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.

  • Krafty Kactus@sopuli.xyz
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    22 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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      21 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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          12 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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            11 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.

            • digitalpeasant@chinese.lol
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              2 hours ago

              I’m going to be honest. I think every sentence in this post is provably wrong, and I know this because I actually looked up the intonation patterns of Esperanto and Spanish, compared it to other Romance languages, etc.

              However, I want to believe you dislike Esperanto because its words and word roots basically all come from European languages. That is a valid reason to dislike Esperanto, and I don’t think you’re wrong for disliking Esperanto.

              • geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml
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                2 hours ago

                I will die on this hill: Esperanto is a Spanish ripoff.

                If it was French the word would be akin to “Espoiro” (Espoir is hope in French)

                The only way I can be wrong is if it is actually Italian because my Italian is worse than my Spanish which is already bad.

                Esperanto is primarily Spanish words with one vowel changed.

                • digitalpeasant@chinese.lol
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                  22 minutes ago

                  If it was French the word would be akin to “Espoiro” (Espoir is hope in French)

                  To be fair, many words in Esperanto can be linked to Spanish, such as the word “esperi”. However, you could argue “esperi” is influenced by the French verb “espérer” (to hope).

                  The only way I can be wrong is if it is actually Italian because my Italian is worse than my Spanish which is already bad.

                  Italian definitely has a stronger influence on the language than Spanish, looking by word roots. However, French actually has an even stronger influence on the language by that metric.

                  I think the “Spanish” influence you are seeing is primarily from terms which both Spanish and Esperanto borrowed from other languages, especially Latin. It could also be from terms derived from French which you are mistaking for terms derived from Spanish due to the fact they are pronounced with 5 vowels, despite the fact that the relevant words don’t actually exist in Spanish.