Heh So: why does the fact that Toki Pona is extremely simple mean that it's not a language? You've previously referred to it as a 'game' which I think is derogating it unnecessarily, and which I think is motivated by your desire to advocate for Esperanto instead. But to be honest you don't have to do that kind of thing to argue convincingly that Esperanto would function better as a global auxiliary language than Toki Pona. Toki Pona wasn't created for that purpose, and I'm not sure how Sonia Lang feels about those who want to treat it as if it could be an auxiliary language. But Toki Pona is still a language, because such a thing doesn't have to have a literary tradition, or capacity to communicate all sorts of complex (or even non-simple) things. It just has to be a system of representing meaning by physical forms like speech or writing, complete with shared rules including grammar and vocabulary. Wouldn't it be better to say that Esperanto is just a _better_ language for an IAL purpose than Toki Pona, or various other candidates?
@@MatthewMcVeagh Say that in toki pona. Translate your other comments made to me into it. Make sure your translation of words is as intelligible as those you used in English. Go on, prove it's a language.
@@anthonymccarthy4164 if the proof of something being a "real language" and not a language game is being able to losslessly translate something from english into it, that would imply that pig latin is a real language
@@HBMmaster FFS, his comment's not poetry, it's not a bunch of aphorisms from the The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. If the schmuck can't say it in tp conveying the same meaning, it's not a real language. "TP" is actually an apt abbreviation for what it is.
@@anthonymccarthy4164 therefore, if you could translate it into something without losing any information, that would mean that what you translated into IS a real language, right?
Esperanto has managed to achieve what few of the other conlangs have - a sizeable user community on multiple continents, varied cultural output including decent original literature, and intergenerational transmission. It may not do these as well as organic languages do, but it is in many ways much more important, and is a sales point. Many people have met and fallen in love through Esperanto and raised kids to speak it. Very few conlangs can boast that. People can talk about various linguistic features all they like, but that's only half the battle. What Esperanto loses in terms of vocabulary and phonology, it makes up for in a social and cultural sense.
@@gwest3644 If the motto of the show wasn't «The show that gets facts wrong about your favourite conlang!», I'd be gnawing at Misali's knee. I remember I was pretty mad when he put Esperanto above Lojban. XD
george aka Angrycheese It's almost like you can find lots of flaws in something and still like it. Alternatively, it's almost like being the best or second best at something doesn't necessarily mean being good.
@@zoushuu The most common reforms in Esperanto are currently to make it gender neutral. There's iĉ-ismo - using "iĉ" to mark the masculine gender Ans there is ri-ismo - using of the gender neutral pronoun "ri" Or ĝi-simo - using pronoun "ĝi" (it) as a gender neutral personal. There were also other. Ido language is an exampe of reformed Esperanto.
@@darthszarych5588 People sstarted to use gender neutral language some time ago, so I think that this is the future of the language. It really isn't that difficult to do like in Spanish or Polish :-)
okay i actually love making a country name "container for [demonym]" that's hysterical to me for some reason. someday i want to make a conlang based entirely around having the most compound words that I find funny.
@@Anonymous-df8it this comment is so baffling to me. I literally don't understand what you're trying to say. it feels racist but I don't feel confident enough about ascribing any meaning to it to even call it that.
Yes, your content and analysis is interesting, but that noise is unattractive. Just the thought that your other videos may have this same noise, makes me refrain from watching, even though I do like the points you raise and find your content attractive.
I feel like Zamenhof was very conservative, like he wanted to avoid a fatal flaw that would make the language unusable. I think it is understandable, because back then, there was no Esperanto and only "failed" attempts. Esperanto is a proof that many things can work in a conlang. It is a important stepping stone on thinking what is possible for an International Auxiliary Language.
The great success of Esperanto is a proof that it worked, and these 'issues' are minor stylistic options. Let's note that we are now 'thinking in English' and that's why it looks different. Thinking in Esperanto would be fully natural the way it (mostly) is.
+Vanege Volapük was a "stepping stone", Esperanto is beyond that. I know only four(!) languages with the potential of becoming a LAI, two of them having but some dozens of speakers: * Idiom Neutral * Esperanto * (original) Interlingua-IL, sive Latine sine flexione, Lingua Auxiliare Internationale * Neo Zonal LAs don't count, there is already one used (Bahasa Indonesia) and two in active development (Meźduslovianski/Interslavonic and a Turk language).
Being a constructed language one has to conform to popular views to stick around, I support it's core values but we need to understand that it came from a different time with different opinions and is still changing to stay relevant with this ever changing thing
My theory as to why "w" wasn't used is that: In Polish (and German and all other Germanic languages except English) w makes a "v" sound, so Zamenhoff refused to use this character in case it would he misinterpreted as "v". In Polish, the sound is written as ł, but since that was too Polish he went with the weird "u" letter. But he still used "j" even though it could be misinterpreted as the "j" in "jump". This is probably because in Polish "j" makes a "y" sound. That doesn't justify it, as it gives a bias to Polish, but it does explain it.
the logic of the accusative was that people tend to use the word order common in their native language and that the accusative allows people to use any word order they like without creating confusion. For instance, in English adjective comes before noun, but in Romance languages it's the other way around. Esperanto allows both.
@Judith Mirville the recent esperanto tends to have Adj before Noun... It may be permitted to have N-Adj format, yet its usage has fallen, thus practically Esperanto is using Adj-N. Even in many recent textbooks and literatures of Esperanto, except the poems, ALL use Adj-N. It becomes an additional unofficial rule in Esperanto.
@@wolfthunder2526 it never became a rule, it's just a _kutimo_. Esperanto is spoken a lot, and therefore not everything is under control, so some stuff get something it wasn't supposed to get. But this thing isn't a rule, it's a custom that can be broken for emphasis
But tell me which of these things is easier to learn: -A simple word order -What the accusative is, and in which specific types of words you have to put the suffix
"Hindi doesn't have t͡ʃ." It most definitely does. Here's our letter for it: च. I don't think there's a single dialect of Hindi that lacks this sound. EDIT: So does Urdu, چ. Not sure where you got this misconception from.
@@yeetyeet-jb6nc Thanks for letting me know. You're certainly right about the /v/ /w/ thing. It was one of the hardest things for me to learn when I left India
@@alexhornsey8129 yeah that is true. In Marathi, /tʃ/ and /ts/ are represented by the same character and are pronounced one or the other pretty unpredictability. In Hindi and Urdu, there is only tʃ, so he's right there.
@@zacharyherfkens7902 this is close to true. It would be Usona to avoid confusion with the Union of South America (also USA) that existed at the time the name was made up. There are actual American documents from the 1800s that refer to America as Usona. The last letter is simply replaced with an -o to make it a noun.
Classical Latin has exactly those diphthongs, which is probably where he got them from (which makes sense, looking at how much else he took from the Romance languages)
Conlang Critic Usually it is ("ruinas", etc.), but "muy" is a special case. It's possibly the only common instance of /uj/ in the language, with other exceptions being some words borrowed from American Indian languages like "cuy", the exclamation "huy", and a few rare words like "suido". "Cuidar" and "fluido" also used to have /uj/ until about a century ago, when /wi/ took hold. That said, some people do pronounce it as /mwi/, in accordance to the usual rules of Spanish orthography.
Yeah, the game show part wasn't yet a part of conlang critic, so instead we get an angry Mitch yelling why esperanto is not compatible with most common languages
Doug Demuro: *”This car is the best I’ve ever reviewed. I’ll give it a 13/50 on the overall score.”* You: *Puts Esperanto in 2nd despite the criticism*
Esperanto is one of the most developped, if not the most developped, conlang so it makes sense to rate it that good, but it stays a highly criticable language.
Doug is a fucking imbecile lmao. Every time he reviews a Western or Japanese piece of garbage, it's cozy, but when it's a Slavic car, it's the worst thing he's ever seen
It's... most popular in China? Yeah it's not the most conservative inventory in the world, but the only *hard* combination to pronounce I've ever encountered is "scsii", which yes, is ridiculous. Honestly I just pronounced it "ssii". Anyway beyond that none of the rest of the consonants are difficult to learn. Making a language that's recognizable and instantaneously accessible to everyone is impossible without returning to caveman speech. It's more important to have a wide array of easy-to-learn sounds.
@@connermckay4012 "easy to learn sounds" I'm Spanish and it took me 2 weeks to pronounce v correctly, but Esperanto has it so I guess I have to be able to say it easily.
7:03 Malsanulejo is a word that is commonly used to show people how words can be formed in Esperanto. But "hospitalo" is a word in EO. It wasn't left out.
I know I'm 3 years too late, but... In his video about Interslavic, Mitch said he doesn't speak any slavic language. I think if he would, he would be even harsher. As a native polish speaker I gotta say; from what I see, Esperanto is almost entirely based on polish. Not only phonology, as he mentioned in the video, but most of its grammar rules, not using 'x' and 'q' among other letters, redundant and misleading diacritics, suffixes on both nouns and adjectives and female words based on male versions (although not that extreme to call mother a 'female father' lel). The only part of it that isn't copied from polish is vocabulary. On a positive note, I'm glad to hear that people try to change Esperanto and address problems like gender-based vocabulary. I believe that, just as natlangs change throughout years of usage, so should conlangs, getting closer and closer to being... well... natural to use. You can't speak pseudocode your whole life, spoken languages, natural or constructed, should constantly evolve to be usable. It really looks like Zamenhof just took polish, covered it up with romanic based vocabulary and said "Wow, what a wonderful new language. I'm sure at least 10 million people would love to speak it as their secondary language". It's too eurocentric to be international, too gender-unfair to work in XXI century and have too much in common with polish for me to like it. 1/10, left my country because I used to live in Zamenhof street.
wow never seen anybody hating it so much! why? how is it "based on polish"? he knew like 5 langs, it is "based on" yiddish as much - it just has "lowest common denominator" features!
@@valinorean4816 Not really, like the reviewer says, it's phonology is *not* international, it's vocabulary is just slightly distorted Romance, and it has a ton of uneccesarily complicating features that don't even add additional specificity or meaning. Of course, things like grammatical gender are common (in IE, at least), but of course that's a legacy of the evolution of natural languages, where many formerly useful features are retained, even millennia after they've become redundant, following the evolution of features that supplant their original function. If Esperanto was an 'art-lang', like Tolkien's languages, full of invented entymologies and history, that would be fine, but Esperanto was designed as an international creole, and on that criterion its design *IS* terrible.
@@Thomas-u8q "Not really, like the reviewer says, it's phonology is not international, it's vocabulary is just slightly distorted Romance" - hold, when you're creating a language you have to make some specific selections for these, and so by definition they will not be universal then? what's... the criticism here? "things like grammatical gender" - Esperanto doesn't have grammatical gender, the question is merely about assymetry of male and female suffixes - it works in Esperanto just like in English in actor/actress, steward/stewardess, etc, and while that didn't raise eyebrows in the 19th century it does now. regardless, there is no redundancy here, it's a political question, like gender neutral pronouns; Esperanto only does what English does with genders! The "unnecessarily complicating features" free up the word order, enabling the speakers whose native languages have different word orders to start speaking Esperanto without being ungrammatical right away. "Esperanto was designed as an international creole, and on that criterion its design IS terrible" - how? and there is a bunch of references about native speakers of Chinese and so on finding Esperanto a tenfold relief in difficulty compared to IE natlangs, say. I think it's just about as good as it can be, and any serious problems in its path to its goal are political.
5:40 - in an earlier iteration of Esperanto, ŝ, ĉ, ĵ, ĝ were written ś, ć, ź, dź, by the way, like you suggested. But Zamenhof changed this shortly before first publishing his language, to make the spelling of Romance and Germanic words more recognizable. E.g. ĵurnalo is more recognizable as "journal" than źurnalo, and aĝo looks a lot more like "age" than adźo. So this was a very conscious choice. Even if you may not agree with it.
@@eljestLiv I believe I wrote that comment mostly based on the Wikipedia page on Proto-Esperanto, which says "The Slavic-style acute diacritics became circumflexes to avoid overt appearances of nationalism, and the new bases of the letters ĵ, ĝ (for former ź, dź) helped preserve the appearance of Romance and Germanic vocabulary." Apparently a lot of Zamenhof's notes on early versions of Esperanto were lost or destroyed by nazis, but enough copies still exist to at least know some things, like how the alphabet in early drafts of Esperanto worked. The Esperanto-language Wikipedia article "Pra-Esperanto" has more of these details, with citations and stuff.
Word order is flexible like in Latin, and I LOVE that. You can communicate so much subtlety by the order you choose, as it communicates the emphasis; but also, flexible word order allows for some really fantastic creative writing.
You can't, if you don't have clear rules on how to use "free word order". For example Hungarian focus is before the verb whereas Estonian focus is after it. So a Hungarian and an Estonian could use the same Esperanto word order and mean to emphasize completely different things.
For me, as Japanese, Esperanto is easy lang to learn, yes, I can say Indonesian and Mandarin much simpler grammar, but compare to most of language, it's much easier. ALSO, that complex grammar makes Esperanto more swappable, which gives flexibility when you write or say.(e.g. "Mi amas vin", "Amas vin mi", "Vin mi amas", etc.) (like Japanese or Korean) And you may know, Japanese lang has less phonics than major langs around the world, but pronunciation of Esperanto wasn't prob for me. So, I definitely can say Esperanto is easy lang, especially compare to most of natlang. But, still I agree about sexism in Esperanto, I think it should be like this: boy; [child]-[male] girl; [child]-[female] man; [grown-up]-[male] or [person]-[male] woman; [grown-up]-[female] or [person]-[female] Also, a word "they", "ili", should change third person pronoun of male and neutral or "ili" itself.
@@HealyHQ because most of the hundreds of changes that turn Esperanto into Ido accomplish nothing. If Esperanto is too european, why remove the slavic influence in favour of germanic/romanic? Turo-->turmo, mi-->me, rajtas-->darfas Why twist the meaning of an existing suffix (-ulo) instead of inventing a new one?
Alright there's a lot of issues with this video, but your biggest blunder was by far the complaint about the accusative and lack of designated word order. *This is by design.* By indicating the part of speech at the end of the word you allow the speaker to use the word order they're most comfortable with, without compromising intelligibility. The adjective agreement is for clarity. In addition to how any word can be derived from combining smaller roots, and any root or group of roots can be changed into noun, adjective, or adverb form makes it an ideal language for direct translation. Learning to tack on an n to the object is by far easier than retraining yourself to use a completely different word order.
I've heard this line of thought before, but do esperantists native with non-SVO actually habitually speak in their own order? If I'm translating something into Esperanto from Latin, should I put the verb at the end for the purposes of fidelity? To be fair, I can't say I've met many esperantists personally, and certainly someone with a non-SVO native language, but I get the feeling that general Esperanto usage has a standard word order which is the "correct" one
At the time that Zamenhof constructed Esperanto, the letter W was only used in Polish, Wendish, German, Dutch, and English. It was incorporated in the alphabets of languages that adopted the Latin alphabet since then, but It wasn't in the Swedish or Portuguese alphabets until the 21st century. Zamenhof couldn't use it. In European languages (bear in mind that Zamenhof knew about English but didn't speak it, and didn't know Spanish) there is no consensus about the sound of the letter Y. Given Esperanto's phonology, there are more sounds than letters. He could have used diagraphs like Polish (look at what a mess that is!) or diacritics like Czech. He chose diacritics, which is good because digraphs run into problems: (philosophy, upholstery). He started using letters like č but switched to ĉ so that it would be more international by not being partial. The diacrtics became problematical even for him, but there was a point of no return. The phonology is cluttered, however, everyone speaks Esperanto with an accent, which means essentially that no one does. The advantage is that names, place names, and other words, don't have to be distorted beyond recognition to be Esperantized. One problem is that it is not clear whether verbs are inherently transitive or intransitive (this is hard for English-speaking people), and which root is which native part of speech. For example, the root bel- is adjectival and the root kron- is nominal. Esperanto is more successful than any other conlang by far. Whether it is because of or in spite of its flaws would make an interesting debate.
All of these are good points, and quite similar to mine (see my other comment, the long one). As for the digraphs vs. diacritics: If anyone considers diacritics problematic (e.g. cannot produce them on a keyboard or believes in the superiority of digraphs, as the author of this video), one can use digraphs in Esperanto as well: "cx" instead of "ĉ", "sx" instead of "ŝ" etc. Also I'm glad you mentioned the transitive vs. intransitive problem of Esperanto, that makes your critique much more solid than the author's. Unfortunately, this is not a problem unique to Esperanto. Same with the adjectival vs. nominal roots. It's pretty much just how a particular word originated and which version was first (noun or adjective) and which one has been derived from it later. But I'm not sure how could this problem be solved in a language (either constructed or natural), because there are words or meanings that are purely of the "quality" sort (adjectival), while others are purely nominal (thought there is a tendency for creating new adjectives out of nouns, and nouns seem to be the most basic and common feature of every language, because they basically name things around us). Nevertheless, Esperanto might not be a perfect language, but still I find it much more elegant and organized than any natural language I know of, so even if its flaws it serves its purpose very well.
BTW any ideas about how the transitive/intransitive problem could be solved in a language? (Either a constructed one, or maybe there is a natural language that solves it already?)
"The diacrtics became problematical even for him". Are you referring to his proposal for some Ido-like reforms? I'm not sure that was his misgivings as much as giving the opponents a chance.
