Christmas: a good time to broach a topic of hope. We’re talking Esperanto. This language that spurred the hope it one day could hack the barriers between people, eliminating war and miscommunication. The video below unpacks the history of this linguistic marvel. Esperanto was a constructed language dreamed up in 1887 by Ludwik Zamenhof, a Polish-Russian eye doctor with a knack for linguistics and great ideals. If you’re a little into linguistics yourself, you’ll sure know the name stems from the Latin sperare: to hope.
Inspired by the chaos of multilingual strife in his hometown, Zamenhof created Esperanto to unite humanity under a single, simple, easy-to-learn tongue. With just 16 grammar rules, modular word-building, and no pesky exceptions — looking at you, English — Esperanto was a linguistic hack ahead of its time.
But Esperanto wasn’t just a novelty—it almost became the lingua franca of diplomacy. In 1920, Iran proposed Esperanto as the official language of the League of Nations, but the French vetoed it, fearing their language’s global dominance was at risk. From there, Esperanto’s journey took a darker turn as both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia persecuted its speakers. Despite this, Esperanto persisted, surfacing in quirky corners of culture, from William Shatner’s Esperanto-only horror film Incubus to its inclusion on NASA’s Voyager Golden Record.
Fast-forward to the digital age: Esperanto is thriving on online learning platforms, where over a million learners explore its minimalist elegance. It appears at places in various editions of Grand Theft Auto. It has even inspired modern makers to create new constructed languages, like Loglan, Toki Pona, and even Klingon. Could Esperanto—or any reimagined language—rise again to unite us? For curious minds, watch the video here.
Perhaps evolution is better than intelligent design. LISPers of 1960s scoffed at primitives doing BCPL, COBOL or assembly. 60 years later LISP machines are gathering dust in museums while C (a descendant of BCPL) powers everything from smart toilet seats and Hatsune Miku figurines to airplanes, anti-tank missiles, nuclear power plants and mars rovers.
I like C. Easy portable to different platforms.
I have no idea why python is promoted so hard and being an interpreted language like basic has no realtime operation.
Could it be because of Adafruit pushing it as the tinkering language?
Python is promoted because it’s a forgiving language to beginners. Note forgiving is a fact and easy is a personal opinion.
There’s no conspiracy with how it’s pushed, much like there us no need for semi colons on every line, structures are by necessity only, and most importantly it’s readable / legible by those who are new to programming.
Pascal is forgiving too, especially with its clear error messages. And Python is not very good as high-performance language. It was advertised as this easy to learn language, so everyone was and is learning it. This made it popular, and that popularity pushed it to infect everything. It’s a viscous cycle. If you want PDP-1 performance on your Ryzen or Pentium box, write it in Python. I once wrote a simple, iterative script that performed some multiplications of few variables, then single division of the result, and then it printed the result. It was so slow, I could watch numbers increase for every line. I’m pretty sure that if I wrote this as .bat file for Windows CLI, it would work faster…
Any language that uses tabs and CRLF as a vital part of its syntax is just evil.
Calling print is slow. But yeah, if someone doesn’t want to use brackets and such they should go get an IDE to do it for them, rather than non-printed characters being part of code.
I love C and C++ (from a distance for C++). But you’re very out of touch if you don’t know why Python is beloved.
Last weekend I made a simple chess backend using pychess, flask and sqlite3 it probably took under an hour to have something in happy with.
And then I began work using micropython for a client on a ESP32.
How long would that take you in C? Honestly?
I’ve also done projects where I desperately needed C just to get the latency and footprint small enough to fit the target and saved £££ due to that.
Horses for courses.
Read preface to “How to Think Like a Computer Scientist, Learning with Python” part “How and why I came to use Python”:
https://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkCSpy.pdf
Thanks for posting that. I’m on Ch. 3 and finding it quite a good book, and suited for beginners as well as users of other languages. I too am tired of having pythons shoved down my throat but may become a convert though I pledge not to proselytise. Better than a UNIX class I once tried where the instructor started with “Every computer has a Central Processing Unit blahblahblahblah…” Imagine 4 hours of that on your first day. Didn’t hang around to get the full experience, walked out in the first hour.
