Today is Esperanto Day – here’s why I learned it

Perfect occasion to ask something that I didn&#x27;t know who to ask: does anyone here knows if it has ever been tried to &quot;simplify&quot; the visual aspect of Esperanto, by getting rid of all accents? (ĉ, ĝ, ŭ, etc.)<p>I&#x27;m a French speaker and I know some Spanish, so I should be used to accents and maybe biased towards the idea of having them as part of a language, but on the contrary, I love that English has none:<p>- Accents make a language look more complex at first glance, and therefore less appealing to beginners (my opinion).<p>- They make it harder to learn and type in the language on a keyboard, even a virtual one. In my case, choosing a language for a keyboard is a big deal.. French one so that accents are easy to type, or English so that code is easy to type? (I chose the latter).<p>I&#x27;m gonna risk a comparison here: it&#x27;s a bit like programming languages syntax, you can build an app with either Objective-C or Swift, but I suspect many beginners would find Swift&#x27;s syntax a bit less intimidating. Similarly, someone looking at Esperanto might be immediately put off by seeing that they will have to learn to type ĉ, ĝ, ŭ, etc.<p>I would love to see someone refactor Esperanto&#x27;s syntax to remove its accent while still keeping its capabilities.<p>1. Is that even technically possible, or would that imply making words too complex or adding new letters?<p>2. Has this idea ever been debated, could I read about it anywhere? (on a public forum&#x2F;wiki maybe?)<p>Thanks!<p>----------------------------<p>Edit: Thank you for your answers! So Esperanto has indeed been changed, and each &quot;constructed language derived from Esperanto&quot; is called an Esperantido.<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Reformed_Esperanto" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Reformed_Esperanto</a> (this version has been created by Zamenhof himself and removing the accents is part of the proposal.<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ido_language" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ido_language</a><p>Would love to see a new crowdsourced and open-source reform on Github, in 2019!

Glad to see this on HN. I&#x27;m not fluent in Esperanto, but the 20 or so hours I&#x27;ve put into it, I can read, write, and speak much better than I can in Spanish (where I&#x27;ve gone through 3 years of formal education).<p>The reason is that Esperanto doesn&#x27;t have irregular anything, drops out unnecessary things, easy phonetics, and introduces devices to make things easier. For example, all nouns end in &quot;o&quot;, questions usually start with &quot;cu&quot;. Also, the vocabulary you need is reduced by marking certain things as opposites (if you know the word for good &quot;bona&quot; the word for bad is &quot;Mal&quot; + &quot;bona&quot; or &quot;malbona&quot;.<p>I still have a ways to go to learn the language, but I figure I have more chance of learning it than other languages I&#x27;m interested in like Spanish and Swedish (relatively easy for native English speakers) and Hungarian and Finnish (far beyond my wildest grasps).<p>There are not many Esperanto speakers you&#x27;ll meet on the subway, but there is a vibrant online community and international events.<p>It&#x27;s beneficial to us in the USA and the UK that English is the lingua Franca. What if the tables were turned and we had to learn Mandarin? The Esperanto language was eventually repurposed as an international auxillary language. So everyone learns their native tongue and international discussions (like the U.N.) are all done in Esperanto and you don&#x27;t need armies of translators. It will never happen, but I really like the concept.

I wonder if a better solution for a &quot;universal&quot; language would be a Simplified English, where the English language as spoken in the US&#x2F;UK is greatly simplified in terms of rules, spelling etc. Go with the Esperanto idea of a common verb tense rule (I go, He go -&gt; I goed, He goed), and clean up the spelling (tough -&gt; tuf, though -&gt; tho). Most people in the world have a grasp of English based on the Internet and entertainment, maybe making it even easier to learn would help them become proficient in it.

