just finished learning esperanto. i already knew a bit of spanish so it wasn’t too hard to learn a similar language. i think i’ll stick to english though, since thats what most people speak online and in movies and stuff. have a good day everyone :)

how did we let it get this bad

no way we let this slide

viva la AimIsADick

All tf2 communication should occur through pig latin because i think it'd be better than english (or esperanto).

englishcels seething over esperantochads

La saluto de la hispana estas "gracias"

what was bad about it in the first place?

lol yeah. English is also the same language that has a 18% illiteracy rate in native speakers.[1][2]

jes, vi pravas.

functional illiteracy rate*, 18% isn't even especially high for this. It's about the same, if not a bit higher, in many non-English speaking European countries. Literacy is mainly a social/education issue, doesn't matter what language you speak.

You are still assuming that Americans are by default native English speakers

Indeed. I think that term should be used more often, as it's much more appropriate. of course, that means that most of the world is logically illiterate in English, because they cant comprehend it; that doesn't immediately mean it's bad for them (remember colonialism?), just that it's important to take note of context.

Also, found that PBS is saying that 36%of U.S citizens are illiterate in English.

Social/education is the base of such problems, but the language itself certainly can impede progress to literacy, depending on its structure. (Example can be English: with it's massive amount of exceptions.)

In Esperanto, functional illiteracy is unheard of, because of the easiness of our language.

I'm not:

I did not mention "american" nor "usonian" here. I only mentioned "native speakers".

Yes you did. Both sources are about American adults [1]. You are lying to the good and honest users of this website

I did not mention any of the those words in the aforementioned quote; only the sources mentioned those terms (yes, I didn't think about the hispanics mentioned. sorry about that.)

and None of the fucking responders here where honest in the first place!

https://i.imgur.com/6sJDVXD.png

https://i.imgur.com/pceLpuq.png

wow!!!!

Why didn't you read your own sources? They could have corrected your assumption that Americans are by default native English speakers. I think it's cruel and hurtful of you to call us dishonest when you have spent six threads insisting you speak Esperanto and yet refuse to provide any evidence

I didn't think such a thing. I was trying to talk about native speakers of english, not u.s. There are native speakers of english outside the united states.

And anyway, what the hell does it have to do with my point? My point was supposed to be that there was a functional illiteracy rate in english in the first place, not that it was segregated to only americans and not foreign-language learners.

I FUCKING DID YOU PIECEE OF SHIT!

and you people are fucking cruel to hate on someone like me, when you didnt even try to study it yourself.

---

but, thank you, for at least trying to read one of my sources for once, and not just fucking ignoring them. not that it fucking matters anymore.

Also to eddiiee once again, about the ethnologue source:

I think this is what you were referring to: https://www.ethnologue.com/insights/most-spoken-language/ (of course, you didn't give me a single direction to help, if this is the case. lol.)
and here's an older statistics page on their sizes: https://web.archive.org/web/20180630183842/https://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size

Ethnologue cites English as the worlds largest native (not spoken) language; mandarin as the worlds largest language. Wait no, they're switched. Help! how do I delete this reply? Shit I can't. I hate these shitty forum websites.

In any case: the real problem with Ethnologue is that they are: 1. Christian and 2. Colonial

Also, there is (unsurprisingly) problems with them regarding the transparency of their sources. which is a big red flag.

I have not really read the rest of this thread (given its length) but I would like to comment that I would be very very surprised if this wasn't largely or entirey driven by selection bias/confounding.

Also would like to comment that if you can prove or show evidence that simplicity/consistency/regularity of syntactic structure of a particular language leads to differences in processing speed compared to a language that is more "complex" (in the sense of syntactic structure, irregularities in morphology/conjugation that type of stuff, ambiguities in semantics), to quote my undergrad advisor, "I will give you a PhD". To my knowledge that is not a settled point. Not sure if there will ever be a study on that tbh, seems extremely difficult to set up that sort of experiment in a good way (want native bilingual speakers of a "simple" and "complex" language, doubt there's that many of those out there and linguistics depts are struggling for funding as is). If only "wild child" experiments weren't looked down by IRB, would love to see if my woodland child could flex esperanto twice as fast as english.