I love C[++], but it requires a good bit of skill and experience to write good C. In fact, IMO, I think it’s the only appropriate language to use for certain things – kernel / core OS stuff, speed-critical applications, or anything where you want to (or need to) get close to the hardware or memory.
But Python is easy, approachable, fast to develop, has far fewer things to worry about (memory allocation, pointers, etc.), and has built-in libraries to do all kinds of stuff. Plus, it’s performance is acceptable.
While it may be interpreted (well, run on a virtual machine), it’s a hell of a lot faster than the old interpreter BASICs that it’s taken the place of. You can (almost) always write something that runs faster in C / C++, but it would be tough to call any modern Python “slow”.
Re: Micro Python, I can’t stand it, especially because I usually use AVR uCs. I’d rather write C, or just go all the way and do it in assembly. (Though I’ll be honest that I enjoy the latter mostly because it’s fun to be that close to the hardware, and find creative ways to make an 8-bit machine do your bidding).
It will not be a tough call to say “modern Python is slow.” Comparing with BASIC, yes, but it’s unfair to compare its VM with a 60 year old interpreter.
I know I am biased, because I am a beginner C programmer, and ex-pro PHP programmer. I ported a trading bot from Python to PHP and the speed increase was brutal. Cycle time (from deciding to open an order to receiving confirmation) went from 4-8 seconds to 200-300 milliseconds. Network RTT was on tens of milliseconds, so most of the cycle time was application processing, not network.
Python is way faster than old BASIC, but PHP is faster than it when you know what you are doing. And C beats both to dust.
Why? Because Python is so easy to use. Not just for beginners. I use it in my projects a lot and professionally too. When you don’t need absolute speed/real-time/etc. Python is hard to beat. 99% of the time it runs fast enough to get the job done. Right now I am playing around with the Pico 2. MicroPython makes it easy to program for a lot of things. BTW I am a die-hard C programmer by trade, and assembly, and even Pascal/Object Pascal was used a lot in my career. Accessing registers of hardware in ‘C’ to do things was a skill well learned… But now I use Python for most projects and drop to C/C++ only when I really need it … which isn’t that often anymore. Loving it!
I love C, and learned to code in C – which was hard, but ultimately invaluable. But, professionally, my computer costs 1-2 cents an hour to run, so most work that doesn’t have to be in C or C++ is done in Python these days because it is so easy to spin up a brand spanking new Python environment, get the packages you need and hammer out some code. The fact that all this abstraction results in 100,000 to 1000,000 times more instructions actually going through the CPU is irrelevant.
The reality is it is important to know how computers actually work, which assembly or C is great for, it is great to quickly learn algorithms and data structures, for which you cannot beat Python’s flexibility and readability, and if computers are your livelihood rather than a hobby, it is great to learn that usually coding costs vastly outweigh runtime costs – C/++ is important when the hardware has to be dirt cheap or energy efficient or enormous amounts of computation has to happen, but most of the time, that doesn’t matter.
Related to Mars Rovers and old languages, I’m still confused as to why FORTH is so widely used in space probes and adjacent systems. I’m sure there’s an interesting history behind this
Forth (and Lisp) need very little space, run efficiently even on small CPUs/microcontrollers, and especially: have proven themselves to be interactively debuggable from within the system. Very important if system or especially hardware access is … impractical.
Properties of the language and 2. ready availability of a sufficiently capable, low-power, radiation-hardened chip that ran it natively.
About the language, I mean Forth’s peculiar combination of coder efficiency and hardware efficiency. It gives you handy low-level control but also encourages you to immediately start abstracting toward high-level commands. Then if you do so in steps too big to easily reason about, or you pick abstractions that aren’t domain-appropriate, or that are too tightly coupled with each other, Forth makes your work difficult promptly, while the error is still easy to tear out and redo.
