7:13 esparanto can still be developed into a more international and simple language. 1 such as reducing the number of letters used like R. 2. Use a non-European word. 3 . Plural words using word repetition. Like austronesian language family
@@AlfarrisiMuammar -- re 1. makes nothing easier and anyway you are 125 years too late: Eo is not anymore a theoretical project, but an established, stable language like e.g. English. re 2. I already showed in another comment that Esperanto is full of non-European words, quoting some few examples of Japanese words (harakiri, cunamo, kimono, animeo and many others). re 3. In Eo word repetition can be used to indicate strengthening: plen-plena = plen' - full, plen-plena - full to the maximum; kore = cordially, kor-kore = as cordially as possible; tuj-tuje - tuj = at once, immediately, tuj-tuje = I don't know in English, maybe there is no equivalent (?). Another way is using the word "eg" which indicates the augmentative: plen/eg/a = plen-plen/a, kor/eg/a = kor-kor/e, tuj/eg/e = tuj-tuj/e.
Every language IS an invented language, that a dude invented, and that the rest were taught by someone else, and then they taught it to others, and so on, languages do not ‘arise naturally’ and, there’s no such thing as ‘natural’ languages, as languages didn’t just magically appear out of thin air or from nature, tho the dudes that created and modified them did get inspired by nature, at least the ones that made the pretty languages! Esperanto was made by a dude, inspired by other languages or based on other languages, just as every other language, and he actually took more words from Latin and modified them a bit, so Esperanto is a Latin language basically, which has some Germanic characteristics, such as the use of Ks instead of Cs etc and some Germanic words, but most of it is based on Latin and it sounds like a Latin language, so it’s a Latin language, same as Catalan and Gallo and Portuguese etc! But all languages come from Proto European, anyway, which is the first proper language with actual grammar and thousands of words that also came with the first true writing system that a dude created from scratch a long time ago, that inspired all other languages and all other writing systems that exist today, either directly or indirectly! Languages that are pretty should always be learnt for their pretty words, as pretty words bring true joy to one’s eye / ear - that’s why I am learning all the pretty languages that exist! So technically, languages aren’t related to words such as ‘culture’ etc, plus, there is no such thing as a ‘culture’ etc - everything was inspired by nature, and things that were made were made by a few dudes, and things that most ppl do were taught by a few dudes, so there is no reason to associate languages with the idea of cultures, in general, which is really just an iłłusion, while pretty languages are something that’s really fun to learn, so the true motivation comes from within and from seeing the pretty words, especially when one has a good eye / ear for prettiness in nature (including pretty words and sounds) and knows to appreciate it, which was inspired by the beauty that is found in nature, so one should never care if a language isn’t spoken by many or by anyone etc, if it’s a pretty language, one should learn it for its pretty words and sounds, because pretty languages are always fun to learn and speak and use in poetry / lyrics etc and to look at / hear etc, plus creating a pretty language is a true art in itself, so pretty languages are a form of art!
But anyways, the international languages should be English & Dutch & Old Norse, which are the prettiest and most refined languages with the most pretty and poetic words and also the easiest languages ever in every way, and Norwegian is also one of the prettiest ever! However, Esperanto is a nice language, not the prettiest Latin language, but still nice enough to learn, so it’s on my list of languages I want to learn and improve, and it’s similar to Spanish & Latin, and I recommend learning all these pretty languages, including Esperanto, and especially Dutch and Old Norse and Gothic and Norwegian and Icelandic and the other Germanic languages, as Germanic languages are the prettiest languages ever, and also the 6 Celtic languages (namely Welsh / Breton / Cornish / Manx / Irish / Scottish Gaelic) and Gallo / Latin / Galician / Catalan / Guernsey / Portuguese / French / Spanish / Italian and other Italian-based languages and Hungarian and Slovene etc! I am learning all pretty languages, and I could recognize the root words of all those Esperanto words, so I could understand everything - Esperanto is real fun to learn, actually, tho I will use the word ti instead of vi for the singular ye / you, because the plural form shouldn’t be the same as the singular form in any language, and even in English, I use yens / yous / y’all etc for the plural, and I use ye / you for the singular, and I highly recommend that others do the same!
Technically, every language IS an invented language, that a dude invented, and that the rest were taught by someone else, and then they taught it to others, and so on, languages do not ‘arise naturally’ and aren’t ‘natural’ in that sense, as languages didn’t just magically appear out of thin air or from nature, tho the dudes that made / modified them did get inspired by nature, at least the ones that made the pretty languages - Esperanto was made by a dude, inspired by other languages or based on other languages, just as every other language, and he actually took more words from Latin and modified them a bit, so Esperanto is a Latin language basically, which has some Germanic characteristics, such as the use of Ks instead of Cs etc and some Germanic words, but most of it is based on Latin and it sounds like a Latin language, so it’s a Latin language, same as Catalan and Gallo and Portuguese etc!
@@champigranja1179romance languages have easier phonetic. Spanish has a simple phonetic (not like english that IS a nightmare). The problem IS their grammar, specially system verbs. Spanish is too dificult, but english as well. Esperanto must be internacional language
@@interbeamproductions Then pronounce correctly : vegetable, confortable, a tomb, a comb, to indict, to tear, a tear, a pear, near, debt, doubt, to import, an import, to increase, an increase, I presume, a resume, a choir, a recipe, I walk, I know, now, to lead, lead (metal), to plough, to cough, thoroughly, etc. This is absolute nonsense and the reason why it might seem easy to you is either that you've been heavily exposed to it and you pronounce all these words perfectly or that you don't even realize you've never pronounced them properly.
@@interbeamproductions Sorry men. English has a hard phonetic. For this reason I supporter of esperanto as international language. My language, spanish, is a bullshit specially for our system verbs. In my opinión interlingua IS the perfect international language.
13:28 That actually translates to "She loves her(as in someone else's) mother". The correct way to say it, assuming that isn't what you meant, is "Ŝi amas sian(her own) patrinon". Much love, been subscribed for years!
Just back from the Polyglot Gathering in Poland 🇵🇱. There was a very strong Esperanto presence there, and because I speak Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages I understood it without being able to answer. It really messed with my head!!
@@amikecoru Białystok is in Poland, not Belarus. Yeah, Zamenhof was a Polish Jew that was a polyglot. He knew Polish, Yiddish, and lots of other languages. I think everyone agrees Polish is is first language.
@@modmaker7617 Except for the inconvenient fact that the chief language of the Zamenhof home was Russian, and his first languages were Russian and Yiddish. (Not surprising, since in Zamenhof's day, Bialystok was part of Russia, not Poland, and documents of the day describe Zamenhof as a Russian Jew.)
I have been an on-again off-again Esperantist since sometime in the 1970's. As a host on Pasporta Servo, I've hosted Esperantists from a number of countries. What I love about Esperanto, is the ability to meet and interact with people from other cultures, not just Europeans, on a level playing field where one side is not struggling to make oneself understood in the other's language. Unfortunately, being advanced in age and due to COVID, I have had to stop offering my home for Esperantists to stay in.
Esperanto isn’t fair though. It is heavily based on European languages especially the romances so a Spanish speaker will have a much easier time learning an speaking it than some Vietnamese.
I don't know... I also took some lessons on Duolingo few months ago. As an Italian native, speaking English and a bit of German, I found almost the whole vocabulary (at least pretty basic one) immediately recognizable and intuitive... it seems to be a heavy latin prevalence, at least to me. Some sentences seem to me as almost italian
Perhaps LL Zamenhof had a preference for Latin roots and that might come across as “almost Italian,” Italian being, arguably, the Romance language closest to Latin (if we ignore Sardinian, I guess).
I don't speak Esperanto , but I think it should be the European Union's primary language. To replace the five or so current ones. This would just demote those five languages to the same level as all the other official languages of the EU
I love the sound of it and how regular it is. One of the annoying things about learning languages is all the irregularities. It’s not something I like but I have to deal with. Knowing that it’s easy to learn and that there are very few exceptions to the rules makes me want to learn it. I also like that it doesn’t belong to any country and can be anyone’s. I just wish it were more popular
There's not any language that "belongs" to any country, but rather has its origin in a particular country. However, according to your approach languages created by a person, such as Esperanto, belong to their creator.
Thanks, Danny! I never leave, though. If it takes a month or two to make a video, that means I work on it every day during that time. I released a video on Turkish in May. People seem to think I take breaks between videos. lol, I wish. :)
Paul points out that Esperanto is criticized by some for being eurocentric. What about English, which plays the role of de facto international language? It's not eurocentric? Of course it is, but it's far more difficult than Esperanto. The alternative is a mishmash that would be a total mess. For many Asians, Esperanto's Europeanness is actually a big plus, on top of its relative simplicity. The fact is that European influences of all kinds have spread around the world. But Esperanto is not just another European language: it has many autonomous features, including a word-building system with similarities to that of Chinese, and a number system identical to the Japanese one (e.g. 12 is 10 + 2, "dek du" in Esperanto, "ju ni" in Japanese, while 20 is 2 + 10, "dudek" in Esperanto, "niju" in Japanese).
My biggest adventure with Esperanto was probably my 3 months in Senegal where I was teaching the language before the African Esperanto Congress that took place in Thies. I made lots of new friends, shared so much with my students and other local Esperanto speakers, one of the brightest periods of my life. Many would argue that Esperanto does have culture (original literature, songs, all that), but I would agree with Paul that learning the language opens doors to other marvels, like being able to speak to random average person in almost any country finding out a lot about local realities, cultures and languages too! I never had any regrets about learning Esperanto in my student years. Or any other languages that I learnt, for that matter. Languages are fun, and Esperanto no less than others (but you can also actually master it at a point of time unlike national languages that seem endless the farther you go).
esperanto definitely has a culture. Not as in depth as other cultures but it definitely exists through things like pasporta servo, UKE, literature (also originally written in esperanto) music, history, references such as crocodiling etc
My initial thoughts on learning Esperanto were that I wasn't interested. I was interested in learning natural languages rather than constructed ones--because who knows how closely Dr. Zamenhof's efforts come to what sort of structures would arise naturally? On the other hand, if I get a good enough grip on enough natural languages, maybe studying Esperanto would be interesting--just as a comparison of Zamenhof's ideas to what can be found occurring naturally.
Having culture, literature or whatever is the minimum a language must have... but of course, a language with no real speakers has no real culture (I don't fall for that falacy of native speakers, the only native speaker that made a video couldn't speak it fluently, a fallacy)
@@danielpmonteyro most native speakers of Esperanto speak it with less proficiency than the other native language that they have in the environment. Some do speak well, if they keep the interest and use the language regularly. The phenomenon is not a "fallacy", it's an existing described thing. Non-native fluent speakers are also speakers and also produce speech and texts. Most Esperanto writers and RUclips-ers are non-natives, as are grammarians and editors of vocabularies, that's how an international auxiliary language is supposed to exist.
As to Esperanto's easiness to learn: I started learning it by myself, from a book, then followed-up with a free correspondence course from the Esperanto League of North America (now Esperanto USA). A year and a quarter after starting, I attended ELNA's three-week summer course. The first Esperantist I met, in the cafeteria the day before classes began, was one of the instructors: a Yugoslav, who spoke no English. We enjoyed a fluent conversation at our lunch table, quite involved and interesting. We were soon joined by a student, an Iranian woman, who also just fit right in. During the three weeks, I was really impressed with how natural it felt to use the language with any and all of the professors and students. This is in stark contrast to my experience years before with French, which I studied for a year at the university level, then continued reading over a few more years until my first visit to France. Once I arrived there, I found that I had extraordinary trouble understanding the spoken language, and expressed myself mostly quite haltingly.
Admittedly, my having studied French before Esperanto was of course a real advantage in learning the latter, since E-o incorporates some vocabulary and idioms from French. And before French, I had three years of high school German, which also helped, as E-o also takes much from that language. But, that said, it became hugely obvious to me as I made real, effective use of E-o during my three week course -- and not just in daily classes, but in innumerable conversations with professors and fellow students, as we were all staying the same dormitory and sharing meals -- that E-o lends itself to an immediacy of application that is completely foreign to the learning of most any other language. Of course, a huge part of this is the complete standardization of verb forms: no irregular verbs, no changes in conjugations for different persons, all tenses having completely standardized endings. That makes learning everything about all verbs in E-o take probably only about 5% of the time and energy it would take to learn them in French or German! The. There's the completely phonetic alphabet (and having only five vowels, instead of about eight or nine in those other languages).
I learned Esperanto over a few weeks when I was a bit bored one summer. I met the local Esperanto group and was astounded that I could carry out a conversation. This convinced me that I was capable of learning a language, so I dove in to German. I became fluent in the latter but have forgotten most of Esperanto.
Nice, I'm a native German speaker, how is it to learn German? I mean, it's a hard language compared to other... Cases, pronunciation, writing, grammar... I think, all those things are very hard to learn.
@@labernaut9260 Es war keine leichte Arbeit, aber durchaus machbar. Nach etwa zwei Jahre intensiver Auseinandersetzung mit der Sprache konnte ich fließend Deutsch. Das ist schon lange her.
I'm from Indonesia and I speak Esperanto. It's hard to find Esperantists in Asia, I must say. But the community is very welcoming and it makes me feel like home immediately. As an Esperantist myself, I am hopeful to make the community bigger in Asia! 🎉
Eh, hardly a feat. I spend a weekend to finish the course and coupd speak it quite well. The language feels like lacking in identity, theres not much cultural relevancy to that language other than the languages it borrows word from.
