Is there anything cool about Esperanto?

[Nooj]

I was wondering whether there was anything about it that struck you as an interesting feature of the language.

I've never been remotely aesthetically attracted to it, but I realise I am arguing from a position of ignorance here as I don't know anything about it.

[Vijay]

Maybe I'm just ignorant, but I dunno, I find some things about Esperanto kind of interesting. I mean, it's probably the most famous conlang there is aside from Klingon. I also think it's pretty interesting that China has been pretty big on Esperanto. I also find it kind of interesting that the word for 'yes' is jes (pronounced exactly like English yes) even though the creator of Esperanto claimed not to speak much English and even though the only other languages that I can think of that have this same word are Interlingue and some English-based creoles.

[mèþru]

Yes is a pretty basic word in languages that have a specific word for it. You can learn it easily from many different languages without trying to.

[zompist]

I always liked Esperanto's "table of correlatives", an idea which makes so much intuitive sense that I have to remind myself that non-Esperantists don't use the term that way, or the concept— rather, they talk about relative pronouns, interrogatives, and indefinite pronouns.

I'm probably more influenced than I'd like to admit by it's fricative-heavy phonology.

Oh, and for new conlangers it's a kind of alternative LCK. If you'd never thought of agglutinative morphology, a highly productive set of derivations, and case, it's a good introduction to those.

It's really hard to look at it without seeing its mistakes and wanting to do better, but it did set a minimum standard for auxlangs. I have a soft spot for Volapük, that marvelous steampunk eccentricity, which only came 7 years before. But it's easier to admire Volapük than to learn it. Esperanto is probably the first pretty OK auxlang, something Europeans can pick up without much difficulty.

[Vijay]

Yes is a pretty basic word in languages that have a specific word for it. You can learn it easily from many different languages without trying to.

Sure, but why specifically English? (I'm sure someone has explained this to me before, but I'm asking again because I never remember what the motivation for that was...does it have something to do with English already having been widely spoken at the time?).

[missals]

Well, Esperanto will always be interesting in that it's the most widespread and successful conlang in history - it has a 130-year-old linguistic community with tens of thousands of members and even some native speakers. I don't think it's particularly good as an auxlang, but the fact that it's generated a long-lasting linguistic community is remarkable.

Also, grammatically, Esperanto marks the word class of all content words with its system of vocalic suffixes, but interestingly, each lexeme has a covert, inherent membership in one word class that acts as a base from which the lexeme's instantiations in other word classes are derived, and this membership cannot be predicted from its form (but can usually be observed through the semantics of its instantiations in each word class).

E.g., in Justin B. Rye's Ranto, he notes that we have brosi, kombi 'to brush, to comb' - but broso, kombo 'a brush, an act of combing' - that is, despite being very semantically similar, the lexeme bros- is inherently nominal, while komb- is inherently verbal - the form brosi is clearly a verbalization of broso, and not the other way around, while kombo is clearly a nominalization of kombi, and not the other way around.

It would be interesting to do a study to see if there is any logic to the distribution of covert word class membership in Esperanto. It may be that for many words it reflects nothing but the random whim of Zamenhof, but even so, the lexicon of Esperanto has grown a lot in the past 130 years and some kind of pattern might have emerged

[Frislander]

I suppose the cool thing about Esperanto for me is that it shows how loads of people will happily learn a conlang regardless of how linguistically broken it is.

[Linguoboy]

I suppose the cool thing about Esperanto for me is that it shows how loads of people will happily learn a conlang regardless of how linguistically broken it is.

Yet it's surprising how many people still insist that linguistic features really matter when it comes to learning languages. Just a few days ago, I had someone else insist that if we created a better Esperanto, it would be really successful.

[Zju]

I dunno about really successful, but if your native language doesn't have a lot of consonant clusters, you'd have hard time pronouncing them at first.

[Salmoneus]

I suppose the cool thing about Esperanto for me is that it shows how loads of people will happily learn a conlang regardless of how linguistically broken it is.

On the contrary, the fact that loads of people will happily learn Esperanto, despite almost no benefit from doing so, simply shows that your assumptions about how linguistically broken it is were false.

If it were broken, you would not be able to use it.

[Travis B.]

I dunno about really successful, but if your native language doesn't have a lot of consonant clusters, you'd have hard time pronouncing them at first.

That doesn't prevent fuckloads of non-native speakers from learning English.

[alice]

I don't think there's anything particularly cool about Esperanto which either (1) doesn't actually already exist in perfectly workable form in a natlang or (2) hasn't been done far better in another conlang. But that's just me.

OTOH, reading Justin Rye's Ranto will teach you a *lot* about many of the issues around language design.

[Imralu]

I like its agglutination. I mean, it's not a standout in terms of conlangs or natlangs, as alice said, but it's kind of cool when you just think it's going to be a typical European language because it sounds like Spanish spoken by Poles, but it's much more agglutinative than any SAE natlang. I really fucking hate the ge- prefix though ... but the topic was cool and I don't think I need to add to the voices talking about the malmojosaĵoj.

[mèþru]

I agree completely with alice.

[Linguoboy]

I really fucking hate the ge- prefix though ... but the topic was cool and I don't think I need to add to the voices talking about the malmojosaĵoj.

Yeah, I wish it were simply a collective prefix like its etymon, since the ability to form collectives from names etc. is a feature I'm pretty fond of.

[alice]

I agree completely with alice.

I agree completely with mèþru.

[Imralu]

I really fucking hate the ge- prefix though ... but the topic was cool and I don't think I need to add to the voices talking about the malmojosaĵoj.

Yeah, I wish it were simply a collective prefix like its etymon, since the ability to form collectives from names etc. is a feature I'm pretty fond of.

But that's what -ar- does.

[Linguoboy]

I really fucking hate the ge- prefix though ... but the topic was cool and I don't think I need to add to the voices talking about the malmojosaĵoj.

Yeah, I wish it were simply a collective prefix like its etymon, since the ability to form collectives from names etc. is a feature I'm pretty fond of.

But that's what -ar- does.

Can you use it with personal names, though? I don't recall seeing this usage.

[Imralu]

Yeah, I wish it were simply a collective prefix like its etymon, since the ability to form collectives from names etc. is a feature I'm pretty fond of.

But that's what -ar- does.

Can you use it with personal names, though? I don't recall seeing this usage.

I've never seen ge- in either German or Esperanto used with personal names. Ich treffe mich mit dem Gejänne. = "I'm meeting up with the group of people called Jan." Also: sure, why not. Mi vidis Johanaregon Johanumantajn Johane. "I saw a large group of Johanns Johanning around Johannically."

[Linguoboy]

Also: sure, why not. Mi vidis Johanaregon Johanumantajn Johane. "I saw a large group of Johanns Johanning around Johannically."

There's a difference between "a group of people named Johan" and "a group of people associated with someone named Johan". Similarly, a Gebüsch consists of more than just Büsche.

I'm saying that it would be useful to have an affix with a range similar to, e.g. Chinese -們. Ge- would be a good candidate for that if the language didn't have inherently-gendered roots.