Which language has a distinguishing mark on its transitive or intransitive roots? None that I'm aware of. If you think marking transitivity is a problem, then just don't, like in Lingua Franca Nova were verbs can be used transitively or intransitively without change. Transitivity is inherent in the meaning, and there are multiple kinds of intransitive verbs (look up ergative, unergative, and unaccusative). As to the part of speech, that's why dictionaries have the primary ending: you just learn "bel/a" or "bela" and you know it's natively an adjective. Esperanto's success is primarily because of its age and past activism and infrastructure. Secondarily its agglutinative nature, which is very flexible and expressive, and a refreshing freedom from the rigidity of languages that don't allow arbitrary compounding and changing parts of speech. Thirdly, and more controversially, because the part-of-speech endings make it unambiguous in a way that fixed-word-order languages just can't do -- ambiguities are unavoidable when a word can be a subject, verb, object, or adjective without change. Fourth, at least in the beginning, because it borrowed vocabulary and spelling from several different languages rather than favoring just one.
@@bonbonpony hmmmmm, actuallllyyy Japanese isn't consistent and exceptionless about this one, but a lot of tr-intr pairs have a pattern like transitive ends with -eru while intransitive end's with -aru 始める hajimeru (to begin something) - 始まる hajimaru (to begin) 終える oeru (to end something, to finish something) - 終わる owaru (to come to an end, to finish) 止める tomeru (to stop something) - 止まる tomaru (to stop) Maybe we could make three types of verbs, one always intransitive: to see - vid[end1], one for intransitive in a pair: to begin - komenc[end2], one for transitive in pair: to begin (smth) - komenc[end3] (ion)
From Doctor Zamenhof's perspective, probably seemed more international than . is more transparently related to than , as is transparently related to , (despite making a different sound in many many languages, including a few European ones), and makes a /v/ sound in many European languages (which were obviously the only kind of languages he was really thinking about). Admittedly, the choices about and were probably strongly influenced by his desire not to contradict Polish orthography.
Yes, it's worth understanding that Zamenhof had to sell it in the first instance to the people in his region. More than a century later the Esperanto movement has not changed these things, thinking that if they do, all of their existing literature and documentation will be rendered unreadable!
As far as I know, the originally was used only in diphtongs and . the little bow was above both letters to indicate that you shouldn't pronounce them separately. The way typewriters were designed meant that you could only put it above one letter. I'm still not sure whether the is hidden in my "english, international" charset somewhere, so I'm using ú instead
wtf where did you ever see it written as chao? As someone who is a native portuguese never have i in 22 years seen people write chao. Only chau or xau (xau being waaay more common)
@@KingHalbatorix it really does, I learnt Esperanto and i had almost non of the problems he talked about, practically the problems are different (i have a few friends who also learnt Esperanto so it's not just me)
@Léo Pintto Ele provável que pegou uma tabela do IPA qualquer, pq o Tch só apareceu depois de ~1930 e gerou a palatalização em palavras como 'de', já o tchau foi influência italiana
@@allisond.46 Actually, yes. From least common to most common: Portuguese doesn't have /ts/; /x/ may appear as one of the realizations of our gutteral r but I don't think it's super common, and that also makes it a free variation of /h/, another possible pronunciation of the gutteral r, causing some confusion; The /tʃ/ and the /dʒ/ only appear as allophones of /t/ and /d/ before /i/ and in loanwords And the alveolar trill /r/ isn't veeery common anymore (but this one is easy for us to do :P)
Regardless of Esperanto’s issues, it’s still 10x easier to learn then any other language. I’ve studied Spanish and French for years. I barely remember anything besides some basic phrases. Esperanto on the other hand, I studied a small book and remember the entire grammar. I was able to start constructing sentences with just a few words. Is it perfect? No, but does it work and allow me to learn it quickly? Yes.
I really feel like most of the critic in this video is not from an objective point of view. This is critic from an english-speaking standpoint. The accusative case is very simple if you're from country who uses a language with and accusative case alike grammar it's really simple to learn
Even English distinguishes the accusative case for _some_ words. E.g. the personal pronouns: "he" vs. "him", "she" vs. 'her" etc. It's just that it's not a language-wide feature, and it's quite miserable, because it introduces unnecessary ambiguities sometimes, which have to be overcame by using other grammatical constructs (like the passive voice for example).
@Bon Bon: You find (almost) all of the eight "basic" cases in any language (because you have to have a way to communicate eg. going from a place (Ablative) or addressing someone (Vokative). A "vanished" case means it is now communicated prepositionally. MOST English-speakers have problems that Levi Eliezer Samenhof (L Zamenhof) took the "Latin Accusative", ie. the Accusative in Esperanto includes the Allative: "Ĉu mi sekvas lin en la urbon? Ĉu mi sekvas lin en la urbo?" ("Gerda Malaperis", Easy Reader by Claude Piron) "Do I follow him INTO the city? Do I follow him INSIDE the city?"
Well, I might be a bit biased, because I have 7 cases in my native language (though one of them, the vocative, is not used that frequently). And I know some languages that have even more. But I studied enough languages to know that there's always some construct to communicate the same idea as cases, either directly or indirectly through prepositions or other constructs. And even the inflectional ending for the cases in many languages originally were prepositions that merged with other words with time. I understand that people that don't have much of that tricky feature in their (isolating) languages may have problems with understanding the idea, because they don't have anything in their experience that they could refer to. But I think it's a matter of how these concepts are taught to them (and they are usually taught very badly, because teachers just refer to their knowledge about the cases and cannot explain it to people who don't understand what they're talking about :q ). For the accusative in Esperanto, I would go with showing English speakers the examples where the accusative is used in their language: "I" vs. "me", "he" vs. "him" etc. Knowing the difference between the subject and direct object helps a lot in this case. The genitive can be explained with the "Saxon possessive" 's. But I would have to think on how to explain other uses of accusative, or other cases.
i have 4 cases in my language (historically 5, the 5th is understood just not used) (one of those 4 is the vocative, aka a rarely used case). the other 3 are like the bare minimum: nominative; genitive; accusative
why should an "objective" point of view have to come from the perspective of a language with case distinctions? Billions of people natively speak languages that don't inflect nouns for case (Chinese languages, English, Spanish) and using SVO with no case markers would avoid the issue entirely, so there's no point in adding it to a language that's supposed to be "easy for native speakers of any language to learn." Either way, there's definitely no excuse for case agreement concord on adjectives, which Zamenhof himself agreed was a mistake.
Everyone: you're wrong, Portuguese does have that sound, in "tchau"! Tchau: is borrowed from another language Tchau: is the only example people can think of Does that really count as being part of Portuguese's phonological inventory? Like sure English has a glottal stop in "Batman" and "uh-oh", but it's not in our phonology.
But you can pronounce it ! I'm french and I cannot pronounce the sound "the" properly. It a sound that I've never prononce in my life before learning english.
while its true european portguese does not have the [tʃ] sound, brazilian portuguese does have it in an excessive amount. everytime the a T meets an I sound (pronounced like ee in english) the ti actually beacomes a chi. it even happen when the e vowel is reduced into an i at the end of words or randomly in the middle of them. words like "tia" sounds like chia in english, and "monte" sounds like munchy because the e gets reduced to an i. however, considering the creator of esperanto was a polish guy in the 1800, he probabily couldnt care less about brazil, so the point of portuguese not having the [tʃ] sound still makes sense
Actually, in any word that has the sillable "ti" this sound is used, unless in some accents (It is used also with "te", but only when the word ends with it)
One could argue that the fact that none of the world's most major languages' phonologies is completely compatible with Esperanto makes it more international, because it doesn't favor any particular group too much. That would ignore the fact that Esperanto clearly does favor speakers of some languages over others, but my point is that assuming some major world language has to be completely compatible with an IALs phonology for it to be international is a little bit misguided. As you pointed out, Esperanto is intended to be easy to learn, which makes compatibility desirable, but it would be limiting to be compatible with everyone (though Toki Pona is around the close to that), so being incompatible to favor internationality over ease of learning is a legitimate option. I'm also probably biased by the fact that, to me, learning to distinguish new phonemes, especially ones that are just holes in your native languages phonology, is always infinitely easier than learning vocabulary or getting used to the grammar. Apparently, though, many people learn significant grammar and vocabulary without even acquiring such basic phonological skills as distinguishing all the phonemes of a language, so maybe I'm just weird.
Would you prefer a conlang which gives most people an easier time learning the phonology, or a conlang where it is equally difficult for everyone to learn it?
Research on l1 acquisition in children shows that they actually pick up case endings before word order, implying that its easier to learn. And it makes sense when you think about it. Tell me, which is easier to decipher: something that's explicitly stated, or something that's indirectly implied. In fact, people who speak languages with case systems find confirgurational languages annoying, because they're used to basically being told specifically that a given noun in a sentence is the direct object rather than it being assumed just because of the word order. And besides, they're used to interpreting an unmarked noun as the subject of a sentence, who seeing an unmarked noun that is actually the direct object is counter-intuitive to them. Also, configurational grammars are vastly more complicated. A book about English or Chinese grammar takes hundreds of pages, and new rules are being discovered all the time. However, a case-marking language doesn't nearly require as many pages, even if you list all the irregularities the language may have (and no, not all case-marking languages are irregular and complicated like Latin, though THAT is harder to learn than configuration it seems).
That's an interesting point but Esperanto is primarily learned as a l2 not l1. For English speakers at least (probably the most important group of speakers to please if you want an ial to succeed) learning non-configurationality is much harder than a new word order.
@@sumwon6973 but would us trying to memories something like object subject verb word order be easier than adding suffixes? even if osv is uncommon that's not my point
lXBlackWolfXl at least for me the hard thing about Latin is conjugating verbs (memorizing all the conjugations and using the right mood and tense). The case system is one of the easiest parts tbh.
Haha it figures that Esperanto phonology only matches with Polish phonology. Note: I'm actually currently learning Polish and love it to bits, so don't think I'm hating. Kocham Polskę. :)
@@bonbonpony Polski naprawdę nie jest taki trudny... Honestly, the hardest thing *by far* is the ortography. For example, we have the "rz" and "ch" which nowadays are no different than "ż" and "h" (they make the [ʒ] and [x] sounds respectively). There's really no reason for their existence today, but they're still here because the made different sounds in Old Polish. And you have to remember when to write them, as you can't write a "ż" down when the [ʒ] can change to [r] (lekaRZ -> lekaRski), whereas if it changes to [z] or [g], it needs to be a "ż". Same goes for "u" and "ó" (though to my knowledge they never really made different sounds) - when the [u] changes to [ɔ], you *have* to put down an "ó" (drOGa -> drÓŻka). There are also a lot of grammatical forms to different words. For example, the Polish word for "two" is "dwa" - but that's only the base form. Used in nominative for neuter or inanimate male nouns ("dwa krzesła" - two chairs; dwa stoły - "two tables"). Intimidating, isn't it? Well, there is also "dwojgu" and "dwóm" (the second one could also be written as "dwom" in some dialects), which can be simplified to "dwójce" (that one derives from "dwójka" which is another word for the number 2). Now, all of them are used in dative and mean the same thing- but the first one is for neuter, the second one for personal male *and* female, and the third for male, female *and* neuter nouns. "Dwa" has *SEVENTEEN* forms. Tak, wcale nie mamy trudnego języka :)
"Esperanto is too eurocentric! It's too difficult to pronounce for Chinese and Japanese people!" ...and then Esperanto was significantly more popular in Asia than in the West.
Esperanto's main problem is that its "akademio" barely fixes any problems, and its members aren't elected by ordinary users. Esperanto wasn't "designed to be sexist". Zamenhof simply worked with what he had: English has "hero" vs "heroin", Dutch has "leeuw" vs "leeuwin", "vriend" vs "vriendin" and a bunch of others, German has many more. Zamenhof merely made it universal so we don't have to learn separate words like sow, bitch, ewe, etc. A male suffix "iĉo" was proposed in (or before) 1984 but in 2015 the akademio declared that it would wait for "the natural evolution of the language" to justify official acknowledgement. The pronouns "ri" and "sli" are being used to some extent, to indicate third person singular without suggesting a sexe
Learning german and decided to turn german subtitles on, and »müssten die Leute ›Männin‹ statt ›Frau‹ sagen" is really funny. Props to whoever translated this!
Lustigerweise ist das im Deutschen bei anderen Wörtern ja ziemlich verbreitet: Polizist -> Polizistin Schüler -> Schülerin Also die Idee, das Geschlecht bei Wörtern anzeigen zu müssen und das durch Ableitung des männlichen, aber auch allgemeinen Begriffes zu machen, ist bei Esperanto nichts besonderes. Das heißt natürlich nicht, dass da keine Reform angemessen sei!
I am no Esperanto speaker, I have only done a two-hour-course one afternoon once and read a little bit on Wikipedia, but I feel like some of your critisism isn't fair. Yes, it is a Europecentric language, but I find the phonology not that hard (i am european, tho). Also, the accusative marker -n doesn't seem too complicated to me, all natural languages have an accusative (well, technically ergative languages don't, but whatever...same difference), so it should be easy even for someone, who in their native language doesn't mark the accusative, to learn that. As other people have pointed out, adding an affix to make something male female (hey, as english does) is not what I would have chosen in a conlang, but it's nothing uncommon in natural languages. Especially with the orthography I felt like you were looking at the language from a very Englishcentric point of view.
May I ask where the accusatives are in English? And Dutch, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish? Apart from pronouns, these languages absolutely do not have an accusative.
@@purple_purpur7379 But I think pronouns are enough to learn to use the accusative -n. My native languages are Spanish and Galician and it is very easy to recognize the direct object if you pronominalize everything. For example, "Vin o can" (I saw the dog) becomes "Vino" (I saw it), the O in "Vino" being the direct object, masculine singular pronoun. In Esperanto, "Mi vidis la hundon", "Mi vidis ĝin".
Yes, that's what i thought as well. It should use word order for accusative like we do in English. It should use W like we do in English. Japanese people wouldn't recognise Japanio, if the J isn't pronounced like in English.
@@boivie I don't think that counts since they will probably learn it as "ジャパン" and hearing "ヤパン" they wouldn't think "ああ日本そっそっか" like when I wrote "ヤパン" full Katakana wasn't even an option but it realized I was trying to write "ジャパン" before I even finished. EDIT: Also nominative-accusative alignment is the most common alignment there is ergative-absolutive is only used in 1/4 of the world's languages.
4:29 Im a native italian speaker. Since i was a kid, i've wondered why italian doesn't have a ĵ. It's really easy to pronounce, because it would sound like the g equivalent of the italian version of the ŝ (written with sc+i or e). Sure, italian doesnt have it, but i dont complain about its presence in esperanto. Instead i'm really happy of it. What's difficult to me is the ĥ instead.
I'm native Spanish speaker. Spanish doesn't have ŝ, ĝ, h and ĵ, but it's easy to pronounce them because now we have a lot of influence from English, and ĵ is easy because the argentinian accent has that sound (sound that Mexican Spanish doesn't have).
"It isn't very easy to learn." Are you kidding me. Sure, it is not the easiest possible language, but it is one of the easiest conlangs and definitely easier than any natlang.
Currently learning Chinese. It's easy as hell and I've studied a shit-ton of languages with no luck. I'm a week in and I'm already thinking in Chinese. The tones really aren't that hard and the writing system is at least logical even though it's complex. In my own subjective experience, Chinese is easier than Esperanto.
TBH, maybe I got ahead of myself with the characters statement because I've only just scratched the surface there, but so far, I'm really intrigued. Otherwise, Pinyin is legit. Seriously, the language is not that complicated. I suppose the shit with classifiers is a little clunky. That's nitpicking, though.
it spread more, yes. Partly because Zamenhof allowed natural evolution rather than keeping all strings in his own hands, partly because nobody designed something significantly better. As long as there are no dozens of millions of speakers of Esperanto as proof that people want a neutral worldlanguage, why would anyone capable waste their time on designing something better?
To be very fair to him, his goals at the time makes sense for all the weird spelling decisions he made, he wanted to make it as familiar as possible so more people would get to speak it
The compound word in Esperanto are just easier to learn. For me it was easier to learn a word (sano) and then form the word for hospital adding suffixes that are identical for every noun that learning a entire new word.
Hey thanks for making the video and mentioning me in the introduction (even if you did mispel my name). Unfortunately there's a lot of errors and mistakes in your video. Here's my thoughts: * The introduction made my ears bleed, never do that again! * Why do you call Zamenhof "L Lejzer Z"? * The sound quality isn't great, there was a buzzing sound and sometimes you spoke very quickly and mashed words together. * You complain that Esperanto doesn't have certain sounds from some languages and vice versa. Yeah, because Esperanto is a combination of languages, it's not similar to just one. * "You can use the word order instead of the accusative" - but what word order? Does a neutral word order exist? * Are plurals for adjectives really that much of a problem or is it just because English doesn't have them? French has them, so if Zamenhof ignored that then French people would probably complain * "Suno doesn't sound like sun" - Er what? Yes it does. Even when you prounounced them, they sounded the same, did you not notice? * "Esperantoignores international words like hospital" - Actually hospitalo is an Esperanto word * The word for woMAN comes from man. feMALE comes from male. This is true of English, Esperanto and lots of other languages. * "Esperanto is sexist". No, just no * "You must learn a completely new name of where you live" Wrong. The vast majority of the time, the name is the same. I'm from Irlando (Ireland) but I live in Francio (France). You cherry picked the few exceptions. * For country suffixes it's almost always -io. It's not the clearest system, but you wildly exaggerate the problems. -stano is not a suffix, that's incorrect.
