Given that international auxiliary languages allow for more efficient cooperation; I think more people should consider using an easily learnable IAL, like Esperanto.

IALs would reduce the English dominance that gate-keeps software development to English persons; and hence allow more potential software developers to better develop software. The English language is mostly dominant in software development because of linguistic imperialism.

  • ttmrichter
    81·
    2 years ago

    Dude, I said English was harder. Seriously, try to keep up! I just said it’s not much harder and comes with the benefit of people actually speaking it so that learning it isn’t a waste of effort.

    Further, Esperanto is ignored because it’s not much easier than natural languages to huge swathes of the world’s population, but at least has the benefit of being utterly useless to learn.

    Learn a few languages from places that aren’t Indo-European ones. Learn how you can have grammars with little to no declension, for example: no verb tenses, aspects, voices, genders, cases … not even declining by count. Then consider:

    1. Esperanto has almost all of these alien-to-many concepts; and,
    2. While it is true that it is more regular in these than in natural Indo-European languages, the latter have the benefit of actually having speakers: the purpose of learning a foreign language is met: communication.

    On top of this:

    1. Esperanto has a consonant-heavy phonetic inventory, making its pronunciation hard for a lot of speakers of other languages. (It is painfully obvious that Zamenhoff was Polish, let’s put it this way.) Too it is very bizarrely irregular (though it’s not so bizarre once you check out Zamenhoff’s native dialect and its consonantal inventory…). Lest you think this isn’t a problem, most native languages in the world rarely present more than “consonant+vowel” structures, so strings of consonants are absolutely horrendously difficult for them. (Even saying “string” is hard, and that’s mild compared to some of the atrocities of PolishEsperanto.
    2. Esperanto uses a system of affixes (pre- and suf-) to words to modify word forms and attach meanings. This is a difficult concept for speakers of languages like Mandarin, say, to comprehend (where word forms are notoriously vague and grammatical particles are used in place of affixes to accomplish many of the same things). Further, Esperanto assumes that a) word forms are universal, b) that the categories in those languages that have them are the same, and c) that even when the categories are the same individual words are categorized similarly across languages. Yet in English “angry” is an adjective. In other languages it is a verb. Fancy that!
    3. Esperanto has the single most useless feature of any language: gendered declensions. (And, naturally, just to add icing to this cake, the default is masculine.) Zamenhoff had the chance to remove the single most useless feature of a language from his grammar … and didn’t. Flipping FARSI managed to do this, a natural language in the Indo-European family, but a constructed language had to keep this vestigial nonsense?! Again, gendered grammar is not even slightly universal and makes the language difficult to learn for people coming from sane languages.
    4. Esperanto’s lexical inventory is gloriously East European for the most part, with random slathering of Romance-language vocabulary generously applied. So, you know, using as a basis words from a small geographical region instead of words from around the world. Where are the Chinese roots? The Arabic ones? The roots from various African languages? There aren’t any. Thus it is pretty much equally difficult for a Chinese(or Arabic(or, say, Swahili))-speaking student to learn the lexicon of an actual language spoken by actual people instead of a toy language spoken by basically nobody.
    5. What is a subjunctive? What is an infinitive? What is a participle? These are concepts that are very much Indo-European. Speakers of languages outside that family (which is checks notes most people) have no idea what one or more of these are. So that’s three alien grammatical concepts right off the top of my head in Esperanto’s grammar, and while sure it’s more regular (FSVO “regular”) than in natural languages, it’s the conceptual barrier that is hard to breach, not the rote memory work to learn them once you’ve grokked the idea. So again, slightly more difficult to learn a natural language, but even a natural language with as low a speaker count as Basque will give you about as many people to talk to as does Esperanto while the Big Name™ languages will give you multiple of orders of magnitude more. Each.
    6. Esperanto assumes that notions of “subject”, “object”, and “argument” are linguistic universals. They aren’t. This makes Esperanto’s twee case structure with its cute little suffixes actually fiendishly difficult to learn for speakers of languages that mix agents, experiencers, and patients in ways different from the Indo-European majority. (Don’t know what agents, experiencers, and patients are? Maybe you should crack open an inventory of linguistics before talking about how “easy” a language is to learn…)
    7. Why are there plurals in Esperanto? Why decline for number at all? Plenty of languages don’t and it works just fine. OK, so for whatever reason you think plurals are necessary: WHY THE HELL DOES ESPERANTO ALSO HAVE COUNT/VERB AGREEMENT!? That’s just bizarre even in many languages that have retained the unnecessary concept of a plural!
    8. Personal pronouns. Ugh. There’s first person singular and plural (but no way to distinguish between inclusive and exclusive in the latter case). There’s second person with no ability to distinguish singular and plural (because consistency is for whiners!). There’s gendered (🙄) singular third-person, but non-gendered (let’s be honest: default-masculine) third-person. And then there’s a weird one (oni) that means one. Or people. Because screw making sense! Why are there gendered pronouns at all!? They serve no useful purpose; many languages (including Farsi, the language of Iran(!)) eschew them completely, and others (e.g. Mandarin) only distinguish them in writing (and that itself is a very recent cultural import!).
    9. Articles. WHY IS THERE AN ARTICLE IN ESPERANTO!? And why only one!? You’ve eliminated all the other articles, take that final step dammit! Join the majority of world languages which don’t bother with these vestigial adverbs!

