You have a point there. I've been disappointed that Korean has been stuck in the 'In Progress' state. The Korean tech giants already have APIs to do common speech recognition. I hope more Korean grassroots efforts focus on tools that are open and accessible so it can be built scalable and better.
Thank you for pointing it out, I had no idea but I'd happy to contribute on this one. There is indeed a decent korean natural language process engine but it's severely tied to own ecosystem AFAIK.
> Esperanto is a hobby language for upper-middle class people in developed countries.
I wonder what gave you such an impression of Esperanto. My personal experience of Esperanto is quite different.
I started to casually self-learn Esperanto about one year ago as my second foreign language apart from English. After about half a year, I was confident enough to join online Esperanto communities and it gave me a surprisingly much more diverse experience than any community I had encountered on the Internet.
For example, in an online chat group, active users mainly come from US, South America, and Russia. As an person from East Asia, there is little chance for me to get in touch with the latter two groups otherwise. And there are often new users from South America who speak only Spanish and Esperanto.
I myself do not identify as a upper-middle class person, and I don't know enough to assess other Esperanto speakers' class status.
The impression of Esperanto speakers being upper-middle class may come from the fact people learn Esperanto as a hobby. But people not in the upper-middle class can have other hobbies, why is Esperanto different? It doesn't come with the many benefits that people may expect from learning a "practical" language, but it takes significantly less effort. I'd say it's about as hard as learning a new instrument. So it is not that exclusive to only upper-middle class people.
After one year of casual learning, I am now able to contribute to the Common Voice project in Esperanto (175 recordings and 123 validations) and I actually use it as a source of learning material.
You must be a fast learner. After one year of learning a new language, I personally would not feel comfortable speaking it well enough to use as examples for others.
Thanks to the design of the language, each letter of Esperanto has a fixed pronunciation, and the stress is always on the second-to-last syllable. So after you learn the alphabet and some diphthongs, you are able to pronounce every Esperanto text in the canonical way (even if you don't know a single thing about the meaning). No exception. This is also a great feature for self-learning.
Of course, it takes time to fluently "read out" the words, and in practice, it's much easier if you just know the word and pull the pronunciation from your memory.
For the Common Voice project, there are usually two or three words in a batch of five sentences that I don't know. And there are unfamiliar places and names, since most of the text come from Wikipedia. In such case, I'll take my time to use the spelling to infer the correct pronunciation and practice it several times, until I can put it into the sentence. Then I'll record. And I know it must be correct.
If I am not sure about the meaning of the new word (you can usually guess from etymology or word formation), I look it up in the dictionary and learn a new word.
You are not wrong, but besides the upper-middle-class hobby people, there is also a 130 years old culture that exists parallel to it. I've met a few native Esperanto speakers, and for them Esperanto is their identity. Traditional Esperanto clubs exists in countries like Iran, Japan, China, Burundi, Nigeria and many more. So Esperanto is both, a nerdy hobby and an old culture.
They weren't exclusively talking about Esperanto. I read it as a reference to Kinyarwanda and Catalan more than anything else. In the bigger scheme of things there are a lot of languages here that are definitely a product of being able to share your own language. There's multiple native languages that are being shared here, like the thread above about Guarani.
Esperanto was designed to be easy to learn. It isn't an elite pursuit in the way you suggest, because its community isn't gatekept. I personally have met people of all social classes who have been interested in it.
It was also never meant to be a first language, it is an auxiliary language. It is possible for an English speaker to have a conversation with a Mandarin speaker with no intermediary if both know the (comparatively easy to learn) Esperanto. Its original purpose wasn't trivial either: it was created to stop groups without a common language in the same city (Warsaw, I think?) fighting, created on the basis that they'd stop doing so if only they could speak a common language.
Auxiliary languages are kind of inherently doomed to fail to function as they're intended because in order for them to function as such, commitment needs to be made to adopt it multilaterally by governments with sufficient influence. If today the United States and China bilaterally decided to force Esperanto into their school curriculum it'd likely be adopted very quickly by everyone else, but that isn't the case and I doubt it ever would be under almost any circumstance, because learning English is just immediately more practical, even if it's a significantly more difficult language to be picked up.
And that's how it's played out. Nearly every developed nation teaches English as a second language or is a native population of English speakers. The universal language is English. The JVM bytecode for people is English.
I don't have to, you can look at pretty much any of their language curriculum and find a huge presence of English in nearly all their education systems.
Certainly you will find people learning other languages for trade depending on the region, but even in East Asia, as you say, English is taught in China, Japanese, Korea. In Singapore English is the language everyone learns (and is taught in). In Vietnam the primary foreign language taught is English. In the Philippines one of its official languages is English. Argentina teaches English in elementary school. In Brazil students from grade 6 have to learn a language, which is usually English. In Venezuela English is taught from age 5.
My takeaway is that nobody should speak English, but instead people should compose their sentences in a different language and then translate them to English at the point of speaking (with small pauses in the conversation for you to collect your thoughts on this garbage).
Ah yes, major world languages with 10s or 100s of millions of speakers (Bengali, Korean, Malayalam) are ignored or are perpetually stuck "in progress" while hobby languages like Esperanto are supported.
Hey, I work on the Esperanto version of CV. You are right, many languages should be bigger than Esperanto, and we never planned to become this big, it just happened. We are around ten active people and a telegram group with a few hundred motivated donors. Plus, we write about the project in Esperanto magazines and talk about it on Esperanto congresses.
The point is: the only reason Bengali Korean and Malayalam are stuck "in progress" is that no one is working on them. No language but English is actively supported by Mozilla, it all comes from the communities. And the success of Esperanto shows that every language can make it. I hope that people take our work as a motivation. Every language can become big if a few motivated people work on it for a year or two. Even the smallest language can make it. You just need a lot of public domain sentences, a few thousand donors and some technical knowledge then your language will grow as well :)
Sure, I was responding to the factitious comment above.
When I can use Google or Facebook in any of these languages for 10+ years, it's silly of this project to claim some high moral ground when you can't support some of the most widely spoken languages in the world and stick to languages that hipsters in San Francisco think is cool.
It can support those languages, they just need some people who actually speak them to come along and make it happen. If you can help, I'm sure it will be appreciated.
