One of the biggest problems facing the European Union today is the fact that within its borders, 23 languages are spoken. This means that all the important documents have to be translated by a whole army of translators, which costs the taxpayer more than 1 billion Euros a year - and companies trading within the EU spend millions more. The EU-funded TC-STAR project aims to tackle this issue with technology: a system that eats speech in one language, and outputs that same speech in another.
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Member since:2005-07-08
That article, although long and comprehensive, doesn't tell why using the extra letters of Esperanto with breves and circumflexes is supposed to make the language easy to use? That kind of extra baggage that makes typing Esperanto extremely difficult (I really don't even know where to get a breve using my keyboard) is a major argument against Esperanto even if there were no other problematic issues.
Easy oral communication is only one part of an ideal easy-to-use auxiliary language, easy written communication using commonly available keyboards and other equipment (like mobile phones and sms) should be as important. Typing Esperanto is just all too problematic because of the use of breves and circumflexes in the language.
Edited 2008-05-06 16:30 UTC
Member since:2008-05-06
Nonsense. You install a keymap (which takes about 30 seconds) and you can type the superscripted characters just as easily as the regular characters, simply by switching between the maps (Ctrl-Shift will switch maps on my system, but it's configurable).
ĉĝĥĵŝŭ
Very simple.
Member since:2008-05-05
quote: "That article, although long and comprehensive, doesn't tell why using the extra letters of Esperanto with breves and circumflexes is supposed to make the language easy to use?"
read http://remush.be/rebuttal/spelling.html ;
In 1897 the letters ĉ ĝ ĥ ĵ ŝ ŭ were quite easy to write by hand and with an azerty keyboard (French WAS then the preferred international language). It's later than unsophisticated computers could not manage. Nowadays it does not require exceptional skills to type them.
However if you are working abroad on a foreign keyboard, use
ch gh hh jh sh u or any other method that pleases you.
Isn't that nice? What's the problem?
Member since:2008-05-04
Claude Piron's article, "Psychological Reactions to Esperanto" is worth reading too:
http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/reactions.htm
Member since:
2008-05-05
read http://remush.be/rebuttal/index.html