@MsHackthat Wow, you could speak it within a weekend? Now that's a real feat; I envy your genius. Next time someone tells me about their experience with a language I'll make sure to point out how unimpressed I am that they learned it and how boring that language is after all.
Saluton al ĉiuj! Mi esperantiĝis en 2006. Mia denaska lingvo estas la portugala kaj havis tiame bazan lingvokapablon en franca, angla kaj hispana antaŭ la eklernado de Esperanto. Du jaroj poste, mi partoprenis en nacia esperanta kongreso kaj havis oportunon por gastiĝi kun aliaj esperantistoj pere de Pasporta Servo. La lernado de Esperanto igis min pli lingvema. Nuntempe mi studas la latinan kaj jam ellernis la grekan. Mi dankas vin, Paul, pro la bonega filmeto pri Esperanto!
Mi parolas Esperanto ekde 2020 kaj studis en Eŭropo dum jaro poste tio. Tie mi ekkonis kelkajn esperantistojn kaj esperas vidi ilin baldaŭ kiam mi revenos tien
I'm native Polish speaker and most of these sentences don't make any sense to me, but knowing some bits of German and English I can clearly see Esperanto was based on these languages. What I like about it is how simple it is, everything is regural and predictable. What I find really interesting, is because Zamenhof was born in Poland and was partialy Polish, he adopted question marker "cu" from Polish "czy".
Zamenhof was ashkenazi jew and his native laguage was yiddish, but he probably spoke russian, polish and german as well like most educated jews at the time.
Some other Esperanto facts are also from Polish: like the way of asking and telling time (je la sesa, o szóstej, literally "at 6th"), certain words like "nafto" for oil, etc.
Zamenhof was an Ashkenazi Jew who was born in the Russian Empire and grew up speaking Russian. His hometown, Belostok, and Warsaw, the city where he spent most of his life, both became part of the Kingdom of Poland (which is not the same thing as modern Poland and even had slightly different borders) during his lifetime. He did learn Polish because, well, the borders shifted around him and his children were native Polish speakers.
It should be added that “vespero” is derived from Latin “vesper” and Greek “hespera”. In Italian too, but nowadays used almost exclusively in ecclesiastical contexts, we have “i vespri” for “the evening hours” and the related liturgical celebrations.
In French "Les vêpres" are the evening prayer. I am sure it shows up elsewhere but anyway, French people would likely understand the meaning pretty quickly.
I’ve been on Duolingo for the past half year, learning bits and pieces of Latin, Spanish, French, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Arabic, Russian, Ukrainian and Greek. I’ve been wondering about Esperanto, but now that I’ve seen your video, I’m very intrigued. I’m adding Esperanto to my languages right now!
Esperanto is probably the most fun language I'm learning. It's immediately rewarding and very logical. It's fun to use online with other speakers and the community feels very open and welcoming. I started learning for the pasporto system, but it was soon enjoyable enough in its own right. Hopefully I'll feel confident enough to take a trip and stay with another esperantist one day soon!
Neat! I've always liked Esperanto. I studied it a bit in my youth, and it was in fact the very first language where I experienced the thrill of actually understanding a language without translating it in my head as I read it.
Esperanto was my first foreign language, it opened up the door for me to English and Spanish and general love for linguistics. I highly recommend Esperanto to anyone who struggles with learning languages, it will become much easier to learn other languages.
I met a Mayan guy about early 20's in age in Guatemala, back in 2009. He was learning Esperanto and asked him why he was learning it. His answer was after he becomes confident and fluent enough in Esperanto, he knows it will help him learn English. His native languages were a Mayan language and Spanish.
It seems that its really a good alternative for those who don't have a language close to Latin to have a base in Latin, but for me, who speak Portuguese, unless many start using it, it's a little useless to learn, because I would use English or Spanish , if I want to learn Russian this language does not help me..
@@paulovictortimoteo7535 For Russian and Slavic languages in general one might be interested in another planned language - Interslavic, it is more difficult than Esperanto but still it is easier than any natural Slavic language.
Great work! This is the best short overview of the language that I have seen. Esperanto is the most fun language to learn and I feel it has rewired the way my brain for learning new languages.
I've spent the last year learning Esperanto through the Duolingo course. I learned far more in one year than I did in three school years of Spanish. In a year's time I reached a point where I can read a novella and meet with other people at an Esperanto club. I do have to bring a dictionary, because I have ten times the English vocabulary as I do Esperanto vocabulary, so I frequently have to look up words.
Kiun libreton vi legis? Hehehe. Libreto por "novella" mi estas scivema lol. Also, I feel that. I use google translate all the time because off my (apparently) complex way of expressing myself. Doesn't seem particularly complex, until I need to say my thoughts in esperanto, then I'm left like a fish, gasping for air. SEE! Just like that, how the heck do I say "Gasping for air" in esperanto!?
Once you have a solid vocabulary in Esperanto, having a larger vocabulary in English shouldn't be an issue. Instead of looking up equivalent words, ask yourself what, conceptually, you are actually trying to express. More often than not, you'll find that a simplification, paraphrase or simple reframing will get the idea across every bit as well. Moreover, that mental exercise in and of itself can be one of the most linguistically enriching aspects of learning Esperanto.
I told you yesterday that I was impressed by the quality of your comparison between French and Portuguese and I can repeat that compliment for this video on Esperanto. I also learned Esperanto a few years ago out of curiosity and I must say that what you explain here corresponds to what I felt. What's more, this is a very rich language, because thanks to the interplay of prefixes and suffixes that are attached in front of or behind a noun or a root and that each evoke a particular meaning, we can create an infinite number of new words that everyone will easily understand, even if it's the first time they've heard the word. It's a real shame that the French delegation blocked the adoption project at the time.
I have been capable of learning some Esperanto for several years, and based on my own experience, I totally agree with Paul about the fact that it is indeed an easy language to learn, but getting to master it at a professional level, it's a process that takes time.
Vi parolas Esperanton tre bone, Paul: gratulon! 🙂 I am glad you were able to get that good at the language using the Duolingo Esperanto course: I was part of the team that developed the course, and I'm one of the two male voices in the course. 🙂 If you are interested in seeing Esperanto (and Esperantists!) up close, the Esperanto National Congress for the U.S. is happening next weekend in Raleigh, North Carolina, and in August the World Congress is happening in Turin, Italy. Have you been to any local meetings, or been able to speak it with Esperantists "in the wild"? Thanks for yet another great video. Ĝis!
I don't know which one you are, but damn are you my bane in the listening portions so commonly. Someone's Bs,Ps,Vs, just mix together, and the R's and L's! AAAAHHH Whatever, I power through it. Thank you for all of your hard work, I love you nonetheless. It's weird hearing an adult male's voice when Lily or Junior is talking though...
@@Kalmaro4152 the pictures appear randomly, hence the situations with Lily speaking with a male voice. The people who created the course no longer have access to it, the work is frozen, they can't fix obvious mistakes and they cannot develop the thing adding me phrases, stories, etc (that happens now with most of the courses in the app)
I speak Esperanto and Iearning it was one of the best decisions of my life. It enriched my life more than I could imagine. It got me even more interested in languages, thanks to it I travelled a lot and I made friends for life. People who are like "it's not a real language, it's useless, nobody speaks it" have no idea what they are talking about.
I think it's fair to say that it's not useful except as a hobby. Hobbies are valuable, and bring people together. Saying it's not useful is like saying "Cosplay isn't useful", or "Watching sports isn't useful" for that matter. People just tend to think of languages as skills rather than hobbies.
@@Langfocus Learning languages can be a hobby, but it's one the brings objective benefits that the other "hobbies" you mentioned just can't. I know several people who are good friends and who wouldn't be able to communicate properly if it weren't for Esperanto. That seems like a pretty major benefit to me that building puzzles and making collages just wouldn't give you.
@@Langfocus I think, the key factor many people miss out, is that the number of speakers of certain language is a relative metric if to think about it in practical way. What's really matter is not an overall number of speakers, but the number of speakers you would be interested to talk to. In other words, it is not about how many of them are out there, it is about who they are. If someone has a hobby of learning other languages, then learning Esperanto seems to be a pretty logical step. It's a language in which linguists and other language enthusiasts are interested, which means, there are a high concentration of these people in Esperanto community. If you are one of them then you will find a lot of people who share your interests.
pigrulo -- Mi shatas vian kashnomon "pigr/ul/o" (= homo pigra) -- pigra = Mallaborema, malpenema: nomis la leporo moke la testudon pigra. Pigrulo's name means "lazy guy" 😂 (pigra cp. Latin piger, pigra)
Agreed. Any language you can read and write books or plays in or converse about pretty much anything in groups of a hundred or more is a language. 130 plus years and still going.
I love that there no conjugations or irregular verbs. I have only taken classes in Spanish and I abhorred conjugations and dealing with irregular verbs.
And I abhorred that there's almost no word in English that is pronounced in the same way as it is written, as well as there are 14 vowel sounds instead of just 5 vowel sounds as in Spanish.
Aprendí esperanto hace casi 20 años. No sólo me dio una excelente base para aprender otros idiomas (de hecho estoy estudiando alemán), sino que también me permitió conocer gente muy diversa y hacer nuevos amigos. Los esperantistas por lo general son gente muy simpática, abierta y divertida que siempre quiere aprender cosas nuevas. ¡Gracias Paul y Ludovico! ;-)
@@tesraisrey7465 Esperanto is so futile that I learn it as a secret language, due to the lack of people who use it throughout the world. Outside group community, I have never found a single Esperanto learner throughout the social medias and real life... that's how it works.
I’ve been learning Esperanto on and off since 2020, but I have a big problem with being consistent. But I decided that this year I’ll be “fluent” in it. It’s really a beautiful language with deep old history! I enjoyed every bit of this video! Thanks Paul :)
I learned Esperanto about 55 years ago, when I was a teenager and became quite a fan. Even though it wasn't so easy in those days, I managed to buy books to learn it and even a few books actually in Esperanto. I used it only once in actual conversation, and I ceased paying much attention to it for most of my life. But I can still read it easily. Speaking, of course, is considerably more difficult. I must say that it really IS an easy language.
I learned Esperanto in about three months on my own at the age of 13, using an old textbook - this was in the early 1970s. It was easy and enjoyable to learn. It was a while before I met other people who spoke the language, but within a year of starting contacts I attended a world Esperanto congress in Yugoslavia. I have attended quite a few congresses since then. As for its limited number of speakers, the thing is that one needs to plug into the global Esperanto community (starting with a local group in your area, if one exists) and then you'll find enough people to speak with.
Estas amuza la hispana lingvo. Efektive, Nazioj dum WW2 penis ke ĝi estis la italia lingvo kiam homoj parolis ĝin en la koncentrejoj. Tial ĝi ne estas morti dum tio tempo. (It is a funny Spanish. In fact, Nazis during WW2 thought that it was Italian when people spoke it in the Concentration Camps. That's why it didn't die during that time.
im of the bahai faith, and one of our big things is the desire for a neutral constructed lingua franca to serve as a communication medium for all people globally, and esperanto has always played a big role in the faith for that reason. many bahais globally learn at least basic esperanto and english❤
Bahais also brought Esperanto to Japan in the 1920s when meeting with members of the Oomoto religion! Interestingly, the Oomoto religion has since regarded the creator of Esperanto (Zamenhof) as a god. One belief of the Oomoto religion is that the world is undergoing reconstruction, with the goal being harmony of all peoples. Therefore, all humans will need to speak a second universal language alongside their native language for world peace to be achieved and the reconstruction to be successful. Many members today speak Esperanto as a second language, and many of their religious texts are printed in Esperanto.
هههههههه أعتقد أن مؤسس الديانة قال في نفسه: دعنا نخترع ديانة مزيفة فأخترع البهائية هو لاحقا: لكن هناك شيء ناقص ممممم اه وجدتها لغة مزيفة لنرى اها الإسبرنتو لنخدع بعض الحمقى
Initially Esperanto was made for an average educated European, mastering at least one European language besides his native one, but over the time Esperanto's target audience got significantly extended. Zamenhof took an attempt to create an easy language and took the best (as per him) from all languages, he spoke. Yes, nothing is perfect, and Esperanto's vocabulary is somewhat chaotic, but it still has much more upsides. First of all, thanks to its regularity any learner would quickly start feel confident using it, since it would be predictable to create a new word, knowing the rules. Another advantage, at least for me, is that you can construct a phrase the way you want, unless it contradicts the rules. For example, in English one can say a phrase, which is grammatically correct, but they do not say like this. Esperanto is truly neutral in this regard, because you can come across French, English or Russian calques, and it is great. Hardly anybody would be judgmental about a beginner, speaking weird, because it remains a second language for the majority of its speakers, apart from minor native speakers (denaskuloij). Yes, thanks to a relative easiness one can learn it pretty quickly, what saves time. Pity, that it remains underestimated, and not many people take it seriously, but Esperanto movement enthusiasts. But still Esperanto is nearly the only constructed language, that has survived since 19 century. Hence it is worth something, hence it is should be supported and further developed. Kaj, jes, mi komencis lerni lerni ĝin du jaroj antaŭe, kaj nun mi komprenas preskaŭ ĉion kaj povas diri ion. Jes, mi ne parolas ĝin multe, ĉar mi ne havas iun por tio :D Sed se vi adoras lingvojn kaj la lernado, do tio certe plezurigos vin kaj vi ekpovos rapide kompreni kaj uzi ĝin. Hehe, jes, mi iomete esperantiĝis :D
Also worth mentioning, is how quickly students of Esperanto develop a reliable instinct for the "right way" to say something in Esperanto, and a feel for the natural flow of the language.