*nice *his middle name is Lejzer and we cannot let people forget that *my old mic broke :( *but like my point was that it's different from all of those major languages *SOV is the most common, so that works, but a lot of the most common languages use SVO. either one really *but like a lot of major languages DON'T have them *[ˈsu.no] and [sɐ̃n] sound pretty different to me *yeah but that's a newer addition and wasn't part of the original design *just because natural languages do sexism doesn't mean that it's good for constructed languages *but it is though? *sure, some European countries get endonyms in Esperanto, but most countries don't *true; the actual suffix is -(i)stan. Uzbekoj live in Uzbekistano; Afganoj live in Afganistano.
"but like my point was that it's different from all of those major languages" Different languages are different, I don't see that as a major problem. "SOV is the most common, so that works, but a lot of the most common languages use SVO. either one really" But then people will complain that it gives certain languages an advantage and isn't actually neutral. "but like a lot of major languages DON'T have them" Learning a new language comes with lots of new experiences. That's not unique to Esperanto. Spanish has sounds that English doesn't have, is that a flaw of Spanish? If you expect a new language to be the same as your native language, you're gonna have a bad time. "yeah but that's a newer addition and wasn't part of the original design" Because Esperanto (like other languages) has developed and changed over time. Adding new words isn't a flaw. "just because natural languages do sexism doesn't mean that it's good for constructed languages" But is it really sexism? Is nearly every European language sexist? "true; the actual suffix is -(i)stan. Uzbekoj live in Uzbekistano; Afganoj live in Afganistano." Wrong again. The word for Afghanistan is Afganio, Uzbekistan is Uzbekio. In fact, none of the Central Asian countries names end in -istano, their names are Kazaĥio, Turkmenio, Taĝikio and Kirgizio. The only country I could find that ends with -stan is Pakistano, but one example doesn't count as a root ending.
Lejzer looks like lazy Ingliŝ (equivalent for EN) transliteration of Łazarz which is Lazar-o. In Wiki Name discrepancy it states English Lazar-us. So, simple (Slavic) name would be Lazar (+localised suffix)
+Robert Nielsen actually, -io is unofficial; and I DO prefer "-ujo" for ALL incorporated states, and "-ano" for ALL nationals - "Irlando" was at Samenhof''s time, but it gained statehood and became "Irlandujo", you went from "irlanda grandbritanano" to "irlandano". Yes, "Irlando" is no autonym (that would be "Eiro" or something like that); but everyone knows what's meant. To reach unambiguity, IMO all ekster-sufiksoj should be eliminated (making "Germana" into "Germuja" for the German state, "germa" for the cultural region or language). Stano is in PMEG (-istan, actually) as ekster-sufikso for Afghanistán, Pakistán, Turkestán... - It would make a good neologism for "super-provincial incorporated body", which is about its original meaning in Farsi (Pl. stanha). In "Unua Libro" ("Dr Esperanto's International Language"), the Vortaro was a large peace of thin paper, also available separately; in the English translations it wass made into a multi-page part. You were supposed to use only the 900-950 radicals in there and include the "vortaro" in letters to non-Esperantists. Unfortunately, this design goal was neglected by the UEA after Samenhof's death. These radicals, plus terminology from the "Jarlibnroj" (see STEB) still are a good "basic set" to use for communication (I write my thesis bilingually in them). For that, however, the radicals have to be limited. Can there be a "box of Germans"? No. Can there be a "Fruit tree of matches"? no. "-uj-" does not mean "container of", but equally "fruit tree/bush of" or "n-ic nation / nation of n-anoj". That those concepts are similar (where something grows or is held) leads to the correct meaning of the three. (An "apple-box" is a "apple-ish fruit box".)
maybe the reason for why zamenhoff didn't use for the /w/ sound is because in polish represents the /v/ sound, and he didn't want to confuse his peers so he used
I actually like Esperanto. And where he was saying that inflecting the adjectives for the same case and number as the nouns, that s exactly what Latin does. And many romance languages inflect the adjectives for the same gender and number as the nouns. Esperanto grammar is actually pretty simple to me. It makes sense and I really enjoy the language. I eve call myself fluent in Esperanto
the it is inconsistent is because esperanto has diverged from the esperanto that dr.lazier spoke. it is basically a natural language with constructed origins now
2:14 The criticism of the sound set is pretty legit. I honestly don't like that this language has the ĥ, l, and the r. 4:00 "Notably dumb." The diphthongs are dumb, eh? I think you underestimate people's ability to learn a new way to say things. The dumb comment was mean. It hurt a bit :( 4:49 scii OH GOD THIS ONE. Yeahhhhh I am with you on the 'sc' combo in Eo. It was HELL to learn. I mean, I can do it now like a native, but it does take quite a bit of practice to get the hang of. That being said, again, I learnt it. Who's to say others couldn't? I mean, is it REALLY the end of the world if the language has sounds that you don't know yet? 5:09 What is it with English speakers and not liking diacritics? Honestly. The only reason that there is to complain about the fact that Eo has diacritics that aren't in any other language is that it would be difficult to print which was BARELY a problem until computers came out 100 years later give or take. This point is more of a personal opinion. 5:30 You mentioned the fact that Zamenhof's native language was Polish. Does it surprise you that the letter w wasn't pronounced as it is in English? Did you know that Polish pronounces that as a v? Like..... this is another meaningless criticism. 5:42 I'm gonna go ahead and make the point that people brains do not naturally think of letters in terms of linguistics. There, I said it. Complaining that the letters don't look like how they should be pronounced is SOOO pointless. Does the letter s look like it should make an s sound? No. Well, if most of the alphabet is gonna be inconsistent, then why change that? This is another point that falls dead in practice. I certainly didn't even think of this as a criticism until I heard it just now. 6:10 Word order Esperanto's grammar is supposed to be very free and open. You really missed that point and complained that the accusative case could have just been marked with word order, but not every language is an SVO language. I feel like you didn't research this part of the language before you made the video or at least forgot about it. 6:24 "There is actually no reason to do this." (talking about more markers) My response: "Why not?" You really could have gone into the criticisms instead of stating the fact that it was bad over and over again or going into the alternatives. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. 6:40 'The vocab is super euro-centric' This is true. Actually, you could have said 'romance language centric' and would have been about right too. Then again, you could always try to use more words from other areas of the world, if it bothered you that much, I suppose. 7:02 I think this is one of Esperanto's major strengths. Whenever you read the word 'malsanulejo,' you start to think, hmmm.... now what could that mean? Well, un-health-person-place.... ahhh like a hospital! Another example: pafilo.... hmmmm.... shoot-device.... ahh like a gun! This is totally useful when you want to clarify some point to someone else and you are talking about ideas that are less common than hospitals or guns. This point also TOTALLY goes against the last point you made at 6:40. 7:08 oh no.... he's gonna talk about this now.... I'll admit that sexism in Esperanto can be seen as an issue, but the iĉ movement (the male counterpart to 'in' in the video, the female version) pretty much takes care of this. Also, not having to learn two separate words for objectively the same concept is a pretty good idea at least to start with. But I guess criticism equals negative only right now... 7:46 I have never ever met an Esperanto speaker from a European language background that complained about this ever. Like, did you talk to actual Esperanto speakers when you were making this or were you just guessing what problems someone would have when learning this language? 8:22 Honestly, just slap an -ujo or an -io at the end and you will be PERFECTLY understood. This is the convention, not a solid rule. Nobody is going to arrest you because you said Germany wrong (which can be 'theechland' in English too, by the way!) 8:26 Usono is not the full name of the country, but is an abbreviation: Unuigintaj Statoj de Ameriko. You can just call it Ameriko if you prefer. This is definitely the worst point out of your entire video. 8:37 Calling it Nihonio or Nihonujo is PERFECTLY FINE. Like.... where are you getting this from? You could call India 'Indio,' but I and most people whom I know actually call it 'Baratio' or 'Baratujo.' It actually seems more respectful because you are retaining the way that it is pronounced in their language. 8:52 The suffix for country is still -ujo. You can use either. I personally use -ujo because it is more logical, but the -io thing happened because time passed and people started saying the names of the countries that way. This is an awful point too because this change happened well AFTER Zamenhof designed the language. Unlike most conlangs, Esperanto is a living language. It can't help changing over time. 9:03 No, you do not need to 'memorise' which one you are supposed to use. Refer to the previous few points. 9:31 Nope, it would be pretty hard to 'fix' anything in Esperanto now because it is a living language spoken by probably around a million people give or take. You should not treat Esperanto like a normal conlang. Anyway, the video was okay, but you really missed the part where you were supposed to compliment the language. That would be okay, but a lot of the points you made against it were really groundless and/or plain wrong.
The point of this channel is to criticize languages. I feel that one of the major points that you are missing from this video, is that Esperanto is supposed to be an auxlang, which means that it is easy to learn for a large amount of people (from multiple language backgrounds). It fails at achieving this in multiple areas, so obviously much of the video will be criticism.
Still though, what is the point of learning Esperanto if it is just as hard to learn as a regular natlang? We may not be able to change the problems with Esperanto, but we can shift our focus onto another, better auxlang like Toki Pona.
Esperanto may take only 150 hours, however that's still like 25% of the time it takes to learn french. If you compare it to Toki Pona, which may take 10 hours or less, depending on how diligently you work at learning it, you can achieve under 0.05% of the time it would take to learn french. This shows that languages like Toki Pona do a much better job to fit their role as an auxlang. If we decided to use Esperanto as an auxlang, we'd be settling for a more naturalistic auxlang, which makes it both more time consuming and harder to learn, which makes it ineffective as an auxlang. So if everybody devoted the 10 or so hours it would take to learn Toki Pona, we could have a relatively easy to speak auxlang, and we could move on from Esperanto, which fails as it's goal to be an auxlang, but could potentially be an okay a posteriori language.
@TesseractCat I think you should learn Toki Pona, then correct your sentence. Toki Pona is easy for saying basics things, but for reaching a level of expressivity that is waited for a natural language, Esperanto is far easier. After a certain level of Toki Pona, you have to memorize so mannnny word-combinations that are not regular, not self-evident, and are cultural dependant.
you don't need to memorize them though. there's nothing preventing you from coming up with your own way to say something like "endless scrolling website" (lipu sin pi tawa ale? sure, why not)
Esperanto is a Planned language vs Ad-hoc. Does EN have immunity against critics? The point was that the above Esperanto issues are mostly stylistic. It's the most successful planned language (~>3mn). How much can you critic that outcome?
I agree, he over criticised it. All the other conlangs that he criticised, he seemed to have hated less, even though he didn't (he ranked esperanto #2)
I feel like the phonology isn't a huge issue. /x/ isn't in English but learning to make that one sound was easier than any other part of learning any other language.
For anyone watching: This video has quite a lot of (possibly unintentional) inaccuracies (as you may verify by reading the corrections made in the other comments). My two non-mentioned-yet-by-anyone cents are: 1. The circumflex is NOT considered punctuation, its part of the letter itself, and thus, it doesn't need to have a separate meaning. 2. The letter "o" at the end is NOT part of the suffixes, it is the Nominative Case (a marker to indicate that the word is a noun); thus, "-ej-", "-uj-", "-in-", "-an-" are suffixes, but "ejo", "ujo", "ino" and "ano" are NOT; they are nouns ("place", "container", "female" and "member", respectively). 3. The suffix "-in-" simplifies a lot the topic of family (the only topic where it really is mandatory besides the distinction between man-woman and boy-girl), and is optional for occupations and everything else (e.g.: the word "instruisto" by itself has no gender, it just means "teacher", but if for some reason you need to clarify it's a female teacher, you can say "instruistino"). 4. "Left" is written "maldekstra", not "maldektra", and if you want, you can say "liva" instead. By the way, the cluster "sc" is much easier to pronounce if, before saying it, you put your mouth in the position required for the next vowel (e.g.: to say "scii, scio or sciuro", put your mouth in the position to make the "i" before starting the word). 5. The countries work like this: Originally, "-uj-" (the suffix for containers) was used for the names of non-american countries (bc the name of the people determined the name of their country, so the "francoj" (frech) lived in "francujo" (container of the frech people), but nowadays, for various reasons, we prefer "-i-" instead of "-uj-"; so "francujo", today is "francio" (but you can use any form you want). In America (the continent) is the other way around: the name of the country determines the name of the people, and bc of that, the name of the inhabitants is the one needing a suffix this time ("-an-", the suffix of members ["ano" is "member" *¡laughs in spanish!*]), thus: "El Salvador" is "Salvadoro" and its demonym is "Salvadorano". 6. "Stano" literally means "tin" (yes, the element, the metal); it doesn't have anything to do with countries. EDIT: Improved explanations.
Although I'd disagree that Esperanto is *sexist* , I would agree that making up new words for female equivalents is *pointless* and *confusing* . Sure: English does this too: (fe)Male; Actor(ress). However, this was a constructed language: someone made a conscious decision to include that needless feature. It's a gripe of mine, yet Esperantists that talk about it seem to imply it's a really good feature, as it differentiates between - for example - a male teacher and a female teacher. I'd ask why there is a need of distinction, and then I'd ask why gender is the differential factor and not age or respect.
I can see where age might be a differential factor, but I don't understand why respect. Respect is subjective, so it would at some point just refer to power in a hierarchy. A "respected teacher" might come to mean some other unforseen role. Also, I don't see what's inherently bad about differentiating gender in a constructed language.
and yet it has no word for just "parent." (please don't say "gepatro"! Even though I use it myself there is a HUGE controversy over the use of the "ge-" suffix in this way. ,I of course, see no problem with it, but others seem to think it's the harbinger of the Antichrist). Now, if Dr. Z had just asked ME, I would have suggested to make a word for "parent" (and "sibling" and "child" and many others) and the use suffixes to denote the male and female counterparts.
Yes. in that case it's actually just an allophone, so it's /ti/, but it's pronounced [ʧi] (The underlying phoneme is /t/, but it's palatalized before /i/). I suggest you read about the difference between phones and phonemes if you haven't already; it really helped me in conlanging (and besides it's very interesting)
Carlos Soto No, it also appears in the word "tchau" ("tch"), and people from Rio Grande do sul sometimes say "tche!" at the end of sentences (it's an interjection, I'm not sure what it means). I'm not sure if this "tch" sound (sorry, I can't type the proper IPA symbol now) can be considered a phoneme or if it's just an allophone (I can't remember any minimum pair now) but, anyway, I always could notice the difference between sx and cx (I also can't type Esperanto characters now), I never had to learn it.
heard a joke once. man goes to doctor. says he's spent five years of his life struggling with letting go. says the people he talks to worry and ask if he's okay, and he just reflexively brushes them off and lies that he's great, been laughing nonstop and never bored. says he's desperate for a distraction, to move on. doctor says: "treatment is simple. clown commenter jan Antoni returned to the comment section tonight. go and read his puppetmaster schtick, that should pick you right up." man bursts into tears. says: "but doctor... i AM jan Antoni"
Also, just because a language doesn't have a sound doesn't mean those people can't say a sound. I can go to any languages phonology, then point to a sound and a corresponding language without that sound.
No shit. I recently learnt some sounds that I could previously not pronounce. The point is the sounds are just taken directly from Polish and aren't very common, which is contradictory to making an international language. The the best option would be to select the most common phonemes out of all languages (maybe not including languages below like 10-15 million speakers). That would be best when making a interlang, not this.
very close! however, Toki Pona's phonology is lax enough that all of its phonemes sill can be mapped to Arabic without breaking any phonological rules: p /f~b/ t /t/ k /k/ m /m/ n /n/ s /s/ w /w/ l /l/ j /j/ i /i/ u /u/ e /aj/ o /aw/ a /a/
Actually, there are many dialects of Latin American Spanish that pronounce the letter J as /h/ and not /x/. Another key point to mention is that Argentinian Spanish speakers often lenite coda /s/ into /h/. And one more point: Some dialects of Arabic do have /e/ and /o/ as phonemes, especially Egyptian Arabic. So, Esperanto is somewhat compatible with a few dialects of Spanish and Arabic, and not every other dialect.
I'm not a Esperanto fan, but it made for Europe. But the UN tried to make it into the international language, and that made it associated with international-lity
This episode feels very useless compared to your others. You repeat the same superficial things that can be found in many articles, without saying something new by diving really into the language (see semantics). At least with the other episodes, we can learn something new about things that are rarely documented.
The channel owner gave a disclaimer in the video that a lot has already been said about Esperanto (which is true) and that he was not likely going to say anything extremely original, but was simply going to add his own view. I think he did a pretty good job of presenting his viewpoint -- even as I nitpick with little details in the comments ;-).
That's what he said. It's like expecting somebody to give an original opinion of Shakespeare. He's talking about what strikes him about the languages and how they compare. Obviously it will be new for little-known languages and repetitive for well-known languages.
