I don’t speak Esperanto yet but I think it might be a good thing to have a community for, given the language’s internationalist nature and its historical connections to left-wing politics. If you look for federated Esperanto communities, one of them is basically locked because they moved instances, and the other is dead as a doornail.

An Esperanto comm could be used to talk about Esperanto history and culture and news from Esperantujo, or help people learn the language, or people could discuss language politics, et cetera, all in Esperanto. Hexbear does have that weird thing where it won’t let you post if you say that your post is in a language other than English, though.

An alternative might be to see if there are any Esperantist instances we can federate with.

  • HumanAnarchist@hexbear.netEnglish
    111·
    2 months ago

    Two points:

    1. Esperanto is extremely Eurocentric and white in nature and in history. It seems to be a dying community and not all that useful. I’d much rather have a toki pona community and we could all learn that together.

    2. I’m pretty sure there is an Esperanto instance which I would support federation with.

    • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      13·
      2 months ago

      I’d much rather have a toki pona community and we could all learn that together.

      There’s already !tokipona@lemmygrad.ml, but really I do agree that Toki Pona is the better or at least more interesting language to promote, even though treating TP as an IAL is sort of a square peg through a round hole. I’ve even brought up the idea of adding sitelen pona as Hexbear emojis such that we can write with them.

      Esperanto is extremely Eurocentric and white in nature and in history.

      Extremely Eurocentric, yes — it doesn’t even have much of any Slavic vocabulary despite Zamenhof being a native of Białystok — but I’d question how strictly “white” Esperanto is. I’ve recently shared a Congolese band as well as a Sri Lankan artist who make music in Esperanto; Prolewiki’s article on Esperanto talks about a declaration made by Korean Esperantists in the Chosun Ilbo in the 1920s stating that Esperanto should be used to combat Japanese linguistic imperialism.

      Now you can of course question whether it is wise of those Congolese musicians to so enthusiastically support such a Eurocentric language as the world language, you can question whether that Sri Lankan artist should think of Esperanto as having a “romantic sound” if this might play into the prestige of Western European natlangs, you can question the choices of those Korean anti-imperialists, but the fact of the matter remains that Esperanto does indeed have plenty of non-white history if you actually bother to look for it. Just because Esperanto is Eurocentric in its design, and originated and first proliferated in Europe, doesn’t mean that non-Europeans can’t engage with the language on their own terms, whether that be from a finvenkist or a Raumist perspective.

      It seems to be a dying community and not all that useful.

      I don’t get the impression that the Esperanto community is dying at all, and I don’t think the decision to learn Esperanto should be guided by the language’s “usefulness” or its chances of achieving its original goal of becoming the world’s second language. Esperantujo is an interesting country with an interesting history, and I think that’s something that’s worth preserving, regardless of how big the community is or indeed how white the community is. There are today native speakers of Esperanto whose parents were native speakers, and that’s just kinda cool, right?

    • FrogPrincessEnglish
      10·
      2 months ago

      Esperanto is extremely Eurocentric

      It gets too much shit for this, IMO

      The two choice were:

      • be similar to the world’s largest language-family, so that speakers of that family pick it up quicker

      • be distant from all languages, so that nobody picks it up extra quickly

      The alternative to making speakers-of-european-languages winners was making everybody everywhere losers

    • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      6·
      2 months ago

      I think that’s mostly covered by !worldbuilding@hexbear.net for fictional conlangs, and !conlangs@mander.xyz otherwise. There is also a !conlang@lemmygrad.net but that one’s dead as a doornail.

      The reason why I want to have a comm specifically for Esperanto is really for the specific subculture/community around specifically Esperanto. That community definitely does have an intersection with both the broader language learning community, and the broader community around conlangs, but it’s also clearly distinct from both, I’d say.

      • Imnecomrade [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        6·
        2 months ago

        I don’t think I see any specific language as a community on hexbear, thus I figured a conlang community could serve the Esperanto community and pull the fictional conlangs from worldbuilding into a more relevant community, though I figured the conlang community would serve more real-world conlangs, such as the ones listed here, specifically the auxiliary and engineered constructed languages. I wouldn’t be against a separate hexbear community for Esperanto or any other language, but I figured there may be a reason for the limited generalized communities.

        I find the language Lidepla interesting as it includes more language sources beyond the romantic languages, though it’s request to obtain an ISO 639-3 code from the International Organization of Standardization was denied because it’s still too niche. I would consider this as an example that would belong in a conlang community.

        • FrogPrincessEnglish
          9·
          2 months ago

          Esperanto has 100× the traction of any of those, though.

          Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, and James Connolly learned it.

          It definitely has flaws, that other International Auxiliary Languages do better on.

          Lingua Franca Nova, Ido, Novial , Lingwa de Planeta, Lingua sistemfrater – all technically better than Esperanto

          Esperanto – way better than any of those for adoption, actual community, a million or 2 million speakers

          To give an idea of adoption:

          And when you compare it to a language like English… like it’s 6× easier to learn than English. And yeah maybe Ido is 10% better than that… but say English is 600 difficulty points, Esperanto is 100, Ido is 90… you’re pretty much fiddling in the margins at that point.

          • Imnecomrade [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
            3·
            2 months ago

            Oh I’m not disagreeing, my only argument was regarding whether the community should include multiple conlangs or just Esperanto and maybe allow other conlang posts in the community, considering the current structure and style of hexbear’s communities.