BillChapman (u/BillChapman)

BillChapman commented on What's Coming in Python 3.8 lwn.net/SubscriberLink/79... · Posted by u/superwayne

jnwatson · 7 years ago

The only frozen languages are the ones nobody uses except for play or academic purposes.

As soon as people start using a language, they see ways of improving it.

It isn't unlike spoken languages. Go learn Esperanto if you want to learn something that doesn't change.

BillChapman · 7 years ago

Esperanto does change, in that new items of vocabulary are introduced from time to time. For example, 'mojosa', the word for 'cool' is only about thirty years old.

BillChapman commented on Today is Esperanto Day – here’s why I learned it martinrue.com/zamenhofa-t... · Posted by u/martinrue

asutekku · 7 years ago

I love the concept of esperanto but to be honest there are no practical uses for it. Fun language and it teaches you the concepts of others but as I said, not that useful.

BillChapman · 7 years ago

No practical uses! What! Over recent years I have had guided tours of Berlin, Douala (loo it up!), Yerevan and Milan in this planned language. I have discussed philosophy with a Slovene poet, humour on television with a Bulgarian TV producer. I’ve discussed what life was like in East Berlin before the wall came down and in Armenia when it was a Soviet republic, how to cook perfect spaghetti, the advantages and disadvantages of monarchy, and so on. I recommend it as a very useful and practical way to overcome language barriers.

Take an unguided wander around the net. You wil find political stuff, religious stuff, scientific stuff - all in Esperanto.

BillChapman commented on Today is Esperanto Day – here’s why I learned it martinrue.com/zamenhofa-t... · Posted by u/martinrue

kevinios · 7 years ago

Interesting! I see that this refactor was made in 1907.

This makes me wonder... in an age where we have tools to open-source and crowdsource software programming, would it be possible to crowd-source the creation of a new language? It could then be refactored regularly (with new major versions published every X years), the source of truth would be the main branch of the repo, and the role that an Academy usually assumes (approving changes to a language) would be given to contributors.

I suspect that a language created by a common effort from a thousand brains would be simpler and more optimized than one invented by a single person in the late 19th century, no matter how hard that person worked on it.

BillChapman · 7 years ago

The problem would be to get the thousand brains to agree.Now thousands and thousands of brains are applied every day to stretching anbd applying Esperanto to all aspects of life. I have found Esperanto of a lot of use when travelling on my own, to get my bearings within a country. Esperanto may not be perfect, but I've used it successfully in Africa, South America and Europe, and it does the job, serving as a unique common language on my travels in, for example, Armenia and Bulgaria.

Esperanto speakers are highly organised. There is a Jarlibro (Yearbook) published annually giving access to a network of local representatives. These people, scattered all over the world and act as 'consuls', providing help and information, and passing on the visitor from another country to his/her contacts. Esperanto does have an Academy, but it is the people who decide in practice.

BillChapman commented on China now the most prolific contributor to physical sciences, engineering, math bloomberg.com/view/articl... · Posted by u/petethomas

jabl · 8 years ago

We should all switch to Esperanto! :)

BillChapman · 8 years ago

Kial ne uzi Esperanton? Why not use Esperanto?

BillChapman commented on The Mystery of People Who Speak Dozens of Languages newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/jeffreyrogers

aloisdg · 8 years ago

Glad to see that Esperanto count as living language.

BillChapman · 8 years ago

Of course Esperanto is a living language.How could anyone doubt that.

BillChapman commented on We Can’t Stem the Tide of Language Death lareviewofbooks.org/artic... · Posted by u/diodorus

imron · 8 years ago

> I think it'd be a worthwhile trade off against the loss of cultural knowledge that results from language death.

I don't. Out of curiosity, how many languages do you speak?