@@bernardkung7306 Agree. I aquired the vocabulary relatively quickly and became more or less funtional at this within a year, though I wasn't stressed much, because I added Esperanto course at Duolingo just for fun and for the sake of some extra points, of course :D but with the time passage I literally fell in love with that language. And yes, I also aquired this "intuition" when constructing words and phrases in my head, and it didn't take much time to learn it.
That handbook was his first publication, then La Unua Libro. No one else spoke it except for him until he published those books. I still wish he had taken some of the advice from the First Kongreso. I miss the indefinite article. My sweet boy, what did he do to you!?
Tre bona filmeto! Gratulojn! Mi sendos la ligilon al miaj ne-esperantistaj geamikoj por kuraĝigi ilin lerni la lingvon. Dankon por helpi disvastigi la konon de esperanto.
One of the most frustrating things about the lack of Esperanto adoption is that it (along with all other constructed languages) suffers from the Nirvana fallacy: "the perfect is the enemy of the good". For some reason, everyone seems to think they know what a language _should_ be like, and too many of them therefore refuse to accept Esperanto for what it is-an easy-to-learn practical tool for communication. Instead there seems to be an entire cottage industry of anti-Esperantists, who go around criticizing and strawmanning the language for its "flaws", while ignoring the fact that no natural language could ever meet the same standards they hold it to. Where exactly this vitriol comes from I just can't comprehend. It's just a language, for goodness sake. The only argument I have seen that holds any real substance is that it does not have the reach of natural languages like English or French, and is therefore a waste of time. But that, of course is only true because people like them refuse to learn it, in a classic chicken-and-egg problem way. And nobody is saying you can't _also_ learn those other languages, if you really want to. I mean, what's not to like about a language that takes only about one-tenth of the time to become proficient in than any natural language, and lets you converse directly with people all over the world, regardless of what they use natively? So what if it isn't what _you_ would have created, it still works as advertised. It just needs enough speakers to become practical.
You make some excellent points. Those who criticize Esperanto, often without even knowing it (!), fail to see that they themselves are the problem. If they could get over their prejudices and learn some Esperanto, they would soon see how wrong they have been about this beautiful living language.
For a conlang invented in 1887, Esperanto is pretty impressive. It's flaws seem obvious now, but for him, European languages were pretty much the only languages would have been very familiar with. It probably would have never become a global language, but possibly a lingua franca in Europe if not disrupted by the world wars.
What everyone seems to overlook is that the main languages Zamenhof drew from were, and still are, the most taught second languages around the world. That's how he maximised global familiarity. Back then, he probably didn't have the resources to know which languages were the most spoken. And even if he did, drew all words from Chinese, Hindi, and Arabic, we'd just end up with an inconsistent pool of roots that no one is familiar with. Honestly, I find everyone's obsessive focus on the vocabulary instead of the grammar and syntax to be deranged. Grammar and syntax is what really matters in terms of "difficulty."
@@chrisrj9871 Japanese also uses particles to mark case. English's lack of case can actually confuse them. For example, many Japanese students use "is" as a subject marker instead of as a verb. Esperanto's simple case system and may be easier for them to understand. Plus Esperanto allows freer word order so if a Japanese student wants to end their sentence in a verb as is normal for them, they can!
I actually dropped Esperanto for a while, out of concerns that Esperanto was "too Euro-centric". But at an Olympic Games I happened by chance to run into a bunch of Asian Esperanto speakers -- who were quite happy to explain to me that my concerns were, at the very least... misplaced. Note that the conversation was, of necessity, entirely in Esperanto. Only one of the nine could really communicate in English, I had barely any Japanese (KEFR A1), and knew absolutely no Korean or Chinese. Most of them had only six to eight months of Esperanto Club Esperanto (one had studied Esperanto for two years). But with a dictionary to buttress our vocabulary, we were set for a full day of meaningful, broad-ranging conversation.
A very good video about Esperanto. I've participated in some Esperanto activities several years ago, but was interrupted by the coronavirus. So there is no chance for me to practice it now. A good news is that one of my friends has selected the Esperanto course in the next semester, and he is asking me some basic words now.
I think it can be easy for everyone even if you don't speak an European language but speakers of Romance and Germanic languages will find it easier because Esperanto shares many roots with those languages
Lauh esperantisto kiun mi konis, "Esperanto estas euhropa lingvo kun azia animo." Chi tiu azianismo signifas ke okazas intensa uzo de prefiksoj en Esperanto tiel kiel en tjurkaj lingvoj. According to an esperantist I have met, "Esperanto is an European language with an Asian soul". This kind of "asianism" is because of intense use of suffixes in Esperanto, like in the Turkic languages.
A surprisingly neutral and well-researched overview. Two small notes: → "Ne" means "no" as well as "not", and in the sentences it would be better translated as "not" to English. → 13:23 "Ŝi amas ŝian patrinon" means "She loves her mother", but only if that "her" points to someone else mentioned before (i.e. she is loving someone else's mother). If you refer to the subject of the sentence (in the third person), you'd use the special purpose reflexive pronoun "si": "Ŝi amas sian patrinon". Doe the question at the end: When I started learning Esperanto in 2001/2002, after ~ 3 months I was at a level comparable to my English at that time (which I had been instructed during 9 years in school). This doesn't mean there is necessarily a factor of 36 - I certainly was more motivated with Esperanto, and less with English, and I got to actually practice it (which didn't happen much with English) -, but it's certainly much easier. I later found girlfriends and my now-wife with Esperanto. That's a not-so-rare thing that the language is also jokingly named "edzperanto" (edz-per-anto, marriage agent/mediator).
My main experience in learning Eo was a thing they (the eo advocates) claim as a major benefit: It turned me on to language learning in general. I've seen this claim many times, and an additional claim is that it is backed by science/experiments. If one learns esperanto as one of ones first foreign languages, the simplicity and fun of it give you a positive experience. You also learn to see systems/regularites in languages. Before eo, I was an average language pupil, not really getting much out of it, but afterwards I've (partially, obviously) learned Japanese, Italian and Spanish - a feat totally unimagniable before. My practical experience with eo was learning it in a course over a weekend (!) and then traveling through Europe for three months with Pasporta Servo. I'm quite sure I wouldn't have been able to do that in any other language ...
Esperanto is an interesting language. I’ve debated about learning it. Also, it would cool to see a video of Andalucían Spanish! Greetings from California!
I've tried to learn Esperanto about a year ago. I stopped learning, but I'm considering bicking it back up.y experience with Esperanto is even when I haven't been learning Esperanto, it's simple grammar is easy to remember. So I can still create sentences using grammar that I haven't learned since about a year ago
Esperanto really delivers on its promise of being able learn it quickly. Really works. If you are a language geek, you owe this to yourself. If you are traveling, you can use esperanto as a way of stepping off the tourist path, and meeting people from afar when you are at home.
Not a huge fan of Esperanto, but I do have to admit using it as the "international language" would still be an improvement over English. If only because a) Eurocentric as it may be, it still probably is easier to learn for most people in the world than English, and b) it wouldn't give native English speakers an unfair advantage in international environments.
@@froyocrew "Life isn't fair" - Actually, it kinda is. What @uamdbro is crying about: "it wouldn't give native English speakers an unfair advantage" is actually a fair advantage. Their great grandfathers and grandfathers and fathers worked hard to build a country whose economy dominated the world for decades. What is unfair about that? Nothing is free in life. They earned it.
@@uamdbro "crazy right-wingers" -- Oh look, someone who values generations of hard working people, he must be a CRAZY RIGHT WINGER! I feel sorry for you, you will never be a man.
I felt that the explanation you gave was on right on target. And you're right, active and passive participles and participle phrases do represent probably the steepest learning curve. The tendency to translate whole English phrases with an adverbial participle in Esperanto demonstrates both the simplicity of the language as well as the hardest thing for most people to get used to.
I took 2 separate Esperanto course about 10 years ago and I still find I remember the majority of it. I am able to read comments on websites in Esperanto but that is about it. I was never able to understand spoken, speak it, or know enough to read a book in the language. The one thing I did find that I disliked was more with modern Esperanto and just adding more borrowed words. I wish it would have taken a more Toki Pona approach and have a limited word selection and just use compound words to create meaning. I always felt that was more of the original intent with the 900 or so original words.
SAME! I wish that Esperanto actually used it's own library of roots to build more complex and foreign words, like how german does to an extent. Want to know what Redstone from Minecraft was translated to, by an authentic speaker!? Redstone'o! REDSTONE'O! He could have literally just took the words "Ruĝa" and "ŝtono" and smashed them together! That's literally what Notch did when he originally named the damn thing. "Ruĝŝtono!" or if you don't like that "Ruĝoŝtono"
Many thanks from this old Esperantist. I hardly use this language nowadays, but accidentally I did today 🙂. It is such a shame that it didn´t work out on a large scale. Yet, sometimes I think that young top students should not learn the complexities of Latin or Greek, they should learn the simplicity of Esperanto to shape their mind.
I always love your deep in depth videos! Honestly this video makes me want to take a look into Esperanto! Still waiting on your deep dive into czech! 😇
I learned Esperanto in 2004. I participated in more than 10 esperanto meetings. Among these 4 Brazilians Esperanto congress and the Universal Congress of Esperanto, the most important esperanto meeting in the world (in Buenos aires, Argentina 2014) I talked by internet and in the congress with esperantists from all parts of the world. It is something amazing, People from everywhere can comunicate with other people who speak as mother tonges many languages apart from each other. By one projected language as esperanto they can comunicate easily among then.
To me besides the fact of learning a specific language, Esperanto does help getting a deeper insight on the grammar of other languages that one already knows or is learning. For instance for a Spanish speaker, the idea of declensions for cases is strange, but through Esperanto one can get the logic of how that works and then apply it when learning german or Russian. It may also help an english speaker realize on the agreement of adjective/article in gender and number for other languages which is normally a bit trickier for them at first. The different participles also resemble the prefectiveness or not of verbs in Russian. Also the construction of some words helps with understanding the use of some prefixes/suffixes in other languages.
I get the impression Esperanto would have pedagogic value as a first language to learn, not just for ease but because the grammar is explicitly built into the language.
I was watching a video on RUclips where a person was baking something in a foreign (to me) language, and suddenly I realised I understood the subtitles. They were in Esperanto, and I understood them after just doing the first few lessons in the Duolingo course. 😅
"Saluton", "dankon", "bonan matenon", etc, are presented in Esperanto-learning materials as "Mi deziras al vi ___n" (I desire to you X). this may be easier to remember than giving, because you can give someone greetings or thanks but you don't usually give them a morning.
I actually can say wity cinfieence that I love Esperanto. It's true that there's not a lot of people to speak with, and that's the down side. But I think everyone should give it a try, it was a lot of fun to learn.
I'm learning Esperanto, and I really like it. I do think it would be a good choice for an official international auxiliary language, especially if it's taught in elementary schools. It already has a publishing house, a record label, thousands of books written in it, and a presence on Duolingo and Google translate. English never "applied" to be a lingua franca, it applied to replace other languages. Esperanto is a far better candidate for the job - much easier to learn, even for Asians, and isn't connected with any specific country. Yes, it is Eurocentric, but with thousands of languages in the world, it would be impossible to include them all.
It's a coincidence that I just started learning Esperanto on Duolingo this week. I'm Saudi and I speak fluent English and a bit of French. Esperanto looks really easy.
Esperanto always struck me as easy Latin. Very romance in character, vocabulary, and structure, albeit with a very simplified grammar and syntax. And I'm all for simplifying Latin grammar!
How much of Esperanto's vocabulary comes from German seems not to be appreciated as much as it should be. I suspect that is because lots of people don't know German.
@@beowulfciceroit wouldn't really matter how much German there is if they Simply it greatly like how the simplify the Latin languages. Learns will be able to easily associate the words with whatever it's called in whatever they already speak
An interesting language. I think I'll try to learn it. And btw you are very sympatic. I also love to learn new languages. And I had make some languages too. 😅
At the university ELTE (Budapest, Hungary) until the last reorganization there was an Esperanto major. Besides general linguistics we learnt Esperanto culture, read original novels and poetry, watched taped theatrical productions etc. We had every paraphernalia of a lively culture, maybe smaller in size, less ingenious in quality, but I definitely experienced a unique culture. Our National Library of Foreign Literature has 11 000 books written in Esperanto.
