Opinion on crafted languages:
I'm really sceptical that any crafted language will ever actually work if one of those don't happen :
- a gov decide to make it official language and enforce it's use at the expence of the country previous language.
- the gate keppers stop being rigid about the rules and let people who use the language decide what works better for them, and adapt the rules.
I understand the later might bring some confusion at the beginning, but languages need to adapt to the people who speak them, not the reverse.
@Ambraven I do agree. However, I don't think it is useless though. I mean, it's fun to learn, fun to create. And learning something like Esperanto is easy enough so that with only little knowledge, it is able to understand and talk about basic things.
However, I think there are also other issues (about Esperanto, but it may be applied to other languages as well) : Esperanto aims to be an international language, but is based only on european ones ; it is really binary (probably less inclusive than french, I really don't like marking the gender of every word).
@fluffy @Ambraven I read somewhere that a lot of the esperanto structures are similar to those of eastern-asian languages as a counter argument to the pretended eurocentrism of esperanto. Is it a common argument ? I also read about a "patch" to esperanto fixing the gender issues (i think it was something like riism), isn't that used ? I mean it isn't because someone says it isn't correct that we can't use it (just like gender neutral grammar isn't considered correct in french but we still use it) : at the end the users are the ones that are right.
I didn't hear the eastern structure argument. But my experience with Esperanto is that it has lot to do with german/latin grammar and structures.
As for the gender "patch" it's clumsy, often frowned upon or at least using it marks you as sjw, and it doesn't fixes some questionable choice of root words.
@Ambraven Thanks for the insight !
Here is the article about eurocentrism : http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenfrancais/langueoccidentale.htm
It's probably biased but really interesting nonetheless.
@fluffy
@Hector @fluffy I skimmed over the article, but it seems it's only argument for Esperanto being also close to Chinese is it's regularity. The language is build to be easy to learn, it doesn't need to look at a specific language to decide irregular verbs are bad. Also the part where Esperanto decline words... Well Latin and Germanic languages can do that too, so relating that to Chinese seems useless.
I'm unconvinced.
@fluffy I fully agree with this.
Esperanto is problematic, some people try to arrange that, the gate keepers are like "IT'S TOO COMPLICATED, DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING, IT'S NOT A REAL ISSUE, etc"...
Dude, if you're language is so fragile it is doomed too fail.
And indeed it's european centric.
Lojban is really better for all this, letting you precise stuff or not as you like, but it's freaking difficult to learn and speak. (and you don't find many translators online... for a language supposedly easy for computer to parse, it is disapointing. )