The chip in question is the RTX-2010. It can enter a subroutine in a single instruction, recurse up to 256 levels deep (for a single chip in 1988, this is outstanding), and the call stack is in hardware. Data stack is also 256 in hardware. And its production runs were (are?) large for a rad-hard chip.
Almenaŭ vi provis.
“the name stems from the Latin esperi: to hope.” Nope. Not Latin in any direction.
First conjugation: Verbs ending in “-are”
Second conjugation: Verbs ending in “-ere”
Third conjugation: Verbs ending in “-ere”
Fourth conjugation: Verbs ending in “-ire”
‘The verb meaning “to hope” is spērō, spērāre, spērāvī, spērātum. This verb is from the 1st conjugation, and is completely regular. Some quick phrases include: “spērō” – I hope.’
This is why I will learn Speranto, no need of -are -ere -ire stuff. Or maybe Spanglish or Japanglish.
Or Chinglish — the standard language in product manuals for Amazon merchandise.
I think Japanglish wins with Namewee: you start like wth? and seconds later you can’t take it out of you head! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhGnuWwpNxI
By the way something and not for nothing, in the good old days, that 4th one would have been spērātus (masc.) instead of spērātum (neut.). Might as well go the whole hog including the postage and just say spērāthey. Whole effing world’s going to hell in a handbasket.
Wow, triggered much?
As a fluent speaker I must correct your assertive correction.
– root word “espero” = hope
– suffix “anto” = one who does something
Esperanto was a bizarre idea. A new language which no one can understand.
Interlingua on the other hand was genius – the most common bits from European languages rolled together. And due to English, French, or Spanish being a trade language in most of the world, most of the world can at least vaguely understand it. (Writing it is harder, as you’ve got to learn the vocabulary; it’s designed to be widely understood)
Reader – Given you’re on HaD you presumably read English. You can read interlingua:
Interlingua se ha distacate ab le movimento pro le disveloppamento e le introduction de un lingua universal pro tote le humanitate.
I can /almost/ read it. So “you presumably read English. You can read interlingua” is /almost/ correct.
Yes, it’s a practical solution because it derives from de facto standards like Latin and English (although, judging by this sample, more Latin than English :)).
But! From what I’ve seen, where Esperanto wins is the alphabet. One letter is pronounced in one way only, so for example “c” is always the same whether it is in “ca”, “ci” or “ce”. It isn’t sometimes read as “k” and sometimes as “s”. I know that the alphabets in former Yugoslavia (maybe others as well) have the same principle, and learning to read or write is trivial to the point that they don’t even have a word for “spelling”. If you know how to say a word, you know how to write it. Learn how to pronounce individual letters and you can read.
Jes . ( yes )
Unu sono unu litero estas la regulo.
One sound one letter.
And the stress / accent of syllables is always on the last but one syllable.
La monto estas granda. The mountain is big.
Plus that there is the h system for the letter
Sh -š and ć -ch
La shuo- the shoe
la Chevalo – the horse 🐎
Try some Duolingo lessons , I like language so it is fun for me.
Nope! :-(
Seems a lot more similar to the Latin based languages than Germanic ones. I think I’d have to stare at that for quite a while if I didn’t know Spanish.
Although I don’t think this sample is it there was an Interlingua that was a modification of Latin, also called Latino sine flexione, sort of a Latin for dummies.
Not a “new language which no one can understand” but a new language that we ALL have to put same effort in learning it. Why would I (non-En/Fr/Esp speaker) be in worse position than an En/Fr/Esp speaker? If kids start learning Esperanto next school year we will at least have a chance for better new world in almost no time (some 20-30 years).
My best guess:
Interlingua se ha distacate ab le movimento pro le disveloppamento e le introduction de un lingua universal pro tote le humanitate.