Also, everyones biased to an extent, my dude (me included). humans are not soulless beings; we have emotions from our primitive days. However I've backed up most of my claims with sources starting from early in the thread.

Also, the entire grammar and letters of Esperanto can be read in just 1 (yes, 1) page: https://www.akademio-de-esperanto.org/fundamento/gramatiko_angla.html . so I'm founded on actual evidence in this regard (and not just using clickbait scumbag tactics like, hyping up chinese to be easy focusing on the grammar, only for the beginner to get crushed down by ideograms.

In particular, if I had the resources, I would actually like to create an experiment in regards to competitive gaming, about the influence of language on processing time.

Dear AimIsADick,

In response to your comment on the influence of language on processing time, studies have shown that all languages tend to convey information at a rate of 39 bits/s with little variation (Coupé et al., 2019). As Esperanto has a strong basis in the Romance languages (which are represented in this study), I suspect its rate of information conveyance will be similar.

As an aside, could you please use the APA style (Ver. 7; American Psychological Association, 2020) to format your citations? I find your posts rather lacking in clarity and hard to follow due to your choice of citation style.

Kind Regards,
Dr Zesty McLime

References:
American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association: The official guide to APA style (7th ed.).
Coupé, C., Oh, Y. M., Dediu, D., & Pellegrino, F. (2019). Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: Comparable information rates across the human communicative niche. Science Advances, 5(9). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/002/529/459/141

I think I wasn't clear, I meant moreso that you can't really use (functional) illiteracy rates of Esperanto as evidence of the ease of the language because of confounding factors. Also, practically speaking, if you define functional illiteracy as when an individual lacks the literacy level to interact with their immediate environment Esperanto is practically automatically exempt given its nature (given that Esperanto is usually learned because it serves as a bridge for ppl across the world, how many places in the world do you truly rely on it as your sole means of communication/interaction). The confounding is in the form of socioeconomic status, as was mentioned that drives functional illiteracy and I'd be very surprised if most people who have the desire or time to learn a conlang are at least well off "enough". Previous point more or less applies to all conlangs, although I doubt anybody is teaching Klingon to poor kids.

I agree that Esperanto on its own merits is very "easy" or "simple".

Ethnologue is neither Christian nor colonial. Their publisher is Christian, but you would need to find evidence of that affecting Ethnologue for it to be relevant. The Washington Post article isn't relevant. Some people thinking that SIL translators are religiously or politically biased really has nothing to do with Ethnologue (which is widely accepted to be a high quality and generally unbiasaed source).

You claim there are problems with Ethnologue citing sources yet provide no source for your own claim. Curious

Also, please provide an example of you speaking Esperanto. You could translate the sentence "ｉｍ ｓｏｒｒｙ ｉｍ ｎｏｔ ｇｏｏｄ ｉ ａｐｏｌｏｇｉｚｅ ｆｏｒ ｍｙ ｅｇｏ ｐｌｅａｓｅ ｆｏｒｇｉｖｅ ｍｅ, ｉｍ ｊｕｓｔ ｅｕｒｏｐｅｅａｎ" and record yourself speaking it in Esperanto. I think that would be convincing evidence for the users of this forum.

6 Pages... He got yall in the trap

Speak the Esperanto .

6 Paĝoj... Li havas vin ĉiujn en la kaptilo

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/19/science/how-linguists-and-missionaries-share-a-bible-of-6912-languages.html

How is the Washington post article "not relevant"?

Here: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/world-s-largest-linguistics-database-getting-too-expensive-some-researchers, I cited this earlier too.
Also this: https://humans-who-read-grammars.blogspot.com/2019/11/ethnologue-changes-access-again.html

so yes I did cite my sources, earlier, but i probably should have linked it to the post where I first said the first source.

I can just repeat the same greeting again, but very slowly. (i didn't agree to use that particular sentence, it'd be too long.)

Yeah true, you don't see any large-scale studies saying people are functionally illiterate in gabagool either