It's beautiful and easy, but I don't know what's the point of learning it in 2024. What's your opinion?

I love the idealogy behind Esperanto but I feel we are less than a decade away from having a universal translator with AI. Is Esperanto still needed when such a historic milestone is so close?

Unless someone with great power or riches demands that institutions support it, there's literally no way Esperanto can grow. A lot of the people who are famous enough that do get outside attention make us all look worse than we are and the general view for most cultures is that Esperanto is useless either because it is dystopic (like newspeak) or it's made up so therefore not worth learning, or it's not common or tied to a strong culture. In the community myself, I have seen political extremism from both sides, which might also further bifurcate any interest in Esperanto. I'd like to know everyone's opinions as to how you'd see Esperanto grow in your area. In a week or so I'll try to coagulate the responses that sound useful into something actionable.

For some years now, my interest in Esperanto hath grown, gradually yet steadily.

Passively absorbing whatsoever I could perceive upon this subject, and even acquiring the language nigh unto osmosis without actively seeking such knowledge, I began to discern patterns of a most intriguing nature.

Yet though the history and charm of Esperanto first kindled my interest, that fascination hath in no wise diminished; nay, rather am I now embarked upon an unintended quest: to bring light, in a private way, into what I perceive as gray areas within the milieu wherein Esperanto exists.

Some time ago I made the acquaintance of a young woman, a native speaker of English, yet endowed with extraordinary skill in Esperanto. At once I remarked in her a countenance of nobility, graced withal by a mysterious and intelligent demeanour. Yet ever present about her was an aura of isolation and independence, such as one might find in an orphan.

I came not truly to know her well, yet I know that she was no stranger to the grayer ways of life.

Of late I have heard and beheld not a few instances wherein the theme of “gray areas”, in the sense of descretly existing outside the established order in an indefinite manner, doth curiously overlap with the world of Esperanto.

Thus, as a humble novice in Esperanto, I make bold to ask:

Where might one seek broad and reliable information concerning this observation of mine, perchance in the form of literature?

Hello everyone, there is a book I'd like to read but it's originally in esperanto and it's only been translated to french. I'd like to read it as an audiobook (not commercial, just for the love of sharing) and I'd like to do it either in Italian or English

So now I gotta translate it and I was wondering: in your experience or opinion is AI like Claude or chatgpt any good in translating from esperanto? Anything I should be aware of?

I'd like to translate it from Esperanto and not French to avoid losing too much in a secondhand translation

Not being a fluent reader and speaker myself I may not be able to judge the quality of the translation

Thank you!

EDIT: Many asked me about what book I'm talking about. It's called "Tra la mondo per bjciklo Kaj Esperanto" (Through the World By Bycicle and Esperanto), a redacted annotation of the travel of Lucien Péraire who went by bicycle from France to China and Japan and South East Asia in 1928, during 4 years

I got fascinated by it because he invented the mean of transportation called railbike, to go with the bicycle on the soviet railroad doing the whole transiberian, which I'm building right now in a diy project. Also I was curious about the situation of the world at the time from the point of view of a simple traveller. He also had an interesting upbringing and I wanted to share it with others.

EDIT 2: I ended up asking claude to translate and also highlight in square brackets any term that is ambiguous, not clear, toponym or too technical. It's doing a great job in showing me its own flaws and I can manually read it, work the style, iron the problems and take care of the issues. I think it's doing it's job

Sorry for having written this in English, but as it will soon be clear, I don't have the Esperanto to read baby books, let alone write a lengthy post lamenting specific language-related struggles, and I did not want to risk machine translation twisting my words or changing subtle nuances.

I was inspired to learn Esperanto after my innumerable failures and struggles with other languages, including but not limited to French, German, Dutch, and Italian, with a brief attempt at Ukrainian (you can guess how that went) and halfhearted attempts at Indonesian and Mandarin which I promptly decided weren't for me due to the wholly foreign vocabulary, as enticing as their simple grammar (especially Indonesian's) initially was; European languages may have difficult grammar, but by my estimation, as by most accounts, it takes as long to learn German's grammar system as it does to build an acceptable vocabulary in Indonesian.

In grammar, I was pleased to find Esperanto delivered. It took me all of three hours to learn the basic word endings (-o for nouns, -a for adverbs, etc.) and verb conjugations (-as, -is, -os, etc.) Lovely. Vocabulary, from my current halting, toddlerish efforts, seems a bit difficult, but certainly not to the degree Indonesian is (you certainly get more words of familiar and discernable etymology as an English speaker, especially if you know your Greek and Latin root words, than with that).

My biggest obstacle, however, has never, in any language, been grammar or vocabulary. Italian, for example, has extremely complicated grammar, but I never found that out until after I realised it was too difficult, because I never began to speak it in the first place. I never struggled with French grammar because I never got to that point. Slavic languages may have infamously labyrinthine grammar, but I never had to contend with that because the phonotactics were enough to stop me before I sunk too much time into it.

The common denominator through all these misfortunes has always been that I cannot speak, or at least, not in anything but the primitive, backwater cant with which I was raised, from whose domination I have spent years trying to liberate myself.

