‘Saluton’: the surprise return of Esperanto
In conlang (constructed language) communities, Esperanto is a type of conlang known as an auxlang (auxillary language) that tries to be easily learnable and speakable by many people. Esperanto remains very popular and has tons of high quality learning material (I myself learned it from a book in my local community college public library over a few hours in between summer classes) and translated works.<p>That said, there&#x27;s plenty of criticism for Esperanto. In Esperanto nouns are male gendered by default, and a suffix is used to make them female. (e.g la patro means &quot;the father&quot;, and la patrino means &quot;the mother&quot;). Esperanto is also much harder to learn for people without western language backgrounds.<p>For folks interested in the world of auxlangs, there are other prominent ones. Toki Pona is ridiculously easy to learn (the vocabulary is some odd 150-or-so words) and has a very neutral phonology (easy to pronounce regardless of language background). You can pick it up in a month or so of idle study. There are texts out there and communities on Telegram which make it fun and easy to join in. It&#x27;s hard to be specific in Toki Pona, but it turns out most banter is just light conversation anyway. I&#x27;ve used it in a bar setting with friends and it&#x27;s a fun way to have a &quot;secret&quot; language.<p>Lojban is a conlang based loosely around predicate logic, which makes it weirder than most other languages, but also easy to express complex ideas in. Lojban has unambiguous syntax, and many parsers have been written for Lojban. The &quot;standard&quot; camxes parser is useful when learning the language. It doesn&#x27;t have as big of a following as Esperanto, but is unique and fun. Lojban has rougher learning materials than Esperanto and fewer translated works, but they are there (including &quot;lo selfri be la .alis.
bei bu&#x27;u la selmacygu&#x27;e&quot;, Alice&#x27;s Adventures in Wonderland) I&#x27;m partial to Lojban myself as far as auxlangs is concerned, though I find it to sound very... harsh.