• 0 Posts
  • 7 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: November 26th, 2023

help-circle
  • Esperanto is also good, but when my partner tried to learn it, they were weirded out by some of it’s quirks, like noun declinations based on whether it’s a subject or object, that seems unecessary.

    That sounds interesting. Esperanto has no noun-declinations, it’s an agglutinating language, you don’t bend words (= declination).

    But what is barely resembling that what you mention is the two cases of the language, which is nominative and the so called “accusative”. Which is adding -n to words to make them an object, depending on whether the verb of the sentence needs one or not. This case also is not just for objects, but also for directions, for measurements and time. That combination normally confuses the heck out of people.

    Which is why there is also an in-joke in the Esperanto community “don’t forget the accusative”, because people forget it or apply it too often.


  • What’s actually kinda interesting is that Esperanto is having a moment like this, while technically you are to use the pronouns Li and Sxi, for he and her, Duolingo has a lot of the use of Si, which is a singular they, and since a lot of esperanto’s modern speakers are duolingo users, a lot of folks are just using si.

    I speak Esperanto for 14 years now. And no, “si” is not a singular “they”. That’s a self-referencing pronoun. And if that usage is used for genderless addressing a person then this is simply incorrect usage, because people don’t know how actually the language works. It’s used in sentences like “li lavis sin” vs. “Li lavis lin”. The first one says “he washes himself” and the second says “he washes him”, the first references the person who executes the action to reference and the second says that the action is done on a different person.

    If it comes to Esperanto and genderless usage then there ĝi (it) or ri (they). The first one would be more in accordance with the fundament of the language and the second is a new pronoun which is around since at least the 70s.

    No need to misuse si.


  • which only has european roots

    Oh I love it how people shit on Esperanto for it’s euroncentrism. Argumentation by perfectionism, that’s this. No one says that Esperanto could not evolve into a more egalitarian language, but feeling morally superior because its inventor chose to take from one cohesive language family (latin, romance languages) because the roman empire conquered the world a long time ago … is silly and wrong.





  • Esperanto is eurocentric, because it’s international. Because romance languages where made by colonialism of the roman empire. The argument goes of “equality”. Thinking the other way around would be that asiatic languages colonized the world, then Esperanto would be based on asiatic languages.

    Esperanto is a pragmatic language, not a “totally neutral” language. If you design a language to be “totally neutral” then parts would be distributed differently. How to chose which vocabulary of languages should be used often?

    So using romance languages is a pragmatic solution to this. Through usage words can be added or fall out of use, all that is allowed in Esperanto and which can make the language out of colonialism in the future more egalitarian.

    But it’s ignorant to ignore Esperanto at all and morally vilifying it as “eurocentric therefore bad”.