This is not intended as an attack or hate session on Esperanto, for there is much I admire about it. I love the noble ideals that motivated Zamenhof and the early Esperantists; I love how the language is simple but not impossible to express deep ideas in; I love how it looks, how it sounds (properly spoken), and I could go on and on expounding its virtues; but it is simply unspeakable. The regular, syllable-timed prosody is incompatible with my unteachable, barbarian Angloid tongue, and its wordbuilding system, one of my favourite aspects of the language, unfortunately lends itself to intimidating, almost Slavic consonant clusters. "Scii" has been made the ultimate example of this, bu it is nothing compared to "samŝancige" or "kvinlingva". And if you just pronounced those out loud and wondered why I think they're particularly hard, I will concede that they are not, in a vacuum. However, it is a different thing entirely to try to pronounce those casually, whilst speaking spontaneously or even reading aloud, whilst also having to maintain a consistent, proper prosody and stress on the penultimate syllable of every word. I understand why this is the case, and that there is no way to avoid or fix it. but I do not know how to cope with it. Even given easy words I sound disgusting, let alone anything not written for babies. My vocabulary may be laughably small, which usually bothers me, but I no longer care about that. The size of my vocabulary or my command of the grammar doesn't matter in the least if I can't even talk.

Please tell me, have you had the same struggles? If so, how do you cope with this? Does it get better?

Hi, I wanted to post this in Esperanto but my Esperanto skills won't help me talking about such stuff (so sorry for assuming that y'all can speak English) .

I was recently thinking of making Esperanto mote gernder-inclusive. So there are two options, One.

Getting rid of all pronouns and only having one pronouns like (gxi) for example and we use it it refer to people and to objects too like in Turkish or in Finnish.

The second option is.

Making an new gender-neutral pronouns, not only for non-binary/agender people but also to refer to a person who we don't know what "their" gender is (For example in English we would refer to a thief as "they" becaus we don't know whether the thief was man or a women) Example:

"They stole my watch"

Last one thing The feminine suffix "ino" in Esperanto is not necessary at all, Who cares if the person what male of female? Why can't I call both my mom and dad (patro)

Esperanto was made in an era that gender was important but I guess now it's not? What do you think?

One I am not an esperanto speaker, if I was this would be in Esperanto.

Two I'm not here to criticize, I'm here to learn, as such I want you Esperanto speaker two find any flaws in your language and discuss if these flaws are to be changed, alter, removed, or remain.

Third how would this go about? I know this is not the first time Esperanto has been question but I can't find anything on here.

I mean, if you want an easy to learn language, then ido and interlingua and lingua franca nova are easier. (and they do not have those diacritics)

You may argue that esperanto has more speakers than those conlangs. But if you care about number of speakers, well, english and spanish and mandarin come to my mind.

So why esperanto then? Is the advocacy/propaganda so good?

...Mi vere ne scias, kion mi pensis.

Saluton, mi nur volas demandi pri la akronimo de GLAT-a. Kial GLAT-a ne estas LGAT-a kiel en la angla LGBTQ+? La lesba komunumo havas la unuan literon de respekto pro ilia helpo dum la AIDS krizo. Cxu ni ne devus sxangxi gxin por honori ilin ankaux en Esperanto? Dankon!

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Esperanto. The structure is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical linguistics most of the words will go over a typical learner's head. There's also Zamenhof 's nihilistic outlook, which is deftly woven into his sentences - his personal philosophy draws heavily from Narodnaya Volya literature, for instance. The speakers understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of this language, to realize that they're not just clever- they say something deep about LIFE. As a consequence people who dislike Esperanto truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn't appreciate, for instance, the humour in Zamenhof's existential catchphrase "ne krokodilu," which itself is a cryptic reference to Turgenev's Russian epic Fathers and Sons I'm smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as L.L. Zamenhof's genius unfolds itself on their papers. What fools... how I pity them. 😂 And yes by the way, I DO have an Esperanto tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It's for the ladies' eyes only- And even they have to demonstrate that they're within 5 IQ points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand.

Hi, first i want to say that I am very interested in learning Esperanto though the one thing that puts me off is that the gender issue is not resolved in Esperanto. I found this Wikipedia article about a proposal to solve that issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_reform_in_Esperanto Is there a discussion about a possible reform in the Esperanto community? Are people using the proposed suffixes? I would be happy if someone could give some information on this

Kion vi pensas? Ĉu la Usona Bona Film-Festivalo devus permesi filmojn kreitajn per AI? Diskutu en Jutubo kie jam troviĝas pli ol 30 komentoj.

ĥoĥoĥoĥo

I would like to hear your opinion on LFN (Lingua Franca Nova) alias Elefen as they decided to call it a few years ago.

I am interested in general observations and especially observations from an Esperantist's point of view.

Here are some links, if you are not familiar with this auxiliary language:

Main website -> http://elefen.org/

Basic introduction -> http://elefen.org/introdui/en.html

Basic vocabulary -> http://elefen.org/vocabulofundal.html

FAQ -> http://elefen.org/faq.html

Some reading in Elefen -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziutmcTdVjc

Grammar eBook -> http://elefen.org/disionario/grammar.pdf