[frodetb]

I got sucked into Esperanto after a year in Spain trying to learn Spanish. I was intrigued by the premise of an easy to learn, exception free language, with vocabulary that would already be somewhat familiar, and logical ways of building new words from components.

After having spent a lot of time on learning it (before moving on to Latin for a couple of years, and later French), I've become more skeptical of some of the elements that drew me in to begin with. According to the comprehensible input hypothesis of language acquisition, studying grammar is not as important as the number of hours spent taking in messages that you understand in the language. So, a simple grammar is actually not so important. Of course, it will let you start immersing more quickly after less grammar study. But you might also have spent that time instead immersing with a "real" language in content that is more enjoyable and interesting (good entertainment in/translated to Esperanto is scarce) and come out of it with a useful skill with roots in the real world. (Sorry fellow Esperantists if that comes across as harsh...)

Esperanto also does away with a lot of redundancies, like grammatical gender, or arbitrary groups of verbs with distinct conjugation schemes. On its surface that's a good thing. It makes it easier to memorise the rules. However, it also makes the language more fragile as a medium of communication, or less noise resistant. Grammatical gender and redundancy in syntax is very useful to a fluent speaker whose brain is familiar with all the arbitrary rules, because these things provide our brains with different checksums to rely on when parsing spoken sentences. That utility is largely why such grammatically redundant features have persisted.

[ihateolives]

> Esperanto also does away with a lot of redundancies, like grammatical gender, or arbitrary groups of verbs with distinct conjugation schemes. On its surface that's a good thing. It makes it easier to memorise the rules. However, it also makes the language more fragile as a medium of communication, or less noise resistant.

My L1 has no grammatical gender and word order is free and we still can parse our sentences fine without those checksums and certainly is not "fragile". To my brain grammatical gender is noise.

[nequo]

I agree that grammatical gender is not nearly universal.[1]

Does your L1 contain other sources of redundancy that can be used for error correction?

[1] An interesting paper on some of the correlates of languages with grammatical gender: https://unbound.williams.edu/facultypublications/islandora/o...

[ihateolives]

> Does your L1 contain other sources of redundancy that can be used for error correction?

Never looked at it from this angle. I guess the extensive case system for example, which allows to omit agent noun since the information is contained in the verb, but in reality is rarely omitted.

[Longlius]

Yes, case systems are an example of this. Most Indo-European languages use some combination of fixed word-order, noun classes (aka gender), and case systems to compensate for errors in communication.

English for example has a relatively strict word order.

Keep in mind that linguistic drift was a much stronger force in the past than it is today and being able to infer meaning through some incomprehensible input was a very important feature for languages to have.

>I guess the extensive case system for example, which allows to omit agent noun since the information is contained in the verb, but in reality is rarely omitted.

Is this just in the written form or also when spoken? Spoken language is much more susceptible to comprehension errors.

[whoooooo123]

What's your L1?

[pessimizer]

I really used to hate gender in (Romance) languages, but from gradually getting better at my second language (Spanish), I'm starting to see them as just a way to remember which word you were talking about (with an adjective) in languages without really strict word order.

In Spanish it's redundant, you can tell the gender of 99% of words from the ending, others are Greek neuter borrows that end in 'a' and are unexpectedly masculine, and most of the remainder have an inconsistent gender that depends on which country you're from.

So I'm not even sure that getting rid of gender simplifies much. Checksums are a good comparison. I am sympathetic to using 'e' endings when talking about groups or unknown people for the sake of bringing women into language parity with men, but that actually makes gender in Spanish more complicated.

[qball]

>I'm starting to see them as just a way to remember which word you were talking about

I find it even simpler than that: they're just [different versions of articles] designed to help the language flow better.

English has the same sort of thing going on with its indefinite articles a/an- sure, that's not gender per se, but it functions the same way in terms of "fill the empty space when there's a vowel sound coming up". Picking the incorrect gender for a noun in Romance languages is not quite as grating but ultimately after a while you... just know because the other way sounds weird.

[whoooooo123]

There's a chain of Mexican restaurants in the UK called "El Mexicana" which, as anyone who's studied Spanish for more than 10 seconds knows, is wrong: it should be "El Mexicano" or "La Mexicana". ("Lo Mexicano" would work too, come to think of it.)

The mistake is so obvious that it can only be deliberate. I guess it's supposed to be endearing or cute? To my mind it's just grating and annoying and makes me not want to eat there.

(An alternative hypothesis is that the grammatically invalid name is a marketing gimmick designed to get people talking about the company. Looks like it's working.)

https://www.elmexicana.co.uk/

[veltas]

They make really good fast Mexican food, way better than any other Mexican chain I've known of in the UK.

El Mexicana is (I think) a brand they use for Extra service stations. They tried to branch into restaurants under the name "Cocina" and had I think 4-5 locations pre-COVID and now have just one, I am guessing down to the lockdowns and associated investor panic rather than the quality of the restaurants.

[runarberg]

Accusative nouns is one of my favorite things about Esperanto. My native language actually has accusative nouns (as well as dative and possessive; whereas English only has possessive). Accusative is somewhat redundant, because if you follow the subject-verb-object order which is the most common in esperanto, the noun following the verb is most likely accusative. However mandating the accusative n means that I can rearrange the sentence order and it is still understandable (which is really useful for e.g. poetry). I’ve often found my self really wishing english had accusative nouns.

[nivenkos]

The biggest weakness IMO is that you still have to memorise the transitivity of every root verb.