Hello guys. So I’ve seen a lot of conlangs made, based of other languages, namely English or Romance languages such as Esperanto, Interlingua and many others. I just wanted to ask, are these languages made for a joke or as a task because, there seem to be many of them, even on omniglot. Are these conlangs mostly for fun? Is that why, they are mostly underused?
Some of them are certainly made just for fun, but I think that most of them, their creators were serious. The problem is just that people will speak whatever the heck they want, and so languages evolve naturally, not by a creator’s fiat.
This. Esperanto (one of the ones the OP mentions) was created with the intent to be an “international auxiliary language” – that is, the creators hoped that it would widely be learned as a second language by people, and thus would become a tool to make international communication easier.
Its creator, and adherents, certainly took/take it seriously. A big part of the issue, as to why it never caught on, seems to be that it’s never been widely taught or widely spoken. It’s apparently never been granted any sort of official status by any major country, and according to various studies which are quoted in the Wikipedia entry for Esperanto indicates that the number of reasonably fluent speakers of Esperanto, worldwide, is only somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000, and it sounds like much of that is the result of there being “Esperanto clubs” (where people can meet up to speak Esperanto with one another) in some larger cities, primarily in Europe and East Asia.
If you were interested in learning a constructed language, like Esperanto, but there were few, or no, people around you with whom you could speak it, I’m sure that that’s a major impediment for it growing in usage.
Well, that’s controversial. If they were Serious, they would try to spread it around the world.
Esperanto aficionados, for one example, certainly have been trying to spread it around the world, though with only a small degree of success. The fact that they haven’t been successful at this should not be interpreted as a lack of seriousness about their mission on their part.
To facilitate communication, we’ll have two people learn a new language instead of just one.
Yeah, I was thinking just that, as to a big reason why it hasn’t taken off. Especially now, when English has become so widespread as a secondary language in many parts of the world, with over a billion people who can speak it (to some degree) as a second language.
AIUI, the fans of Esperanto believe that an easy-to-learn “neutral” constructed language is preferable to a language which has a specific cultural heritage (and, hypothetically, baggage, I suppose). But, yeah, it means that it’s essentially no one’s primary language, and thus, has to be learned as a secondary language by all speakers of it.
Personally, I hope hànziyŭ takes off. This is a conlang based on the Chinese written characters, where the pronunciation of a word is derived from how the character is written. Consequently, if you know how to say the word you can write the character and vice versa.
Somewhat related, there was a family who tried to raise their son speaking Klingon (originally the father’s idea). It lasted until the boy was about three. After that, he wanted to speak what everyone else was speaking.
I have been to the Esperanto Congress and can testify that it is not a joke, absolutely a real language along with literature, theater, media, even culture.
Um, while there are (a few) people who have Esperanto as a native language, because that is what their parents speak at home, such individuals typically grow up speaking at least three languages, and should not have trouble speaking what everyone else is speaking.
Perhaps the Klingon story was about some people using their son as a guinea pig, though not in a controlled experiment? Incidentally, the Unicode Technical Committee in May 2001 rejected a proposal to encode “Klingon script” because, basically, there was no evidence it was a real thing real people actually used in real life, even those who knew some version of Klingon.
IIRC around 80% or 90% of Chinese characters are already “phono-semantic”, for what that is worth.
Back to Esperanto, it is hard to say how easy or difficult it is to pronounce for a random, especially non-European, person, but at the end of the day is it just another language, albeit with a reasonable one-to-one correspondence of letters (there are 28) to sound.
Oh, it definitely wasn’t a controlled experiment. Completely home-brew. And only one subject.
I am NOT an expert in this field; not even a little bit.
I suggest that pre-internet, there simple was no way for a micro-language to spread. Whether that’s a conlang or some dying language like Cherokee or Cornish. Unless you had a critical mass of speakers in one physical location, there was little incentive for mainstream people to pick up the micro-langauge, and plenty of incentive for the micro-language people to learn and use the mainstream language.
