Wait, what? Why do you want to have raging sex with dragons?

What does "synthetic" mean? Aren't pretty much all languages synthetic, ie. people have just decided that a banana should be called a banana, and not a fuckermeister? It is not like a banana makes a sound "Bah! NA-NA!" when it drops down from a tree, or bush or wherever they grow.

A lecture incoming:

The reason Finnish written words might seem hard to pronounce to you is because you are trying to think like an English speaker. In English there aren't really any simple rules how words are pronounced, you basically have to learn by heart how each written word is pronounced. I guess that's why you have those "spelling bee" contests in school, to show how well you have memorized how different words are written (because you can't really tell how it is written by how it is pronounced; there is no clear connection between the two).

So when you see a (Finnish) word you don't recognize, of course you are puzzled how you (an English speaker) are supposed to pronounce it.

In Finnish we don't have nor need spelling contests because Finnish is 99% a phonetic language, as in "words are written as they are pronounced". That's actually one of the things that make sense in Finnish, and I hope Esperanto has the same (as it was supposed to be easy to learn).

You pronounce to me any non-Finnish word, and I could probably write it down how it would be written in Finnish, and another Finnish person could probably pronounce it pretty much correctly (minus intonation) by just reading what I've written, without knowing the word or language in question. Phonetic.

What, on the other hand, makes Finnish hard to learn, is the quite complicated grammar. Pronunciation in Finnish is quite easy, when you get over your "English way of thinking". So in essence you were complaining about something that is pretty easy in Finnish. :)

BTW, I mentioned Chinese without knowing next to nothing about the language (Mandarin or Cantonese, the heck I know the difference...). I just presume it is one of the hardest languages to learn, considering how it is written, and also how IIRC intonation can change the meaning of words completely. That is definitely something we don't have in Finnish, a dog (=koira) is a dog, no matter whether you use an ascending, descending, low, high or vibrating intonation. I know a bit of Thai language, and there I also know intonation is quite important (to be understood correctly).


EDIT: About daylight saving time, let's argue about that in any of the incoming threads where people (like me) will complain again about having to move clocks. Albeit now in autumn it is not as bad as in the spring, as now we get to sleep one hour longer in the morning, and after all now it is the normal time that is coming back. I'll talk only about languages in this Esperanto thread.

Jes, mi povas paroli Esperanton.

The idea at the time was to create a language easy enough to learn that it could become everyone's second language with a few months of study. It was based on Latin, with word roots borrowed from every major European language from French to Russian, and set up so that its simple rules of grammar would fit on a single page, with zero exceptions.

So what happened?

First, World War I. For a time, nobody had much reason to speak to their neighbor, unless it was to shout curses at them just before trying to kill them.

Second, Nazi Germany. Zamenhof (the original inventor) had the misfortune to be born a Polish Jew, and in Germany's eyes that made his creation suspect. Hitler outright banned the learning of the language.

It saw a revival during the peace and love era of the 1970s, and a big surge with the dawn of the internet. Lernu.net has been in existence for almost 15 years; and Duolingo.com released an English to Esperanto course last year, which as of now has more than half a million students, including myself. Vikipedio, the Esperanto Wikipedia, has well over a quarter million articles written, making it the 32nd most popular language on the site.

Fun fact #1: Right before signing on for Star Trek, William Shatner starred in an Esperanto movie called [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubus_(1966_film)]Incubus[/url].

Fun fact #2: Esperanto was actually Zamenhof's chosen name for himself; it translates as One Who Hopes. The language was originally called the Internacia Lingvo, the international language; but people started calling it by his pseudonym instead, and it kind of stuck.

It is one side of a scale which indicates how much information is in a word, on average, in that language. (to be specific, you'd need to care about the concept of a morpheme, but for the general idea, thinking of it as information per word is usually sufficient) Languages with a lot of information per word are called synthetic. Since, linguistically, there is no theoretical limit to how long a Finnish word can be (so I was taught; do correct me if that's wrong), it's considered highly synthetic. So word order is more flexible (ownership can often be seen by declension of nouns in synthetic languages) and you often use fewer words to communicate the same idea. Compare it to Chinese, in particular, which is a language mostly comprised of words made of very simple parts. Mandarin is the opposite of a synthetic language, called analytic.

Sorry about the nonsense sentence, I just wanted an excuse to include that first monster of a word ^_^

So my question was: is Esperanto a phonetic language, ie. things are written pretty much how they are pronounced, and vice versa? Something that e.g. at least English and French don't do? Not sure about Spain etc.

Ah ok, thanks for that. I didn't know about that being an established term, I thought you were referring it to something like "unnatural" language or something. Yes, it is true that one (long) word can contain lots of information and nuances in Finnish, which is part of that "hard grammar" thing I mentioned.

