Idi ... _hablantes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto
please compare to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxembourgish
https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/ ... nd-society
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... _languages

Don't get me wrong, any pursuit of an endangered language is a great idea.
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Sprachprofi
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Re: Fastest C1 Ever

Postby Sprachprofi » Mon Nov 07, 2022 9:56 am

anitarrc wrote:
Sprachprofi wrote:Esperanto is in the top 10% of languages worldwide when it comes to number of speakers, literature, and Youtube content available in it. Roughly a quarter of all participants at the Polyglot Gathering or Polyglot Conference have studied it, which places it in the top 0.3% of languages for polyglots.


I fully agree with you, there never should be any discrimination against ANY language.

But I REALLY can't figure out where you found the " top 10%".


Actually a conservative estimate; it's probably higher. There are around 7000 languages worldwide, so to "top 10%" means that less than 700 languages have better stats.

- It is hard to get a solid estimate of how many people learned Esperanto, but the three Duolingo Esperanto courses had around 3 million learners altogether. (Right now Duolingo has switched to showing you only the currently active learners, but I can find screenshots of the earlier complete statistics if necessary.) There are a lot of people who learned Esperanto before Duolingo, but let's call it 3 million. Where does that rank in terms of the languages of the world? We don't have a direct source, but we can give a range: for the lower bound, the CIA Factbook you linked asserts that "there are estimated to be just over 7,151 languages spoken in the world (2022); approximately 80% of these languages are spoken by less than 100,000 people", so Esperanto is very very easily in the top 20%. For the upper bound, there is the list of 200 most spoken languages and apparently you need something like 4 million speakers in order to be in this list (Swati is language #188 with 4.7 million speakers), and the list is for 200 / 7000 = top 2.8% of the world's languages. So Esperanto (and Lithuanian, which has a similar number of speakers) are not in the top 2.8% of languages in terms of speakers, but they are probably in the top 5%, I put top 10% just to be on the safe side.

- Literature: considering that there is this 740 page encyclopedia of original literature in Esperanto which goes into the different schools and so on, it's easy to prove that Esperanto has a vast corpus of original literature, probably more than, say, the above-mentioned Swati. Apart from attempts in the Soviet Union, China and Vietnam to make Esperanto the lingua franca of the world's workers, the Esperanto community has always skewed towards university-educated people, including famous writers like Tolstoy and Tolkien. Compare that to language communities in the Global South, where most people were illiterate until the 1960s or even later, and even now the educated elite tends to write in the colonizer's language. In 100 years, these languages may have overtaken Esperanto in terms of original literature production, but if you're looking for interesting reading material right now...

- Youtube: there are vast numbers of lectures, concert and other music videos, short films, audiobooks, stories for children, and so on. When you upload a video, Esperanto is one of only 214 languages that Youtube lets you select as the video language, so again, probably closer to the top 5% rather than top 10% of languages, but staying on the safe side. :)
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Le Baron
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Re: Fastest C1 Ever

Postby Le Baron » Mon Nov 07, 2022 1:45 pm

I found that aside from a few (Iversen, devilyoudont, Iron Mike...) this forum has a generally negative opinion of Esperanto; though not one predicated upon actually having learned it or engaged with it to any significant level. See here.
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Re: Fastest C1 Ever

Postby lichtrausch » Mon Nov 07, 2022 3:17 pm

Since Esperanto is strongly associated with its roots in radical social engineering, I wonder if people's opinion of the language correlates with how they feel about social engineering in general.
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