Okay, I've seen you on evildea so I'mma assume you're an Esperantist, and in this case an angry Esperantist as well. I'm an Esperantist and I'm not pissed at his points It's true, it's phonology isn't compatible with the biggest languages in the world. And as an ial, you shouldn't have to learn new sounds. It's also excluding roots from Asian and the middle East, making it more difficult for them, making another divide. Even if some of his points are not applical. (Sexism, Mal=bad,etc.) He's right when he says it's not a great auxlang. And that's not esperantos/zamenhofs fault. Zamenhof only really had Europe as a frame of reference. At the time, it was a decent attempt, but it needs improvement. Why is it that an overwhelming majority of the Esperantist community feels the need to defend this language? It isn't leaving anytime soon, in fact it's getting better by the minute. It's about time we do what Zamenhof wanted: make it more natural. Give it a solid syllable structure, cut a few sounds. If we can't take criticism, the movement and the language as a whole will get nowhere. (PS. This is long but important. I'm annoyed at the fact that the community that should be respecting everyones beliefs is crying over someone's opinion. This is proof people can't change even if they say they will. If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen) Bone, mi vidis vin sure evildea, do mi supozas, ke vi estas esperantisto, kaj en ĉi tiu kazo, kolera esperantisto. Mi estas Esperantisto, kaj mi ne malamas liaj punktoj Fakte, la fonologio ne estas kongrua kun la plej grandaj lingvoj de la mondo. Kaj kiel IAL, vi ne devas lerni novajn sonojn. Ĝi ankaŭ ekskludas radikojn de azia kaj meza Oriento, farante ĝin pli malfacila por ili, farante alian dividon. Eĉ se iuj el liaj punktoj ne estas aplikeblaj. (Seksismo, Mal = malbona, ktp.) Li pravas, kiam li diras, ke ĝi ne estas bona auxlango. Kaj tio ne estas la kulpo de esperanto / zamenhofo. Zamenhof nur havis Eŭropon kiel kadro de referenco. En tiu tempo, ĝi estis deca provo, sed ĝi bezonas pliboniĝon. Kial estas ke abrumadora plimulto de la esperantista komunumo sentas la bezonon protekti ĉi tiun lingvon? Ĝi baldaŭ ne lasas neniun momenton, fakte ĝi pliboniĝas antaŭ la minuto. Temas pri tempo, kion ni deziris, kion Zamenhof volis: fari ĝin pli natura. Donu ĝin solidan silaban strukturon, tranĉu kelkajn sonojn. Se ni ne povas kritikiĝi, la movado kaj la lingvo en aro iros nenie. (Mi ne rescribas ĉi tio PS.)
I decided I wanted to try to make a conlang which was an auxlang on the side, had 1 sound per letter, and was more compact than English (mostly so I could teach it to my friends and give them really good callouts with limited syllables). After doing research on each of the most popular languages, I ended up with 12 constanants and 5 vowels. It's really fun trying to fit everything neatly into the space! Afterwards I watched this video and immediately questioned half the decisions in this conlang lol
There's the neologism infix ‐iĉ‐ for masculine, that we could start using for Esperanto. So "knabo" is just a young person, "knabiĉo" is a boy and "knabino" is a girl. Make the ‐iĉ‐ infix more popular and remove this male-defaultness that Espernato has.
Nepo nepino nePIĈO... But i think that objectives starting with "ne" does not have to exist because it can be confusing. Ps Piĉo is (unofficial?) bad word in Esperanto meaning "count without o" Nepo=nephew
Yes, more people shopuld join the riismo-movement, it is called after the word "ri", used as genderless pronoun for the third person singular. @Casual_Ice_Consumer : yes, that's where it came from. @Механикус Продакшн : nepo=grandchild , nephew=nevo
As in many languages, Esperanto has its inconsistencies, for instance, the -n suffix is used to sign the direct object of a verb, but in sentences like: "Leginte la libron, li iris vespermanĝi ." the accusative -n is generally used after an adverb, Nevertheless, Esperanto is easy to be learned.
@@MrSkribanto It’s both really. It means “having read”, so it modifies the main verb of the sentence, but it’s also a verb with its own object. “Having read the book, he went to eat dinner.”
Trying to squeeze Esperanto grammar into the boxes of European languages is just as misguided as the effort to somehow* squeeze English grammar into the boxes of Latin. * (Yes, I split the infinitive -- point made?)
How often to Portuguese speakers say bye to each other for it to be one of the most used words? I know that I say buy 10 - 20 times a day (maybe less) (as student). Maybe Portuguese people say buy as a part of speech. I'll have to ask my Portuguese friend.
3:58 Portuguese has all of these "Pai" meaning "father" "Mau" meaning "evil" or "bad" "Gostei" meaning "I liked" "Eu" meaning "I" "Oi" meaning "hi" "Fui" meaning "I went"
Mau has 2 different ways of saying it (Atleast here in Brazil.): Mal and Mau. Mal is an adverb, antonym of bem (good). Mau is an adjective, antonym of bom (also good.) Examples: Ele é uma pessoa *bom* . Isto é alguma coisa do *bem* .
OH YAAAAA! Just because there is a word like "mal" that means bad doesn't mean that word is now off limits! Oh, my native language says this word means "dog" yet in language X it means "yellow!" What am I to do? I'm never going to be able to learn this language. (I think you're getting my point from these comments)
@@bonbonpony Dog is is pronounced with an aw like vowel sound that Hebrew does not have. דג is pronounced with a basic ah sound that any English speaker could tell is very different.
@@MegaBallPowerBall actually in Tiberian, Teimani, and Ashkenazi Hebrew they do have it, just not in the standard dialect in Israel today. But I bet op has the caught-cot merger.
4:21 Actually,portuguese does have t͡ʃ,at least the varietys spoken in brazil,in some dialects,it's just on the sylable "ti" and derivates,but in other dialects,it's a thing on it's own,mine has it in some words,both in formal and informal speech
The smaller you make the phonology, the longer words will have to be on average and the harder it will be to recognizably transliterate names of people, countries, etc. from the languages of the world. You seem to prioritize ease of pronunciation over every other consideration, but there are other concerns in the mix too.
And Hawaiian. A small number of phonemes doesn't make words especially longer: the length is more because of rules against consonant clusters. But a small number of phonemes lead to more homonym clashes, which cause their own problems.
I figured out why esperanto has /sts/, /eu/, and things like that. It’s so that it can loan words from latin and greek, and have the writing of stuff from them match up with the spelling in other languages.
7:06 If you wonder why there is a feminine suffix -in with no corresponding masculine suffix, blame German. In German, -in is added to masculine nouns to make the nouns feminine (eg. Schauspieler, actor compared to Schauspielerin, actress), and -in is only added if the noun does not already specify gender (eg. Bruder, brother compared to Schwester, sister). Zamenhof, in an attempt to make Esperanto as regular as possible; takes the first rule to its logical extreme, and in Esperanto all nouns (excluding personal pronouns) without -in are masculine
I have been a rather avid Esperantist for five years now, and this is the first time I've actually ran into real legitimate criticism with its core concepts. Now I am sad.
I'm an American and learning Esperanto. Some of the letters with the circumflex don't make sense, and I hate how I can't use alt codes to type them on most applications, but it does make sense why they exist. There is are two alternate ways to type the circumflex characters, but the way with using x at the end is the only reliable way as the h at end method has almost no information on it. As an English speaker, the pronunciation is not very hard, but the r, hx, and jx do take a bit of time to get right. (I still can't trill my R's.) Also, has anyone noticed that Google Translate recently removed the voice in Esperanto? The main way I learned Esperanto pronunciation was through the Google Translate Esperanto voice since it was actually consistent. I know enough Esperanto to not need it now but I'm sad Google Translate removed the voice. D: It was annoying to hear for awhile but you don't know how useful it was. Mi amas Esperanton, ĉar ĝi estas facila lingvo, sed ĝi ne estas perfekta lingvo.
To critic a lenguaje you must study before, Esperanto is so easy to study, I'm from Spain and is easier understand Esperanto than english. "Suno not sound how "sun"" jajajjajaja is talks reads is same that speak, likes Spanish.
Yeah but like, Spanish and the romance languages aren't the only in the world. A person that speaks an Asian language wouldn't be able to understand the words like you do.
There is a reason why some country names in Esperanto are derived from the names of their inhabitants, whereas some are the other way around. It's explained by Duolingo: > Esperanto has a two-part system for naming countries and their inhabitants. This two-part system developed early in the history of Esperanto, and was based on the idea of a division of the world into "Old World" and "New World". The assumption was that the "Old World" countries took their names from the people who lived there. In contrast, "New World" countries consisted mainly of immigrants and their descendants, so their inhabitants were named after the countries they lived in. So, for some "Old World" countries, mainly in Europe and Asia, the Esperanto root form gives the name of the inhabitant, and the name of the country is formed from it. For other "New World" countries,mainly in the Americas, Africa and Oceania, the Esperanto root form gives the name of the country, and the name of the inhabitant is formed from it. source: duome.eu/tips/en/eo -- ctrl-f for "country names" "Usono" for the US also makes plenty of sense -- it's similar enough to be easy to remember, and it's possibly derived from an older abbreviation for the US, "USONA"/"Usona" ("United States of North America"). See, for instance: en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Usona#English. Additionally, if you're really bent on having a direct translation, there's (en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Usono#Esperanto) "Unuiĝintaj Ŝtatoj de Ameriko" (lit. "United States of America") or "Unuiĝintaj Ŝtatoj Amerikaj" (lit. "United American States"). What would one have the US be called anyway? No self-respecting IAL should settle for referring to the country of the USA as "America" (or something similar), and the name of the country "the United States" is unlike many others in that it is made up of commonly used words which have meanings in their own right, which means that the name might be literally translated into the IAL (as above), and that doesn't make for recognizability either -- a US national with little knowledge of Spanish might have a hard time recognizing "EEUU" as referring to "los Estados Unidos", i.e., the United States, and even worse with IALs which don't share those roots. "Usono" is short, easy to remember, and better than many alternatives.
@@Kelly_C U-S-American (like the abbreviation US plus the word American), I'd think. Personally I would prefer that to "American" in terms of clarity, but aesthetically "Usonian" looks better. I'm going to try to call myself "usonano", though.
@@Kelly_C USian seems legit but doesn't sound as nice as Usonian in my view. USAnian also makes sense but looks weird. Usanano is wrong because in Esperanto the name of the country is Usono, not Usano, and the name of an inhabitant is derived from Usono + ano = Usonano rather than Usano + ano = Usanano.
![Seungmin "그렇게, 천천히, 우리(As we are)" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kAzmhLHePqU/mqdefault.jpg)
New thread put up November 25, 2020. That last one's already too long for me to be bothered with it anymore.
Heh
So: why does the fact that Toki Pona is extremely simple mean that it's not a language? You've previously referred to it as a 'game' which I think is derogating it unnecessarily, and which I think is motivated by your desire to advocate for Esperanto instead. But to be honest you don't have to do that kind of thing to argue convincingly that Esperanto would function better as a global auxiliary language than Toki Pona. Toki Pona wasn't created for that purpose, and I'm not sure how Sonia Lang feels about those who want to treat it as if it could be an auxiliary language.
But Toki Pona is still a language, because such a thing doesn't have to have a literary tradition, or capacity to communicate all sorts of complex (or even non-simple) things. It just has to be a system of representing meaning by physical forms like speech or writing, complete with shared rules including grammar and vocabulary. Wouldn't it be better to say that Esperanto is just a _better_ language for an IAL purpose than Toki Pona, or various other candidates?
@@MatthewMcVeagh Say that in toki pona. Translate your other comments made to me into it. Make sure your translation of words is as intelligible as those you used in English. Go on, prove it's a language.
@@anthonymccarthy4164 if the proof of something being a "real language" and not a language game is being able to losslessly translate something from english into it, that would imply that pig latin is a real language
@@HBMmaster FFS, his comment's not poetry, it's not a bunch of aphorisms from the The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. If the schmuck can't say it in tp conveying the same meaning, it's not a real language. "TP" is actually an apt abbreviation for what it is.
@@anthonymccarthy4164 therefore, if you could translate it into something without losing any information, that would mean that what you translated into IS a real language, right?
"Esperanto sucks, literally everything about it is awful, I hate it and everyone involved in its creation. Overall, second best interlang so far."
Esperanto has managed to achieve what few of the other conlangs have - a sizeable user community on multiple continents, varied cultural output including decent original literature, and intergenerational transmission. It may not do these as well as organic languages do, but it is in many ways much more important, and is a sales point. Many people have met and fallen in love through Esperanto and raised kids to speak it. Very few conlangs can boast that.
People can talk about various linguistic features all they like, but that's only half the battle. What Esperanto loses in terms of vocabulary and phonology, it makes up for in a social and cultural sense.
"It has a little something for everyone"
"This conlang is absolutely awful. That being said, I rate Esperanto 8/10."
I mean, he can't help it if the bar is so low.
@@gwest3644 If the motto of the show wasn't «The show that gets facts wrong about your favourite conlang!», I'd be gnawing at Misali's knee. I remember I was pretty mad when he put Esperanto above Lojban. XD
Spends whole video bashing every aspect of the language extensively.
Puts it on the second best spot.
george aka Angrycheese It's almost like you can find lots of flaws in something and still like it.
Alternatively, it's almost like being the best or second best at something doesn't necessarily mean being good.
yea lol
Second best _interlang_
Not sure that's a huge compliment
What's the first?
@@john3260 Toki Pona
i was like "hey, the phonology isn't that bad"
and then i remembered
i'm Polish
Źdźbło
Same here, although I'm Russian (and Swedish)
@afootineachworld Yeah, it means a blade [of grass], and is pronounced /ʑʥ̑bwɔ/
How do you read that
@@the-bruh.cum5 Well
ʑʥ̑bwɔ
fun fact zamenhof actually tried to reform the grammar and orthography multiple times but everyone rejected the reforms each time.
That's because the language became live. It's not so simply to change a living language with a reform.
What kind of reforms?
@@zoushuu The most common reforms in Esperanto are currently to make it gender neutral.
There's iĉ-ismo - using "iĉ" to mark the masculine gender
Ans there is ri-ismo - using of the gender neutral pronoun "ri"
Or ĝi-simo - using pronoun "ĝi" (it) as a gender neutral personal.
There were also other. Ido language is an exampe of reformed Esperanto.
@@amadeosendiulo2137 I would love to see a gender neutral esperanto!
@@darthszarych5588 People sstarted to use gender neutral language some time ago, so I think that this is the future of the language. It really isn't that difficult to do like in Spanish or Polish :-)
okay i actually love making a country name "container for [demonym]" that's hysterical to me for some reason. someday i want to make a conlang based entirely around having the most compound words that I find funny.
french containment compound
soooo, Israel would be Jewish container?
uh...
The only country I think that would be accurate for is North Korea. North Korea is (basically) a container for North Koreans but that's it.
@@4sythdude549 No, it would be Israeli container. There are Jewish people who aren't Israeli.
@@Anonymous-df8it this comment is so baffling to me. I literally don't understand what you're trying to say. it feels racist but I don't feel confident enough about ascribing any meaning to it to even call it that.
Yes, if you did the whole episode in that voice, I would move on pretty damn quick.
Stephen DeGrace you did hear or notice that that "voice (someone tell me his name) was beat boxing
Yes, your content and analysis is interesting, but that noise is unattractive. Just the thought that your other videos may have this same noise, makes me refrain from watching, even though I do like the points you raise and find your content attractive.
Stick == firmly up ass
I had to check the bar at the bottom to make sure the video wasn't just glitching in a strangely musical way.
I would’ve just turned off the volume and put subtitles on
"suno doesn't sound like sun"
-Conlang Critic 6:58
OH WAIT IN TOKI PONA 'SUNO' MEANS SUN
Lt Hershel / Jan Nasa wow
Suno sounds like Sunne in german
@@MantrTheSpiceGuy 'Sonne' not 'Sunne'.
lol
Yeah but toki pona didn't mean to be like romance languages
I feel like Zamenhof was very conservative, like he wanted to avoid a fatal flaw that would make the language unusable. I think it is understandable, because back then, there was no Esperanto and only "failed" attempts. Esperanto is a proof that many things can work in a conlang. It is a important stepping stone on thinking what is possible for an International Auxiliary Language.
The great success of Esperanto is a proof that it worked, and these 'issues' are minor stylistic options. Let's note that we are now 'thinking in English' and that's why it looks different. Thinking in Esperanto would be fully natural the way it (mostly) is.
+Vanege Volapük was a "stepping stone", Esperanto is beyond that. I know only four(!) languages with the potential of becoming a LAI, two of them having but some dozens of speakers:
* Idiom Neutral
* Esperanto
* (original) Interlingua-IL, sive Latine sine flexione, Lingua Auxiliare Internationale
* Neo
Zonal LAs don't count, there is already one used (Bahasa Indonesia) and two in active development (Meźduslovianski/Interslavonic and a Turk language).
Being a constructed language one has to conform to popular views to stick around, I support it's core values but we need to understand that it came from a different time with different opinions and is still changing to stay relevant with this ever changing thing
@@efishon7102 3
Yeah, it's a prototype that people decided worked well enough...
You know the conlang is elite when it's on Google Translate
@Alexnader Hamiltun Very - Didn't even notice I typed that
You know it's elite when it's on duolingo
You know it's elite when it's in Minecraft
it's actually eSpeak
@@ingwerschorle_ Like pirate speak.
My theory as to why "w" wasn't used is that:
In Polish (and German and all other Germanic languages except English) w makes a "v" sound, so Zamenhoff refused to use this character in case it would he misinterpreted as "v". In Polish, the sound is written as ł, but since that was too Polish he went with the weird "u" letter. But he still used "j" even though it could be misinterpreted as the "j" in "jump". This is probably because in Polish "j" makes a "y" sound. That doesn't justify it, as it gives a bias to Polish, but it does explain it.
In dutch w is w and v is v
@@Daan03 It's funny. In Afrikaans w = v and v = f. How did that happen?
EDIT: W
The Good Kid Boy I really don’t know, but why would make ‘w=v’ instead of just writing ‘v’
@@thegoodkidboy7726 It's the same in German
Zamenhof's native language is russian
the logic of the accusative was that people tend to use the word order common in their native language and that the accusative allows people to use any word order they like without creating confusion. For instance, in English adjective comes before noun, but in Romance languages it's the other way around. Esperanto allows both.
Esperanto doesn't allow both positions... Check PMEG. Now, Esperanto uses Adj-Noun not Noun-Adj. Yet, in some cases it allows Adj-N-Adj.