Estas interese, ke je Hacker News ĉi tiu afiŝo atingis.<p>La parolantojn de aliaj lingvoj, preciple la angla-parolantojn mi ne plu kuraĝigas por Esperanton lerni. Estas malŝparo de energio. Anstataŭe, la lingvon mi uzas sen tiu celo.<p>Bedaŭrinde, mi ne certas se bonan diskuton pri tiu temo ni povas havi ĉi tie. Se estas parolantoj ĉi tie, mi anticipas ke la nivelo malaltas. Espereble, pli fortan diskuton mi povas havi aŭ vidi.<p>Kompreneble, mi povas konsenti ke fortas Esperanto. Min mem mi farigis kavio. Mi volis scii, se fakte utilas tiu lingvo. Post preskaŭ kvar monatoj, mi konsciis, ke mi pravis. Jes, fakte funkcias Esperanto. Jes, eĉ la plej bizarajn ideojn mi povas esprimi Esperante. Jes, la lingvon mi subtenos en miaj restantaj jaroj.

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.

Sometimes I think something gets talked about in science fiction and then it gets stuck in people&#x27;s heads.<p>Harry Harrison talked about Esperanto in the &quot;Stainless Steel Rat&quot; books and that is why it is so much better known than Interlingua<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Interlingua" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Interlingua</a><p>which is really a cleaned-up Latin that you might already know how to read if you&#x27;ve been exposed to Romance languages much at all.

The link in the article about native speakers is interesting.<p>1. All &quot;native&quot; speakers are actually raised bilingual. and 2. George Soros was raised learning esperanto. I am surprised that there isn&#x27;t some conspiracy about Esperanto

If you are into artificial languages, also check out lfn (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;elefen.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;elefen.org</a>). Like Esperanto, it also features regular spelling and simple syntax, but one key difference is that its vocabulary is almost entirely Romance; it is a artificial Romance creolo. As a result, it is very easy for native speakers of Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, etc.) to understand, and it can also serve as a &quot;gateway language&quot; for learning other Romance languages.

The vocabulary resembles a big pile of stolen goods.

One of the nice surprises I had after learning Esperanto a while back was that there is a small but vibrant literature of original novels and poetry in Esperanto. Especially in the first half of the 20th century quite a few gems were written. I&#x27;ve been able to read works about life in Russia at the turn of the 19th century, a Czech Jew&#x27;s experiences during WWI, and a collection of short stories written by Chinese authors shortly after the Cultural Revolution, all without need of a translator. One Esperanto poet, William Auld, was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times before he died about a decade ago.

over time, several flaws in the language have been pointed out, and proposals to fix them, as well as alternate approaches to an auxiliary language have been made.<p>and while it can be said that esperanto was not yet able to appeal to the majority, it is wildly more successful than any other attempt.<p>why is that?<p>why have none of the alternatives even made it out of the experimental stage?<p>with any of the well meant proposals in this discussion, it is important to understand what would make those proposals succeed. (and by succeed i mean at first reach a speaker-base that equals that of esperanto)<p>i believe that the results up to now indicate that the quality of the language is not the issue.<p>esperanto is like python 2, but in a world where everyone prefers to use php.<p>or is it?<p>are the flaws in esperanto what&#x27;s holding back further growth? do we need to start from scratch, and go through the painful stages of initial growth esperanto has already been through?

Did duolingo remove their Esperanto course? It was there like 2 years ago, but I don&#x27;t see it now.

I got as far as reading gerda malaperis in esperanto, but then I was done with the language. I didn&#x27;t want to dedicate anymore time to it.

Relevant and entertaining: JBR&#x27;s &quot;Ranto&quot; about Esperanto - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jbr.me.uk&#x2F;ranto&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jbr.me.uk&#x2F;ranto&#x2F;</a><p>(you can try https, but it was acting up for me somehow. Sorry!)

I&#x27;ve once learnt Spanish and found it the easiest language I&#x27;ve ever seen, easier than English, it took just 2 weeks to learn. Then I&#x27;ve started learning Esperanto (as the idea of engineered languages (or whatever) amazes me, I feel like we should engineer everything) with DuoLingo (I don&#x27;t happen to know any better Esperanto course) and it felt easy yet it was just a tiny bit easier than Spanish so I was wondering why do we need a new easy language when there already is one spoken by so many people (and it also is very similar to it) but continued learning. Then I&#x27;ve found out Esperanto has grammatical cases and stopped, cases make me panic. I still feel like I would like to learn Esperanto to fluency once as I adore its spirit of technocracy, borderlessness and defiance of nationalism.