I have studied the basic grammar and some of the vocabulary on my own, but do not as of yet have any real experience _using_ Esperanto. However, even just that much has opened up a whole world of language in general that I never knew before. In particular I have learned a lot about how the same words are interrelated and interwoven throughout the languages of the Continent, and even how they relate to various scientific terms (due to E's liberal adoption of Latin/Romance vocabulary). For example, I now recognize the family name for "ant" as _Fomacidae_ because Esperanto uses _formiko_ , and how the oak tree genus _Quercus_ relates to the Esperanto _qverko_ , just to name two off the top of my head. Some of the mysteries of Romance language conjugation and the whole concept of agglutinative word formation have also become easier to comprehend, much more concretely than I learned in my short high school Spanish class. It's quite impressive how flexible this "simple" language is in how sentences can be constructed. If you want study foreign languages, but don't know where to start, Esperanto is a great way to condition your mind into accepting new language concepts, without straining yourself. Even if you never really use it that much on its own, spending the hundred hours or so necessary to become reasonably proficient in it will give you a huge boost in tackling the more complex natural languages it is derived from. As an aside, the only other language I can speak is Japanese, my country of long residence. As a language with an entirely different structure and vocabluary, there is little direct help between the two, but even just being able to associate word cognates between three languages rather than just two is a benefit all on its own.
davidh -- "Fomac*id*ae" - Fun fact: the word *id* means "child", "offspring" in Eo, e.g. cheval'o / cheval'id'o (horse / foal), formik'o / formik'id'o (ant, offspring of an ant, a baby ant ??).
Even though I understand the criticism it gets for being as Eurocentric as it is, I think Esperanto still serves as a great conlang due to how easy the grammatical rules/concepts are to grasp, even to those who don't speak a European language! Ĝi estas vere bonega lingvo!
That "good evening" one (or whichever one it was, I couldn't type at the time of listening)reminded me of the word "Vespers" as in the specific catholic mass for that time of day
Yep, I thought that when I heard that part and then looked up the etymology of vespers assuming that it's probably Latin given its usage in Catholicism. Vespers comes to English from Latin and then Old French.
Zamenhof came from a town inhabited by poles, hews, Belarusians and Germans, in roughly equal proportions - yet the groups hardly mingled, even though Yiddish and German are pretty intelligible, and so are Polish and Belarusian (after some exposure). He lamented the fact and came with a solution, which seems pretty good, tbh!
My first exposure to Esperanto was in Final Fantasy XI back in the mid-2000's. the title song, which features prominently in the story, is written in Esperanto. It takes some liberties, such as clipping o's at the end of lines, to fit with the music, so I'm sure it's not "perfect", but I thought it was pretty cool Fluas nun sango senkulpa, sur Vana'diel, vasta ter', Tremas la tuta mond' pro l' plago en desper'. Preventas ĝin nenia sort'. Haltigas ĝin nenia fort'. Sed tra la nokto tempesta brilas jen stelo de glor'! Kontraū brutala kri' fontas jen kant-sonor'! Stelo brilanta, kanto sonanta: revo kaj preĝo por ni! Vana'diel! Vana'diel! Mano kaj man' kunpremitaj trans la eterno sen lim' ne dismetiĝos plu, ne disligiĝos plu! Unofficial English translation Now flows innocent blood On Vana'diel, a vast land The entire world trembles In despair from the scourge Prevented by no fate Stopped by no strength But through the stormy night Behold: a star of glory shines! Against a brutal outcry Behold: a hymn springs forth! A shining star, a ringing song: A dream and a prayer for us! Vana'diel! Vana'diel! Hand and hand together Across the limitless eternity We will no longer be put asunder We will no longer be separated!
My experience learning it as much as you described -- a lot of excitement learning it because I made a lot of progress easily. I could actually notice knowing more #Esperanto almost day after day, and certainly week after week. It's hard to notice yourself learning so much almost in real time. This is what normally acts as a demotivator when learning most languages (or most things really), but in the case of Esperanto it's actually a motivator. Unfortunately, just as you stated, it is not widely spoken so ones "mileage" becomes limited. It has a lot of potential, but like most tools will only be as useful as people are interested in using them.
I am a person living in Estonia, speaking English in my working environment and yet using Russian as a backup. I wish that the UN accepted the Esperanto language at that time. Esperanto is very easy for everyone. It is designed to be easy. The only thing I don't like about Esperanto is that it uses genders like in many Indian-European languages. There are many languages that do not have genders, like Estonian. There is no he or she, it is "tema".
There are no genders in Esperanto, there are some sex references like distinguishing "him" and "her" in 3rd person (Finnic and Turkic languages don't do that indeed).
Even after living for 20 years in US, I cannot keep track of he/she during a conversation. I start saying “David did this…”, 3 seconds later I say “she”. Why do I have to remember what genitals the person had during the rest of my speech? 😏. Yes, it helps you differentiate if you are talking about a husband and a wife. But nowadays, that’s also useless. What if you are talking about father and son? You have to find other ways to show which “he” you are referring to.
This is weird indeed, almost like the creator of the language didn't want to completely abandon this common feature of Indo-European languages, and therefore went only as far as the most "Gender-abolitionist" language, which is English. Even though it's objectively simpler to not have any genders in the language at all.
I liked this video, it was good to learn a bit about Esperanto. As a language enthusiast, I definitely need the cultural aspect of a language. I started learning English when I was a kid because of music, later on my passion just got stronger when I learned more about the British and American cultures. I had the same experience in Spanish. I had a chance to live in Seville for about a year before and the experience I had with my Spanish friends was truly amazing, which gave a big boost to my Spanish too. Apart from the cultural aspect, the practical use of a language is also quite important to me. That's why I loved learning English & Spanish since these languages are spoken by hundreds of millions of people worldwide, whereas Esperanto is spoken by less people than my native Hungarian. But I accept learning Esperanto can be fun for some people as a hobby.
ferencmori -- "the cultural aspect of a language" - Here is a very easy poem in Esperanto taken from the textbook Tesi, la testudo. In his holiday at the beach he lies in the warm sand and forgets the rest of the world. *Ferie* --- Agrable sur sablo mi kushas, kontente la vento min tushas. --- Najbare la maro sin rulas kaj luma sub suno min lulas. --- Nur bruas la skuo de l' ondo forestas la resto de l' mondo. This one is a bit more complex: while outside (ekstere) blusters a winter storm, he lies in the house (endome) in the warm bathtub and relaxes. The artistic value consists in this : to describe the outside winter world the author uses harsh words with many hard consonants, whereas for the in-house situation soft words and consonants. *Kontrastoj* Ekstere vipas vitrojn hajlopluvo; drivventoj dentojn per akracha bru' agacas; Endome kushas mi en la bankuvo; En varma, mola mar' korlule lukse, lace pacas. --- Ekstere jen novembro tim-panika hurladas kvazaù lupoj tra ebeno siberia; Endome grasa spir' tropik-afrika narkotas min; mi flosas for en stato amfibia.
P.S. And here a last one. The author was an inmate of a concentration camp and therefor his prisoner number is tattooed on his arm. The highlight is the last word "mal'invent'os" which I can't translate to English or any other language; invent'i = to invent; mal' is the opposite, the contrary. Is there an English words which expresses the opposite of inventing? *88834* Jam antaù la invento de la komputero (now more common komputilo) mi estis nura numero tatuita sur mia brako kaj la homa konscienco (human conscience) --- Laù mia sento estas eble ke chi-lastan (= the human conscience) la scienco kaj tekniko en sia triumfa progreso finfine malinventos.
It was a head scratcher for me that a language which is supposed to be simple has grammatical cases. Most learners struggle with that, so why introducs them in the first place? Even asked chat GPT Than I checked out Zamenhoff. He was a polish native who had 7 cases. Guess he thought reducing that to 2 is a great service.
Zamenhof did in fact try eliminating case altogether, but eventually decided that having one additional case brought benefits that outweighed the slight extra complexity. I've heard from those that teach Esperanto, that if the accusative case is introduced early (at or very near the start) students have little trouble with it -- it's in the courses that put off the "complication" till later in the course, that some students appear to have trouble with it. (Imagine what it would be like if students learning English weren't introduced to "him", "her" and "them" till a third of the way through the beginner's course 🤨. )
Dr LL Zamenhof was born in Bialystok, where most people spoke Polish or Byelorussian, but it was then part of the Russian Empire and his family originated from Lithuania. At home he spoke Russian and Yiddish. His father was a teacher of French and German, and in addition taught him Hebrew. He studied Latin, Greek and Aramaic at Gymnasium in Warsaw and went on to study medicine in Moscow and Warsaw. He set up practice first in small towns in Lithuania and Poland before moving to Vienna. He also studied English, Italian and Volapük. His international language project began when he was 14, so it is surprising that there is little Semitic influence on the vocabulary or grammar of Esperanto. Perhaps that was deliberate, because he came out against ethnic nationalism.
Imagine a person who doesn’t need/know accusative conjugation (hint: English) and their feelings? They are not going from 7 conjugations to 2. They are learning conjugation for the first time. Big mistake IMO. Maybe English should have been the starting point (instead of Polish or Spanish). How abour? I did eat, I will eat, I have eat, I can eat…
@@chefnyc The accusative (a case, not a conjugation) DOES occur in modern English, but only in pronouns (him instead of he, her instead of she, them instead of they).
Creoles usually become more complicated, not like the pidgins that father them. Most native speakers of Esperanto speak a worse variety of Esperanto, since it is their "heritage" language, they obviously speak the local national language much better and often forget Esperanto altogether when they grow up. A person needs to be exposed to a language and, ideally, get some education in it not to forget it in future.
@@amikecoru By your logic, Modern English is a worse variety of the old English as it is less complex and a more simplified version of it. The same goes for esperanto. Native speakers do not speak a worse variety, the language simply evolves just like english spoken by celts did back in the day.
Esperanto is as easy as any language designed for a global community can possibly be. That's why no other auxlang has been able to supplant it in terms of community size. People love to bully Esperanto for very bad faith reasons, but I personally don't care if it ever actually becomes T H E W O R L D L A N G U A G E. I study it as a fun hobby because I appreciate the values that inspired it.
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7:13 esparanto can still be developed into a more international and simple language.
1 such as reducing the number of letters used like R.
2. Use a non-European word.
3 . Plural words using word repetition. Like austronesian language family
@@AlfarrisiMuammar -- re 1. makes nothing easier and anyway you are 125 years too late: Eo is not anymore a theoretical project, but an established, stable language like e.g. English.
re 2. I already showed in another comment that Esperanto is full of non-European words, quoting some few examples of Japanese words (harakiri, cunamo, kimono, animeo and many others).
re 3. In Eo word repetition can be used to indicate strengthening: plen-plena = plen' - full, plen-plena - full to the maximum; kore = cordially, kor-kore = as cordially as possible; tuj-tuje - tuj = at once, immediately, tuj-tuje = I don't know in English, maybe there is no equivalent (?). Another way is using the word "eg" which indicates the augmentative: plen/eg/a = plen-plen/a, kor/eg/a = kor-kor/e, tuj/eg/e = tuj-tuj/e.
Every language IS an invented language, that a dude invented, and that the rest were taught by someone else, and then they taught it to others, and so on, languages do not ‘arise naturally’ and, there’s no such thing as ‘natural’ languages, as languages didn’t just magically appear out of thin air or from nature, tho the dudes that created and modified them did get inspired by nature, at least the ones that made the pretty languages! Esperanto was made by a dude, inspired by other languages or based on other languages, just as every other language, and he actually took more words from Latin and modified them a bit, so Esperanto is a Latin language basically, which has some Germanic characteristics, such as the use of Ks instead of Cs etc and some Germanic words, but most of it is based on Latin and it sounds like a Latin language, so it’s a Latin language, same as Catalan and Gallo and Portuguese etc! But all languages come from Proto European, anyway, which is the first proper language with actual grammar and thousands of words that also came with the first true writing system that a dude created from scratch a long time ago, that inspired all other languages and all other writing systems that exist today, either directly or indirectly! Languages that are pretty should always be learnt for their pretty words, as pretty words bring true joy to one’s eye / ear - that’s why I am learning all the pretty languages that exist! So technically, languages aren’t related to words such as ‘culture’ etc, plus, there is no such thing as a ‘culture’ etc - everything was inspired by nature, and things that were made were made by a few dudes, and things that most ppl do were taught by a few dudes, so there is no reason to associate languages with the idea of cultures, in general, which is really just an iłłusion, while pretty languages are something that’s really fun to learn, so the true motivation comes from within and from seeing the pretty words, especially when one has a good eye / ear for prettiness in nature (including pretty words and sounds) and knows to appreciate it, which was inspired by the beauty that is found in nature, so one should never care if a language isn’t spoken by many or by anyone etc, if it’s a pretty language, one should learn it for its pretty words and sounds, because pretty languages are always fun to learn and speak and use in poetry / lyrics etc and to look at / hear etc, plus creating a pretty language is a true art in itself, so pretty languages are a form of art!
But anyways, the international languages should be English & Dutch & Old Norse, which are the prettiest and most refined languages with the most pretty and poetic words and also the easiest languages ever in every way, and Norwegian is also one of the prettiest ever! However, Esperanto is a nice language, not the prettiest Latin language, but still nice enough to learn, so it’s on my list of languages I want to learn and improve, and it’s similar to Spanish & Latin, and I recommend learning all these pretty languages, including Esperanto, and especially Dutch and Old Norse and Gothic and Norwegian and Icelandic and the other Germanic languages, as Germanic languages are the prettiest languages ever, and also the 6 Celtic languages (namely Welsh / Breton / Cornish / Manx / Irish / Scottish Gaelic) and Gallo / Latin / Galician / Catalan / Guernsey / Portuguese / French / Spanish / Italian and other Italian-based languages and Hungarian and Slovene etc! I am learning all pretty languages, and I could recognize the root words of all those Esperanto words, so I could understand everything - Esperanto is real fun to learn, actually, tho I will use the word ti instead of vi for the singular ye / you, because the plural form shouldn’t be the same as the singular form in any language, and even in English, I use yens / yous / y’all etc for the plural, and I use ye / you for the singular, and I highly recommend that others do the same!
