[kevinios]

Perfect occasion to ask something that I didn't know who to ask: does anyone here knows if it has ever been tried to "simplify" the visual aspect of Esperanto, by getting rid of all accents? (ĉ, ĝ, ŭ, etc.)

I'm a French speaker and I know some Spanish, so I should be used to accents and maybe biased towards the idea of having them as part of a language, but on the contrary, I love that English has none:

- Accents make a language look more complex at first glance, and therefore less appealing to beginners (my opinion).

- They make it harder to learn and type in the language on a keyboard, even a virtual one. In my case, choosing a language for a keyboard is a big deal.. French one so that accents are easy to type, or English so that code is easy to type? (I chose the latter).

I'm gonna risk a comparison here: it's a bit like programming languages syntax, you can build an app with either Objective-C or Swift, but I suspect many beginners would find Swift's syntax a bit less intimidating. Similarly, someone looking at Esperanto might be immediately put off by seeing that they will have to learn to type ĉ, ĝ, ŭ, etc.

I would love to see someone refactor Esperanto's syntax to remove its accent while still keeping its capabilities.

1. Is that even technically possible, or would that imply making words too complex or adding new letters?

2. Has this idea ever been debated, could I read about it anywhere? (on a public forum/wiki maybe?)

Thanks!

----------------------------

Edit: Thank you for your answers! So Esperanto has indeed been changed, and each "constructed language derived from Esperanto" is called an Esperantido.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformed_Esperanto (this version has been created by Zamenhof himself and removing the accents is part of the proposal.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ido_language

Would love to see a new crowdsourced and open-source reform on Github, in 2019!

[qwerty456127]

> Perfect occasion to ask something that I didn't know who to ask: does anyone here knows if it has ever been tried to "simplify" the visual aspect of Esperanto, by getting rid of all accents? (ĉ, ĝ, ŭ, etc.)

This is highly subjective view. Of course some people hate diacritics and prefer to write sx instead of ŝ but many have the opposite opinion. As for me sx looks plain disgusting. I would even love to see sh being replaced with ŝ or š or ș in English and the same to happen with sch in German, sz in Polish, ch in French etc. And there have in fact been projects to replace the English alphabet with something that makes more sense and doesn't use combinations of letters to represent a single sound (e.g. the Shavian alphabet). Obviously both ways have their pros and cons, their proponents and opponents so it probably just should be left as it already is in whatever a language.

[kevinios]

Completely agree with you that sx doesn't look good at all! My suggestion was not to replace with something that looks worst, but ideally that looks cleaner (didn't actually even know of the sx form before I read all the great comments, I do not know Esperanto)

[kissickas]

People get around the problem of not being able to type these letters by adding an x or an h (cx, gx, ux). Apparently Zamenhof himself was addressing the issue in order to make the language "simpler," as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_orthography#ASCII_tr...

https://forum.unilang.org/viewtopic.php?t=44907

[snazz]

For accents to be removed, there can't be any ambiguity. For instance, in Spanish, the words cómo and como, or the many forms of "porque" (with very different meanings) are a source of confusion for many speakers. This wouldn't be any easier without accents. I think that a language would have to be designed from the ground up to get rid of accents for this to be possible.

[Swizec]

A funny thing happened in Slovenian, particularly colloquial Slovenian. We have accents. Many accents. Each vowel has several different pronunciations and sometimes those completely change the meaning of a word. Or they make the text flow better. Or it's an accent thing.

Either way the language has many accents in writing.

But over time, those accents are disappearing. Written Slovenian from the 19th century is absolutely littered with them. Modern Slovenian in colloquial writing is starting to lose even the č, š, ž accents.

Interestingly, people don't compensate with things like cz, or ch, or cx. They rely on context informing the reader how to pronounce a word.

I believe the loss of accents on vowels happened because they're not that necessary. The loss of č š ž is happening because of computers. Takes an extra keypress to type those. On iOS/Android it takes a long press and who has time for that when typing a text? Nobody. So we don't.