BillChapman · 8 years ago

Yesterday (21 October 2017) I chaired a gathering of Esperanto speakers in Conwy, north Wales, UK. Present were speakers of Welsh, Tagalog, Slovene, Estonian, Brazilian Portuguese and maybe a few others besides English. We had Esperantyo as our common language. I have spoken Esperanto for precisely fifty years, and throught that time I have seen Esperanto as an aŭiliary language (sorry, my keyboard has just gone into Esperanto mode!), i.e. a language which values our native tongues while enabling trouble-free communication. I speak Welsh, French and German, by the way, and have an ability to bluff my way in a few more languages. Life is too short to learn them all. Keep on fighting for your smaller languages. There is plenty of room in the world for them - and for Esperanto.

BillChapman commented on Esperanto: the language that never was prospectmagazine.co.uk/fe... · Posted by u/samclemens

tokenadult · 10 years ago

There are two different ways to treat Esperanto, both of which come up in the comments. One way is to take Esperanto seriously as a proposal for a world auxiliary language that people from all over the world can use for intercommunication if they didn't grow up speaking a common native language. This first way of treating Esperanto for discussion immediately runs into practical issues and real-world trade-offs. As the article kindly submitted here for our discussion notes, "Because, of course, the massive, trumpeting, stamping, ear-flapping, blanka elefanto in the room is… English; English; English; the English language; the widespread global adoption thereof." It is already well known that the plurality of daily use of English around the world is use of English as an "interlanguage," communicating among persons who are not all native speakers of English, including millions of conversations a day in English that don't include any native speakers of English.[1] I have personally overheard hundreds of conversations in English in multiple countries among people who didn't grow up speaking English, and English is of course the interlanguage of online discussion sites such as Hacker News. (I have also overheard, and participated in, many hundreds of conversations in Modern Standard Chinese that include no native speakers of that language, as Chinese is my most proficient second language.)

For practical value for a language learner, incentives matter. People respond to incentives in deciding which languages to learn, and how attentive to be to opportunities to learn languages. And more opportunity to learn, with more sound recordings to listen to and more texts to read, makes it easier to learn a language. The pervasiveness of English all over the world makes English an easy language to learn--I'm not kidding. Precisely because hundreds of millions of people use English every day as an "interlanguage," English is quite "fault tolerant," full of social conventions about how to get around people with a beginning command of the language communicating with one another, including officially adopted controlled vocabularies for occupations like seafaring.[2] (Again, Modern Standard Chinese is similar in that poorly pronounced Mandarin Chinese is an actual lingua franca in many parts of southern China.) English-language daily newspapers abound all over the world, English-language videos number in the millions on YouTube, many recorded by second-language speakers of English, and English-language books and advertisements make up the plurality of the world's books and advertisements.

Languages spread around the world mostly by people using them or not for practical purposes. The majority of the settlement of the interior of North America by Europeans was done by Europeans who were not native speakers of English. (For example, both of my maternal grandparents, both of whom were born in Great Plains states, grew up in German-speaking families and had all of their schooling in the German language.) The freedom of the United States included a freedom to speak whatever language people pleased. (Abraham Lincoln funded German-language newspapers to help his presidential campaign, and Theodore Roosevelt campaigned in English, German, and French, the three languages he knew from childhood, in various places in the United States.) English was the customary language of governance in the United States, and still is not official at the federal level, but mostly English won out in the world's third most populous country because it was a common language that immigrants from a variety of places could use to communicate with one another (as happened in my paternal ancestral line). The huge population base of native speakers of English (in the following generations) in the United States who still had family ties to other countries provides English with a great advantage in spreading around the world.

Another way to treat Esperanto is to take it as a hobby, an exploration of the characteristics of a constructed language. Many language hobbyists have explored Esperanto from that point of view,[3] as I have. For a hobby language, the main criterion is fun, and I do not judge anyone else's opinion about what is fun. I don't waste my time in online discussion debating whether coin collection or knitting is a better hobby, for example. To each their own in hobbies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#English_as_a_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaspeak

[3] http://interlanguages.net/Esp.html

http://miresperanto.com/konkurentoj/not_my_favourite.htm

http://www.zompist.com/kitespo.html

http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/

BillChapman · 10 years ago

You suggest that the choice is between taking Esperanto seriously as a proposal for a world auxiliary language or take it as a hobby. My experience relates to neither of those. I see Esperanto as a remarkable success story, by far the most successful auxiliary language. It has survived wars and revolutions and economic crises and continues to attract people to learn and speak it. Over 400,000 people have signed up to the Duolingo Esperanto course in the last year. Esperanto works. I’ve used it in about seventeen countries over recent years. I recommend it to anyone, as a way of making friendly local contacts in other countries. English is not enough! I’ve made friends around the world through Esperanto that I would never have been able to communicate with otherwise. And then there’s the Pasporta Servo, which provides free lodging and local information to Esperanto-speaking travellers in over 90 countries. Over recent years I have had guided tours of Berlin, Douala and Milan in this planned language. I have discussed philosophy with a Slovene poet, humour on television with a Bulgarian TV producer. I’ve discussed what life was like in East Berlin before the wall came down and in Armenia when it was a Soviet republic, how to cook perfect spaghetti, the advantages and disadvantages of monarchy, and so on. I recommend it as a very practical way to overcome language barriers.

I will never learn more than the basics in Armenian or Slovene or Finnish, but I make use of Esperanto to get to know about the history, economy and the legal systems of countries I visit.

BillChapman commented on Esperanto is finding new life online theverge.com/2015/5/29/86... · Posted by u/shawndumas

yiyus · 11 years ago

It is not the same case. Esperanto was one of the first attempts. Now that we have Esperanto, Intelingua, Ido, Novial, and many others I have not even hear about, trying again with a new international language would be a good reason to post this comic. But when Esperanto was developed, a simple artificial language was a very innovative idea. Although it was not very successful, I think it was worth a try.

BillChapman · 11 years ago

Unlike you, I see Esperanto as a remarkable success story. It has survived wars and revolutions and economic crises and continues to attract people to learn and speak it. Esperanto works. I’ve used it in about seventeen countries over recent years. I recommend it to anyone, as a way of making friendly local contacts in other countries.

BillChapman commented on Lojban en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loj... · Posted by u/rayalez

runn1ng · 11 years ago

I always wondered. Why do people learn languages like Lojban or Esperanto when you can learn some actual languages that actual people use? Why not learn Spanish, or Hindi, or Mandarin, or Arabic, or Russian... and learn a language nobody really speaks?

I don't mean it in a derogatory sense, I am merely personally interested; if I had the time and capacity to learn a new language, I would gather it's both more useful and more fun to learn an actual living language, with a rich culture and history.

BillChapman · 11 years ago

People learn Esperanto because it's useful - especially if you travel or have international interests. I have used Esperanto in Argentina, Cameroon and about fifteen European countries. We are seeing an upsurge in Esperanto at the moment because of the appearance of the Duolingo course. See: Duolinghttp://www.liberafolio.org/9-000-homoj-eklernis-esperanton-e...

Two days after the launch of Esperanto course at the popular language learning site Duolingo, the course has already gained almost ten thousand participants. The course still is not even officially launched, but is in its test phase. The course opened in its testing phase on Thursday 28 May at eight o'clock in the evening (M.E.T.) In less than two days, the course already had 9,600 registered participants, although it has not yet been actively advertised.

BillChapman commented on What Will the World Speak in 2115? wsj.com/articles/what-the... · Posted by u/prostoalex

jodrellblank · 11 years ago

Your hundred year prediction is already more than a hundred years out of date. Welcome to 1880's Bialystok in not-yet-Poland, and the birth of Esperanto.

Here we are in 2015 and the one hundredth annual Esperanto Congress is coming.

The reasons approximately nobody speaks Esperanto now, are the same reasons nobody will speak your universal language in 2115.

BillChapman · 11 years ago

I see things differently. I see Esperanto as a remarkable success story. It has survived wars and revolutions and economic crises and continues to attract people to learn and speak it. Esperanto works. I’ve used it in about seventeen countries over recent years. I recommend it to anyone, as a way of making friendly local contacts in other countries.