Guys, it’s time to learn Esperanto.
Sorry, that ship has sailed long ago.
Pick your fights wisely, this is a lost cause.
Language history shows that dramatic changes can happen at any moment. Languages can even return from the dead… If the situation with the US spoils to the point of US culture becoming disgusting to the average European… There’s no emotional attachment to English, and most Europeans speak it poorly. You can start speaking basic Esperanto within days.
In what way is English not a European made international language?
If I had to chose, I would rather speak Latin: amazing collection of work available to read from, and to discuss about.
But as others have mentioned English is not a US made language and they certainly do not own it. English comes from Britain but its rooted in old Germanic language. It’s also a mix of a few other languages (including my own French… which is also a mix btw).
maybe spanish as it has the most speakers around the world?
I could settle for Interlingua.
If I’d pick a global language I’d pick to return to Latin.
Hell no.
So do you want to learn it in 3 months or 3 decades? Tough choice.
Children pick up languages fast. Immersion is key.
Plus Latin is already taught at a lot of schools, Esperanto doesn’t have this advantage.
If I had to pick a constructed language, I think Ido or Lojba would be better. Or hell, Toki Pona if you only care about fast vocab.
The reintroduction of Welsh via primary schooling in Wales has been super successful, a really good example of how quickly kids learn and I used to know some couples who had young children that could speak Welsh and they didn’t and it really bugged them as they had no idea what their kids are saying. But pretty much in one or two generations of children, a very endangered language is coming back.
Yeah, it’s beautiful. Here’s to hope that that’ll happen to Irish too.
Esperanto has far more C2 level speakers than Latin. Teachers teaching Latin in European highschools generally can’t speak it themselves. It’s not taught as a living language to use on your life, it’s taught in order to understand ancient scripts.
Its hard to choose, interlingua, esperanto, lingwa de planeta, ido, uropi, lingua franca nova.
Personally I think its better to develop an international sign language.
It’s much easier to learn as you dont need to learn new spellings or alphabets (the sign for “a” can also be greek alpha for instance), or germanic or slavic or latin roots, it is only actions added to your own local word, so literally verbal monoglots can speak to any other monoglot. No matter how thick their accent is.
Plus it would greatly expand the deaf communities international reach, would not exclude the deaf, and I like the idea of children learning an international auxiliary language that can also help the hard of hearing.
And if you’ve ever been in a loud bar or nightclub or restaurant in a foreign country in europe it would make ordering much easier. Obviously unfortunately it does somewhat exclude disabled people with reduced mobility and wouldn’t work on the phone, but we all have videocalls now and we shouldn’t be on the phone while driving anyway. Also it’s quite fun. I’ve started in French Sign Language (Elix app on ios app store) and am pushing to have lessons for my colleagues as we work in medical training and I think its nuts its not offered let alone encouraged or compulsory.So I say we should develop Euro Sign Language.
I mean we all use the middle finger already, lets expand on that.
No. Make German and French the lingua franca.
Esperanto is super Euro-centric, though, which can alienate people from Asia and other places. Esperanto did have something of a brief boom here in Japan, but the barrier to entry is also high since it shares no vocabulary (outside of some loans into Japanese and Korean, though some of those don’t retain the same meaning, and basically very few in Chinese from what I understand), has different grammatical structure, etc. Chinese is basically SOV like many European languages, from what I gather, but Japanese and Korean are generally SVO.
There’s also a whole high-context vs. low-context language issue.
In the context of this sub being Eurocentric is not really a disadvantage.
Yeah, I debated. The community is BuyFromEU but this would also have ripple effects elsewhere so I went for it.
English very little overlap with Japanese either. It’s just popular because the US had a huge influence on the country after dropping two nukes on it. English is still “cool” there, so of course people insert it all over, but that doesn’t mean the languages have a lot of overlap.
pls, I’ll show you the exit
Oh the famous friendliness and open mind-ness of the Fediverse… Legendary
While I find it admirable to promote the use of Esperanto I don’t think that many people want to start learning another language. It might work to garner a nerdish interest from people who love languages - which will contribute to the number of competent speakers. But otherwise it’s hard to convince people to learn a language you still can’t really use in your daily life.
And at the moment I can only give you marketing ideas that will attract fringe groups: Bad Herzberg in Germany is the ❤️ of Esperanto - a great place for hiking. You can even consider it a kind of pilgrimage. William Shatner aka Captain James T. Kirk played in a film that exclusively uses Esperanto. He holds the rights to the film too. You can see snippets of this film in Blade Trinity (and they had to pay Shatner a pretty penny to use it) and there’s also a short dialogue in Esperanto in this film…
The thing is that i don’t even want everyone to speak the same language. You know what, i’m actually kinda appreciative that most people don’t speak english fluently so at least they are spared by the mind-boggling mental illness that is called “american culture” and that we’re exposed to through the internet.
If it was only the internet… US content dominates TVs, cinemas, newspapers and bookshops all over Europe. And in big part that domination is made so easy because we all invest millions of euros to teach our populations how to speak English. L