Interlingua [is?] [??] [distance? dictate? speech? language?] [??] [the?] [movement?] [for?] [the?] [development?] [and? of?] [the?] [introduction] [of?] [an? one?] [language?] [universal?] [for?] [all?] [the? of?] [people? humans? humanity?]
So yeah, “almost” or maybe “not quite almost.” I’m sure with a few hours of practice I would be able to read it much more accurately and much faster. But that’s mainly because (at least this example) seems to follow the sentence structure of English. If noun-verb positions were more French-like (frequently “backwards” of English) then it might take significantly longer.
A fresh starting place to create a language that by definition builds using simple rules makes a great deal more sense than smashing the already garbled and inconsistent overly cross pollinated mess that are the colonial empires of the recent past native languages into one mess. Is the grammar Germanic? English? what exceptions are honoured and from which of the parent languages?
If you want to ‘take the common bits’ in a more practical way get everyone to learn Latin again, being a root language of most modern languages most folks will have some easy bits that they can mostly guess correctly, along side their own particular mix of ‘new’ rules/words. And because everyone is then actually speaking the same language, and it is one that is I understand (never tried to really learn it, but talked shop with a few folks who did) pretty well structured and defined though nuanced there is much less room for confusion.
Even knowing the context of your Interlingua string I can see more than one meaning, and without that context I’d think there are plenty more. For instance a ‘tote le humanitiate’ with no context could be a bag (tote is a type of bag) for something human related, so with the ‘universal pro’ of before something we all need that is ‘pro’ so either good or professional – perhaps relief supplies like food, water and toiletries? Or professional so in the modern world web/phone access…
Once you have gone down the wrong rabbit hole in your initial attempt to ‘read’ that garbage you could easily make it fit an entirely different meaning. I’d have to say its even less clear than the crazy folks who communicate in emoji and crypic crossword clues – at least once you get the twist of logic the correct answer is actually quite clear there, and until you get it you damn well know you haven’t the foggiest.
“Latin … being a root language of most modern languages” That’s a hard NOPE, Rubber Ducky.
It’s debatable if English is Latin-based enough to count (being a language mainly composed of loanwords) but it is the most commonly spoken language. Perhaps the extinct root language we should be teaching people is proto-Indo-European? That is certainly the father of most modern languages, and it begat English through multiple separate paths.
“proto-Indo-European… is certainly the father of most modern languages” That’s not only a NOPE! but a HECK NOPE! If you mean “in commerce” or “at the UN” I’ll yield on that. Not sure if you’re advocating for fixing something that isn’t broken or breaking something that’s already fixed. There are far more languages, Horatio.
Italian’s close to Latin, let’s go with that.
Maybe it’s time to restore French as the language of diplomacy and whatever today’s version of the Russian court is. Speaking of which, know the Russian word for “garage”? It’s “garage” (гараж).
“proto-Indo-European… is certainly the father of most modern languages” That’s not only a NOPE! but a HECK NOPE! If you mean “in commerce” or “at the UN” I’ll yield on that. Not sure if you’re advocating for fixing something that isn’t broken or breaking something that’s already fixed. There are far more languages, Horatio.
Italian’s close to Latin, let’s go with that.
Maybe it’s time to restore French as the language of diplomacy and whatever today’s version of the Russian court is. Speaking of which, know the Russian word for “garage”? It’s “garage” (гараж).
IOW, interlingua provides sufficient vagueness to be preferably used by politicians.
B^)
Forget Interlingua. Interkosmo is the universe’s language. 🚀
…and yet the bizarre language still prevails and the world’s most widely spoken constructed language, go figure….
New radio shows? ;)
A united world means that a dictator only has to take over one government to establish worldwide tyranny. It’s a terrible goal.
And a divided world means never-ending wars. That’s also a terrible idea.
That being said, this discusses a united language. That doesn’t necessarily imply a lack of countries, individual cultures, etc.