So since you know something about Chinese, is it hard or easy to learn, compared to other languages? This just occurred to me when I recently read of the former head of Rovio (the Angry Birds company) deciding to learn Chinese in mere two months or something, as a personal challenge or something.

It mentioned something about him saying some sentence in Chinese but then getting it all wrong because of wrong intonation (changing the whole meaning of the sentence, just because of wrong intonation, go figure), and the Chinese teacher needed to correct him right away. Learning proper intonation is strange for Finnish because we don't really use it in Finnish, we don't necessarily even raise our voice towards the end of the sentence when asking something. A sentence doesn't automatically change to a question in Finnish, just because you happen to raise your voice towards the end. :)

I like the DLI as a language school, and thus give weight to their categories. Mandarin is considered a Category 4 language, which is the hardest to learn. You've said you know some Thai and are familiar with tonality; Mandarin won't be as hard for you if you're already used to the importance of vocal pitch. Note that other Cat4 languages include Japanese and Arabic (the DLI teaches MSA mostly) - neither of which are very hard to learn to a conversational level. So the difficulty is a relative thing.

I know maybe enough Chinese to order food and understand what they were saying in Firefly. I can't read or write one bit. I really don't know it hardly at all.

Yeah, but as a non-tonal Finn, I tend to get frustrated if someone corrects me for using wrong intonation. My reaction usually is: "Come on, that's exactly what I said already, only with a lower and more monotone voice. Are we trying to communicate or sing here?". :)

Hmm, come to think of it, it feels to me a bit like someone is trying to teach me to sing, when they are teaching me correct intonation in some language. Maybe I just don't have a perfect pitch then. :)

I don't know if it was about intonation or what, but I recall when my French teacher (who was a French who had moved to Finland, so he should know his stuff) tried to teach me how to correctly pronounce "technicien". No matter how many times I tried, he claimed I kept saying "techno dog" (techni-chien) or somethng, but I felt I said it exactly like him. I guess not.

Heh, awesome. No, that's not intonation. It's the difference between a "soft" (alveolar) sibilant, like the s in sun, and a slightly "harder" (post-alveolar) sibilant like the sh in shoe. Intonation would be if asking (in our normal, non-tonal way of raised inflection at the end of a question) ou est le technicien meant where is the technician, but informing (in the typical non-tonal way of slightly dropped tone at the end of a sentence) il est la, le technicien meant the technodog is there.

That's probably a terrible example. There's a reason I stopped working as a linguist.

The short answer is <span class="bold">yes, very much so</span>. The slightly longer answer is that there are a few unusual sounds (most notably ĥ, which is pronounced like the 'h' in tuhka or mahti) so there may be some variation based on the speaker's own familiarity.

I have wanted to learn about Esperanto for a while to point where I have a book on it, But I don’t know if I should take the plunge.

By the way my first exposure was from this show. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rkymzsiZFQ

can someone translate?

Definitely take the plunge. Duolingo offers <span class="bold">a free online course</span>, broken into bite-sized lessons.


I wish I could, but it's either nonsense or broken. It's along the lines of, "I am a little toward your [something] in my [something]." The problem is that neither of those nouns seem to be an actual Esperanto word.

Well, I've also been studying Spanish (for two years now, for work-related reasons) and I can tell you that Esperanto does have quite a bit of similarity to it as well. That's because the Romance languages are derived from Latin, and Esperanto borrowed heavily from Latin for that very reason: it means that Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian speakers will recognize more than half the vocabulary right away, except for minor spelling differences to make words conform to the Esperanto rules of pronunciation and grammar.

Sorry. I don't mean to have taken over this thread; but I've had a thing about this language ever since I first learned about it back in the 80s, in my college days.

And here's yet another article about it, this one from Ozy.com. (Full disclosure: I am not Chuck Smith, though I am friends with him on Facebook.)

Yeah... but to my untrained ear it sounded specifically like Spanish. I didn't get a feeling like that it sounded like Italian or especially French almost at all. Of those languages I know French the best, and even that is quite little...

I have no idea how Latin sounds though, but for those other languages (Spanish, French and Italian) I'd say I can recognize right away which of them the language is, if I e.g. see some non-English movie. Not that I understand one bit of those movies without subtitles.

That reminds me that I should watch that French movie soon, Un prophète. A friend of mine just told me to watch it, at least he liked it.

I just got clued in to this today - there's a Spanish-learning podcast taught by a Scottish gentleman with a distinctly Castillan accent in Spanish. It's a fun set of accents to hear. link

A Scottish man who talks like a robot text-reading program speaking in Castillan Spanish. And here I thought I'd heard of everything.