The internet changed that. Like-minded folks can easily connect and communicate via written text, audio, and video.
If somebody starting from an existing online following came up with a good enough language and sold it right it might take off.
Esperanto was already something out there used by dusty old professors and language nerds when the internet was born. It would never be hip. Although, ref @DPRK, it has almost certainly benefitted from the advent of the internet.
Esperanto has also had for decades, besides the aforementioned congresses, programs where people meet each other, or travel and stay with each other, all the while speaking Esperanto, of course. In other words, efforts to maintain a community even though there is no critical mass of speakers concentrated in one physical location.
All the same, I have not heard that there is a huge effort to expand the use of any of these languages, e.g. one of those international universities except to get in one would be required to be proficient in Esperanto, instead of English. There was something like that in San Marino, but I have no idea how much funding they get and in what, if any, form they are still around.
Excellent info. Thank you.
Efforts cost money. Which entity stands to profit financially from spending that money? We live on a (mostly) capitalist planet and that which makes somebody money gets funded and that which doesn’t … doesn’t.
I’m not picking on you; you just laid out the problem very neatly.
E.g.: If somebody thought an Esperanto-only Facebook lookalike or Xitter-equivalent could make them tens of billions, they’d spend the hundreds of millions needed to make the language popular enough to make their project achieve critical mass to succeed.
Absent that, we’ll have what we have: the comparative pennies of the random enthusiasts / nerds / academics / do-gooders mostly speaking into the silent, uncaring, and uncomprehending wilderness.
Conlangs haven’t taken off because they don’t spread and become a lingua franca for the historical and traditional reasons - commerce and conquest.
There was that 1966 movie shot in Esperanto, Incubus (1966 film) - Wikipedia, starring William Shatner. The cast had only a few days to memorize the lines phonetically, so you can imagine how badly it sounded to the few theater goers that actually spoke the language. I like this part: “Principal photography took place over 18 days in May 1965. Location shooting took place at Big Sur Beach and at the Mission San Antonio de Padua near Fort Hunter Liggett in Monterey County. Concerned that the authorities would not grant permission to shoot a horror film in these places, especially the Mission, Stevens concocted a cover story that the film was actually called Religious Leaders of Old Monterey , and showed the script, in Esperanto, but with stage directions and descriptions about monks and farmers.”
I did not add, because it almost goes without saying, that those private universities rake in money because international students have to pay $20,000 (or whatever) in tuition. Even in countries like Germany, they just have the curriculum in English, because everybody everywhere is already taught English in school, so that is the way to maximize the number of applicants, not filtering them for proficiency in German or Latin or Esperanto.
I imagine an Esperantist university would by its nature be anti-capitalist!
Leaving Esperanto and how well it is or is not spoken completely aside, that movie is worth watching at least once. It is not crap as some might expect from the low budget; the cinematography and surreal atmosphere work somehow.
Yeah.
I’ve dabbled in Esperanto for decades now and I can’t say I’m an expert or speak it well, but even to my ear a lot of the dialogue sounded like the actors had little to know idea of what they were saying, which was probably true. It wasn’t a horrible movie, but between a language that almost nobody knew, filming in black and white, and less than awesome production values it was sort of doomed from the start.
If anyone is wondering, here is a clip from the movie with some dialogue mixed in here and there. Having subtitle definitely helps with understanding what they’re saying. Some of the words are pretty clear, some of it is not intelligible to me.
The whole movie can be seen here: link
IMO, the shocking bit is not that con langs fail. It is that they succeed as much as they do. My friend Evelyn speaks Esperanto. Her late husband, Bill, spoke it, had books on it and once showed me his copy of The Hobbit in Esperanto. The fact that Esperanto has lasted these decades is mind boggling.
Well, what would you have them do? The way to get a lot of speakers is to have a lot of speakers. And you get that lot of speakers by having a lot of speakers. It’s a tough market to break into.
On the other hand, aren’t Tolkien’s Elvish scripts (Quenya and Tengwar) included?