A terrible idea according to whom? It has been our natural state of being for 200,000 years at least. This comes down to a millenarian disgust with nature as it actually is, instead of our ideal version of it.
People are still trying to build the tower of Babel; I suppose it is irresistible.
So is the United States of whichever nation you pick any better or more successfully dictatorial?
If you try to tell American’s to do something at least some regions populations really don’t like… And they would really not like many things a world dictator type would want them to do, like get rid of or curtail access to guns, something many American’s in some areas seem to want, but in others just suggesting such a thing…
A unified language or nation doesn’t mean there will never be resistance, or cultural variation – heck look at the differences between the any of the USA/Canada/UK who all speak ‘English’.
Or for the nation take the UK for an example – the Scots are forever whining about something and demanding independence while also often getting a greater share of the UK government funds than Wales, N.Ireland, etc and it is way more than a reflection of their contributions to that pot. They may be part of the UK, but you try telling even the most pro UK Scot they are from now on only allowed to identify as British, or worse English as that is where Westminster and the newly minted UK dictator is…
Yes, but it does reek of social engineering… which has nearly always turned out badly because its planners have the hubris to believe that they understand the complexity of the situation well enough to stave off second-order effects, but every single time they in fact do not come even close to this level of knowledge.
That, and they are always religious zealots for a faith that they themselves created. It’s a bad type
To me Esperanto has always been the 15th standard in XKCD #927: you can’t have it rule them all because for a language to do that it needs to build a critical mass, and some languages are already beyond that point that it’d be pointless to even try to introduce a new one.
Rather than a new one, we’ll likely see a gradual slow implementation of local languages words in more universal languages (English, Spanish, French, Chinese, German, etc) then let technology have them travel across the globe to be adopted by other cultures, until a point in the future where evolution and pervasive global communication will smooth any differences between local and global communication. It’ll need many years though: when I was born we had only land phone and there would have been neither public Internet nor cell phones for decades, and some people older than me neither had the land phone or TV. We’re still so young as a species in this context.
“To me Esperanto has always been the 15th standard in XKCD #927: ”
That’s a good way of putting how I viewed it too!
Esperanto is the official language of the ship in the Red Dwarf universe.
Mi esporas ke kiam vi venos la vetero estos milda.
oh! I almost forgot! we cannot have a unique language cos a big guy will come very pisssed to destroy our bigger skyscraper :) yeah the same guy didn’t want to let us know the good and evil and blamed the son of the son of the son….. of the guys who disregarded the rules and refuse to conform. Yeah that guy.
Yeah it certainly wasn’t an allegory for real social phenomena which was written by people a lot smarter than you and stood the test of time in ways that nothing you or I create ever will
If something resists the “test of the time” ,does that make it good, true, convenient or desiable? war? death? covid? I mean even a lie can resist the test of the time.
…a lot of smarter than me? there is no way to know it. Probe me wrong :)
“Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.”
People wrongly believe that misunderstanding is the only root of conflict. The disillusionment of this precious notion is often much worse for the psyche than the actual conflict. They can’t handle the fact that somebody could adequately understand them, have perfectly functioning logical faculties, have all their needs met by a functioning society, and yet still hate you.
Not forget about SOLRESOL (french language for pertractation and war communication)
and zlango
The video does mention a common misconception: the purpose is for Esperanto to be the world’s SECOND language, not to replace all others. Ironic that some people thought New Moresnet would make sense but that’s diversity for you (heck some think there should be passports and citizenship for speakers).
Ironic how French killed Esperanto fearing it would be replaced… only to be replaced by English.
Esperanto is often used in media as a way to sound foreign without using an identifiable foreign language, take Blade Trinity. It’s also used in Captain Fantastic.
The video assumes Esperanto would have a hard time finding standardization if it were to be internationally adopted (by politicians). The fact is, the Esperanto Zamenhof spoke is not the same we speak today – it si indeed a live language and keeps evolving (e.g. by introducing -iĉ- to conterpoint -ini- in making the language more gender-neutral).