Could Spanish not work similarly? Do Spanish people write out all the accents when sending a text?

I know my French girlfriend doesn't always write all her accents and French is also chock full of accents.

[cageface]

Something similar is happening in Vietnamese and I think smartphones are to blame. Writing properly accented Vietnamese on mobile keyboards, particularly the iPhone, is pretty tedious so people often leave out the accents and rely on context to figure out meanings. Unfortunately for a language like Vietnamese which has tons of monosyllable words and where the accent markings completely change the meaning of a word this can lead to a lot of ambiguity.

Why a company with Apple's resources can't be bothered to implement proper autocorrect for a bit market with 80+ million native speakers is a mystery to me.

[lphnull]

I could be wrong, but don't people have autocorrect on their phones that will correct the character based on context? Is that even possible?

Lets say somebody wants to say "how I eat" in spanish. The correct way to do it would be "cómo como". "cómo" means how, and "como" means "I eat". I wouldn't make sense to say "como cómo", so therefore, autocorrect should, in theory, feel free to correct all instances of "como como". Only until it becomes an international household brand name will this ever be a problem- for this one phrase at least.

[Swizec]

Afaik autocorrect doesn’t work for Slovenian. And even if it does, most people I know have it disabled because our colloquialisms use a lot of English, some German, plenty of Serbocroatian, and sometimes Italian. We often spell those loan words our own way.

This combination of languages and intentionally incorrect spellings makes autocorrect total trash.

[dbrgn]

"como como un mono" (I eat like a monkey)

[hjrnunes]

There is a trend that confuses this (apparent) simplification trend with "evolution" or "progress".

Don't fool yourself, though.

Accents are there for a reason.

Orthography influences pronunciation. In time people will start pronouncing those words as the orthography suggests rather than deducing it from the context.

Even if only because the context won't be discernible. But, generally, because of the principle of the lesser effort: it's always easier to just read what is there than thinking which pronunciation applies.

Eventually, the words will become homophonous (edit: assuming there are other words which differ only in the accents) - you'll effectively loose the words or they'll change, probably for worse.

The language will become more ambiguous and more dependent on the context knowledge - which will be hard to get if you don't know the language well to begin with.

In other words, you've just made the language "harder" to learn.

So, in effect, it's not a simplification at all.

[em-bee]

Orthography influences pronunciation. In time people will start pronouncing those words as the orthography suggests rather than deducing it from the context.

is there any evidence for that?

anecdotal evidence in english for example suggests just the opposite: light -> lite, etc

however learning a language as a child growing up, vs as a second language later are quite different, and the dynamics that affect language change are hence very different too.

http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/m.html explains how esperanto is unlikely to change, and also why that would be a good thing.

back to your argument, i don't think the words with different pronunciation would be lost, but certainly the language would be harder to learn.

[hjrnunes]

English is atypical in its irregular pronunciation rules IMO. At least compared to Latin languages. And it doesn't have accents that change the pronunciation in otherwise similar words.

As such, people are aware that you just have to know how to pronounce every particular word, rather than relying solely on orthography.

Anyway, your example isn't very good: "light" and "lite" are homophonous anyway.

A better one would be "calm". The "l" is almost mute. Presumably, one could "simplify" the orthography to "cam". And you would pronounce "kom" or "kam" according to context.

I claim one of the pronunciations would eventually disappear, sooner or later.

If you're asking for a "scientific study", I don't have one and I don't even know where such a thing can be found.

But the country I'm from has had 3 orthographic reforms in the 20th century. The last one being all about removing supposed "mute" consonants - but which acted like accents in that they altered pronunciation of the word.

[kevinios]

Exactly! And I see that typewriters were invented in 1878, so the difficulty to type Esperanto with typewriters was most probably not taken into account when it was invented.

[schoen]

You can potentially replace them with digraphs if the digraphs aren't used for some other purpose, which some Esperantists have done with the x-method, like gxis for ĝis 'until', although some people find that quite ugly.

