Peak liberalism but I mean that in the best way possible. It's a very nice ideal but completely ignores the material conditions which shape language and ends up being Eurocentric in the process. Maybe after a few thousand years of communism something like it would naturally emerge but until then it's not particularly useful.
Conlangs have never caught on and never will. Also Esperanto is not well designed for people worldwide
I tried learning it for about 2 months on Duolingo and it was cool. The extreme amount of hate it gets is something though.
I think it's nice. I like the concept of a universal language that isn't just the language of whichever country happens to be the most powerful at the time.
It gets criticism for being eurocentric, which I think is fair given that the vocabulary is like 90% romance languages, but then again English is the de facto universal language right now so that criticism feels kinda moot. As long as an official universal language doesn't exist some other language will take its place, so this problem will always be present, and Esperanto is simple enough that I think anyone can learn it easily regardless of their native language, even if some people have an advantage. A universal language without this problem would be poggers, but none so far have appeared and no other conlang has achieved the popularity of Esperanto. I don't even think you can have a universal language that is equally fair to everyone, given how diverse human languages are, though we can certainly try to do better than Esperanto.
Also, the words for boyfriend and girlfriend literally translate to "heart friend" and I think that's cute :comfy:
Toki pona is a much better language than Esperanto, it's easier, less Eurocentric, and gender neutral
Toki pona is not sufficient for complex communication in its constructed state. It was designed for the exact opposite of that, and was never intended to be an auxiliary language. Plus it's based on the discredited and vaguely racist Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
Also grammatical "gender" =/= gender the social construct.
Not to bash it is a project in its own right for its original purpose (basically language as meditation), but it's not in any way supposed to do or be what Esperanto wanted to achieve.
cute but poorly thought out, the premise of a universal language being either feasible or desirable is silly
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The dominant language always drives smaller languages into irrelevance and eventually extinction. The more broadly dominant the language, the faster and more aggressive this process is. A universal language would therefore do this to the extreme.
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International communication functions just fine as is even with language barriers, so it's not really solving any problems.
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No language can remain universal, as language change over time would lead to divergence and eventual unintelligibility. Only an oppressive enforcement apparatus could even hope to stop this, and it would likely fail.
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Shared languages don't historically do anything to stop violence or conflict anyways. The Nazis could understand their Jewish neighbours just fine.
International communication functions just fine as is even with language barriers
Looking at insanely ridiculous opinions people have about other countries, it is not functioning fine at all.
They share opinions of equal nonsensity about areas that share a language. Talk to a Republican in a far-out suburb about "the city" and it makes as much sense as their opinions on China.
It's orders of magnitude less nonsensical, even if still monumentally stupid.
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Is that a bad thing?
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There are still problems of people not understanding each other
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Having one agreed upon version that is taught in schools would prevent divergence.
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There are other benefits
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Yes, language is an integral part of culture and identity. Losing it a loss of that culture and a homogenization of humanity. Ask any indigenous person how they feel about this.
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These barriers are more political than linguistic.
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Whose version?
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Such as?
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I dont have personally anything against homogenization of humanity, and besides these identities are completely arbitrary, what does it matter what sort of identity one has?
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The fact that i for example cant understand more than a majority of people in the world is purely a lingustic problem though fixing it would be political
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I presume there wouldnt be anyone's version, rather it would be a joint project by all the nations in the world
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For example right now i could understand only ~11% of human population i would say it would be much better if everyone could understand 100% of human population
I dont know, i wouldnt mind losing my national identity, though thats just my opinion, besides my idea of a universal language presumes that all the nations agreed to it so im not advocating for anything forceful
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good ideal, but completely impractical. better to take an existing language already spoken by majority of the proletariat and then spending effort teaching that instead + adapting the language to be more accessible.
History shows that's certainly not more likely, and no constructed language will be without bias towards some group of natural languages.
Because there have been many many times throughout history where people have adopted a foreign language in addition to their own, English being the prime example. Most people who speak English are not native speakers. There has never been an example of a constructed auxiliary language catching on in anything more than hobbyist communities and hippy communes.
People at large scale learn languages for practical reasons, not reasons of fairness.
