Today is Esperanto Day – here’s why I learned it
Perfect occasion to ask something that I didn't know who to ask: does anyone here knows if it has ever been tried to "simplify" the visual aspect of Esperanto, by getting rid of all accents? (ĉ, ĝ, ŭ, etc.)I'm a French speaker and I know some Spanish, so I should be used to accents and maybe biased towards the idea of having them as part of a language, but on the contrary, I love that English has none:- Accents make a language look more complex at first glance, and therefore less appealing to beginners (my opinion).- They make it harder to learn and type in the language on a keyboard, even a virtual one. In my case, choosing a language for a keyboard is a big deal.. French one so that accents are easy to type, or English so that code is easy to type? (I chose the latter).I'm gonna risk a comparison here: it's a bit like programming languages syntax, you can build an app with either Objective-C or Swift, but I suspect many beginners would find Swift's syntax a bit less intimidating. Similarly, someone looking at Esperanto might be immediately put off by seeing that they will have to learn to type ĉ, ĝ, ŭ, etc.I would love to see someone refactor Esperanto's syntax to remove its accent while still keeping its capabilities.1. Is that even technically possible, or would that imply making words too complex or adding new letters?2. Has this idea ever been debated, could I read about it anywhere? (on a public forum/wiki maybe?)Thanks!----------------------------Edit: Thank you for your answers! So Esperanto has indeed been changed, and each "constructed language derived from Esperanto" is called an Esperantido.- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformed_Esperanto
(this version has been created by Zamenhof himself and removing the accents is part of the proposal.- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ido_languageWould love to see a new crowdsourced and open-source reform on Github, in 2019!