An interesting example to me is that pinyin uses the diacritical marks to mark tones in Chinese, which can be hard to type on a limited system but also hard for Chinese learners to remember. The Gwoyeu_Romatzyh system has different spellings for each vowel depending on the associated tone!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_in_Gwoyeu_Romatzyh#To...

This is presumably harder to learn but easier for learners to remember. Similarly, Finnish uses double letters to mark a long vowel as opposed to the ā, like maa 'country' which other languages might write as mā. On the other hand, are also vowels ä and ö which are different from a and o, so to find a way to spell Finnish without these marks one would need to find some unused digraph, which might actually be a big challenge, since Wikipedia says

> The Germanic umlaut or convention of considering digraph ae equivalent to ä, and oe equivalent to ö is inapplicable in Finnish. Moreover, in Finnish, both ae and oe are vowel sequences, not single letters, and they have independent meanings (e.g. haen "I seek" vs. hän "he, she").

If one wanted to write Spanish without the accent marks, it might be possible to find digraph equivalents, such as maybe ou for ó (which is a problem in "estadounidense" but almost nowhere else!). The ñ could be written with nh as in Portuguese (señor/senhor).

[bitxbitxbitcoin]

This would work for ñ but it wouldn’t necessarily work for replacing accents unless the vowel followed by u becomes an accent - which leads to the estadounidense problem you identified.

From what I remember from high school Spanish, there is a default syllable that has an “invisible accent” on its vowel in a Spanish word without accents and the purpose of an accent is to change the syllable that gets emphasized.

[schoen]

Yes, we'd ideally need to find a digraph that absolutely doesn't occur in Spanish. This can be tricky with compound words and loanwords. It seems that ou, oe and oo are super-rare in Spanish morphemes but can occur in loanwords and compounds. I just searched for unaccented digraphs that literally don't occur at all in /usr/share/dict/spanish and the only examples (of which there are 184 excluding k and w) contain only consonants and y.

So, there's not any easy natural way to do this without creating at least some ambiguities.

[xelxebar]

In practice, native Spanish speakers leave off accents in text messages and the like without causing much confusion.

[Riverheart]

Spoken Japanese, in my very limited experience, runs into this issue due to the number of homophones and the only recourse are context clues to distinguish their meaning. So there can be ambiguity in an otherwise functional language, although it certainly makes it harder.

[xelxebar]

True, though native speakers do distiguish a good swath of "homophones" by differing pitch accent---e.g. in the standard dialect あめ means "rain" if the pitch drops on め or "candy" if it stays level. To a native speaker, these sound as different as the two ways of saying "present".

If you grab a native Japanaese dictionary that has accent indicators, like 新明解国語辞典, there really are surprisingly few true homophones in a typical vocabulary.

[Riverheart]

Interesting. Thank you for this.

[StevePerkins]

Just when I think it's impossible for an HN thread to be sidejacked into an aesthetics discussion. Well played, HN.

[kevinios]

Guilty! Felt like it was the perfect audience to ask for a question that I could not ask people around me :-) On HN, there is usually always at least one domain expert on any given topic, so it's a pleasure to know that someone will probably have an answer for you.

[chillacy]

Realistically accents are such a small hurdle that if a learner can't stomach it, they're probably not going to make it. It's something like complaining that Russian is written in Cyrillic, which is something you can get over much quicker than the myriad of crazy grammar.

[kevinios]

Makes sense. Although if the idea is to choose one language because it has been created with the purpose of being as simple as possible, it might be normal that we want this to be as optimized as possible. If I already know that I'm gonna have to install a fourth keyboard on my smartphone and switch to it every time I write in Esperanto so that accents are easier to type, that might an unnecessary barrier we could get rid of.

Basically, this was invented decades ago by a few people. It's 2018, I wonder what language would be produced if several thousands people collaborated online to simplify it to a maximum, while retaining its capacity to express any idea.

[chillacy]

Hey I’m all for language experimentation, though if it were truly a modern language designed for the world based on population, consider that it may be a tonal language with characters! Or just use English.

