learninglinguist:

frislander:

robinhasnightwings:

ESPERANTO

This infographic is about Esperanto, an international auxiliary language created in 1887 by Dr. Ludwig Zamenhoff. It is the most widely used constructed language in the world. 

The ultimate response to Esperanto marketing.

Alright everybody read the link above. I knew that Esperanto was very Eurocentric and actually quite bound by culture but yeah. This really is the ultimate response.

god this is the worst response I can’t believe i’m seeing it shared? it’s a mess. like there are serious problems with the sexism of the language that deserves it’s own article but it’s slotted in alongside petty rubbish like “i personally dislike letters with accents”. The author flops between saying the vocabulary could be smaller, and then decrying the use of affixes to keep the vocabulary small. Then he says it should get rid of the accusative case, and then points to languages with dozens of different cases that Esperanto should copy to get rid of prepositions, for some reason.

and i think he’s using a really outdated textbook? he says that some perfectly grammatical sentences are dissallowed, which looks more like personal taste. He asks if Esperanto has those correlatives, why doesn’t it have these ones? and then he lists a few words that do in fact appear in the language. He writes sentences in the longest, most stilted way and then says the grammar is inherently stilted, rather than it being the style of example sentences for learners.

there are actual problems in the language. The sexism: but the author of this doesn’t go into explaining the 1 to 15 words that have been proposed to fix the problem. the sexism is very, very easy to avoid in modern Esperanto and i feel like whoever wrote this should know by now. and parts are genuinely very difficult for some Asian speakers, like inflecting verbs for tense instead of using temporal adverbs. (which i have seen fixed in Esperanto Sen Fleksio, which is floating online somewhere, except I definitely agree there needs to be something Official to allow this in ‘proper’ speech)

i really need to make a proper counter to all his nitpicking and misinfo one day but, people who dislike Esperanto also need to make another essay. this is 10 years old and it’s still the only counter-esperanto essay i’ve been shown. if u want to discuss sexism and racism in a language, you start with that. you don’t harp on with “the alphabet doesn’t suit my taste” and “why don’t​ we stick to SVO word order” because it alienates anyone who likes the language and wants to actually fix it.