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Constructed Languages (Conlangs) / Artificial Languages

Timble2

Timble2

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Is it an urban legend or true, that more people can speak Klingon (a synthetic language originally invented for a movie) than speak Esperanto (a synthetic language that was supposed to promote communication, harmony and understanding worldwide).

And what will the hospital who placed the ad do when they come across a speaker of Elvish?
 
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Esperanto speakers

I did a little research--what the heck, my browser was already open--Esperanto is spoken fluently by about two million people (other than casual users who know a few phrases or words):

How many people speak Esperanto?
Professor Sidney S. Culbert of the University of Washington, Seattle, USA, has done the most comprehensive survey on language use ever attempted. He has conducted interviews in dozens of countries around the world and tested for "professional proficiency", i.e. much more than just "hello, please, goodbye".

Based on this survey, Prof. Culbert concluded that Esperanto has about two million speakers worldwide. This puts it on a par with "minority" languages such as Lithuanian or Hebrew.

Quoted from: "Esperanto: The International Auxiliary Langauge"
URL: http://www.geocities.com/quetl/esperanto.htm

I am afraid Klingon is far behind:

There are Klingon language conventions held annually and Okrand estimates the number of those who can fluently speak Klingon is at least 100, and growing.

Source: "Klingon language gaining acceptance on Earth"
URL: http://www.exn.ca/Stories/1996/11/12/01.asp

(Mark Okrand invented Klingon grammar, so he should know who is fluent or not.)

Of course, you could quibble forever over who is or is not fluent enough to qualify as a fluent speaker.

A lot more people have heard of Klingon than esperanto, perhaps.
 
Bright Idea to Promote International Understanding

I just had an idea: why not create an International Language of the Mentally Ill (ILMI) to promote understanding between insane people? Maybe if the insane could understand each other, they would be able to understand themselves, and then explain themselves to the rest of us--then again, esperanto was designed to help people understand each other and look where it got.

Klingon might be more useful to humanity than esperanto: a warrior language rather than a language of peace, it might be more willingly adopted by the world's lunatics.
 
The trouble with Esperanto IMO, is that it is an artificially-created language -- thus, so as to make it easy to learn, it's very thoroughly regular and logical and rule-following. I suspect that that's part of why it never caught on much: humans like mess and inconsistency and illogic (as in real languages which grew up organically), and find the highly-regulated-and-logical-and-sensible, boring.
 
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(Transplanted from a thread originally entitled "The Dangerous Side of Esperanto")

I considered paraphrasing another thread's name as the title to this one (to give you "Abandoned, disused and ruinous old films"), but resisted temptation this time -- I dare not tread so lightly on the dark side.

Anyway, while scouting around on YouTube for free entertainment, I found a creepy film called "Incubus." I didn't realize what a history it had. You can read about it here (but really, the URL says it all):
https://qz.com/1035897/the-bizarre-...tirely-in-esperanto-starring-william-shatner/

Enjoy!
 
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I completely forgot about Esperanto until now. So the film used Esperanto as a prop in an occult based story. Placing a curse however doesn't do much for the understanding and world peace image Esperanto is suppose to foster.

But in all fairness every group has its' pit bulls.
 
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genex17 said:
Placing a curse however doesn't do much for the understanding and world peace image Esperanto is suppose to foster.

But in all fairness every group has its' pit bulls.
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Alas, too true.
 
In any case Ibis, thanks for that part of William Shatner's life I never even knew about. :cool:
 
Spaco: la fina limo. Ĉi tiuj estas la vojaĝoj de la Starship Enterprise ... :)

Not sure why audiences would find Esperanto particularly creepy, because judged by YouTube videos it sounds pretty much like Spanish, at least to my ears.

Other Esperanto trivia:

In the film Gattaca, the announcements one hears in the background at the Gattaca Institute are in Esperanto.

And a very, very obscure one: when I was a kid, perhaps my all time favorite book series entailed the futuristic adventures of one Fritz Deelman, a member of the fictional "International Security Police." It was set in the not so distant future, and thus the adventures were familiar but also had a distinct scifi feel to them.

Anyway, in the books, Esperanto had become a popular lingua franca spoken by almost everyone, so that Deelman could often communicate with people from South America to the Far East (and learning it was a requirement in his training).