Esperanto was created in 1880, it’s older than world war 1, it’s older than English as the international language, and it’s older than Europe having much exposure to Asian languages

[qznc]

I guess Ido is such a refactored Esperanto.

[kevinios]

Interesting! I see that this refactor was made in 1907.

This makes me wonder... in an age where we have tools to open-source and crowdsource software programming, would it be possible to crowd-source the creation of a new language? It could then be refactored regularly (with new major versions published every X years), the source of truth would be the main branch of the repo, and the role that an Academy usually assumes (approving changes to a language) would be given to contributors.

I suspect that a language created by a common effort from a thousand brains would be simpler and more optimized than one invented by a single person in the late 19th century, no matter how hard that person worked on it.

[qznc]

Regular refactoring seems to be a dangerous thing:

Ido was created around a quarter of a century after Esperanto. The name Ido means "offspring" in Esperanto and was so named by its creators because it was a development of Esperanto. The creation of Ido led to a schism between those who believed that Esperanto should be left as it was and those who believed that it had what they perceived as inherent flaws which made it not quite good enough to be the world's international auxiliary language. Those who opposed change maintained that it was endless tinkering that had led, in their opinion, to the decline of Volapük a once popular constructed language that had predated Esperanto's publication by a few years. They would also surely have pointed out that Dr Zamenhof's reform proposals of 1894 had been rejected by popular vote.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_between_Esperanto_a...

Instead of a single person effort, you could try a group of experts/scientists. That would be Interlingua then.

[BillChapman]

The problem would be to get the thousand brains to agree.Now thousands and thousands of brains are applied every day to stretching anbd applying Esperanto to all aspects of life. I have found Esperanto of a lot of use when travelling on my own, to get my bearings within a country. Esperanto may not be perfect, but I've used it successfully in Africa, South America and Europe, and it does the job, serving as a unique common language on my travels in, for example, Armenia and Bulgaria.

Esperanto speakers are highly organised. There is a Jarlibro (Yearbook) published annually giving access to a network of local representatives. These people, scattered all over the world and act as 'consuls', providing help and information, and passing on the visitor from another country to his/her contacts. Esperanto does have an Academy, but it is the people who decide in practice.

[enriquto]

when I used esperanto on IRC (many years ago), people wrote "cx", "gx" "ux", etc. This seems very standard usage when you are writing on limited charsets. Nowadays, you can just type the actual letters, it's not a big deal. I actually find the choice of accents cute and I love them.

[kevinios]

Very interesting. I should spend a few minutes reading about it, but: does that mean that accents do not actually have a utility in Esperanto, and that using ĝ or g in the same word does not create two different meanings? Is it just for pronunciation purposes?

Edit: The forum link that kissickas's posted answers my question :-) Thanks

[enriquto]

No, the idea is that you write "gx" instead of "ĝ". The letters have a different meaning.

[kevinios]

Ok I see. By "Nowadays, you can just type the actual letters, it's not a big deal.", I had understood that you could actually just use the normal letter and it would still be understood.

[titanix2]

> I should be used to accents and maybe biased towards the idea of having them as part of a language, but on the contrary, I love that English has none

This is popular misconception shared by a lot of French but actually English has accent and a few other diacritics as well. You can see them in loanwords such as canapé or saké, and on word like coördination.

[boznz]

You may be right but I was Born and went to school in the UK and I don't remember any accents. The first two words are just French and Japanese words we use but the accents are generally left out of English spellings of them without any noticeable difference, the other I've always spelled as "co-ordination" with a dash.. of course if you went to a posh school it is likely done properly.

[kevinios]

True, but I suspect they are sufficiently rare not to constitute an argument for a beginner not to learn English (also, correct me if I'm wrong but most of those words have accents because they come from other languages)

[gcthomas]

English had native accents, as in naïve, to show that the double vowel was pronounced as two sounds, but they have declined in use over the year. Cooperate isn't spelt with 'oö', which makes pronouncing it from the spelling difficult. But English has never really been spelt phonetically anyway, so it is now overdue for a reformation really.