@@wolfthunder2526 when I learned esperanto there were only sixteen grammar rules and that wasn’t one of them
@Judith Mirville the recent esperanto tends to have Adj before Noun... It may be permitted to have N-Adj format, yet its usage has fallen, thus practically Esperanto is using Adj-N. Even in many recent textbooks and literatures of Esperanto, except the poems, ALL use Adj-N.
It becomes an additional unofficial rule in Esperanto.
@@wolfthunder2526 it never became a rule, it's just a _kutimo_. Esperanto is spoken a lot, and therefore not everything is under control, so some stuff get something it wasn't supposed to get. But this thing isn't a rule, it's a custom that can be broken for emphasis
But tell me which of these things is easier to learn:
-A simple word order
-What the accusative is, and in which specific types of words you have to put the suffix
"Hindi doesn't have t͡ʃ." It most definitely does. Here's our letter for it: च. I don't think there's a single dialect of Hindi that lacks this sound.
EDIT: So does Urdu, چ. Not sure where you got this misconception from.
He covered it this mistake in another video,
but hindustani still doesn't have a distinction between /v/ and /w/.
@@yeetyeet-jb6nc Thanks for letting me know. You're certainly right about the /v/ /w/ thing. It was one of the hardest things for me to learn when I left India
I think he meant /ts/
@@alexhornsey8129 yeah that is true. In Marathi, /tʃ/ and /ts/ are represented by the same character and are pronounced one or the other pretty unpredictability. In Hindi and Urdu, there is only tʃ, so he's right there.
He also said Portuguese doesn't have it either, and excuse me if I'm getting confused, but I'm pretty sure we make that sound...
8:26 No! You've got it all wrong! Usono actually makes a lot of sense!
United
States
Of
NAmerica
O
No no no, It's:
United
States
Of
North
Omerica
United
States
Of
aNerica
wOo
United
Stupid
Ogres
iN
america woO
United
States
of
Northamerica
(“O” added because it’s a noun)
@@zacharyherfkens7902 this is close to true. It would be Usona to avoid confusion with the Union of South America (also USA) that existed at the time the name was made up. There are actual American documents from the 1800s that refer to America as Usona. The last letter is simply replaced with an -o to make it a noun.
Classical Latin has exactly those diphthongs, which is probably where he got them from (which makes sense, looking at how much else he took from the Romance languages)
Spanish also has exactly those six diphthongs: "aire", "reina", "boina", "muy", "causa", "deuda".
Spanish ui is /wi/, not /uj/
Conlang Critic Usually it is ("ruinas", etc.), but "muy" is a special case. It's possibly the only common instance of /uj/ in the language, with other exceptions being some words borrowed from American Indian languages like "cuy", the exclamation "huy", and a few rare words like "suido". "Cuidar" and "fluido" also used to have /uj/ until about a century ago, when /wi/ took hold. That said, some people do pronounce it as /mwi/, in accordance to the usual rules of Spanish orthography.
Spanish "ui" is definitely [wi] in all cases. To take it for [uj] is simply either a mishearing or a mispronunciation on the speaker's part.
Latin actually doesn't have [uj] it's pronounced [wi] and [wɪ] as in huius and huic, respectively.
POV: You're trying to find the original Anthony McCarthy comment
It's under the Ido video (sorry if you already knew that)
The saddest thing in this episode is the lack of everybody’s favorite game show
Yeah, the game show part wasn't yet a part of conlang critic, so instead we get an angry Mitch yelling why esperanto is not compatible with most common languages
Doug Demuro: *”This car is the best I’ve ever reviewed. I’ll give it a 13/50 on the overall score.”*
You: *Puts Esperanto in 2nd despite the criticism*
Esperanto is one of the most developped, if not the most developped, conlang so it makes sense to rate it that good, but it stays a highly criticable language.
It’s a quirk of ranking reviewed languages head to head and also not having reviewed very many good conlangs
@@notNajimi Yeah, this tbh.
Doug is a fucking imbecile lmao.
Every time he reviews a Western or Japanese piece of garbage, it's cozy, but when it's a Slavic car, it's the worst thing he's ever seen
Its called the ranking paradox. If everything is crap someone needs to be high.
There is a weird buzzing in the background.
Also fade in for audio was... awkward.
i know, that was somewhat offputting for me also
I thought the buzzing was from my earbuds and they were broken. God damn
It was awesome
I guess that if Esperanto is equally hard to learn for *everyone* (that speaks a European language), it doesn't bias anyone!
It's... most popular in China? Yeah it's not the most conservative inventory in the world, but the only *hard* combination to pronounce I've ever encountered is "scsii", which yes, is ridiculous. Honestly I just pronounced it "ssii". Anyway beyond that none of the rest of the consonants are difficult to learn. Making a language that's recognizable and instantaneously accessible to everyone is impossible without returning to caveman speech. It's more important to have a wide array of easy-to-learn sounds.
Except Polish people, who would be more familiar with its phonology, grammar, excessive suffixes, and weird letter/diacritic choices.
Votgil moment
@@connermckay4012 "easy to learn sounds" I'm Spanish and it took me 2 weeks to pronounce v correctly, but Esperanto has it so I guess I have to be able to say it easily.
7:03 Malsanulejo is a word that is commonly used to show people how words can be formed in Esperanto. But "hospitalo" is a word in EO. It wasn't left out.
this
same with "samseksemulo" and "gejo"
And yet crocodile is just krokodilo. Why not?
@@arvinroidoatienza7082 malmalkrokodilo
@@eldattackkrossa9886 malmalmalmalkrokodilo
Malsanulejo is like a tribal name of southeast asia
4:16 Top 10 Rappers Eminem Was Too Afraid to Diss
IKR XD
I know I'm 3 years too late, but...
In his video about Interslavic, Mitch said he doesn't speak any slavic language. I think if he would, he would be even harsher. As a native polish speaker I gotta say; from what I see, Esperanto is almost entirely based on polish. Not only phonology, as he mentioned in the video, but most of its grammar rules, not using 'x' and 'q' among other letters, redundant and misleading diacritics, suffixes on both nouns and adjectives and female words based on male versions (although not that extreme to call mother a 'female father' lel). The only part of it that isn't copied from polish is vocabulary.
On a positive note, I'm glad to hear that people try to change Esperanto and address problems like gender-based vocabulary. I believe that, just as natlangs change throughout years of usage, so should conlangs, getting closer and closer to being... well... natural to use. You can't speak pseudocode your whole life, spoken languages, natural or constructed, should constantly evolve to be usable.
It really looks like Zamenhof just took polish, covered it up with romanic based vocabulary and said "Wow, what a wonderful new language. I'm sure at least 10 million people would love to speak it as their secondary language". It's too eurocentric to be international, too gender-unfair to work in XXI century and have too much in common with polish for me to like it.
1/10, left my country because I used to live in Zamenhof street.
'you cant speak pseudocode your whole life' are you challenging me?
/j
slijmjurk
wow
never seen anybody hating it so much! why?
how is it "based on polish"? he knew like 5 langs, it is "based on" yiddish as much - it just has "lowest common denominator" features!
@@valinorean4816 Not really, like the reviewer says, it's phonology is *not* international, it's vocabulary is just slightly distorted Romance, and it has a ton of uneccesarily complicating features that don't even add additional specificity or meaning.
Of course, things like grammatical gender are common (in IE, at least), but of course that's a legacy of the evolution of natural languages, where many formerly useful features are retained, even millennia after they've become redundant, following the evolution of features that supplant their original function.
If Esperanto was an 'art-lang', like Tolkien's languages, full of invented entymologies and history, that would be fine, but Esperanto was designed as an international creole, and on that criterion its design *IS* terrible.
@@Thomas-u8q "Not really, like the reviewer says, it's phonology is not international, it's vocabulary is just slightly distorted Romance" - hold, when you're creating a language you have to make some specific selections for these, and so by definition they will not be universal then? what's... the criticism here?
"things like grammatical gender" - Esperanto doesn't have grammatical gender, the question is merely about assymetry of male and female suffixes - it works in Esperanto just like in English in actor/actress, steward/stewardess, etc, and while that didn't raise eyebrows in the 19th century it does now. regardless, there is no redundancy here, it's a political question, like gender neutral pronouns; Esperanto only does what English does with genders!
The "unnecessarily complicating features" free up the word order, enabling the speakers whose native languages have different word orders to start speaking Esperanto without being ungrammatical right away.
"Esperanto was designed as an international creole, and on that criterion its design IS terrible" - how? and there is a bunch of references about native speakers of Chinese and so on finding Esperanto a tenfold relief in difficulty compared to IE natlangs, say. I think it's just about as good as it can be, and any serious problems in its path to its goal are political.
5:40 - in an earlier iteration of Esperanto, ŝ, ĉ, ĵ, ĝ were written ś, ć, ź, dź, by the way, like you suggested. But Zamenhof changed this shortly before first publishing his language, to make the spelling of Romance and Germanic words more recognizable.
E.g. ĵurnalo is more recognizable as "journal" than źurnalo, and aĝo looks a lot more like "age" than adźo. So this was a very conscious choice. Even if you may not agree with it.
do you have a source for this?
@@eljestLiv I believe I wrote that comment mostly based on the Wikipedia page on Proto-Esperanto, which says "The Slavic-style acute diacritics became circumflexes to avoid overt appearances of nationalism, and the new bases of the letters ĵ, ĝ (for former ź, dź) helped preserve the appearance of Romance and Germanic vocabulary."
Apparently a lot of Zamenhof's notes on early versions of Esperanto were lost or destroyed by nazis, but enough copies still exist to at least know some things, like how the alphabet in early drafts of Esperanto worked. The Esperanto-language Wikipedia article "Pra-Esperanto" has more of these details, with citations and stuff.
I just can't read "źurnalo' and "adźo" properly, cuz'z I'm Polish and they are different sounds for my mind!
@@amadeosendiulo2137 Ziurnalo
@@Tuberex Ekzakte.
Ho, mi celis diri:
Exactly :-)
Word order is flexible like in Latin, and I LOVE that. You can communicate so much subtlety by the order you choose, as it communicates the emphasis; but also, flexible word order allows for some really fantastic creative writing.
And poetry/music!
You can't, if you don't have clear rules on how to use "free word order". For example Hungarian focus is before the verb whereas Estonian focus is after it. So a Hungarian and an Estonian could use the same Esperanto word order and mean to emphasize completely different things.
For me, as Japanese, Esperanto is easy lang to learn, yes, I can say Indonesian and Mandarin much simpler grammar, but compare to most of language, it's much easier. ALSO, that complex grammar makes Esperanto more swappable, which gives flexibility when you write or say.(e.g. "Mi amas vin", "Amas vin mi", "Vin mi amas", etc.) (like Japanese or Korean)
And you may know, Japanese lang has less phonics than major langs around the world, but pronunciation of Esperanto wasn't prob for me.
So, I definitely can say Esperanto is easy lang, especially compare to most of natlang.
But, still I agree about sexism in Esperanto, I think it should be like this:
boy; [child]-[male]
girl; [child]-[female]
man; [grown-up]-[male] or [person]-[male]
woman; [grown-up]-[female] or [person]-[female]
Also, a word "they", "ili", should change third person pronoun of male and neutral or "ili" itself.
It was made in a sexist time, bringing together languages that probably had sexist tendencies. There are current efforts to address this.
@@RojPoj Why have current efforts when Ido fixed this several decades ago?
In old English "woman" was "wife man" and so was "he", not "she".
@@СергейМатюшов-щ8в wasn't man wereman though? so, man on its own sorta being more neutral back then?
@@HealyHQ because most of the hundreds of changes that turn Esperanto into Ido accomplish nothing. If Esperanto is too european, why remove the slavic influence in favour of germanic/romanic? Turo-->turmo, mi-->me, rajtas-->darfas
Why twist the meaning of an existing suffix (-ulo) instead of inventing a new one?
ive been rewatching the series and boy does misali sound like they're secretly being controlled by bees in this
jan Beesali
0:10 It is not “Hoper” it is “The one who hopes”. Do your reaserch before doing your videos. Unsubscribing now.
OOF
@Lucky Joestar unfortunately, yes, a lot are, speaking as an Esperanto speaker
@Lucky Joestar he is joking, I am a *hoper* that you know that
@@christydavidpallanivel1708 r/whooosh
i know like wow i cant believe someone would do this and no even reserch fully
Alright there's a lot of issues with this video, but your biggest blunder was by far the complaint about the accusative and lack of designated word order. *This is by design.* By indicating the part of speech at the end of the word you allow the speaker to use the word order they're most comfortable with, without compromising intelligibility. The adjective agreement is for clarity. In addition to how any word can be derived from combining smaller roots, and any root or group of roots can be changed into noun, adjective, or adverb form makes it an ideal language for direct translation. Learning to tack on an n to the object is by far easier than retraining yourself to use a completely different word order.
Tion mi tre ŝatas. Malfacila ja estas la akuzativo, sed ankaŭ utila kaj liberiga, ĉu ne? :D
@@frechjo
Jes; ĉar ĝi al ni donas grandegan liberecon pri la sintakso. Danke al ĝi mem frazo povas havi multajn vort-ordojn sen ĝeni la komprenon :).
I've heard this line of thought before, but do esperantists native with non-SVO actually habitually speak in their own order? If I'm translating something into Esperanto from Latin, should I put the verb at the end for the purposes of fidelity? To be fair, I can't say I've met many esperantists personally, and certainly someone with a non-SVO native language, but I get the feeling that general Esperanto usage has a standard word order which is the "correct" one
@@deepwayne757
No. Because the accusative case offers a great construction's liberty.
Do? Vi povas uzi je prepozicio - ekzemple je la prepozicio mi uzas cxi tie - "je"
At the time that Zamenhof constructed Esperanto, the letter W was only used in Polish, Wendish, German, Dutch, and English. It was incorporated in the alphabets of languages that adopted the Latin alphabet since then, but It wasn't in the Swedish or Portuguese alphabets until the 21st century. Zamenhof couldn't use it.
In European languages (bear in mind that Zamenhof knew about English but didn't speak it, and didn't know Spanish) there is no consensus about the sound of the letter Y.
Given Esperanto's phonology, there are more sounds than letters. He could have used diagraphs like Polish (look at what a mess that is!) or diacritics like Czech. He chose diacritics, which is good because digraphs run into problems: (philosophy, upholstery). He started using letters like č but switched to ĉ so that it would be more international by not being partial. The diacrtics became problematical even for him, but there was a point of no return.
The phonology is cluttered, however, everyone speaks Esperanto with an accent, which means essentially that no one does. The advantage is that names, place names, and other words, don't have to be distorted beyond recognition to be Esperantized.
One problem is that it is not clear whether verbs are inherently transitive or intransitive (this is hard for English-speaking people), and which root is which native part of speech. For example, the root bel- is adjectival and the root kron- is nominal. Esperanto is more successful than any other conlang by far. Whether it is because of or in spite of its flaws would make an interesting debate.
All of these are good points, and quite similar to mine (see my other comment, the long one).
As for the digraphs vs. diacritics: If anyone considers diacritics problematic (e.g. cannot produce them on a keyboard or believes in the superiority of digraphs, as the author of this video), one can use digraphs in Esperanto as well: "cx" instead of "ĉ", "sx" instead of "ŝ" etc.
Also I'm glad you mentioned the transitive vs. intransitive problem of Esperanto, that makes your critique much more solid than the author's. Unfortunately, this is not a problem unique to Esperanto. Same with the adjectival vs. nominal roots. It's pretty much just how a particular word originated and which version was first (noun or adjective) and which one has been derived from it later. But I'm not sure how could this problem be solved in a language (either constructed or natural), because there are words or meanings that are purely of the "quality" sort (adjectival), while others are purely nominal (thought there is a tendency for creating new adjectives out of nouns, and nouns seem to be the most basic and common feature of every language, because they basically name things around us).
Nevertheless, Esperanto might not be a perfect language, but still I find it much more elegant and organized than any natural language I know of, so even if its flaws it serves its purpose very well.
BTW any ideas about how the transitive/intransitive problem could be solved in a language? (Either a constructed one, or maybe there is a natural language that solves it already?)
"The diacrtics became problematical even for him". Are you referring to his proposal for some Ido-like reforms? I'm not sure that was his misgivings as much as giving the opponents a chance.
Which language has a distinguishing mark on its transitive or intransitive roots? None that I'm aware of. If you think marking transitivity is a problem, then just don't, like in Lingua Franca Nova were verbs can be used transitively or intransitively without change. Transitivity is inherent in the meaning, and there are multiple kinds of intransitive verbs (look up ergative, unergative, and unaccusative). As to the part of speech, that's why dictionaries have the primary ending: you just learn "bel/a" or "bela" and you know it's natively an adjective.
Esperanto's success is primarily because of its age and past activism and infrastructure. Secondarily its agglutinative nature, which is very flexible and expressive, and a refreshing freedom from the rigidity of languages that don't allow arbitrary compounding and changing parts of speech. Thirdly, and more controversially, because the part-of-speech endings make it unambiguous in a way that fixed-word-order languages just can't do -- ambiguities are unavoidable when a word can be a subject, verb, object, or adjective without change. Fourth, at least in the beginning, because it borrowed vocabulary and spelling from several different languages rather than favoring just one.