Technically, every language IS an invented language, that a dude invented, and that the rest were taught by someone else, and then they taught it to others, and so on, languages do not ‘arise naturally’ and aren’t ‘natural’ in that sense, as languages didn’t just magically appear out of thin air or from nature, tho the dudes that made / modified them did get inspired by nature, at least the ones that made the pretty languages - Esperanto was made by a dude, inspired by other languages or based on other languages, just as every other language, and he actually took more words from Latin and modified them a bit, so Esperanto is a Latin language basically, which has some Germanic characteristics, such as the use of Ks instead of Cs etc and some Germanic words, but most of it is based on Latin and it sounds like a Latin language, so it’s a Latin language, same as Catalan and Gallo and Portuguese etc!
- Are you based on Romance languages?
- Jes.
😂😂😂
@@champigranja1179romance languages have easier phonetic. Spanish has a simple phonetic (not like english that IS a nightmare). The problem IS their grammar, specially system verbs.
Spanish is too dificult, but english as well. Esperanto must be internacional language
English isn't a "nightmare", sure it has flaws, but it's pretty easy to guess how a word is pronounced (like many other languages)
@@interbeamproductions Then pronounce correctly : vegetable, confortable, a tomb, a comb, to indict, to tear, a tear, a pear, near, debt, doubt, to import, an import, to increase, an increase, I presume, a resume, a choir, a recipe, I walk, I know, now, to lead, lead (metal), to plough, to cough, thoroughly, etc.
This is absolute nonsense and the reason why it might seem easy to you is either that you've been heavily exposed to it and you pronounce all these words perfectly or that you don't even realize you've never pronounced them properly.
@@interbeamproductions Sorry men. English has a hard phonetic. For this reason I supporter of esperanto as international language. My language, spanish, is a bullshit specially for our system verbs.
In my opinión interlingua IS the perfect international language.
I love Esperanto!
lore
I LOVE MALTESE
sickening
What-?
lies
13:28 That actually translates to "She loves her(as in someone else's) mother". The correct way to say it, assuming that isn't what you meant, is "Ŝi amas sian(her own) patrinon".
Much love, been subscribed for years!
Yeah, it’s just that English is weird.
You only use si/sia etc with 3rd person pronouns though
Just back from the Polyglot Gathering in Poland 🇵🇱. There was a very strong Esperanto presence there, and because I speak Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages I understood it without being able to answer. It really messed with my head!!
Czy wiesz że Dr Zamenhof jest Polakiem z Białystoka?
@@modmaker7617 ne ĉiu belostokano nepre estas polo. Zamenhof estis jidlingva judo.
@@modmaker7617 I already knew that
@@amikecoru
Białystok is in Poland, not Belarus. Yeah, Zamenhof was a Polish Jew that was a polyglot. He knew Polish, Yiddish, and lots of other languages. I think everyone agrees Polish is is first language.
@@modmaker7617 Except for the inconvenient fact that the chief language of the Zamenhof home was Russian, and his first languages were Russian and Yiddish.
(Not surprising, since in Zamenhof's day, Bialystok was part of Russia, not Poland, and documents of the day describe Zamenhof as a Russian Jew.)
I believe that this is the best overview video about Esperanto’s history and grammar made so far! Very well done!
Saluton! I started learning Esperanto with your videos, and they helped me a lot . Why did you quit making videos?
@@bradpadure5326 I know right! When I started Esperanto I used their videos first. It was a great help
@@bradpadure5326 I just released a new video today!
I have been an on-again off-again Esperantist since sometime in the 1970's. As a host on Pasporta Servo, I've hosted Esperantists from a number of countries. What I love about Esperanto, is the ability to meet and interact with people from other cultures, not just Europeans, on a level playing field where one side is not struggling to make oneself understood in the other's language. Unfortunately, being advanced in age and due to COVID, I have had to stop offering my home for Esperantists to stay in.
Ûaû, vi Sinjoro estas veterano en esperanta lingvo
Ŭaŭ!
Esperanto isn’t fair though. It is heavily based on European languages especially the romances so a Spanish speaker will have a much easier time learning an speaking it than some Vietnamese.
I don't know... I also took some lessons on Duolingo few months ago. As an Italian native, speaking English and a bit of German, I found almost the whole vocabulary (at least pretty basic one) immediately recognizable and intuitive... it seems to be a heavy latin prevalence, at least to me. Some sentences seem to me as almost italian
I've heard that a lot, that it seems like strangely simplified Italian, etc.
As someone who speaks both Spanish and English, I say the same.
True, I am learning Italian, German and i kann speak and French, and English well, so I can understand a lot of Esperanto language
Perhaps LL Zamenhof had a preference for Latin roots and that might come across as “almost Italian,” Italian being, arguably, the Romance language closest to Latin (if we ignore Sardinian, I guess).
I don't speak Esperanto , but I think it should be the European Union's primary language. To replace the five or so current ones. This would just demote those five languages to the same level as all the other official languages of the EU
I love the sound of it and how regular it is. One of the annoying things about learning languages is all the irregularities. It’s not something I like but I have to deal with. Knowing that it’s easy to learn and that there are very few exceptions to the rules makes me want to learn it. I also like that it doesn’t belong to any country and can be anyone’s. I just wish it were more popular
It becomes popular as more of us learn it! ;)
There's not any language that "belongs" to any country, but rather has its origin in a particular country. However, according to your approach languages created by a person, such as Esperanto, belong to their creator.
So happy to see you back, Paul! I've missed your videos, I always learn so much from them.
Thanks, Danny! I never leave, though. If it takes a month or two to make a video, that means I work on it every day during that time. I released a video on Turkish in May. People seem to think I take breaks between videos. lol, I wish. :)
Paul points out that Esperanto is criticized by some for being eurocentric. What about English, which plays the role of de facto international language? It's not eurocentric? Of course it is, but it's far more difficult than Esperanto. The alternative is a mishmash that would be a total mess. For many Asians, Esperanto's Europeanness is actually a big plus, on top of its relative simplicity. The fact is that European influences of all kinds have spread around the world. But Esperanto is not just another European language: it has many autonomous features, including a word-building system with similarities to that of Chinese, and a number system identical to the Japanese one (e.g. 12 is 10 + 2, "dek du" in Esperanto, "ju ni" in Japanese, while 20 is 2 + 10, "dudek" in Esperanto, "niju" in Japanese).
My biggest adventure with Esperanto was probably my 3 months in Senegal where I was teaching the language before the African Esperanto Congress that took place in Thies. I made lots of new friends, shared so much with my students and other local Esperanto speakers, one of the brightest periods of my life.
Many would argue that Esperanto does have culture (original literature, songs, all that), but I would agree with Paul that learning the language opens doors to other marvels, like being able to speak to random average person in almost any country finding out a lot about local realities, cultures and languages too!
I never had any regrets about learning Esperanto in my student years. Or any other languages that I learnt, for that matter. Languages are fun, and Esperanto no less than others (but you can also actually master it at a point of time unlike national languages that seem endless the farther you go).
esperanto definitely has a culture. Not as in depth as other cultures but it definitely exists through things like pasporta servo, UKE, literature (also originally written in esperanto) music, history, references such as crocodiling etc
My initial thoughts on learning Esperanto were that I wasn't interested. I was interested in learning natural languages rather than constructed ones--because who knows how closely Dr. Zamenhof's efforts come to what sort of structures would arise naturally? On the other hand, if I get a good enough grip on enough natural languages, maybe studying Esperanto would be interesting--just as a comparison of Zamenhof's ideas to what can be found occurring naturally.
Having culture, literature or whatever is the minimum a language must have... but of course, a language with no real speakers has no real culture (I don't fall for that falacy of native speakers, the only native speaker that made a video couldn't speak it fluently, a fallacy)
@@danielpmonteyro most native speakers of Esperanto speak it with less proficiency than the other native language that they have in the environment. Some do speak well, if they keep the interest and use the language regularly. The phenomenon is not a "fallacy", it's an existing described thing.
Non-native fluent speakers are also speakers and also produce speech and texts. Most Esperanto writers and RUclips-ers are non-natives, as are grammarians and editors of vocabularies, that's how an international auxiliary language is supposed to exist.
@@amikecoru There are no native speakers of Esperanto, stop spreading out this old lie.
Always good to see a video of yours I haven’t watched!
Thanks to your video, I've been learning Esperanto for a week now and the results are decent for this period. Thank you!
As to Esperanto's easiness to learn: I started learning it by myself, from a book, then followed-up with a free correspondence course from the Esperanto League of North America (now Esperanto USA). A year and a quarter after starting, I attended ELNA's three-week summer course. The first Esperantist I met, in the cafeteria the day before classes began, was one of the instructors: a Yugoslav, who spoke no English. We enjoyed a fluent conversation at our lunch table, quite involved and interesting. We were soon joined by a student, an Iranian woman, who also just fit right in. During the three weeks, I was really impressed with how natural it felt to use the language with any and all of the professors and students. This is in stark contrast to my experience years before with French, which I studied for a year at the university level, then continued reading over a few more years until my first visit to France. Once I arrived there, I found that I had extraordinary trouble understanding the spoken language, and expressed myself mostly quite haltingly.
Admittedly, my having studied French before Esperanto was of course a real advantage in learning the latter, since E-o incorporates some vocabulary and idioms from French. And before French, I had three years of high school German, which also helped, as E-o also takes much from that language. But, that said, it became hugely obvious to me as I made real, effective use of E-o during my three week course -- and not just in daily classes, but in innumerable conversations with professors and fellow students, as we were all staying the same dormitory and sharing meals -- that E-o lends itself to an immediacy of application that is completely foreign to the learning of most any other language. Of course, a huge part of this is the complete standardization of verb forms: no irregular verbs, no changes in conjugations for different persons, all tenses having completely standardized endings. That makes learning everything about all verbs in E-o take probably only about 5% of the time and energy it would take to learn them in French or German! The. There's the completely phonetic alphabet (and having only five vowels, instead of about eight or nine in those other languages).
Too bad NASK is only one week now.
I learned Esperanto over a few weeks when I was a bit bored one summer. I met the local Esperanto group and was astounded that I could carry out a conversation. This convinced me that I was capable of learning a language, so I dove in to German. I became fluent in the latter but have forgotten most of Esperanto.
Nice, I'm a native German speaker, how is it to learn German? I mean, it's a hard language compared to other... Cases, pronunciation, writing, grammar...
I think, all those things are very hard to learn.
@@labernaut9260 Es war keine leichte Arbeit, aber durchaus machbar. Nach etwa zwei Jahre intensiver Auseinandersetzung mit der Sprache konnte ich fließend Deutsch. Das ist schon lange her.
@@chorabari Sehr großen Respekt für das. Du beherrscht die Sprache scheinbar wirklich sehr gut.
I'm from Indonesia and I speak Esperanto. It's hard to find Esperantists in Asia, I must say. But the community is very welcoming and it makes me feel like home immediately.
As an Esperantist myself, I am hopeful to make the community bigger in Asia! 🎉
Eh, hardly a feat. I spend a weekend to finish the course and coupd speak it quite well. The language feels like lacking in identity, theres not much cultural relevancy to that language other than the languages it borrows word from.
@MsHackthat Wow, you could speak it within a weekend? Now that's a real feat; I envy your genius. Next time someone tells me about their experience with a language I'll make sure to point out how unimpressed I am that they learned it and how boring that language is after all.
@@myerwerl are you from Asia?
@@myerwerlYou always know someone's about to be a cunt when they preface their comment with eh
I am from asia too and I have decided i want to learn this language too :) is it very easy? is it too much like Spanish?
Thanks for the video. "Vesper" comes from the word for Evening in Latin. In religious circles it is often used to refer to an evening prayer service.
hi paul! cool to see that you're remastering one of ur older vids. ive already boarded the hype train!
This video bears no resemblance to my old video on Esperanto. lol
@@Langfocus im still hyped lol
@@hohotashyou'd have to wonder what other videos he'd wanna try to remake/remaster
Interesting! Thank you for also including the critcism :)
Saluton al ĉiuj! Mi esperantiĝis en 2006. Mia denaska lingvo estas la portugala kaj havis tiame bazan lingvokapablon en franca, angla kaj hispana antaŭ la eklernado de Esperanto. Du jaroj poste, mi partoprenis en nacia esperanta kongreso kaj havis oportunon por gastiĝi kun aliaj esperantistoj pere de Pasporta Servo. La lernado de Esperanto igis min pli lingvema. Nuntempe mi studas la latinan kaj jam ellernis la grekan. Mi dankas vin, Paul, pro la bonega filmeto pri Esperanto!
@@uzuzlas4676 Klingon.
@@uzuzlas4676 ne… ci tiu estas la lingvo de la esperantistoj, sed ne esperanto…
@@uzuzlas4676jes
Klingon? 😂😂😂😂😂
Mi parolas Esperanto ekde 2020 kaj studis en Eŭropo dum jaro poste tio. Tie mi ekkonis kelkajn esperantistojn kaj esperas vidi ilin baldaŭ kiam mi revenos tien
I'm native Polish speaker and most of these sentences don't make any sense to me, but knowing some bits of German and English I can clearly see Esperanto was based on these languages. What I like about it is how simple it is, everything is regural and predictable. What I find really interesting, is because Zamenhof was born in Poland and was partialy Polish, he adopted question marker "cu" from Polish "czy".
