Esperanto, why bother?

[golyplot]

The hypothetical 19th century Chinese!Zamenhof would have been looking at a world where all the major languages of eastern Asia, (i.e. the ones he cared about) were using Chinese characters. So of course they are "easy" because everyone already studies them, much like how romance vocabulary is "easy" for Europeans. And there are certainly other rationalizations you could use, like how the characters (supposedly) convey meaning independent of language and encode pronunciation hints, etc.

Instead we got a writing system designed for French typewriters, which hence requires the awful x-hack in order to write today.

[Le Baron]

which hence requires the awful x-hack in order to write today..

Well I have an Esperanto keyboard layout with the diacritics. It's no more or less of a chore than having to run a French or Czech or Vietnamese keyboard layout from an English qwerty keyboard. The x-method is a lot easier and works very well. Wouldn't work for French because e + x would mean what? This: é, this ê, or this è?

[Iversen]

The x method is in my eyes ugly and far too clearly an emergency solution. I refuse to use it. I have a list somewhere with numbers which can be used with the ALT key, and when I write in Word I could also use the inbuilt symbols, but as far as I remember I haven't used that alternative for Esperanto. Switching to other keyboards - one per target language - is not something I would want to do, it would be far too confusing (I have used other keyboards on hotels, and I hit the wrong keys all the time). Therefore I mostly use the virtual keyboards at Lexilogos which use the alphabetical order of each language (including Greek and the Cyrillic alphabets). Lexilogos can do some conversions on the fly, but the implementation of that is rather pitiful - and totally lacking for Esperanto.

[Le Baron]

The x method is in my eyes ugly and far too clearly an emergency solution. I refuse to use it. I have a list somewhere with numbers which can be used with the ALT key, and when I write in Word I could also use the inbuilt symbols, but as far as I remember I haven't used that alternative for Esperanto. Switching to other keyboards - one per target language - is not something I would want to do, it would be far too confusing (I have used other keyboards on hotels, and I hit the wrong keys all the time). Therefore I mostly use the virtual keyboards at Lexilogos which use the alphabetical order of each language (including Greek and the Cyrillic alphabets). Lexilogos can do some conversions on the fly, but the implementation of that is rather pitiful - and totally lacking for Esperanto.

I think it was just taken to work in Esperanto because you only need to represent the one circumflex as differentiated from the ordinary letters. In truth the language is usually normally readable even if people fail to add the circumflex, because you pretty much recognise the words and in context, just like French when people don't add the proper (or any!) diacritical marks.

I'm so used to reading x-system from old forums and newsletters from before DTP was in everyone's grasp, that it's not really an obstacle.

[Cainntear]

Instead we got a writing system designed for French typewriters, which hence requires the awful x-hack in order to write today.

Did we?

I mean, Google tells me that accents on French typewriters were a keystroke, but there's no caron (aka haček) on a French typewriter.

I mean, people often say that Zamenhof can't be blamed for failing to anticipate technology problems, but that ignores the fact that there were technological matters in his own time that he was not adequately dealing with.

Aside from the question of whether there were any typewriters that had both a caron and a cedilla on them, there is the issue that printing founts contained specific metal objects for accented characters, because if they didn't the process of printing would be massively more time-consuming. The accented characters of Esperanto are pretty unique (circumflexes over consonants; a caron over a vowel) so it was incompatible with most presses.

The language that was cheapest and quickest to print in was probably English (or maybe even Dutch) because they used smaller founts as a result of having no troublesome diacritics to deal with, and crucially that English's multiple consonant phonemes could be handled in part by the addition of an h (and in part by the fact that English orthography is totally messed up, but that's by-the-bye).

Esperanto was written when fount-based printing was at full swing. Zamenhof created an orthography that needed its own fount and its own typewriter, because practically no language in Europe could offer the diacritics for either the typewriter or printing.

Zamenhof's philosophy of "one letter, one sound" was laudable, but it was impractical. The only way to make it practical would have been to eliminate diacritics and therefore reduce the number of phonemes. Which would have made it more internationally usable, because it would have reduced the phonetic difficulty of the language.