@@bonbonpony hmmmmm, actuallllyyy
Japanese isn't consistent and exceptionless about this one, but a lot of tr-intr pairs have a pattern like transitive ends with -eru while intransitive end's with -aru
始める hajimeru (to begin something) - 始まる hajimaru (to begin)
終える oeru (to end something, to finish something) - 終わる owaru (to come to an end, to finish)
止める tomeru (to stop something) - 止まる tomaru (to stop)
Maybe we could make three types of verbs, one always intransitive: to see - vid[end1], one for intransitive in a pair: to begin - komenc[end2], one for transitive in pair: to begin (smth) - komenc[end3] (ion)
That beat u made with the computer generated voice was actually fire
From Doctor Zamenhof's perspective, probably seemed more international than . is more transparently related to than , as is transparently related to , (despite making a different sound in many many languages, including a few European ones), and makes a /v/ sound in many European languages (which were obviously the only kind of languages he was really thinking about). Admittedly, the choices about and were probably strongly influenced by his desire not to contradict Polish orthography.
Yes, it's worth understanding that Zamenhof had to sell it in the first instance to the people in his region. More than a century later the Esperanto movement has not changed these things, thinking that if they do, all of their existing literature and documentation will be rendered unreadable!
As far as I know, the originally was used only in diphtongs and . the little bow was above both letters to indicate that you shouldn't pronounce them separately. The way typewriters were designed meant that you could only put it above one letter.
I'm still not sure whether the is hidden in my "english, international" charset somewhere, so I'm using ú instead
english people containment unit
ATTENTION ALL GUARDS
THE BRITISH PEOPLE CONTAINMENT UNIT HAS BEEN BREACHED
BE ON HIGH ALERT AT ALL TIMES
4:11
Oi!
Actually, Brazilian Portuguese has [tʃ] a lot of times, although there is one common word in European Portuguese with [tʃ]. And it is:
Tchau!
Deletori actually the European dialects pronounce and write it as xau /ʃaʊ/
wtf where did you ever see it written as chao? As someone who is a native portuguese never have i in 22 years seen people write chao. Only chau or xau (xau being waaay more common)
@@DTux5249 Not exactly. Northern European Portuguese dialects actually pronounce [tʃ] in words like chamar and cheio, for example.
And monte, tia, Tiago, time, te, tchê, tico-tico, cheque-mate, tchuchuca, eu quero tchu eu quero tcha
english container
=
england
I'm dead
I don't even know esperanto, but 95% of the flaws of esperanto he talks about sound like features to me.
They are flawed features.
It's not a bug, it's a feauture
"it just works"
@@KingHalbatorix it really does, I learnt Esperanto and i had almost non of the problems he talked about, practically the problems are different (i have a few friends who also learnt Esperanto so it's not just me)
I'm honestly compelled to not see his other videos about conlangs, because if they have the same amount of bias/misinformation, it's not worth it
6:55 However, "biero" sounds quite like its equivalent in French "bière".
4:20 I am a portuguese speaker and I can correct you: Portugues DOES have [tʃ]. Example: tchau
I believe what he meant is that it's not distinguished from {shau/xau}. Sorry I can't type the IPA symbol, by the way.
@Léo Pintto Ele provável que pegou uma tabela do IPA qualquer, pq o Tch só apareceu depois de ~1930 e gerou a palatalização em palavras como 'de', já o tchau foi influência italiana
BPr has it and its voiced counterpart as very common allophones of /t/ and /d/
@Léo Pintto Going back to the original question, is there a single consonant in Esperanto that isn't in Portuguese?
@@allisond.46 Actually, yes. From least common to most common:
Portuguese doesn't have /ts/;
/x/ may appear as one of the realizations of our gutteral r but I don't think it's super common, and that also makes it a free variation of /h/, another possible pronunciation of the gutteral r, causing some confusion;
The /tʃ/ and the /dʒ/ only appear as allophones of /t/ and /d/ before /i/ and in loanwords
And the alveolar trill /r/ isn't veeery common anymore (but this one is easy for us to do :P)
Regardless of Esperanto’s issues, it’s still 10x easier to learn then any other language. I’ve studied Spanish and French for years. I barely remember anything besides some basic phrases. Esperanto on the other hand, I studied a small book and remember the entire grammar. I was able to start constructing sentences with just a few words. Is it perfect? No, but does it work and allow me to learn it quickly? Yes.
holy shit the comments are excellent
though I recommend putting on a hazmat suit before going down there
9:15 There's a consistent way of knowing which suffix do you use: Polish names for countries lol.
I really feel like most of the critic in this video is not from an objective point of view. This is critic from an english-speaking standpoint.
The accusative case is very simple if you're from country who uses a language with and accusative case alike grammar it's really simple to learn
Even English distinguishes the accusative case for _some_ words. E.g. the personal pronouns: "he" vs. "him", "she" vs. 'her" etc. It's just that it's not a language-wide feature, and it's quite miserable, because it introduces unnecessary ambiguities sometimes, which have to be overcame by using other grammatical constructs (like the passive voice for example).
@Bon Bon: You find (almost) all of the eight "basic" cases in any language (because you have to have a way to communicate eg. going from a place (Ablative) or addressing someone (Vokative). A "vanished" case means it is now communicated prepositionally.
MOST English-speakers have problems that Levi Eliezer Samenhof (L Zamenhof) took the "Latin Accusative", ie. the Accusative in Esperanto includes the Allative:
"Ĉu mi sekvas lin en la urbon? Ĉu mi sekvas lin en la urbo?" ("Gerda Malaperis", Easy Reader by Claude Piron)
"Do I follow him INTO the city? Do I follow him INSIDE the city?"
Well, I might be a bit biased, because I have 7 cases in my native language (though one of them, the vocative, is not used that frequently). And I know some languages that have even more. But I studied enough languages to know that there's always some construct to communicate the same idea as cases, either directly or indirectly through prepositions or other constructs. And even the inflectional ending for the cases in many languages originally were prepositions that merged with other words with time.
I understand that people that don't have much of that tricky feature in their (isolating) languages may have problems with understanding the idea, because they don't have anything in their experience that they could refer to. But I think it's a matter of how these concepts are taught to them (and they are usually taught very badly, because teachers just refer to their knowledge about the cases and cannot explain it to people who don't understand what they're talking about :q ).
For the accusative in Esperanto, I would go with showing English speakers the examples where the accusative is used in their language: "I" vs. "me", "he" vs. "him" etc. Knowing the difference between the subject and direct object helps a lot in this case. The genitive can be explained with the "Saxon possessive" 's. But I would have to think on how to explain other uses of accusative, or other cases.
i have 4 cases in my language (historically 5, the 5th is understood just not used) (one of those 4 is the vocative, aka a rarely used case). the other 3 are like the bare minimum: nominative; genitive; accusative
why should an "objective" point of view have to come from the perspective of a language with case distinctions? Billions of people natively speak languages that don't inflect nouns for case (Chinese languages, English, Spanish) and using SVO with no case markers would avoid the issue entirely, so there's no point in adding it to a language that's supposed to be "easy for native speakers of any language to learn." Either way, there's definitely no excuse for case agreement concord on adjectives, which Zamenhof himself agreed was a mistake.
Everyone: you're wrong, Portuguese does have that sound, in "tchau"!
Tchau: is borrowed from another language
Tchau: is the only example people can think of
Does that really count as being part of Portuguese's phonological inventory? Like sure English has a glottal stop in "Batman" and "uh-oh", but it's not in our phonology.
But you can pronounce it ! I'm french and I cannot pronounce the sound "the" properly. It a sound that I've never prononce in my life before learning english.
while its true european portguese does not have the [tʃ] sound, brazilian portuguese does have it in an excessive amount. everytime the a T meets an I sound (pronounced like ee in english) the ti actually beacomes a chi. it even happen when the e vowel is reduced into an i at the end of words or randomly in the middle of them. words like "tia" sounds like chia in english, and "monte" sounds like munchy because the e gets reduced to an i. however, considering the creator of esperanto was a polish guy in the 1800, he probabily couldnt care less about brazil, so the point of portuguese not having the [tʃ] sound still makes sense
@@tiagoSS90 exactly
There was such a thing as a batman before Batman
Actually, in any word that has the sillable "ti" this sound is used, unless in some accents (It is used also with "te", but only when the word ends with it)
One could argue that the fact that none of the world's most major languages' phonologies is completely compatible with Esperanto makes it more international, because it doesn't favor any particular group too much. That would ignore the fact that Esperanto clearly does favor speakers of some languages over others, but my point is that assuming some major world language has to be completely compatible with an IALs phonology for it to be international is a little bit misguided. As you pointed out, Esperanto is intended to be easy to learn, which makes compatibility desirable, but it would be limiting to be compatible with everyone (though Toki Pona is around the close to that), so being incompatible to favor internationality over ease of learning is a legitimate option.
I'm also probably biased by the fact that, to me, learning to distinguish new phonemes, especially ones that are just holes in your native languages phonology, is always infinitely easier than learning vocabulary or getting used to the grammar. Apparently, though, many people learn significant grammar and vocabulary without even acquiring such basic phonological skills as distinguishing all the phonemes of a language, so maybe I'm just weird.
Would you prefer a conlang which gives most people an easier time learning the phonology, or a conlang where it is equally difficult for everyone to learn it?
@@davinchristino It's not even that hard you're just actually really bad at learning languages lmao
Research on l1 acquisition in children shows that they actually pick up case endings before word order, implying that its easier to learn. And it makes sense when you think about it. Tell me, which is easier to decipher: something that's explicitly stated, or something that's indirectly implied. In fact, people who speak languages with case systems find confirgurational languages annoying, because they're used to basically being told specifically that a given noun in a sentence is the direct object rather than it being assumed just because of the word order. And besides, they're used to interpreting an unmarked noun as the subject of a sentence, who seeing an unmarked noun that is actually the direct object is counter-intuitive to them.
Also, configurational grammars are vastly more complicated. A book about English or Chinese grammar takes hundreds of pages, and new rules are being discovered all the time. However, a case-marking language doesn't nearly require as many pages, even if you list all the irregularities the language may have (and no, not all case-marking languages are irregular and complicated like Latin, though THAT is harder to learn than configuration it seems).
That's an interesting point but Esperanto is primarily learned as a l2 not l1. For English speakers at least (probably the most important group of speakers to please if you want an ial to succeed) learning non-configurationality is much harder than a new word order.
@@sumwon6973 but would us trying to memories something like object subject verb word order be easier than adding suffixes? even if osv is uncommon that's not my point
lXBlackWolfXl at least for me the hard thing about Latin is conjugating verbs (memorizing all the conjugations and using the right mood and tense). The case system is one of the easiest parts tbh.
Haha it figures that Esperanto phonology only matches with Polish phonology.
Note: I'm actually currently learning Polish and love it to bits, so don't think I'm hating. Kocham Polskę. :)
Is it really as hard to learn as most people say? What did you find the most difficult in it?
Polski język nie jest taki trudny, jak go malują :)
@@bonbonpony Polski naprawdę nie jest taki trudny...
Honestly, the hardest thing *by far* is the ortography. For example, we have the "rz" and "ch" which nowadays are no different than "ż" and "h" (they make the [ʒ] and [x] sounds respectively). There's really no reason for their existence today, but they're still here because the made different sounds in Old Polish. And you have to remember when to write them, as you can't write a "ż" down when the [ʒ] can change to [r] (lekaRZ -> lekaRski), whereas if it changes to [z] or [g], it needs to be a "ż". Same goes for "u" and "ó" (though to my knowledge they never really made different sounds) - when the [u] changes to [ɔ], you *have* to put down an "ó" (drOGa -> drÓŻka).
There are also a lot of grammatical forms to different words. For example, the Polish word for "two" is "dwa" - but that's only the base form. Used in nominative for neuter or inanimate male nouns ("dwa krzesła" - two chairs; dwa stoły - "two tables"). Intimidating, isn't it? Well, there is also "dwojgu" and "dwóm" (the second one could also be written as "dwom" in some dialects), which can be simplified to "dwójce" (that one derives from "dwójka" which is another word for the number 2). Now, all of them are used in dative and mean the same thing- but the first one is for neuter, the second one for personal male *and* female, and the third for male, female *and* neuter nouns. "Dwa" has *SEVENTEEN* forms.
Tak, wcale nie mamy trudnego języka :)
ATAHistory EN kiedyś ó wymawiało się bardziej jak o
"Esperanto is too eurocentric! It's too difficult to pronounce for Chinese and Japanese people!"
...and then Esperanto was significantly more popular in Asia than in the West.
It is?
Esperanto's main problem is that its "akademio" barely fixes any problems, and its members aren't elected by ordinary users.
Esperanto wasn't "designed to be sexist". Zamenhof simply worked with what he had: English has "hero" vs "heroin", Dutch has "leeuw" vs "leeuwin", "vriend" vs "vriendin" and a bunch of others, German has many more. Zamenhof merely made it universal so we don't have to learn separate words like sow, bitch, ewe, etc.
A male suffix "iĉo" was proposed in (or before) 1984 but in 2015 the akademio declared that it would wait for "the natural evolution of the language" to justify official acknowledgement.
The pronouns "ri" and "sli" are being used to some extent, to indicate third person singular without suggesting a sexe
3:52
"Now, I usually don't *_C O C K_* about diphthongs,"
- Jan Misali, 2017
hehehehe pp
Learning german and decided to turn german subtitles on, and »müssten die Leute ›Männin‹ statt ›Frau‹ sagen" is really funny. Props to whoever translated this!
Yeah, it's not like English does anything like that now is it? You wouldn't call a female hero heroine, right
@@ronaldonmg Yeah, it's different for stuff like the generic term for person.
Lustigerweise ist das im Deutschen bei anderen Wörtern ja ziemlich verbreitet:
Polizist -> Polizistin
Schüler -> Schülerin
Also die Idee, das Geschlecht bei Wörtern anzeigen zu müssen und das durch Ableitung des männlichen, aber auch allgemeinen Begriffes zu machen, ist bei Esperanto nichts besonderes.
Das heißt natürlich nicht, dass da keine Reform angemessen sei!
Please explain this to me.
@@kakahass8845 people have to say “männin” for “frau”.
In German, “Frau” means woman, and “-in” is the feminine suffix, so basically “maness”
I am no Esperanto speaker, I have only done a two-hour-course one afternoon once and read a little bit on Wikipedia, but I feel like some of your critisism isn't fair. Yes, it is a Europecentric language, but I find the phonology not that hard (i am european, tho). Also, the accusative marker -n doesn't seem too complicated to me, all natural languages have an accusative (well, technically ergative languages don't, but whatever...same difference), so it should be easy even for someone, who in their native language doesn't mark the accusative, to learn that. As other people have pointed out, adding an affix to make something male female (hey, as english does) is not what I would have chosen in a conlang, but it's nothing uncommon in natural languages.
Especially with the orthography I felt like you were looking at the language from a very Englishcentric point of view.
May I ask where the accusatives are in English? And Dutch, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish? Apart from pronouns, these languages absolutely do not have an accusative.
@Sapien and that's why esperanto shouldn't need to mark it either
@@thesuomi8550 The point of accusative case markings is free word order.
@@purple_purpur7379 But I think pronouns are enough to learn to use the accusative -n. My native languages are Spanish and Galician and it is very easy to recognize the direct object if you pronominalize everything. For example, "Vin o can" (I saw the dog) becomes "Vino" (I saw it), the O in "Vino" being the direct object, masculine singular pronoun. In Esperanto, "Mi vidis la hundon", "Mi vidis ĝin".
@@purple_purpur7379 English: me, thee, him, her, us, them, whom. Spanish: me, te, lo, la, nos, os, los, las; a+noun (when it's a person). French, Italian and Portuguese similar, I'm guesstimating. I don't speak Swedish. Russian: masc/neut: -a (for animate nouns); fem: -u, masc/neut adj: -ogo; menya, tebya, ego, nas, vas, ix.
wow! this was so anglocentric!
Yes, that's what i thought as well. It should use word order for accusative like we do in English. It should use W like we do in English. Japanese people wouldn't recognise Japanio, if the J isn't pronounced like in English.
@@boivie I don't think that counts since they will probably learn it as "ジャパン" and hearing "ヤパン" they wouldn't think "ああ日本そっそっか" like when I wrote "ヤパン" full Katakana wasn't even an option but it realized I was trying to write "ジャパン" before I even finished.
EDIT: Also nominative-accusative alignment is the most common alignment there is ergative-absolutive is only used in 1/4 of the world's languages.
4:29
Im a native italian speaker. Since i was a kid, i've wondered why italian doesn't have a ĵ. It's really easy to pronounce, because it would sound like the g equivalent of the italian version of the ŝ (written with sc+i or e).
Sure, italian doesnt have it, but i dont complain about its presence in esperanto. Instead i'm really happy of it. What's difficult to me is the ĥ instead.
I'm native Spanish speaker. Spanish doesn't have ŝ, ĝ, h and ĵ, but it's easy to pronounce them because now we have a lot of influence from English, and ĵ is easy because the argentinian accent has that sound (sound that Mexican Spanish doesn't have).
@@joseantoniomorenoluna9971 The Argentinian accent also has ŝ
It does exist, actually. But only in central regions such as Toscana and Lazio.
@@francescot5012 i mean, there also is the widely used word "garage", but it's not by default in standard italian
6:10 It depends on your native languages. My native language is Russian, and for me fixed word order is difficult.
"It isn't very easy to learn." Are you kidding me. Sure, it is not the easiest possible language, but it is one of the easiest conlangs and definitely easier than any natlang.
indjev99 not for many asian languages which don't do plurals or time based tenses
honestly. as hebrew speaker. a lot of natural languges are easier for me than esperanto. i'm sure the same is true for arabic, swahilli speakers.
Currently learning Chinese. It's easy as hell and I've studied a shit-ton of languages with no luck. I'm a week in and I'm already thinking in Chinese. The tones really aren't that hard and the writing system is at least logical even though it's complex. In my own subjective experience, Chinese is easier than Esperanto.