Yeah, Esperanto is like Interslavic but only for Roman languages.
Zamenhof was ashkenazi jew and his native laguage was yiddish, but he probably spoke russian, polish and german as well like most educated jews at the time.
He made a language entirely out of the simplest things from every language. That’s ingenious.
Some other Esperanto facts are also from Polish: like the way of asking and telling time (je la sesa, o szóstej, literally "at 6th"), certain words like "nafto" for oil, etc.
Zamenhof was an Ashkenazi Jew who was born in the Russian Empire and grew up speaking Russian.
His hometown, Belostok, and Warsaw, the city where he spent most of his life, both became part of the Kingdom of Poland (which is not the same thing as modern Poland and even had slightly different borders) during his lifetime.
He did learn Polish because, well, the borders shifted around him and his children were native Polish speakers.
It should be added that “vespero” is derived from Latin “vesper” and Greek “hespera”. In Italian too, but nowadays used almost exclusively in ecclesiastical contexts, we have “i vespri” for “the evening hours” and the related liturgical celebrations.
In French "Les vêpres" are the evening prayer. I am sure it shows up elsewhere but anyway, French people would likely understand the meaning pretty quickly.
In astronomy too. Vespero is an archaic way to refer to Venus
Is Spanish, there are "víspera" (which shifted in meaning) and "vespertino" (which stayed semantically closer).
In English we also use the term "vespers" to refer to evening prayers.
The Scottish Gaelic for “afternoon” or “evening” is “feasgar” (pronounced /ˈfeskər/) which is derived from Latin “vesper”.
To me, Esperanto sounds like Spanish and German having a fist fight while the rest of the Romance and Germanic languages cheer them on.
I don't hear any Germanic influence
Esperanto IS like rumanian fucking with a hungarian
@@smelly1060🤦♂️
I thought he was going to say Esperanto sounds like Spanish and German having a fist fight in your mouth.
I’ve been on Duolingo for the past half year, learning bits and pieces of Latin, Spanish, French, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Arabic, Russian, Ukrainian and Greek. I’ve been wondering about Esperanto, but now that I’ve seen your video, I’m very intrigued. I’m adding Esperanto to my languages right now!
Esperanto is probably the most fun language I'm learning. It's immediately rewarding and very logical. It's fun to use online with other speakers and the community feels very open and welcoming. I started learning for the pasporto system, but it was soon enjoyable enough in its own right. Hopefully I'll feel confident enough to take a trip and stay with another esperantist one day soon!
Neat! I've always liked Esperanto. I studied it a bit in my youth, and it was in fact the very first language where I experienced the thrill of actually understanding a language without translating it in my head as I read it.
Esperanto was my first foreign language, it opened up the door for me to English and Spanish and general love for linguistics. I highly recommend Esperanto to anyone who struggles with learning languages, it will become much easier to learn other languages.
What was your first language?
@@samuelsonger5449 Russian
I met a Mayan guy about early 20's in age in Guatemala, back in 2009. He was learning Esperanto and asked him why he was learning it. His answer was after he becomes confident and fluent enough in Esperanto, he knows it will help him learn English. His native languages were a Mayan language and Spanish.
It seems that its really a good alternative for those who don't have a language close to Latin to have a base in Latin, but for me, who speak Portuguese, unless many start using it, it's a little useless to learn, because I would use English or Spanish , if I want to learn Russian this language does not help me..
@@paulovictortimoteo7535 For Russian and Slavic languages in general one might be interested in another planned language - Interslavic, it is more difficult than Esperanto but still it is easier than any natural Slavic language.
Great work! This is the best short overview of the language that I have seen. Esperanto is the most fun language to learn and I feel it has rewired the way my brain for learning new languages.
I've spent the last year learning Esperanto through the Duolingo course. I learned far more in one year than I did in three school years of Spanish. In a year's time I reached a point where I can read a novella and meet with other people at an Esperanto club. I do have to bring a dictionary, because I have ten times the English vocabulary as I do Esperanto vocabulary, so I frequently have to look up words.
Kiun libreton vi legis? Hehehe. Libreto por "novella" mi estas scivema lol.
Also, I feel that. I use google translate all the time because off my (apparently) complex way of expressing myself. Doesn't seem particularly complex, until I need to say my thoughts in esperanto, then I'm left like a fish, gasping for air.
SEE! Just like that, how the heck do I say "Gasping for air" in esperanto!?
Once you have a solid vocabulary in Esperanto, having a larger vocabulary in English shouldn't be an issue. Instead of looking up equivalent words, ask yourself what, conceptually, you are actually trying to express. More often than not, you'll find that a simplification, paraphrase or simple reframing will get the idea across every bit as well.
Moreover, that mental exercise in and of itself can be one of the most linguistically enriching aspects of learning Esperanto.
Mi ŝatis tiun videon, daŭrigu tiel, dankon por helpi min kompreni la bazojn de la Esperanto-lingvo!
I told you yesterday that I was impressed by the quality of your comparison between French and Portuguese and I can repeat that compliment for this video on Esperanto.
I also learned Esperanto a few years ago out of curiosity and I must say that what you explain here corresponds to what I felt.
What's more, this is a very rich language, because thanks to the interplay of prefixes and suffixes that are attached in front of or behind a noun or a root and that each evoke a particular meaning, we can create an infinite number of new words that everyone will easily understand, even if it's the first time they've heard the word.
It's a real shame that the French delegation blocked the adoption project at the time.
I have been capable of learning some Esperanto for several years, and based on my own experience, I totally agree with Paul about the fact that it is indeed an easy language to learn, but getting to master it at a professional level, it's a process that takes time.
Vi parolas Esperanton tre bone, Paul: gratulon! 🙂
I am glad you were able to get that good at the language using the Duolingo Esperanto course: I was part of the team that developed the course, and I'm one of the two male voices in the course. 🙂
If you are interested in seeing Esperanto (and Esperantists!) up close, the Esperanto National Congress for the U.S. is happening next weekend in Raleigh, North Carolina, and in August the World Congress is happening in Turin, Italy.
Have you been to any local meetings, or been able to speak it with Esperantists "in the wild"?
Thanks for yet another great video. Ĝis!
I don't know which one you are, but damn are you my bane in the listening portions so commonly. Someone's Bs,Ps,Vs, just mix together, and the R's and L's! AAAAHHH Whatever, I power through it. Thank you for all of your hard work, I love you nonetheless. It's weird hearing an adult male's voice when Lily or Junior is talking though...
@@Kalmaro4152 the pictures appear randomly, hence the situations with Lily speaking with a male voice.
The people who created the course no longer have access to it, the work is frozen, they can't fix obvious mistakes and they cannot develop the thing adding me phrases, stories, etc (that happens now with most of the courses in the app)
I speak Esperanto and Iearning it was one of the best decisions of my life. It enriched my life more than I could imagine. It got me even more interested in languages, thanks to it I travelled a lot and I made friends for life. People who are like "it's not a real language, it's useless, nobody speaks it" have no idea what they are talking about.
I think it's fair to say that it's not useful except as a hobby. Hobbies are valuable, and bring people together. Saying it's not useful is like saying "Cosplay isn't useful", or "Watching sports isn't useful" for that matter. People just tend to think of languages as skills rather than hobbies.
@@Langfocus Learning languages can be a hobby, but it's one the brings objective benefits that the other "hobbies" you mentioned just can't. I know several people who are good friends and who wouldn't be able to communicate properly if it weren't for Esperanto. That seems like a pretty major benefit to me that building puzzles and making collages just wouldn't give you.
@@Langfocus I think, the key factor many people miss out, is that the number of speakers of certain language is a relative metric if to think about it in practical way. What's really matter is not an overall number of speakers, but the number of speakers you would be interested to talk to. In other words, it is not about how many of them are out there, it is about who they are. If someone has a hobby of learning other languages, then learning Esperanto seems to be a pretty logical step. It's a language in which linguists and other language enthusiasts are interested, which means, there are a high concentration of these people in Esperanto community. If you are one of them then you will find a lot of people who share your interests.
pigrulo -- Mi shatas vian kashnomon "pigr/ul/o" (= homo pigra) -- pigra = Mallaborema, malpenema: nomis la leporo moke la testudon pigra.
Pigrulo's name means "lazy guy" 😂 (pigra cp. Latin piger, pigra)
Agreed. Any language you can read and write books or plays in or converse about pretty much anything in groups of a hundred or more is a language. 130 plus years and still going.
I love that there no conjugations or irregular verbs. I have only taken classes in Spanish and I abhorred conjugations and dealing with irregular verbs.
Absence of irregular verbs makes all verbs having two syllabes as minimum.
And I abhorred that there's almost no word in English that is pronounced in the same way as it is written, as well as there are 14 vowel sounds instead of just 5 vowel sounds as in Spanish.
@@masn9997yes English spelling and phrasal verbs are the most difficult parts for learners. Oh, and prepositions.
@@masn9997There are many words in English that are pronounced thre same way as written: dog, cat, car, big, dig, shit. 😀
Aprendí esperanto hace casi 20 años. No sólo me dio una excelente base para aprender otros idiomas (de hecho estoy estudiando alemán), sino que también me permitió conocer gente muy diversa y hacer nuevos amigos. Los esperantistas por lo general son gente muy simpática, abierta y divertida que siempre quiere aprender cosas nuevas. ¡Gracias Paul y Ludovico! ;-)
Creo que empezaré a aprenderlo.
Vivu Esperanto!! :D Saluton, Patricio!
@@tesraisrey7465lernu esperanton! Vi sxatos gxin 😬
I'm a crocodile.
@@tesraisrey7465 Esperanto is so futile that I learn it as a secret language, due to the lack of people who use it throughout the world. Outside group community, I have never found a single Esperanto learner throughout the social medias and real life... that's how it works.
I’ve been learning Esperanto on and off since 2020, but I have a big problem with being consistent. But I decided that this year I’ll be “fluent” in it. It’s really a beautiful language with deep old history!
I enjoyed every bit of this video! Thanks Paul :)
Kiel bone vi paroli povas Esperanto nun?
Cool, I had a 84 day streak in 2023
How's that going now? What's your main reasources
I learned Esperanto about 55 years ago, when I was a teenager and became quite a fan. Even though it wasn't so easy in those days, I managed to buy books to learn it and even a few books actually in Esperanto. I used it only once in actual conversation, and I ceased paying much attention to it for most of my life. But I can still read it easily. Speaking, of course, is considerably more difficult. I must say that it really IS an easy language.
I learned Esperanto in about three months on my own at the age of 13, using an old textbook - this was in the early 1970s. It was easy and enjoyable to learn. It was a while before I met other people who spoke the language, but within a year of starting contacts I attended a world Esperanto congress in Yugoslavia. I have attended quite a few congresses since then. As for its limited number of speakers, the thing is that one needs to plug into the global Esperanto community (starting with a local group in your area, if one exists) and then you'll find enough people to speak with.
As someone who speaks Spanish and can understand Portuguese and a little Italian... this just sounds like funny spanish. But it's cool!
Estas amuza la hispana lingvo. Efektive, Nazioj dum WW2 penis ke ĝi estis la italia lingvo kiam homoj parolis ĝin en la koncentrejoj. Tial ĝi ne estas morti dum tio tempo.
(It is a funny Spanish. In fact, Nazis during WW2 thought that it was Italian when people spoke it in the Concentration Camps. That's why it didn't die during that time.
im of the bahai faith, and one of our big things is the desire for a neutral constructed lingua franca to serve as a communication medium for all people globally, and esperanto has always played a big role in the faith for that reason. many bahais globally learn at least basic esperanto and english❤
Bahais also brought Esperanto to Japan in the 1920s when meeting with members of the Oomoto religion! Interestingly, the Oomoto religion has since regarded the creator of Esperanto (Zamenhof) as a god. One belief of the Oomoto religion is that the world is undergoing reconstruction, with the goal being harmony of all peoples. Therefore, all humans will need to speak a second universal language alongside their native language for world peace to be achieved and the reconstruction to be successful. Many members today speak Esperanto as a second language, and many of their religious texts are printed in Esperanto.
@@lompkjin I was gonna mention oomoto
هههههههه أعتقد أن مؤسس الديانة قال في نفسه: دعنا نخترع ديانة مزيفة
فأخترع البهائية
هو لاحقا: لكن هناك شيء ناقص ممممم اه وجدتها لغة مزيفة لنرى اها الإسبرنتو لنخدع بعض الحمقى
Initially Esperanto was made for an average educated European, mastering at least one European language besides his native one, but over the time Esperanto's target audience got significantly extended. Zamenhof took an attempt to create an easy language and took the best (as per him) from all languages, he spoke. Yes, nothing is perfect, and Esperanto's vocabulary is somewhat chaotic, but it still has much more upsides. First of all, thanks to its regularity any learner would quickly start feel confident using it, since it would be predictable to create a new word, knowing the rules. Another advantage, at least for me, is that you can construct a phrase the way you want, unless it contradicts the rules. For example, in English one can say a phrase, which is grammatically correct, but they do not say like this. Esperanto is truly neutral in this regard, because you can come across French, English or Russian calques, and it is great. Hardly anybody would be judgmental about a beginner, speaking weird, because it remains a second language for the majority of its speakers, apart from minor native speakers (denaskuloij).
