I think it would be great to be able to click a button on a comment\post and have it translate to your language. I think its possible to build a way to include this in a privacy respecting way (im not a coder so forgive my ignorance) if we use something like the google translate scraper that is used for this privacy respecting google translate frontend https://github.com/thedaviddelta/lingva-translate
Making it easier for people to communicate across languages would be pretty sweet for the fediverse.
Toki Pona might be better just because it uses more common sounds and less of them. Might be easier to learn and speak from a background like Cantonese or something. Isn’t Esperanto very euro-centric?
Euro centric is a loaded term. It’s a kind of Indo European language but most people on Earth speak an IE language so it’s the most efficient route.
only European branches of Indo European. It’s a mix of Germanic, Slavic, and Romance. if that’s not eurocentric, in an objective way, i don’t know what is
Slavic is in the Satem branch so it’s defeinitely Asian. However, a language merely being European doesn’t make it bad or unsuitable. It was the best choice at the time and continues to be the best choice
modern slavic languages have a lot more in common with other european languages than they do with farsi or hindi, even if they were in the same branch as them at an extremely early stage of their development
i agree esperanto is the best choice for a universal language, but only because it’s already established and the grammar is easy to understand for speakers of any language. but if we could go back and change some things, or if modern esperantists were willing to replace a bunch of vocabulary, it would need to have arabic, indic and sinitic influences to truly be considered a universal language
It’s called Persian language, and actually even now there’s lots of notable similarities between them. Even so, family relationship is not that important (as you said) in determining how useful Esperanto is or isn’t. On the one hand, any regular auxlang regardless of its roots will be better than any natlang. In my view, Esperanto did something very smart by taking advantage of an already-established legacy by piggybacking off of Latin and its successors in Europe.
Of course you are right about the “already established” part. Some people mistakenly think that Esperanto is a project, like a new idea for creating a language. It’s already created and the work is all done, so Esperanto is a complete package ready to go. Just plug and play.
I strongly disagree with the point though, that just throwing in vocab from languages like Hindi, Chinese, and Arabic somehow makes the language better or more universal. If anything it would make Esperanto much less coherent and less able to take advantage of the backwards compatibility and legacy stuff that helps with onboarding. Just as an example, translation from English to Esperanto is very easy because of the lexical and grammatical proximity, so a transition from English (globally dominant now) to Esperanto would be a very fast and smooth one. You’d have a larger amount of better quality translations in the shortest possible time span to help people eliminate the need for English and the other “power” languages like Spanish, French, and Russian, which are similarly close to Esperanto. In that way, Esperanto theoretically is an ideal killer of those languages.
is farsi an offensive term? persian is an exonym, farsi is an endonym. i prefer to use endonyms, especially when they’re that simple to pronounce.
i think you proved my exact point by saying that esperanto’s similarities to european (“power”) languages will be what serves to replace them with esperanto. what you don’t realize is that, while most non-europeans do know decent english, they are much better at their own local lingua francas, like arabic, hindi, and mandarin, and they are by far the majority. so these languages are just as much power languages as french and spanish, maybe even english, so if esperanto were to have elements of them, it would much more easily replace them.
originally i thought your point was that it doesn’t matter what languages influenced esperanto, which i kind of agree with, but if you’re saying that its european influence isn’t a problem because european languages are dominant, that couldn’t be further from the truth, any way you look at it.
Well, technically nobody can stop you from calling it Farsi, but if you don’t call German “Deutsch”, or Spanish “Español”, or Russian “Russkiy”, or Arabic “Arabiyya”, I am wondering why you specifically chose Persian to refuse to use its name. I know it’s not just you though because other English speakers sometimes mistakenly refer to it as Farsi, and so it’s a trend that grew in the last few decades or so. I think it was probably the result of a disconnect where English speakers no longer knew what Persian was, and Persian speakers they met who also didn’t know English well enough to know it had a name in English already, would tell people the language is called Farsi.
Beyond just being a personal preference, there’s a few good reasons for not changing the name of the language. The often cited one is simply to not cause confusion, since the language’s name has been “Persian” in English for centuries, that it might make older references less clear. In my opinion, the better reason is that people sometimes squabble over whether to call their language Farsi, Dari, or Tajik, and sometimes that argument can by sidestepped by calling it Persian which is just a more inclusive name. Some Persian speakers even do this in their own language by referring to it as Parsi and not Farsi. Ironically, their argument is that “Farsi” itself is an exonym, but I don’t believe this is true.
I don’t think a language that’s a mix of Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, Indonesian, etc. ends up being any more of an effective competitor against any one of them than Esperanto already is. Esperanto may be primed to replace western European languages in particular, and Eastern Europeans also find it very familiar, but adding some Arabic although not enough Arabic would make it not only fail to easily replace English, but Arabic as well. Not that this is really the primary concern because any conlang could even be a priori and still be better than any natlang simply due to regularity. Regularity is the killer feature any conlang brings to the table. I just think Esperanto sweetens the deal by offering a quick transition.
So yeah I think you interpreted my comment as mostly correct, that the roots shouldn’t matter, but if they did I don’t see anything wrong or problematic with Latin roots. People usually come out against Esperanto as if this is something wrong about it, but Esperanto is the product of history and I don’t think its creators could have made a better choice really. Esperanto wanted to be humanity’s L2, and it ended up being founded on Latin, possibly the most influential language in human history, and close to the L2’s of most of the world, so even today the majority of Earth’s population, aside from their native language, have at least some familiarity with English, or Spanish, or French, or Russian… that lets Esperanto capitalize on something most people already know. It also capitalizes on what most people need to know, which is non-fiction (for example, scientific and academic articles) written in the aforementioned languages, which can be rapidly and effectively translated into Esperanto.