These books were written in the 1950s and early 1960s, but they are still in print here in South Africa, though I suspect they are now mostly bought by older folks on a nostalgia trip because they have become rather dated now. :)
 
I am trying to figure out why this is titled "The Dangerous side of Esperanto". I assume it is because someone doesn't like Willian Shatner?
 
AlchoPwn said:
I am trying to figure out why this is titled "The Dangerous side of Esperanto". I assume it is because someone doesn't like Willian Shatner?
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The 1966 film Incubus (starring Shatner) was filmed in Esperanto.
 
MetroGnome said:
And a very, very obscure one: when I was a kid, perhaps my all time favorite book series entailed the futuristic adventures of one Fritz Deelman, a member of the fictional "International Security Police." It was set in the not so distant future, and thus the adventures were familiar but also had a distinct scifi feel to them.

Anyway, in the books, Esperanto had become a popular lingua franca spoken by almost everyone, so that Deelman could often communicate with people from South America to the Far East (and learning it was a requirement in his training).
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Wasn't the Stainless Steel Rat also fluent in Esperanto? I dimly recall Harry Harrison was quite the enthusiast for the language, and so endowed his hero with the ability to speak it.

From a linguistic point of view, while I was quite keen on the notion of Esperanto myself when still a child, in my later years I am somewhat suspicious of the extent to which it actually manages to be a universal language - it may well look like that, provided your mother-tongue was European in origin. For people from other language backgrounds, however, I suspect they would find little familiar within Esperanto's syntax and lexis.
 
Min Bannister said:
I had thought it was supposed to be a European language rather than a world one?
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Krepostnoi said:
... in my later years I am somewhat suspicious of the extent to which it actually manages to be a universal language ...
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My recollection is that:

- Esperanto's creator intended for it to be used worldwide.

- It was originally promoted as a universal second language facilitating communication and understanding among native speakers of all the diverse extant languages.

- The notion of Esperanto becoming a universal first language was a hopeful speculation rather than an explicit objective.
 
Min Bannister said:
I had thought it was supposed to be a European language rather than a world one?
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You may well be right. I'd just assumed it had global ambitions rather than mere regional aspirations.

ETA: as ever, I defer to @EnolaGaia, whose response I did not see until I'd posted my own less substantial offering.
 
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Krepostnoi said:
You may well be right. I'd just assumed it had global ambitions rather than mere regional aspirations.
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No, I have looked it up and you are correct. It was supposed to be worldwide. It may be that because my knowledge is sketchy, I had assumed that it was actually made up of European words that most Europeans could understand (eg French, German, English etc and not so much Hungarian or Finnish) The only examples I have heard have been of this ilk and presented to me as, hey, you can understand Esperanto! Why yes I can. Cool!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

The goal for Esperanto to become a general world language was not the only goal of Zamenhof; he also wanted to "enable the learner to make direct use of his knowledge with persons of any nationality, whether the language be universally accepted or not; in other words, the language is to be directly a means of international communication."[9]
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I stand corrected!
 
Krepostnoi said:
Wasn't the Stainless Steel Rat also fluent in Esperanto? I dimly recall Harry Harrison was quite the enthusiast for the language, and so endowed his hero with the ability to speak it.

From a linguistic point of view, while I was quite keen on the notion of Esperanto myself when still a child, in my later years I am somewhat suspicious of the extent to which it actually manages to be a universal language - it may well look like that, provided your mother-tongue was European in origin. For people from other language backgrounds, however, I suspect they would find little familiar within Esperanto's syntax and lexis.
Click to expand...

Sci-fi superfan Forrest J. Ackerman was a great exponent of Esperanto as well. I'm guessing because it was like Star Trek's universal translator in practice, assuming you found someone who could speak it, and didn't speak your local tongue.
 
EnolaGaia said:
My recollection is that:

- Esperanto's creator intended for it to be used worldwide.

- It was originally promoted as a universal second language facilitating communication and understanding among native speakers of all the diverse extant languages.

- The notion of Esperanto becoming a universal first language was a hopeful speculation rather than an explicit objective.
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My Grandad tried to sell the idea to me, stating that if everybody could speak it, there'd be world peace. He gave me a book by EUP press, but I never bothered.

