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Esperanto: The artificial language that aimed to unite humanity (bigthink.com)
submitted 10 months ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to c/linguistics@mander.xyz
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[-] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 7 points 10 months ago

Currently Esperanto is in a weird "double dilemma":

  • it's weakly designed, but languages with a better design barely have speakers;
  • it's spoken by a relatively low amount of people, but the other options are all languages associated with national identities.

Reminds me of the programmer's expression: "there are two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about, and the ones nobody uses"

[-] lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 points 10 months ago

Yup. It's a bit like this, but on two levels - people complaining about natlangs because "nobody"* uses Esperanto, and complaining about Esperanto because "nobody"* uses the other auxiliary conlangs.

*I mean, proportionally.

this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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