Fun facts regarding fount-based printing:
Scottish Gaelic was printed without diacritics for several years, because the printers had founts designed for writing English.
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.

[Factoid]

The hypothetical 19th century Chinese!Zamenhof would have been looking at a world where all the major languages of eastern Asia, (i.e. the ones he cared about) were using Chinese characters. So of course they are "easy" because everyone already studies them, much like how romance vocabulary is "easy" for Europeans. And there are certainly other rationalizations you could use, like how the characters (supposedly) convey meaning independent of language and encode pronunciation hints, etc.

Excuse me... was the latin alphabet used only used in Europe? No it wasn't, it was also used in most of America, and also in parts of Africa and Asia, so it was a more universal alphabet than the cyrillic, used only on slavic countries, and much more than the chinese, used mostly in China.

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...

[rdearman]

The hypothetical 19th century Chinese!Zamenhof would have been looking at a world where all the major languages of eastern Asia, (i.e. the ones he cared about) were using Chinese characters. So of course they are "easy" because everyone already studies them, much like how romance vocabulary is "easy" for Europeans. And there are certainly other rationalizations you could use, like how the characters (supposedly) convey meaning independent of language and encode pronunciation hints, etc.

Excuse me... was the latin alphabet used only used in Europe? No it wasn't, it was also used in most of America, and also in parts of Africa and Asia, so it was a more universal alphabet than the cyrillic, used only on slavic countries, and much more than the chinese, used mostly in China.

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...

He is talking about a hypothetical person, not the real person.

[Factoid]

The hypothetical 19th century Chinese!Zamenhof would have been looking at a world where all the major languages of eastern Asia, (i.e. the ones he cared about) were using Chinese characters. So of course they are "easy" because everyone already studies them, much like how romance vocabulary is "easy" for Europeans. And there are certainly other rationalizations you could use, like how the characters (supposedly) convey meaning independent of language and encode pronunciation hints, etc.

Excuse me... was the latin alphabet used only used in Europe? No it wasn't, it was also used in most of America, and also in parts of Africa and Asia, so it was a more universal alphabet than the cyrillic, used only on slavic countries, and much more than the chinese, used mostly in China.

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...

He is talking about a hypothetical person, not the real person.

We are using a wrong premise, which is assuming than the hypothetical chinese Zamenhof would propose a complex writing method with more than 5.000 different characters as something easy to learn...

The french typewriter doesn't make much sense, as those were almost no existant in 1870...

[Cainntear]

The hypothetical 19th century Chinese!Zamenhof would have been looking at a world where all the major languages of eastern Asia, (i.e. the ones he cared about) were using Chinese characters. So of course they are "easy" because everyone already studies them, much like how romance vocabulary is "easy" for Europeans. And there are certainly other rationalizations you could use, like how the characters (supposedly) convey meaning independent of language and encode pronunciation hints, etc.

Excuse me... was the latin alphabet used only used in Europe? No it wasn't, it was also used in most of America, and also in parts of Africa and Asia, so it was a more universal alphabet than the cyrillic, used only on slavic countries, and much more than the chinese, used mostly in China.

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...

He is talking about a hypothetical person, not the real person.

We are using a wrong premise, which is assuming than the hypothetical chinese Zamenhof would propose a complex writing method with more than 5.000 different characters as something easy to learn...

You are using a wrong premise, because you're assuming that someone literate in Chinese would realise that it was inefficient. The claim here is that Zamenhof identified Latin as being easier because he already knew it.

The french typewriter doesn't make much sense, as those were almost no existant in 1870...

OK, but that only makes things worse: Gutenberg's work nearly half a millennium earlier had made movable typefaces a thing, and there was no real equivalent to the overtyping of typewriters for adding a diacritic to a letter after the fact.

As far as I can see, Zamenhof had made something that was expensive to print and while couldn't be printed with a fount intended for any language other than Esperanto.

[Iversen]

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.

As for creating an analogue to Esperanto from Asian languages - well, if it had been realistic (and sufficiently tempting) someone would probably have made it already. But one thing is certain: it could not have been based on the thousands of Chinese symbols, because the idea behind an Esperanto has to be that it is fast and easy to learn.