i love the idea of creating conlangs. i’ve experimented with the idea of them in years past but have never done anything with them, let alone created one.

i did create some toki pona-based ones as they consist of few words (~100) but i want to create ones that aren’t just based off toki pona.

  • geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml
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    20 hours ago

    The word to be in Esparanto is “estas”

    The you form of “to be” in Spanish is “estas”.

    You can paste any Esparanto sentence and it will 100% sound Spanish to someone who does not know Esparanto.

    Do you know any Spanish?

    • Krafty Kactus@sopuli.xyz
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      19 hours ago
      1. The Esperanto word for “to be” is “esti”. “Estas” means “is”. The Spanish equivalent would be “ser” which is not even close to the same word.
      2. Just because Esperanto shares some vocabulary and phonemes with Spanish doesn’t make it a knockoff. I guarantee if you speak Portuguese to an English person they’ll think it sounds like Spanish but that doesn’t make Portuguese a copy of Spanish.
      3. I don’t speak Spanish but I live around enough Spanish-speakers, and speak enough Brazilian Portuguese that I can tell the difference between Spanish and a conlang made by a Polish man.
      • digitalpeasant@chinese.lol
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        18 hours ago

        To be fair, “estar” in Spanish means “to be (something-ing, something-ed, someplace, or in a temporary state)”. That said, estas (Esperanto) and estás (Spanish) are not homophones because their stress patterns are different.

        Also, I don’t think Spanish has a one-word translation for “esperanto”. “Esperanza” means “hope” in Spanish, not “one who hopes”. I think “esperador” means “one who waits”, “esperanzado” means “hopeful”, and “esperanzador” means “encouraging”.

        As for me, I know enough Spanish that Esperanto doesn’t sound like Spanish to me (though I’m not a native speaker). The sounds of Esperanto and Spanish are kind of similar, but not identical. For example, the voiced stops in Spanish are fricatives a lot of the time, and /j/ can become a fricative in Spanish but not Esperanto. Also, the stress in Esperanto is completely regular and the stress in Spanish isn’t.

        I’m actually kind of curious how much Spanish geneva_convenience knows. Maybe I’ve actually underestimated them, just because they made some spelling errors.

          • digitalpeasant@chinese.lol
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            8 hours ago

            I think it’s because Esperanto uses many word roots which have a similar shape among various descendants of Latin, so people who speak those languages have an easier time intuitively understanding those words. I think this occurs for some Germanic and Slavic languages as well.

            • geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml
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              8 hours ago

              For sure, but the intonation is very Spanish. Comparing it to other Latin languages it also appears to have most words based in Spanish or straight up ripped from Spanish.

              Esparanto is not so much a new language as it is ripping words out of other languages. But most of it is Spanish.

              What bothers me most is that it is not an efficient or easy language to learn for people who do not already speak a Latin langage. Might as well teach them English at that point.