FOSS enthusiasts will surely already have come across it in language dropdowns of popular software.
Jes, mi parolas ĝin.
Neutral Moresnet, the fourth state that had a common border in Vaals (NL) with The Netherlands, Germany and Belgium, was thought to be the place to have Esperanto as the official language. Too bad the First World War (of which they didn’t know it was the first of a series) ended the existence of Neutral Moresnet.
It’s an interesting history about this very small “country” where Esperanto didn’t make it.
Esperanto should be a second language, not the main official one, that defeats the purpose.
For those who hadn’t heard of this interesting little country (like me), I have attached a Wikipedia link.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral_Moresnet
Thanks for this comment. As another fluent esperantist, and FOSS developer, it feels bad to see opinions in this thread formed through lack of information and misunderstanding. Unfortunately that’s the way it’s always been, and with a lot of things – decisions made on preconceptions, bias, FUD. Meh, that’s how people work.
The good news is that every article like this presents an opportunity for someone who has never heard about the language to give it a shot and perhaps change their lives. That’s how it’s been for me. And I feel enriched by the experience, friends in many countries, and the ability to learn other languages much more quickly. Esperanto has always been a great vehicle, never the ultimate goal.
From a fluent speaker:
While the root word Espero has a base in Latin, the language is sourced from many others. By saying it has Germanic roots we include modern English. By saying it has Latin roots we include modern French, Spanish, Italian, etc. Polish people recognize slavic influence, and others recognize other familiar origins. The point here is that there is no single root or orientation … it’s truly international in a way that makes it native in some way to almost everyone.
Esperanto is much easier to lean than other languages, especially English, with only 16 rules of grammar that really do cover everything. Anyone can learn the basics in a couple weeks. From there it’s just vocabulary, which is much smaller given the powerful and consistent grammar. Doubters will doubt but it is what it is.
It’s been proven that some number of months of Esperanto followed by a year of any other national language is more effective than at least two years in that national language. I’ve taught Esperanto and have seen this play out. I speak other languages in large part because of this dynamic. My experience is not unusual. What’s unusual is that I’m saying this as an American, where language education is notoriously poor but most American esperantists that I know are multilingual with the same experience.
In the USA we have a language divide, exasperated by being a nation of immigrants. (Brits, Germans, and other countries have similar challenges.)
Much of that would go away with a few months of Esperanto in schools … for everyone, do that we could communicate better with immigrants and so they could communicate with us. Yeah, I know, “they should freakin learn Our language”. Until they do, this is an effective transition solution.
In the news lately it’s sad to see thousands of people killed in war specifically because of language issues. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, my goal is not to be political or educate on current events, just to cite the fact … and that just a little Esperanto could have literally saved many of these lives.
Anecdotes abound over the last 135ish years, but my point has been that the language is easy while still being rich, useful, and not politically charged. It’s always been a punching bag for those who have agendas or don’t get it, nevertheless it’s merits have always been consistent. So, you know, say what you want but it actually does what it was designed to do for those who choose to try it.
While it has never “taken off”, it’s far from dead – though granted, a couple million speakers in a world of billions has always put it on the unfortunate side of the math :) It’s potential is as real now as it was when it was created, and for the exact same reasons why it was created. There’s still hope (espero!) that it will be used as an international second/auxillary language for human benefit. Get it now? :)
Swear words in Esperanto.
When I learned Esperanto, at that time as a 6th language, I was astonished when I found the “tabuaj vortoj en Esperanto “ dictionary.
Words for private parts, insults , swear words
Fi-voroj ( fi – vortoy)
Kreteno , idioto, fek’ ,
There is a song entirely made of those words by Georgo Handzlik
https://lyricstranslate.com/de/frazlibro-de-morta-lingvo-phrase-book-dead-language.html
It begins with mensmalsana idioto – mentally ill idiot.
La menso- the mind
Sana – healthy
Malsana- ill