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Cake day: November 26th, 2023

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  • Esperanto is also good, but when my partner tried to learn it, they were weirded out by some of it’s quirks, like noun declinations based on whether it’s a subject or object, that seems unecessary.

    That sounds interesting. Esperanto has no noun-declinations, it’s an agglutinating language, you don’t bend words (= declination).

    But what is barely resembling that what you mention is the two cases of the language, which is nominative and the so called “accusative”. Which is adding -n to words to make them an object, depending on whether the verb of the sentence needs one or not. This case also is not just for objects, but also for directions, for measurements and time. That combination normally confuses the heck out of people.

    Which is why there is also an in-joke in the Esperanto community “don’t forget the accusative”, because people forget it or apply it too often.



  • Esperanto is eurocentric, because it’s international. Because romance languages where made by colonialism of the roman empire. The argument goes of “equality”. Thinking the other way around would be that asiatic languages colonized the world, then Esperanto would be based on asiatic languages.

    Esperanto is a pragmatic language, not a “totally neutral” language. If you design a language to be “totally neutral” then parts would be distributed differently. How to chose which vocabulary of languages should be used often?

    So using romance languages is a pragmatic solution to this. Through usage words can be added or fall out of use, all that is allowed in Esperanto and which can make the language out of colonialism in the future more egalitarian.

    But it’s ignorant to ignore Esperanto at all and morally vilifying it as “eurocentric therefore bad”.