Yes, thanks to a relative easiness one can learn it pretty quickly, what saves time. Pity, that it remains underestimated, and not many people take it seriously, but Esperanto movement enthusiasts. But still Esperanto is nearly the only constructed language, that has survived since 19 century. Hence it is worth something, hence it is should be supported and further developed.
Kaj, jes, mi komencis lerni lerni ĝin du jaroj antaŭe, kaj nun mi komprenas preskaŭ ĉion kaj povas diri ion. Jes, mi ne parolas ĝin multe, ĉar mi ne havas iun por tio :D Sed se vi adoras lingvojn kaj la lernado, do tio certe plezurigos vin kaj vi ekpovos rapide kompreni kaj uzi ĝin. Hehe, jes, mi iomete esperantiĝis :D
Also worth mentioning, is how quickly students of Esperanto develop a reliable instinct for the "right way" to say something in Esperanto, and a feel for the natural flow of the language.
@@bernardkung7306 Agree. I aquired the vocabulary relatively quickly and became more or less funtional at this within a year, though I wasn't stressed much, because I added Esperanto course at Duolingo just for fun and for the sake of some extra points, of course :D but with the time passage I literally fell in love with that language. And yes, I also aquired this "intuition" when constructing words and phrases in my head, and it didn't take much time to learn it.
That handbook was his first publication, then La Unua Libro. No one else spoke it except for him until he published those books. I still wish he had taken some of the advice from the First Kongreso. I miss the indefinite article. My sweet boy, what did he do to you!?
Tre bona filmeto! Gratulojn! Mi sendos la ligilon al miaj ne-esperantistaj geamikoj por kuraĝigi ilin lerni la lingvon.
Dankon por helpi disvastigi la konon de esperanto.
One of the most frustrating things about the lack of Esperanto adoption is that it (along with all other constructed languages) suffers from the Nirvana fallacy: "the perfect is the enemy of the good". For some reason, everyone seems to think they know what a language _should_ be like, and too many of them therefore refuse to accept Esperanto for what it is-an easy-to-learn practical tool for communication.
Instead there seems to be an entire cottage industry of anti-Esperantists, who go around criticizing and strawmanning the language for its "flaws", while ignoring the fact that no natural language could ever meet the same standards they hold it to. Where exactly this vitriol comes from I just can't comprehend. It's just a language, for goodness sake.
The only argument I have seen that holds any real substance is that it does not have the reach of natural languages like English or French, and is therefore a waste of time. But that, of course is only true because people like them refuse to learn it, in a classic chicken-and-egg problem way. And nobody is saying you can't _also_ learn those other languages, if you really want to.
I mean, what's not to like about a language that takes only about one-tenth of the time to become proficient in than any natural language, and lets you converse directly with people all over the world, regardless of what they use natively? So what if it isn't what _you_ would have created, it still works as advertised. It just needs enough speakers to become practical.
You make some excellent points. Those who criticize Esperanto, often without even knowing it (!), fail to see that they themselves are the problem. If they could get over their prejudices and learn some Esperanto, they would soon see how wrong they have been about this beautiful living language.
For a conlang invented in 1887, Esperanto is pretty impressive. It's flaws seem obvious now, but for him, European languages were pretty much the only languages would have been very familiar with. It probably would have never become a global language, but possibly a lingua franca in Europe if not disrupted by the world wars.
What everyone seems to overlook is that the main languages Zamenhof drew from were, and still are, the most taught second languages around the world. That's how he maximised global familiarity.
Back then, he probably didn't have the resources to know which languages were the most spoken. And even if he did, drew all words from Chinese, Hindi, and Arabic, we'd just end up with an inconsistent pool of roots that no one is familiar with.
Honestly, I find everyone's obsessive focus on the vocabulary instead of the grammar and syntax to be deranged. Grammar and syntax is what really matters in terms of "difficulty."
@@chaosPneumatic - I know that Japanese doesn't conjugate its verbs per pronoun, just like Esperanto. So there's at least that.
@@chrisrj9871 Japanese also uses particles to mark case. English's lack of case can actually confuse them. For example, many Japanese students use "is" as a subject marker instead of as a verb. Esperanto's simple case system and may be easier for them to understand. Plus Esperanto allows freer word order so if a Japanese student wants to end their sentence in a verb as is normal for them, they can!
correction: if france didnt vote against it
I actually dropped Esperanto for a while, out of concerns that Esperanto was "too Euro-centric". But at an Olympic Games I happened by chance to run into a bunch of Asian Esperanto speakers -- who were quite happy to explain to me that my concerns were, at the very least... misplaced.
Note that the conversation was, of necessity, entirely in Esperanto. Only one of the nine could really communicate in English, I had barely any Japanese (KEFR A1), and knew absolutely no Korean or Chinese. Most of them had only six to eight months of Esperanto Club Esperanto (one had studied Esperanto for two years). But with a dictionary to buttress our vocabulary, we were set for a full day of meaningful, broad-ranging conversation.
A very good video about Esperanto. I've participated in some Esperanto activities several years ago, but was interrupted by the coronavirus. So there is no chance for me to practice it now. A good news is that one of my friends has selected the Esperanto course in the next semester, and he is asking me some basic words now.
I think it can be easy for everyone even if you don't speak an European language but speakers of Romance and Germanic languages will find it easier because Esperanto shares many roots with those languages
Esperanto is useless to learn.
@@tibodeclercq2131lol how so?at least give us your opinion
Lauh esperantisto kiun mi konis, "Esperanto estas euhropa lingvo kun azia animo." Chi tiu azianismo signifas ke okazas intensa uzo de prefiksoj en Esperanto tiel kiel en tjurkaj lingvoj.
According to an esperantist I have met, "Esperanto is an European language with an Asian soul". This kind of "asianism" is because of intense use of suffixes in Esperanto, like in the Turkic languages.
@@tibodeclercq2131 there's no thing such as "useless" in languages
Which means it fails at what it intended to do. A "neutral" lingua franca with... massive European bias.
A surprisingly neutral and well-researched overview.
Two small notes:
→ "Ne" means "no" as well as "not", and in the sentences it would be better translated as "not" to English.
→ 13:23 "Ŝi amas ŝian patrinon" means "She loves her mother", but only if that "her" points to someone else mentioned before (i.e. she is loving someone else's mother). If you refer to the subject of the sentence (in the third person), you'd use the special purpose reflexive pronoun "si": "Ŝi amas sian patrinon".
Doe the question at the end:
When I started learning Esperanto in 2001/2002, after ~ 3 months I was at a level comparable to my English at that time (which I had been instructed during 9 years in school). This doesn't mean there is necessarily a factor of 36 - I certainly was more motivated with Esperanto, and less with English, and I got to actually practice it (which didn't happen much with English) -, but it's certainly much easier.
I later found girlfriends and my now-wife with Esperanto. That's a not-so-rare thing that the language is also jokingly named "edzperanto" (edz-per-anto, marriage agent/mediator).
Another excellent, interesting and detailed language presentation video-ty! 👏
Really well done... thank you!
My main experience in learning Eo was a thing they (the eo advocates) claim as a major benefit: It turned me on to language learning in general.
I've seen this claim many times, and an additional claim is that it is backed by science/experiments. If one learns esperanto as one of ones first foreign languages, the simplicity and fun of it give you a positive experience. You also learn to see systems/regularites in languages.
Before eo, I was an average language pupil, not really getting much out of it, but afterwards I've (partially, obviously) learned Japanese, Italian and Spanish - a feat totally unimagniable before.
My practical experience with eo was learning it in a course over a weekend (!) and then traveling through Europe for three months with Pasporta Servo. I'm quite sure I wouldn't have been able to do that in any other language ...
Esperanto is an interesting language. I’ve debated about learning it. Also, it would cool to see a video of Andalucían Spanish! Greetings from California!
I love your channel so so much❤
I enjoyed that, Paul. Thank you
I've tried to learn Esperanto about a year ago. I stopped learning, but I'm considering bicking it back up.y experience with Esperanto is even when I haven't been learning Esperanto, it's simple grammar is easy to remember. So I can still create sentences using grammar that I haven't learned since about a year ago
Esperanto really delivers on its promise of being able learn it quickly. Really works. If you are a language geek, you owe this to yourself. If you are traveling, you can use esperanto as a way of stepping off the tourist path, and meeting people from afar when you are at home.
Not a huge fan of Esperanto, but I do have to admit using it as the "international language" would still be an improvement over English. If only because a) Eurocentric as it may be, it still probably is easier to learn for most people in the world than English, and b) it wouldn't give native English speakers an unfair advantage in international environments.
Oh my God, English is Eurocentric, no, kill it now! Good Lord, brainwashed teenagers today...
Life isn't fair
@@froyocrew "Life isn't fair" - Actually, it kinda is. What @uamdbro is crying about: "it wouldn't give native English speakers an unfair advantage" is actually a fair advantage. Their great grandfathers and grandfathers and fathers worked hard to build a country whose economy dominated the world for decades. What is unfair about that? Nothing is free in life. They earned it.
@@mountainhobo What is it with all of these crazy right-wingers following language channels? Go away lol
@@uamdbro "crazy right-wingers" -- Oh look, someone who values generations of hard working people, he must be a CRAZY RIGHT WINGER! I feel sorry for you, you will never be a man.
I felt that the explanation you gave was on right on target. And you're right, active and passive participles and participle phrases do represent probably the steepest learning curve. The tendency to translate whole English phrases with an adverbial participle in Esperanto demonstrates both the simplicity of the language as well as the hardest thing for most people to get used to.
I love your channel, don't stop making videos
I took 2 separate Esperanto course about 10 years ago and I still find I remember the majority of it. I am able to read comments on websites in Esperanto but that is about it. I was never able to understand spoken, speak it, or know enough to read a book in the language. The one thing I did find that I disliked was more with modern Esperanto and just adding more borrowed words. I wish it would have taken a more Toki Pona approach and have a limited word selection and just use compound words to create meaning. I always felt that was more of the original intent with the 900 or so original words.
SAME! I wish that Esperanto actually used it's own library of roots to build more complex and foreign words, like how german does to an extent. Want to know what Redstone from Minecraft was translated to, by an authentic speaker!? Redstone'o! REDSTONE'O! He could have literally just took the words "Ruĝa" and "ŝtono" and smashed them together! That's literally what Notch did when he originally named the damn thing. "Ruĝŝtono!" or if you don't like that "Ruĝoŝtono"
Many thanks from this old Esperantist. I hardly use this language nowadays, but accidentally I did today 🙂. It is such a shame that it didn´t work out on a large scale. Yet, sometimes I think that young top students should not learn the complexities of Latin or Greek, they should learn the simplicity of Esperanto to shape their mind.
16:07 "I'm giving you a greeting", "I'm wishing you a good day", I liked the way you explained it.
Thanks! Yeah, that seemed like the clearest way to explain why it's accusative.
That explains the grammatical case, but we don't think about it when using these phrases 😀
@@amadeosendiulo2137 I know it because I'm a German speaker. I know how cases work. Thanks anyway! 👍🏻
"Krokodilu" with a meaning understood by insiders only is a sign of a culture already.
I always love your deep in depth videos! Honestly this video makes me want to take a look into Esperanto!
Still waiting on your deep dive into czech! 😇
I learned Esperanto in 2004. I participated in more than 10 esperanto meetings. Among these 4 Brazilians Esperanto congress and the Universal Congress of Esperanto, the most important esperanto meeting in the world (in Buenos aires, Argentina 2014) I talked by internet and in the congress with esperantists from all parts of the world. It is something amazing, People from everywhere can comunicate with other people who speak as mother tonges many languages apart from each other. By one projected language as esperanto they can comunicate easily among then.
YESSSS!!! NOW I'M LEARNING TWO LANGUAGES!
To me besides the fact of learning a specific language, Esperanto does help getting a deeper insight on the grammar of other languages that one already knows or is learning.
For instance for a Spanish speaker, the idea of declensions for cases is strange, but through Esperanto one can get the logic of how that works and then apply it when learning german or Russian. It may also help an english speaker realize on the agreement of adjective/article in gender and number for other languages which is normally a bit trickier for them at first. The different participles also resemble the prefectiveness or not of verbs in Russian. Also the construction of some words helps with understanding the use of some prefixes/suffixes in other languages.
I get the impression Esperanto would have pedagogic value as a first language to learn, not just for ease but because the grammar is explicitly built into the language.
I was watching a video on RUclips where a person was baking something in a foreign (to me) language, and suddenly I realised I understood the subtitles. They were in Esperanto, and I understood them after just doing the first few lessons in the Duolingo course. 😅
So its been 8+ years since i first discovered your channel.
Thanks for being here since the early days!
The Esperanto word for evening resembles vespers which were evening prayers.
Yay, I’m so happy you did an updated video… I literally asked for this on that old video a couple weeks ago 😅
"Saluton", "dankon", "bonan matenon", etc, are presented in Esperanto-learning materials as "Mi deziras al vi ___n" (I desire to you X). this may be easier to remember than giving, because you can give someone greetings or thanks but you don't usually give them a morning.
That makes sense.
Honestly Esperanto works well in my life, I've been just to 13 countries so far but in many of them I met Esperanto speakers and this is amazing!
Esperanto folks are everywhere, but they need to be found.
YES! I'm so excited for this as an esperanto learner!
I actually can say wity cinfieence that I love Esperanto. It's true that there's not a lot of people to speak with, and that's the down side. But I think everyone should give it a try, it was a lot of fun to learn.
