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Esperanto: The artificial language that aimed to unite humanity (bigthink.com)

submitted 9 months ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to c/linguistics@mander.xyz

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[–] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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 9 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.