    And I’m out of steam already. There are a whole lot of hidden linguistic assumptions in Esperanto that are alien to language speakers from outside of the Indo-European milieu, or difficult for such speakers to actually perform. To someone in steeped an Indo-European linguistic environment these are invisible. They’re “natural” or even “logical”. But they are absolute tongue-twisters and conceptual mountains for those coming from outside of those environs. And if you’re going to climb those conceptual mountains and twist your tongue in service of these phonetic horrors, where do you think it’s best to expend your efforts:

    1. On a fantasy football league language that has maybe a million speakers world-wide (and that’s being generous!); or,
    2. On a natural language that’s a little bit more difficult but gives you access to ~1 billion native speakers and ~200 million secondary speakers (Mandarin), ~475/75 million (Spanish), ~400 million/~1 billion (English), 350/250 million (Hindi), or even 50/26 million (Hausa)?

    If you’re sane and value your time, you pick literally almost any natural language in the world for better return on investment, even though it may, in the case of some of those (coughIndo-Europeancough) languages, be a little bit more difficult than Esperanto. (Yes. A little bit.)

    • Dochyo
      1·
      2 years ago

      You raise some excellent points in your response, on every point besides 2 and 6 we are generally in agreement. 6 is outside of my experience, and so I don’t have a meaningful opinion. 2 is one of the things I like about Esperanto, though you might well be right. I intend to study Mandarin, and since you mentioned it perhaps that will change my opinion regarding #2.

      I did say that Esperanto isn’t perfect, truly it is itself flawed. Even besides the points you made, even in the foundation there are irregularities which exist which are scarcely justifiable:

      • words which are redundant
      • some root words which are simply difficult to pronounce for anyone
      • the difficulties that arise from certain combinations of word parts
      • constructed words which work one way in a certain set of cases, a different way in another
      • the confusing resemblance to unrelated word constructions which some root words have

      …to name but the things that come to mind.

      And certainly if we’re going by head-count there is little reason to learn Esperanto instead of a natural language. But there is more to a language then just the number of people who speak it, there is also the question of who your going to be talking to and why. In that analysis depending on the particulars, almost any language can be about equal, even a “toy” language like Esperanto.

      But it must not be forgotten what the original subject is: the question of the future of software development. Arguing in favor of any national language is like arguing for the domination of a national system of measurement, instead of metric. Certainly you probably are right that the euro-centricity of Esperanto makes it ill suited as a international language at it’s very core, and in this you and I would be in agreement, but so too in that way no national language should enter into the equation.

      • ttmrichter
        1·
        2 years ago

        Any second language used only for programming purposes is going to be doomed from the outset anyway. I work in a Chinese engineering firm. They work with Chinese people (and me). They sell their products to Chinese firms. What possible incentive could they have to make all their engineers use a different language than Mandarin to communicate in? If they grow to the point that international markets are a concern, they’ll have to i18n their products anyway (because their customers won’t be speaking some conlang!) and given the costs of that, updating the design documents in another language is a minor cost.

        Conlang IALs are a solution in search of a problem for an overwhelming number of professionals. They present a high-cost initial barrier of entry (the time it takes to learn the conlang to fluency) with a very low payout in the short- and medium-term for almost all involved people. And even if the engineers in question did learn the conlang do you genuinely believe they’ll use it when doing work among other speakers of their own language? Do you genuinely believe the conlang will be the primary communication tool?

        Idealism is a good thing. A great thing. Provided that it is, in some fashion, compatible with reality. A conlang IAL for programming is not compatible with reality.