Nick Warren reallly? Well thats really good for you. Are you learning simpliified? Are you learning pinyin or chacters?
TBH, maybe I got ahead of myself with the characters statement because I've only just scratched the surface there, but so far, I'm really intrigued. Otherwise, Pinyin is legit. Seriously, the language is not that complicated. I suppose the shit with classifiers is a little clunky. That's nitpicking, though.
Esperanto succeeded more than any other conlang. Respect
Only really because it's the oldest, though
@@RyanTosh there are quite a few older ones, actually.
@@RyanTosh Not really, it succeeded in part because of it's age, but conlanging is not a modern thing. It's been around for a while.
Spanish is technically a conlang, so it's not really the oldest
it spread more, yes. Partly because Zamenhof allowed natural evolution rather than keeping all strings in his own hands, partly because nobody designed something significantly better. As long as there are no dozens of millions of speakers of Esperanto as proof that people want a neutral worldlanguage, why would anyone capable waste their time on designing something better?
To be very fair to him, his goals at the time makes sense for all the weird spelling decisions he made, he wanted to make it as familiar as possible so more people would get to speak it
Usono is because USN - Unuiĝintaj Ŝtatoj de Nordameriko. And when you spell these initials in Esperanto you get U So No. Usono.
like in Spanish it's called EEUU. as a Spanish speaker, I got the logic right away.
Petition to rename the word for the US in esperanto to "Jejnkiko" or something
@@hollowhoagie6441 Esperanto ne havas y-on xD
@@donmeles7711 oh yeah. "Jejnkiko"
In Czech and Slovak USA would be "SŠA" (Spojené štáty Americké), but noone uses that
The compound word in Esperanto are just easier to learn. For me it was easier to learn a word (sano) and then form the word for hospital adding suffixes that are identical for every noun that learning a entire new word.
I was worried the speaker on my phone had broken for a second there.
0:11: Wow, that's some great music!
Hey thanks for making the video and mentioning me in the introduction (even if you did mispel my name). Unfortunately there's a lot of errors and mistakes in your video.
Here's my thoughts:
* The introduction made my ears bleed, never do that again!
* Why do you call Zamenhof "L Lejzer Z"?
* The sound quality isn't great, there was a buzzing sound and sometimes you spoke very quickly and mashed words together.
* You complain that Esperanto doesn't have certain sounds from some languages and vice versa. Yeah, because Esperanto is a combination of languages, it's not similar to just one.
* "You can use the word order instead of the accusative" - but what word order? Does a neutral word order exist?
* Are plurals for adjectives really that much of a problem or is it just because English doesn't have them? French has them, so if Zamenhof ignored that then French people would probably complain
* "Suno doesn't sound like sun" - Er what? Yes it does. Even when you prounounced them, they sounded the same, did you not notice?
* "Esperantoignores international words like hospital" - Actually hospitalo is an Esperanto word
* The word for woMAN comes from man. feMALE comes from male. This is true of English, Esperanto and lots of other languages.
* "Esperanto is sexist". No, just no
* "You must learn a completely new name of where you live" Wrong. The vast majority of the time, the name is the same. I'm from Irlando (Ireland) but I live in Francio (France). You cherry picked the few exceptions.
* For country suffixes it's almost always -io. It's not the clearest system, but you wildly exaggerate the problems. -stano is not a suffix, that's incorrect.
*nice
*his middle name is Lejzer and we cannot let people forget that
*my old mic broke :(
*but like my point was that it's different from all of those major languages
*SOV is the most common, so that works, but a lot of the most common languages use SVO. either one really
*but like a lot of major languages DON'T have them
*[ˈsu.no] and [sɐ̃n] sound pretty different to me
*yeah but that's a newer addition and wasn't part of the original design
*just because natural languages do sexism doesn't mean that it's good for constructed languages
*but it is though?
*sure, some European countries get endonyms in Esperanto, but most countries don't
*true; the actual suffix is -(i)stan. Uzbekoj live in Uzbekistano; Afganoj live in Afganistano.
"but like my point was that it's different from all of those major languages"
Different languages are different, I don't see that as a major problem.
"SOV is the most common, so that works, but a lot of the most common languages use SVO. either one really"
But then people will complain that it gives certain languages an advantage and isn't actually neutral.
"but like a lot of major languages DON'T have them"
Learning a new language comes with lots of new experiences. That's not unique to Esperanto. Spanish has sounds that English doesn't have, is that a flaw of Spanish? If you expect a new language to be the same as your native language, you're gonna have a bad time.
"yeah but that's a newer addition and wasn't part of the original design"
Because Esperanto (like other languages) has developed and changed over time. Adding new words isn't a flaw.
"just because natural languages do sexism doesn't mean that it's good for constructed languages"
But is it really sexism? Is nearly every European language sexist?
"true; the actual suffix is -(i)stan. Uzbekoj live in Uzbekistano; Afganoj live in Afganistano."
Wrong again. The word for Afghanistan is Afganio, Uzbekistan is Uzbekio. In fact, none of the Central Asian countries names end in -istano, their names are Kazaĥio, Turkmenio, Taĝikio and Kirgizio. The only country I could find that ends with -stan is Pakistano, but one example doesn't count as a root ending.
Lejzer looks like lazy Ingliŝ (equivalent for EN) transliteration of Łazarz which is Lazar-o.
In Wiki Name discrepancy it states English Lazar-us.
So, simple (Slavic) name would be Lazar (+localised suffix)
+Robert Nielsen actually, -io is unofficial; and I DO prefer "-ujo" for ALL incorporated states, and "-ano" for ALL nationals - "Irlando" was at Samenhof''s time, but it gained statehood and became "Irlandujo", you went from "irlanda grandbritanano" to "irlandano". Yes, "Irlando" is no autonym (that would be "Eiro" or something like that); but everyone knows what's meant.
To reach unambiguity, IMO all ekster-sufiksoj should be eliminated (making "Germana" into "Germuja" for the German state, "germa" for the cultural region or language).
Stano is in PMEG (-istan, actually) as ekster-sufikso for Afghanistán, Pakistán, Turkestán... - It would make a good neologism for "super-provincial incorporated body", which is about its original meaning in Farsi (Pl. stanha).
In "Unua Libro" ("Dr Esperanto's International Language"), the Vortaro was a large peace of thin paper, also available separately; in the English translations it wass made into a multi-page part. You were supposed to use only the 900-950 radicals in there and include the "vortaro" in letters to non-Esperantists. Unfortunately, this design goal was neglected by the UEA after Samenhof's death. These radicals, plus terminology from the "Jarlibnroj" (see STEB) still are a good "basic set" to use for communication (I write my thesis bilingually in them).
For that, however, the radicals have to be limited. Can there be a "box of Germans"? No. Can there be a "Fruit tree of matches"? no. "-uj-" does not mean "container of", but equally "fruit tree/bush of" or "n-ic nation / nation of n-anoj". That those concepts are similar (where something grows or is held) leads to the correct meaning of the three. (An "apple-box" is a "apple-ish fruit box".)
man used to refer to any person in general. there was wifmann (wife-person) and werman (man with werner, may or may not be accurate wordlore-wise)
maybe the reason for why zamenhoff didn't use for the /w/ sound is because in polish represents the /v/ sound, and he didn't want to confuse his peers so he used
I actually like Esperanto. And where he was saying that inflecting the adjectives for the same case and number as the nouns, that s exactly what Latin does. And many romance languages inflect the adjectives for the same gender and number as the nouns. Esperanto grammar is actually pretty simple to me. It makes sense and I really enjoy the language. I eve call myself fluent in Esperanto
Esperanto grammar is pretty Eurocentric. Have a look at Mandarin or Austronesian grammar with no concept of number or case
the it is inconsistent is because esperanto has diverged from the esperanto that dr.lazier spoke. it is basically a natural language with constructed origins now
Spanish does have the "h" sound but just in latinamerica
Animalius12 Wolf Yes, but never x and h as different phonemes.
Actually, only the caribeans have the h sound
Maybe allophonic with /x/ in some places when speaking lazy, but nothing consistent
@@iosusito5683 /h/ also exists in rioplatense spanish (and other argentine dialects) as an allophone of /s/.
@@fernandobanda5734 Juan, José and Javier eat huevos in Jerez ?
J and H are different from eachother ( I don't speak spanish)
2:14
The criticism of the sound set is pretty legit. I honestly don't like that this language has the ĥ, l, and the r.
4:00
"Notably dumb." The diphthongs are dumb, eh? I think you underestimate people's ability to learn a new way to say things. The dumb comment was mean. It hurt a bit :(
4:49
scii
OH GOD THIS ONE. Yeahhhhh I am with you on the 'sc' combo in Eo. It was HELL to learn. I mean, I can do it now like a native, but it does take quite a bit of practice to get the hang of. That being said, again, I learnt it. Who's to say others couldn't? I mean, is it REALLY the end of the world if the language has sounds that you don't know yet?
5:09
What is it with English speakers and not liking diacritics? Honestly. The only reason that there is to complain about the fact that Eo has diacritics that aren't in any other language is that it would be difficult to print which was BARELY a problem until computers came out 100 years later give or take. This point is more of a personal opinion.
5:30
You mentioned the fact that Zamenhof's native language was Polish. Does it surprise you that the letter w wasn't pronounced as it is in English? Did you know that Polish pronounces that as a v? Like..... this is another meaningless criticism.
5:42
I'm gonna go ahead and make the point that people brains do not naturally think of letters in terms of linguistics. There, I said it. Complaining that the letters don't look like how they should be pronounced is SOOO pointless. Does the letter s look like it should make an s sound? No. Well, if most of the alphabet is gonna be inconsistent, then why change that? This is another point that falls dead in practice. I certainly didn't even think of this as a criticism until I heard it just now.
6:10
Word order
Esperanto's grammar is supposed to be very free and open. You really missed that point and complained that the accusative case could have just been marked with word order, but not every language is an SVO language. I feel like you didn't research this part of the language before you made the video or at least forgot about it.
6:24
"There is actually no reason to do this." (talking about more markers)
My response: "Why not?" You really could have gone into the criticisms instead of stating the fact that it was bad over and over again or going into the alternatives. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
6:40
'The vocab is super euro-centric'
This is true. Actually, you could have said 'romance language centric' and would have been about right too. Then again, you could always try to use more words from other areas of the world, if it bothered you that much, I suppose.
7:02
I think this is one of Esperanto's major strengths. Whenever you read the word 'malsanulejo,' you start to think, hmmm.... now what could that mean? Well, un-health-person-place.... ahhh like a hospital! Another example: pafilo.... hmmmm.... shoot-device.... ahh like a gun! This is totally useful when you want to clarify some point to someone else and you are talking about ideas that are less common than hospitals or guns. This point also TOTALLY goes against the last point you made at 6:40.
7:08
oh no.... he's gonna talk about this now....
I'll admit that sexism in Esperanto can be seen as an issue, but the iĉ movement (the male counterpart to 'in' in the video, the female version) pretty much takes care of this. Also, not having to learn two separate words for objectively the same concept is a pretty good idea at least to start with. But I guess criticism equals negative only right now...
7:46
I have never ever met an Esperanto speaker from a European language background that complained about this ever. Like, did you talk to actual Esperanto speakers when you were making this or were you just guessing what problems someone would have when learning this language?
8:22
Honestly, just slap an -ujo or an -io at the end and you will be PERFECTLY understood. This is the convention, not a solid rule. Nobody is going to arrest you because you said Germany wrong (which can be 'theechland' in English too, by the way!)
8:26
Usono is not the full name of the country, but is an abbreviation: Unuigintaj Statoj de Ameriko. You can just call it Ameriko if you prefer. This is definitely the worst point out of your entire video.
8:37
Calling it Nihonio or Nihonujo is PERFECTLY FINE. Like.... where are you getting this from? You could call India 'Indio,' but I and most people whom I know actually call it 'Baratio' or 'Baratujo.' It actually seems more respectful because you are retaining the way that it is pronounced in their language.
8:52
The suffix for country is still -ujo. You can use either. I personally use -ujo because it is more logical, but the -io thing happened because time passed and people started saying the names of the countries that way. This is an awful point too because this change happened well AFTER Zamenhof designed the language. Unlike most conlangs, Esperanto is a living language. It can't help changing over time.
9:03
No, you do not need to 'memorise' which one you are supposed to use. Refer to the previous few points.
9:31
Nope, it would be pretty hard to 'fix' anything in Esperanto now because it is a living language spoken by probably around a million people give or take. You should not treat Esperanto like a normal conlang.
Anyway, the video was okay, but you really missed the part where you were supposed to compliment the language. That would be okay, but a lot of the points you made against it were really groundless and/or plain wrong.
The point of this channel is to criticize languages. I feel that one of the major points that you are missing from this video, is that Esperanto is supposed to be an auxlang, which means that it is easy to learn for a large amount of people (from multiple language backgrounds). It fails at achieving this in multiple areas, so obviously much of the video will be criticism.
Still though, what is the point of learning Esperanto if it is just as hard to learn as a regular natlang? We may not be able to change the problems with Esperanto, but we can shift our focus onto another, better auxlang like Toki Pona.
Esperanto may take only 150 hours, however that's still like 25% of the time it takes to learn french. If you compare it to Toki Pona, which may take 10 hours or less, depending on how diligently you work at learning it, you can achieve under 0.05% of the time it would take to learn french. This shows that languages like Toki Pona do a much better job to fit their role as an auxlang.
If we decided to use Esperanto as an auxlang, we'd be settling for a more naturalistic auxlang, which makes it both more time consuming and harder to learn, which makes it ineffective as an auxlang.
So if everybody devoted the 10 or so hours it would take to learn Toki Pona, we could have a relatively easy to speak auxlang, and we could move on from Esperanto, which fails as it's goal to be an auxlang, but could potentially be an okay a posteriori language.
@TesseractCat I think you should learn Toki Pona, then correct your sentence. Toki Pona is easy for saying basics things, but for reaching a level of expressivity that is waited for a natural language, Esperanto is far easier. After a certain level of Toki Pona, you have to memorize so mannnny word-combinations that are not regular, not self-evident, and are cultural dependant.
you don't need to memorize them though. there's nothing preventing you from coming up with your own way to say something like "endless scrolling website" (lipu sin pi tawa ale? sure, why not)
Don't try to create one for English. It will take months to explain all the illogical exceptions.
It's CONLANG critic. English is not a conlang.
Esperanto is a Planned language vs Ad-hoc.
Does EN have immunity against critics? The point was that the above Esperanto issues are mostly stylistic.
It's the most successful planned language (~>3mn). How much can you critic that outcome?
I wasn't saying that english is immune against critics. I was saying that this channel is called "CONLANG critic" and english is NOT a conlang.
OK, thanks. I was criticising the 'Conlang critic' for over criticising the Most Successful Planned Language with indirect sarcasm.
I agree, he over criticised it. All the other conlangs that he criticised, he seemed to have hated less, even though he didn't (he ranked esperanto #2)
I feel like the phonology isn't a huge issue. /x/ isn't in English but learning to make that one sound was easier than any other part of learning any other language.
For anyone watching: This video has quite a lot of (possibly unintentional) inaccuracies (as you may verify by reading the corrections made in the other comments). My two non-mentioned-yet-by-anyone cents are:
1. The circumflex is NOT considered punctuation, its part of the letter itself, and thus, it doesn't need to have a separate meaning.
2. The letter "o" at the end is NOT part of the suffixes, it is the Nominative Case (a marker to indicate that the word is a noun); thus, "-ej-", "-uj-", "-in-", "-an-" are suffixes, but "ejo", "ujo", "ino" and "ano" are NOT; they are nouns ("place", "container", "female" and "member", respectively).
3. The suffix "-in-" simplifies a lot the topic of family (the only topic where it really is mandatory besides the distinction between man-woman and boy-girl), and is optional for occupations and everything else (e.g.: the word "instruisto" by itself has no gender, it just means "teacher", but if for some reason you need to clarify it's a female teacher, you can say "instruistino").
4. "Left" is written "maldekstra", not "maldektra", and if you want, you can say "liva" instead. By the way, the cluster "sc" is much easier to pronounce if, before saying it, you put your mouth in the position required for the next vowel (e.g.: to say "scii, scio or sciuro", put your mouth in the position to make the "i" before starting the word).
5. The countries work like this: Originally, "-uj-" (the suffix for containers) was used for the names of non-american countries (bc the name of the people determined the name of their country, so the "francoj" (frech) lived in "francujo" (container of the frech people), but nowadays, for various reasons, we prefer "-i-" instead of "-uj-"; so "francujo", today is "francio" (but you can use any form you want). In America (the continent) is the other way around: the name of the country determines the name of the people, and bc of that, the name of the inhabitants is the one needing a suffix this time ("-an-", the suffix of members ["ano" is "member" *¡laughs in spanish!*]), thus: "El Salvador" is "Salvadoro" and its demonym is "Salvadorano".
6. "Stano" literally means "tin" (yes, the element, the metal); it doesn't have anything to do with countries.
EDIT: Improved explanations.
Although I'd disagree that Esperanto is *sexist* , I would agree that making up new words for female equivalents is *pointless* and *confusing* .
Sure: English does this too: (fe)Male; Actor(ress). However, this was a constructed language: someone made a conscious decision to include that needless feature.
It's a gripe of mine, yet Esperantists that talk about it seem to imply it's a really good feature, as it differentiates between - for example - a male teacher and a female teacher. I'd ask why there is a need of distinction, and then I'd ask why gender is the differential factor and not age or respect.