Sal, multajn dankojn por ĉi tio filmeto pri Esperanto.
I'm learning Esperanto, and I really like it. I do think it would be a good choice for an official international auxiliary language, especially if it's taught in elementary schools. It already has a publishing house, a record label, thousands of books written in it, and a presence on Duolingo and Google translate. English never "applied" to be a lingua franca, it applied to replace other languages. Esperanto is a far better candidate for the job - much easier to learn, even for Asians, and isn't connected with any specific country. Yes, it is Eurocentric, but with thousands of languages in the world, it would be impossible to include them all.
It's a coincidence that I just started learning Esperanto on Duolingo this week. I'm Saudi and I speak fluent English and a bit of French. Esperanto looks really easy.
Esperanto always struck me as easy Latin. Very romance in character, vocabulary, and structure, albeit with a very simplified grammar and syntax. And I'm all for simplifying Latin grammar!
How much of Esperanto's vocabulary comes from German seems not to be appreciated as much as it should be. I suspect that is because lots of people don't know German.
@@beowulfciceroit wouldn't really matter how much German there is if they Simply it greatly like how the simplify the Latin languages. Learns will be able to easily associate the words with whatever it's called in whatever they already speak
An interesting language. I think I'll try to learn it.
And btw you are very sympatic. I also love to learn new languages. And I had make some languages too. 😅
At the university ELTE (Budapest, Hungary) until the last reorganization there was an Esperanto major. Besides general linguistics we learnt Esperanto culture, read original novels and poetry, watched taped theatrical productions etc. We had every paraphernalia of a lively culture, maybe smaller in size, less ingenious in quality, but I definitely experienced a unique culture. Our National Library of Foreign Literature has 11 000 books written in Esperanto.
You majored in Esperanto yourself?
8:00
>designs a language to be simple
>adds fucking noun cases
I like that the h isn’t silent. Far too many languages have a silent h.
I have studied the basic grammar and some of the vocabulary on my own, but do not as of yet have any real experience _using_ Esperanto. However, even just that much has opened up a whole world of language in general that I never knew before. In particular I have learned a lot about how the same words are interrelated and interwoven throughout the languages of the Continent, and even how they relate to various scientific terms (due to E's liberal adoption of Latin/Romance vocabulary).
For example, I now recognize the family name for "ant" as _Fomacidae_ because Esperanto uses _formiko_ , and how the oak tree genus _Quercus_ relates to the Esperanto _qverko_ , just to name two off the top of my head. Some of the mysteries of Romance language conjugation and the whole concept of agglutinative word formation have also become easier to comprehend, much more concretely than I learned in my short high school Spanish class. It's quite impressive how flexible this "simple" language is in how sentences can be constructed.
If you want study foreign languages, but don't know where to start, Esperanto is a great way to condition your mind into accepting new language concepts, without straining yourself. Even if you never really use it that much on its own, spending the hundred hours or so necessary to become reasonably proficient in it will give you a huge boost in tackling the more complex natural languages it is derived from.
As an aside, the only other language I can speak is Japanese, my country of long residence. As a language with an entirely different structure and vocabluary, there is little direct help between the two, but even just being able to associate word cognates between three languages rather than just two is a benefit all on its own.
davidh -- "Fomac*id*ae" - Fun fact: the word *id* means "child", "offspring" in Eo, e.g. cheval'o / cheval'id'o (horse / foal), formik'o / formik'id'o (ant, offspring of an ant, a baby ant ??).
Even though I understand the criticism it gets for being as Eurocentric as it is, I think Esperanto still serves as a great conlang due to how easy the grammatical rules/concepts are to grasp, even to those who don't speak a European language! Ĝi estas vere bonega lingvo!
Esperanto is cool 🔥 At the very end, you mention Toki Pona and yeah that's definitely even faster to learn and get going than Esperanto. ❤
Yeah, it's faster to get going with Toki Pona, but I can't imagine actually conversing in it.
That "good evening" one (or whichever one it was, I couldn't type at the time of listening)reminded me of the word "Vespers" as in the specific catholic mass for that time of day
Yep, I thought that when I heard that part and then looked up the etymology of vespers assuming that it's probably Latin given its usage in Catholicism. Vespers comes to English from Latin and then Old French.
Zamenhof came from a town inhabited by poles, hews, Belarusians and Germans, in roughly equal proportions - yet the groups hardly mingled, even though Yiddish and German are pretty intelligible, and so are Polish and Belarusian (after some exposure).
He lamented the fact and came with a solution, which seems pretty good, tbh!
My first exposure to Esperanto was in Final Fantasy XI back in the mid-2000's. the title song, which features prominently in the story, is written in Esperanto. It takes some liberties, such as clipping o's at the end of lines, to fit with the music, so I'm sure it's not "perfect", but I thought it was pretty cool
Fluas nun sango senkulpa,
sur Vana'diel, vasta ter',
Tremas la tuta mond'
pro l' plago en desper'.
Preventas ĝin
nenia sort'.
Haltigas ĝin
nenia fort'.
Sed tra la nokto tempesta
brilas jen stelo de glor'!
Kontraū brutala kri'
fontas jen kant-sonor'!
Stelo brilanta, kanto sonanta:
revo kaj preĝo por ni!
Vana'diel! Vana'diel!
Mano kaj man' kunpremitaj
trans la eterno sen lim'
ne dismetiĝos plu,
ne disligiĝos plu!
Unofficial English translation
Now flows innocent blood
On Vana'diel, a vast land
The entire world trembles
In despair from the scourge
Prevented by
no fate
Stopped by
no strength
But through the stormy night
Behold: a star of glory shines!
Against a brutal outcry
Behold: a hymn springs forth!
A shining star, a ringing song:
A dream and a prayer for us!
Vana'diel! Vana'diel!
Hand and hand together
Across the limitless eternity
We will no longer be put asunder
We will no longer be separated!
It is perfectly fine to cut the -o at the end of words in poems and song text, it is done a lot because it helps to make rhimes more interesting.
This is a common convention in Esperanto for music and poetry.
@@stefang5639 DOn't forget the clipping of "a" in "la" as well. l'dom' wouldn't be unheard of in a poem or song.
My experience learning it as much as you described -- a lot of excitement learning it because I made a lot of progress easily. I could actually notice knowing more #Esperanto almost day after day, and certainly week after week. It's hard to notice yourself learning so much almost in real time. This is what normally acts as a demotivator when learning most languages (or most things really), but in the case of Esperanto it's actually a motivator.
Unfortunately, just as you stated, it is not widely spoken so ones "mileage" becomes limited. It has a lot of potential, but like most tools will only be as useful as people are interested in using them.
Well done!
I am a person living in Estonia, speaking English in my working environment and yet using Russian as a backup. I wish that the UN accepted the Esperanto language at that time. Esperanto is very easy for everyone. It is designed to be easy. The only thing I don't like about Esperanto is that it uses genders like in many Indian-European languages. There are many languages that do not have genders, like Estonian. There is no he or she, it is "tema".
There are no genders in Esperanto, there are some sex references like distinguishing "him" and "her" in 3rd person (Finnic and Turkic languages don't do that indeed).
Even after living for 20 years in US, I cannot keep track of he/she during a conversation. I start saying “David did this…”, 3 seconds later I say “she”. Why do I have to remember what genitals the person had during the rest of my speech? 😏. Yes, it helps you differentiate if you are talking about a husband and a wife. But nowadays, that’s also useless. What if you are talking about father and son? You have to find other ways to show which “he” you are referring to.
This is weird indeed, almost like the creator of the language didn't want to completely abandon this common feature of Indo-European languages, and therefore went only as far as the most "Gender-abolitionist" language, which is English. Even though it's objectively simpler to not have any genders in the language at all.
I liked this video, it was good to learn a bit about Esperanto. As a language enthusiast, I definitely need the cultural aspect of a language. I started learning English when I was a kid because of music, later on my passion just got stronger when I learned more about the British and American cultures. I had the same experience in Spanish. I had a chance to live in Seville for about a year before and the experience I had with my Spanish friends was truly amazing, which gave a big boost to my Spanish too. Apart from the cultural aspect, the practical use of a language is also quite important to me. That's why I loved learning English & Spanish since these languages are spoken by hundreds of millions of people worldwide, whereas Esperanto is spoken by less people than my native Hungarian. But I accept learning Esperanto can be fun for some people as a hobby.
ferencmori -- "the cultural aspect of a language" - Here is a very easy poem in Esperanto taken from the textbook Tesi, la testudo. In his holiday at the beach he lies in the warm sand and forgets the rest of the world.
*Ferie*
---
Agrable sur sablo
mi kushas,
kontente
la vento
min tushas.
---
Najbare
la maro
sin rulas
kaj luma
sub suno
min lulas.
---
Nur bruas
la skuo
de l' ondo
forestas
la resto de l' mondo.
This one is a bit more complex: while outside (ekstere) blusters a winter storm, he lies in the house (endome) in the warm bathtub and relaxes. The artistic value consists in this : to describe the outside winter world the author uses harsh words with many hard consonants, whereas for the in-house situation soft words and consonants.
*Kontrastoj*
Ekstere vipas vitrojn hajlopluvo;
drivventoj dentojn per akracha bru' agacas;
Endome kushas mi en la bankuvo;
En varma, mola mar' korlule lukse, lace pacas.
---
Ekstere jen novembro tim-panika
hurladas kvazaù lupoj tra ebeno siberia;
Endome grasa spir' tropik-afrika
narkotas min; mi flosas for en stato amfibia.
P.S. And here a last one. The author was an inmate of a concentration camp and therefor his prisoner number is tattooed on his arm. The highlight is the last word "mal'invent'os" which I can't translate to English or any other language; invent'i = to invent; mal' is the opposite, the contrary. Is there an English words which expresses the opposite of inventing?
*88834*
Jam antaù la invento
de la komputero (now more common komputilo)
mi
estis
nura
numero
tatuita
sur mia brako
kaj la homa
konscienco (human conscience)
---
Laù mia sento
estas eble
ke
chi-lastan (= the human conscience)
la scienco
kaj tekniko
en sia
triumfa
progreso
finfine malinventos.
It was a head scratcher for me that a language which is supposed to be simple has grammatical cases. Most learners struggle with that, so why introducs them in the first place?
Even asked chat GPT
Than I checked out Zamenhoff. He was a polish native who had 7 cases. Guess he thought reducing that to 2 is a great service.
Yeah, you can see in the clip of my video from 8 years ago that I made a mistake by missing the accusative case in my very first sentence.
Zamenhof did in fact try eliminating case altogether, but eventually decided that having one additional case brought benefits that outweighed the slight extra complexity.
I've heard from those that teach Esperanto, that if the accusative case is introduced early (at or very near the start) students have little trouble with it -- it's in the courses that put off the "complication" till later in the course, that some students appear to have trouble with it.
(Imagine what it would be like if students learning English weren't introduced to "him", "her" and "them" till a third of the way through the beginner's course 🤨. )
Dr LL Zamenhof was born in Bialystok, where most people spoke Polish or Byelorussian, but it was then part of the Russian Empire and his family originated from Lithuania. At home he spoke Russian and Yiddish. His father was a teacher of French and German, and in addition taught him Hebrew. He studied Latin, Greek and Aramaic at Gymnasium in Warsaw and went on to study medicine in Moscow and Warsaw. He set up practice first in small towns in Lithuania and Poland before moving to Vienna. He also studied English, Italian and Volapük. His international language project began when he was 14, so it is surprising that there is little Semitic influence on the vocabulary or grammar of Esperanto. Perhaps that was deliberate, because he came out against ethnic nationalism.
Imagine a person who doesn’t need/know accusative conjugation (hint: English) and their feelings? They are not going from 7 conjugations to 2. They are learning conjugation for the first time. Big mistake IMO.
Maybe English should have been the starting point (instead of Polish or Spanish). How abour?
I did eat, I will eat, I have eat, I can eat…
@@chefnyc The accusative (a case, not a conjugation) DOES occur in modern English, but only in pronouns (him instead of he, her instead of she, them instead of they).
Speaking of constructed languages, please do a video on Interslavic!
I am much more interested in “native Esperanto speakers”. It is almost like a pidgin language became a creole in front of our eyes.
Creoles usually become more complicated, not like the pidgins that father them. Most native speakers of Esperanto speak a worse variety of Esperanto, since it is their "heritage" language, they obviously speak the local national language much better and often forget Esperanto altogether when they grow up. A person needs to be exposed to a language and, ideally, get some education in it not to forget it in future.
@@amikecoru By your logic, Modern English is a worse variety of the old English as it is less complex and a more simplified version of it. The same goes for esperanto. Native speakers do not speak a worse variety, the language simply evolves just like english spoken by celts did back in the day.
Esperanto is as easy as any language designed for a global community can possibly be. That's why no other auxlang has been able to supplant it in terms of community size. People love to bully Esperanto for very bad faith reasons, but I personally don't care if it ever actually becomes T H E W O R L D L A N G U A G E. I study it as a fun hobby because I appreciate the values that inspired it.
what values, the destruction of european cultural diversity?
@@bleekrisp Esperanto has never aimd to destroy other languages.
Same, it's just my language and my hobby.
Nonsense. Esperanto is as exotic and hard to learn for a Chinese person as most European languages.
@@amjan No, in European laguages the verb to be itself is irregular.
I'd love a video about Interlingua, or even Lingua Franca Nova.