I met (well, saw) Harry Harrison at the Brighton Worldcon in 1987. He also had a stall set up outside for a while, which was devoted to Esperanto.
 
Krepostnoi said:
Wasn't the Stainless Steel Rat also fluent in Esperanto? I dimly recall Harry Harrison was quite the enthusiast for the language, and so endowed his hero with the ability to speak it.
Click to expand...

Never heard of the Stainless Steel Rat, I fear.

From a linguistic point of view, while I was quite keen on the notion of Esperanto myself when still a child, in my later years I am somewhat suspicious of the extent to which it actually manages to be a universal language - it may well look like that, provided your mother-tongue was European in origin. For people from other language backgrounds, however, I suspect they would find little familiar within Esperanto's syntax and lexis.
Click to expand...

Yup, a Chinese or Vietnamese may find it almost as difficult as English. But if the spelling and rules are absolutely consistent I suppose it would be easier to learn for almost anyone, than natural languages. However, it may well contain sounds not found in some languages? I would think that one requirement for a universal language should be that it only contains sounds found in all languages.

I would of course suggest we just use my own native language, Afrikaans, as universal language. It's a kind of creole of Dutch, but unlike Dutch, the grammar is greatly simplified and the rules and spelling conventions remarkably consistent. There are very few irregular verbs, nouns don't have genders, there is nothing like the awkward and difficult to remember is/are thing etc.

On the negative side, it is infamous for its heavily rrrrolled Rs and guttural Gs, that even English speakers find difficult to pronounce, so I don't know what Asians might make of it. :)
 
Or we could just go back to latin.

In Denmark when you don't understand something you might say that it is volapyck. It was only recently that I learned it doesn't simply mean gibberish. Volapyck is an artificial language from the 1800s.
 
MetroGnome said:
On the negative side, it is infamous for its heavily rrrrolled Rs and guttural Gs, that even English speakers find difficult to pronounce, so I don't know what Asians might make of it. :)
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I admit I like the sound of the SA accent and can acquire it by osmosis with almost no effort. Bring it on. :)
 
MetroGnome said:
I would think that one requirement for a universal language should be that it only contains sounds found in all languages.
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There's a more recent language, Lojban, which makes a decent stab at being universal. It's vocabulary is algorithmically generated by taking word sounds from the six most commonly-spoken languages, weighted to account for the number of speakers. This, however, means Chinese sounds end up being more predominant than European, and probably makes it as initially off-putting to a Westerner as Esperanto would be to a Chinese speaker.

For a flavour, here's Alice in Wonderland in Lojban.
 
Coal said:
I admit I like the sound of the SA accent and can acquire it by osmosis with almost no effort. Bring it on. :)
Click to expand...

To me it has always sounded kind of stupid, but alas, try as I might to avoid it, it is an accent that inevitably slips into my own English. :)
 
Steerpike said:
There's a more recent language, Lojban, which makes a decent stab at being universal. It's vocabulary is algorithmically generated by taking word sounds from the six most commonly-spoken languages, weighted to account for the number of speakers. This, however, means Chinese sounds end up being more predominant than European, and probably makes it as initially off-putting to a Westerner as Esperanto would be to a Chinese speaker.

For a flavour, here's Alice in Wonderland in Lojban.
Click to expand...

I have heard of Lojban before, but I don't know much about it. One more thing to go look up... :)
 
There isn't just a wiki entry about volapyk, there are entries actually written in volapyk. Though I can't read them, to me they are just...I can't think of a good analogy right now.
 
MetroGnome said:
Interesting! I see there is a Wiki article: ...
Click to expand...

The part I find most fascinating is how the Volapük movement disintegrated owing to internal disagreements and squabbles - even to the extent of spawning multiple short-lived derivative language schemes reflecting the opinions of the conflicting cliques.

Was the notion of a constructed international language a notably widespread fad peculiar to the late 19th century?
 
The late, great sci-fi author Philip José Farmer was an Esperanto advocate and the language featured heavily in his superb Riverworld series.

As Zamenhof based Esperanto on a modernised and totally regularised version of Latin, but with a few anglo-germanic terms added, it looks readily accessible to most speakers of European languages.
 
I'd imagine in the 1800s the invention of the telegraph and phone would have spurred the creation of a new lingua franca.
 
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