I can see where age might be a differential factor, but I don't understand why respect. Respect is subjective, so it would at some point just refer to power in a hierarchy. A "respected teacher" might come to mean some other unforseen role. Also, I don't see what's inherently bad about differentiating gender in a constructed language.
and yet it has no word for just "parent." (please don't say "gepatro"! Even though I use it myself there is a HUGE controversy over the use of the "ge-" suffix in this way. ,I of course, see no problem with it, but others seem to think it's the harbinger of the Antichrist). Now, if Dr. Z had just asked ME, I would have suggested to make a word for "parent" (and "sibling" and "child" and many others) and the use suffixes to denote the male and female counterparts.
I'm Portuguese speaker and in my dialect we have the /ʧ/ phoneme
In which word? I thought it was only an allophone of /t/ before front vowels.
Well, in the name of my on city is pronounced with it in the "te" wich becomes a /ʧi/
The word in question is "Horizonte" (skyline)
Yes. in that case it's actually just an allophone, so it's /ti/, but it's pronounced [ʧi] (The underlying phoneme is /t/, but it's palatalized before /i/). I suggest you read about the difference between phones and phonemes if you haven't already; it really helped me in conlanging (and besides it's very interesting)
Carlos Soto No, it also appears in the word "tchau" ("tch"), and people from Rio Grande do sul sometimes say "tche!" at the end of sentences (it's an interjection, I'm not sure what it means).
I'm not sure if this "tch" sound (sorry, I can't type the proper IPA symbol now) can be considered a phoneme or if it's just an allophone (I can't remember any minimum pair now) but, anyway, I always could notice the difference between sx and cx (I also can't type Esperanto characters now), I never had to learn it.
heard a joke once.
man goes to doctor.
says he's spent five years of his life struggling with letting go. says the people he talks to worry and ask if he's okay, and he just reflexively brushes them off and lies that he's great, been laughing nonstop and never bored.
says he's desperate for a distraction, to move on.
doctor says: "treatment is simple. clown commenter jan Antoni returned to the comment section tonight. go and read his puppetmaster schtick, that should pick you right up."
man bursts into tears. says: "but doctor... i AM jan Antoni"
Also, just because a language doesn't have a sound doesn't mean those people can't say a sound. I can go to any languages phonology, then point to a sound and a corresponding language without that sound.
No shit. I recently learnt some sounds that I could previously not pronounce. The point is the sounds are just taken directly from Polish and aren't very common, which is contradictory to making an international language. The the best option would be to select the most common phonemes out of all languages (maybe not including languages below like 10-15 million speakers). That would be best when making a interlang, not this.
CHALLENGE: find a language with more than sixty million speakers that isn't compatible with Toki Pona's phonology
Conlang Critic done! Arabic
very close! however, Toki Pona's phonology is lax enough that all of its phonemes sill can be mapped to Arabic without breaking any phonological rules:
p /f~b/
t /t/
k /k/
m /m/
n /n/
s /s/
w /w/
l /l/
j /j/
i /i/
u /u/
e /aj/
o /aw/
a /a/
Conlang Critic nope! Arabic only has three vowels and toki pona has 5
Actually, there are many dialects of Latin American Spanish that pronounce the letter J as /h/ and not /x/. Another key point to mention is that Argentinian Spanish speakers often lenite coda /s/ into /h/. And one more point: Some dialects of Arabic do have /e/ and /o/ as phonemes, especially Egyptian Arabic.
So, Esperanto is somewhat compatible with a few dialects of Spanish and Arabic, and not every other dialect.
"'suno' doesn't sound like 'sun!'" haha yeah that's weird, anyway what's it called in toki pona
well, it doesn't sound like "sol" or "haul" or "sunce" or "ilios" either
I'm not a Esperanto fan, but it made for Europe. But the UN tried to make it into the international language, and that made it associated with international-lity
This episode feels very useless compared to your others. You repeat the same superficial things that can be found in many articles, without saying something new by diving really into the language (see semantics). At least with the other episodes, we can learn something new about things that are rarely documented.
The channel owner gave a disclaimer in the video that a lot has already been said about Esperanto (which is true) and that he was not likely going to say anything extremely original, but was simply going to add his own view. I think he did a pretty good job of presenting his viewpoint -- even as I nitpick with little details in the comments ;-).
That's what he said. It's like expecting somebody to give an original opinion of Shakespeare. He's talking about what strikes him about the languages and how they compare. Obviously it will be new for little-known languages and repetitive for well-known languages.
Okay, I've seen you on evildea so I'mma assume you're an Esperantist, and in this case an angry Esperantist as well. I'm an Esperantist and I'm not pissed at his points
It's true, it's phonology isn't compatible with the biggest languages in the world. And as an ial, you shouldn't have to learn new sounds.
It's also excluding roots from Asian and the middle East, making it more difficult for them, making another divide.
Even if some of his points are not applical. (Sexism, Mal=bad,etc.)
He's right when he says it's not a great auxlang. And that's not esperantos/zamenhofs fault. Zamenhof only really had Europe as a frame of reference. At the time, it was a decent attempt, but it needs improvement.
Why is it that an overwhelming majority of the Esperantist community feels the need to defend this language? It isn't leaving anytime soon, in fact it's getting better by the minute. It's about time we do what Zamenhof wanted: make it more natural. Give it a solid syllable structure, cut a few sounds. If we can't take criticism, the movement and the language as a whole will get nowhere.
(PS. This is long but important. I'm annoyed at the fact that the community that should be respecting everyones beliefs is crying over someone's opinion. This is proof people can't change even if they say they will. If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen)
Bone, mi vidis vin sure evildea, do mi supozas, ke vi estas esperantisto, kaj en ĉi tiu kazo, kolera esperantisto. Mi estas Esperantisto, kaj mi ne malamas liaj punktoj
Fakte, la fonologio ne estas kongrua kun la plej grandaj lingvoj de la mondo. Kaj kiel IAL, vi ne devas lerni novajn sonojn.
Ĝi ankaŭ ekskludas radikojn de azia kaj meza Oriento, farante ĝin pli malfacila por ili, farante alian dividon.
Eĉ se iuj el liaj punktoj ne estas aplikeblaj. (Seksismo, Mal = malbona, ktp.)
Li pravas, kiam li diras, ke ĝi ne estas bona auxlango. Kaj tio ne estas la kulpo de esperanto / zamenhofo. Zamenhof nur havis Eŭropon kiel kadro de referenco. En tiu tempo, ĝi estis deca provo, sed ĝi bezonas pliboniĝon.
Kial estas ke abrumadora plimulto de la esperantista komunumo sentas la bezonon protekti ĉi tiun lingvon? Ĝi baldaŭ ne lasas neniun momenton, fakte ĝi pliboniĝas antaŭ la minuto. Temas pri tempo, kion ni deziris, kion Zamenhof volis: fari ĝin pli natura. Donu ĝin solidan silaban strukturon, tranĉu kelkajn sonojn. Se ni ne povas kritikiĝi, la movado kaj la lingvo en aro iros nenie.
(Mi ne rescribas ĉi tio PS.)
Portuguese has all of those diphthongs, although not necessarily all varieties have them.
I decided I wanted to try to make a conlang which was an auxlang on the side, had 1 sound per letter, and was more compact than English (mostly so I could teach it to my friends and give them really good callouts with limited syllables). After doing research on each of the most popular languages, I ended up with 12 constanants and 5 vowels. It's really fun trying to fit everything neatly into the space! Afterwards I watched this video and immediately questioned half the decisions in this conlang lol
"Five of these consonants appear in less than a third of all languages"
*Proceeds to list four*
"third of all languages" means 1 out of 3 languages, not 3 languages
@@atruv2089 Four consonants.
There's the neologism infix ‐iĉ‐ for masculine, that we could start using for Esperanto. So "knabo" is just a young person, "knabiĉo" is a boy and "knabino" is a girl. Make the ‐iĉ‐ infix more popular and remove this male-defaultness that Espernato has.
Also, it matches
Panjo -ino
Pacxjo -icxo
I use that way when I can. Mostly when talking to people that I know that know it :-)
Nepo nepino nePIĈO...
But i think that objectives starting with "ne" does not have to exist because it can be confusing.
Ps Piĉo is (unofficial?) bad word in Esperanto meaning "count without o"
Nepo=nephew
Yes, more people shopuld join the riismo-movement, it is called after the word "ri", used as genderless pronoun for the third person singular.
@Casual_Ice_Consumer : yes, that's where it came from.
@Механикус Продакшн : nepo=grandchild , nephew=nevo
@@ronaldonmg MDR ahah nun mi scias, tiam mi estis komencanto (nun ankaŭ sed parolas pli bone)
As in many languages, Esperanto has its inconsistencies, for instance, the -n suffix is used to sign the direct object of a verb, but in sentences like: "Leginte la libron, li iris vespermanĝi
." the accusative -n is generally used after an adverb,
Nevertheless, Esperanto is easy to be learned.
"Leginte" is not adverb, it is adverbial participle, so it is form of verb
@@СергейМатюшов-щ8в well that answers my question, спасибо!
@@MrSkribanto It’s both really. It means “having read”, so it modifies the main verb of the sentence, but it’s also a verb with its own object. “Having read the book, he went to eat dinner.”
Trying to squeeze Esperanto grammar into the boxes of European languages is just as misguided as the effort to somehow* squeeze English grammar into the boxes of Latin.
* (Yes, I split the infinitive -- point made?)
My English teacher once asked me if I tried to learn a fictional language
I told him "Yeah, I tried to learn Esperanto"
The intro is so funny. I love the AI voice beatboxing
Accusative was a real good idea. One rules instead of hundreds of word order rules (400 + 700 exceptions)
Actually, portuguese has the "tch" sound (as the "c" in italian "ciao"), it's in one of our most used words, "tchau", that means "bye"
How often to Portuguese speakers say bye to each other for it to be one of the most used words? I know that I say buy 10 - 20 times a day (maybe less) (as student). Maybe Portuguese people say buy as a part of speech. I'll have to ask my Portuguese friend.
@@rykloog9578 oh, not really if you do think about it, your friend will confirm, it was more of a figure of speech
@@Elwislipknot lol, sorry i was being a bit facetious
If you think about the 1000 most used words, I guess "tchau" will be there. Many words aren't used mone then once a week.
0:33
Jan Masali = Faith character
3:58
Portuguese has all of these
"Pai" meaning "father"
"Mau" meaning "evil" or "bad"
"Gostei" meaning "I liked"
"Eu" meaning "I"
"Oi" meaning "hi"
"Fui" meaning "I went"
Mau has 2 different ways of saying it (Atleast here in Brazil.): Mal and Mau.
Mal is an adverb, antonym of bem (good). Mau is an adjective, antonym of bom (also good.)
Examples:
Ele é uma pessoa *bom* .
Isto é alguma coisa do *bem* .
OH YAAAAA! Just because there is a word like "mal" that means bad doesn't mean that word is now off limits! Oh, my native language says this word means "dog" yet in language X it means "yellow!" What am I to do? I'm never going to be able to learn this language. (I think you're getting my point from these comments)
In Hebrew "dog" means "fish" :q Figure that...
Bon Bon, not exactly the word דג (which in English sounds like dag) means fish.
@@bonbonpony Dog is is pronounced with an aw like vowel sound that Hebrew does not have. דג is pronounced with a basic ah sound that any English speaker could tell is very different.
@@MegaBallPowerBall actually in Tiberian, Teimani, and Ashkenazi Hebrew they do have it, just not in the standard dialect in Israel today. But I bet op has the caught-cot merger.
hello kala
4:21
Actually,portuguese does have t͡ʃ,at least the varietys spoken in brazil,in some dialects,it's just on the sylable "ti" and derivates,but in other dialects,it's a thing on it's own,mine has it in some words,both in formal and informal speech
Esperanto is actually supported by the UN, it’s not recognized as an official language but the UN is supporting it as an international language
Falacy of authority
Good for them, still won't make it good
The smaller you make the phonology, the longer words will have to be on average and the harder it will be to recognizably transliterate names of people, countries, etc. from the languages of the world. You seem to prioritize ease of pronunciation over every other consideration, but there are other concerns in the mix too.
fair enough, but you'd be surprised how much you can get away with as far as phonological approximations go!
Japanese is a clear example of how words can be almost unrecognizable after putting them through the small inventiry of phonemes.
And Hawaiian. A small number of phonemes doesn't make words especially longer: the length is more because of rules against consonant clusters. But a small number of phonemes lead to more homonym clashes, which cause their own problems.
Toki Pona - Words are usually 1 - 2 syllables, sometimes 3 or 4, how many phonemes does it have?
@@palatasikuntheyoutubecomme2046 The number of phonemes is just the number of consonants + the number of vowels, so count them up.
I figured out why esperanto has /sts/, /eu/, and things like that. It’s so that it can loan words from latin and greek, and have the writing of stuff from them match up with the spelling in other languages.
But literally no one speaks latin and greek today
@@davinchristino but their words have been influential in international scientific vocabulary.
As far as I remember my latin-classes, Latin has neither sts nor eú
@@ronaldonmg probably wanted to keep the . Latin always represents /sk/. Eu is in eurus (east wind).
7:06 If you wonder why there is a feminine suffix -in with no corresponding masculine suffix, blame German. In German, -in is added to masculine nouns to make the nouns feminine (eg. Schauspieler, actor compared to Schauspielerin, actress), and -in is only added if the noun does not already specify gender (eg. Bruder, brother compared to Schwester, sister). Zamenhof, in an attempt to make Esperanto as regular as possible; takes the first rule to its logical extreme, and in Esperanto all nouns (excluding personal pronouns) without -in are masculine
0:18 ESPERANTO (remix)
I have been a rather avid Esperantist for five years now, and this is the first time I've actually ran into real legitimate criticism with its core concepts. Now I am sad.
mi esperas, ke vi ne haltis lerni ĝin :)
I'm an American and learning Esperanto.
Some of the letters with the circumflex don't make sense, and I hate how I can't use alt codes to type them on most applications, but it does make sense why they exist. There is are two alternate ways to type the circumflex characters, but the way with using x at the end is the only reliable way as the h at end method has almost no information on it. As an English speaker, the pronunciation is not very hard, but the r, hx, and jx do take a bit of time to get right. (I still can't trill my R's.)
Also, has anyone noticed that Google Translate recently removed the voice in Esperanto? The main way I learned Esperanto pronunciation was through the Google Translate Esperanto voice since it was actually consistent. I know enough Esperanto to not need it now but I'm sad Google Translate removed the voice. D: It was annoying to hear for awhile but you don't know how useful it was.
Mi amas Esperanton, ĉar ĝi estas facila lingvo, sed ĝi ne estas perfekta lingvo.
To critic a lenguaje you must study before, Esperanto is so easy to study, I'm from Spain and is easier understand Esperanto than english. "Suno not sound how "sun"" jajajjajaja is talks reads is same that speak, likes Spanish.
Yeah but like, Spanish and the romance languages aren't the only in the world. A person that speaks an Asian language wouldn't be able to understand the words like you do.
@@lomsahit7367 But much easier than English for the Asian language. that's why it's a better choice as an international language.
There is a reason why some country names in Esperanto are derived from the names of their inhabitants, whereas some are the other way around. It's explained by Duolingo:
> Esperanto has a two-part system for naming countries and their inhabitants. This two-part system developed early in the history of Esperanto, and was based on the idea of a division of the world into "Old World" and "New World". The assumption was that the "Old World" countries took their names from the people who lived there. In contrast, "New World" countries consisted mainly of immigrants and their descendants, so their inhabitants were named after the countries they lived in.
So, for some "Old World" countries, mainly in Europe and Asia, the Esperanto root form gives the name of the inhabitant, and the name of the country is formed from it. For other "New World" countries,mainly in the Americas, Africa and Oceania, the Esperanto root form gives the name of the country, and the name of the inhabitant is formed from it.
source: duome.eu/tips/en/eo -- ctrl-f for "country names"
"Usono" for the US also makes plenty of sense -- it's similar enough to be easy to remember, and it's possibly derived from an older abbreviation for the US, "USONA"/"Usona" ("United States of North America").
See, for instance: en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Usona#English. Additionally, if you're really bent on having a direct translation, there's (en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Usono#Esperanto) "Unuiĝintaj Ŝtatoj de Ameriko" (lit. "United States of America") or "Unuiĝintaj Ŝtatoj Amerikaj" (lit. "United American States").
What would one have the US be called anyway? No self-respecting IAL should settle for referring to the country of the USA as "America" (or something similar), and the name of the country "the United States" is unlike many others in that it is made up of commonly used words which have meanings in their own right, which means that the name might be literally translated into the IAL (as above), and that doesn't make for recognizability either -- a US national with little knowledge of Spanish might have a hard time recognizing "EEUU" as referring to "los Estados Unidos", i.e., the United States, and even worse with IALs which don't share those roots. "Usono" is short, easy to remember, and better than many alternatives.
ive seen ppl on the internet use USAmerican no idea how thats pronounced though
@@Kelly_C U-S-American (like the abbreviation US plus the word American), I'd think. Personally I would prefer that to "American" in terms of clarity, but aesthetically "Usonian" looks better. I'm going to try to call myself "usonano", though.
@@aetherel why wouldn't it be usanian or usian or usanano or whatever though
@@Kelly_C USian seems legit but doesn't sound as nice as Usonian in my view. USAnian also makes sense but looks weird. Usanano is wrong because in Esperanto the name of the country is Usono, not Usano, and the name of an inhabitant is derived from Usono + ano = Usonano rather than Usano + ano = Usanano.