Right now French and English are the official languages of Canada. There are the English parts (the majority of the country) and the French parts (the biggest being Quebec). But it seems to me that the French-speaking parts punch well above their weight culturally. Because their language insulates them from the strong US cultural influence, giving them space to develop their own unique cultural identity and not have to compete with US media. So it would be a big cultural upgrade if all of Canada spoke French. Plus the French language is cool. Wouldn’t it just be cooler if we all spoke French more?

Q: But how would that work?

A: Good question. Well French immersion is already really common (when English-speaking families sent their kids to French-speaking school). What we need to do is make all schools French immersion, and once we have a generation fluent in French we can begin the process of slowly purging the English language from any sort of government institution. Overtime people will be speaking French so much that it will seep into their private lives and they’ll just speak French at home.

Q: But wouldn’t a policy like this be massively unpopular and cause widespread backlash?

A: Absolutely it would that’s why it’s an unpopular opinion. But in an ideal world, we would do it. 🇨🇦🇫🇷

If anyone wanted to phase out English in favour of some indigenous languages I would be in favour if that too.

Edit for spelling

Another edit: why are you guys downvoting this for disagreeing, you’re supposed to disagree thats the point of this sub

  • ResistingArrest@lemmy.zipEnglish
    4·
    6 days ago

    I can see why you’d think that, but I see Esperanto as Spanish with fewer steps. No grammatical gender, two less tenses, fewer moods, and verbs don’t change form depending on the subject. “I/he talks” in Esperanto would be mi/ni estas, whereas in Spanish it would be Yo/El Hablo/Habla. Esperanto was manufactured by a linguist to be easy to learn, for use in global politics, but the French really liked being the main language used in trade/diplomacy at the time, so it all kinda fell apart.

    • ZDL@lazysoci.alEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      Wow. How many incorrect statements can you pack into a paragraph about Esperanto.

      1. Zamenhof wasn’t a linguist. He was an ophthalmologist and an occultist who was also a polyglot. Polyglot is not the same as linguist.
      2. Refresh my memory. What does <‑in> signify on nouns again? What are <li>, <ŝi>, and <ĝi>? Surely they aren’t, you know, gender, right?
      3. Why are there inflectional tenses, moods, etc. at all. Declining for anything is not necessary. The world’s most-spoken native language has no declensions of any kind really…or one, I guess, if you squint right. (It also didn’t have gendered third-person pronouns until the 1910s, and is now reverting that ever so slowly.) Esperanto declines by gender, by tense, by aspect (and here it’s almost pseudorandom how aspects are signalled and assigned!), by mood, etc.
      4. It wasn’t the French who killed Esperanto. It was pretty much everybody in the world who saw no point in using a language that was almost as difficult to learn as French, but hey! at least you couldn’t talk to anybody in it for any reasonable value of “anybody”.
      5. Esperanto is “easy to learn” iff you have command of at least two Continental languages, ideally a Slavic one and a Latin one. It is not easy to learn for people who come from languages without declensions. Without word forms. With particulate grammars, or with agglutinative grammars, instead of inflecting grammars. It has a phonetic inventory that is filled with little landmines like the ⟨ĥ⟩ (velar fricative), the ⟨ĵ⟩ (voiced post-alveolar fricative), and the ⟨r⟩ (trill) … and this is before we even start talking about assimilation rules. And the plethora of stringed consonants. Why not just be honest and say “this language is for (some) European speakers only” and be done with it?

      Esperanto is only marginally easier (at best!) to learn than to learn actually useful world languages like English, French, Arabic, Mandarin, etc. but hey, at least you can speak to up to 1K/30K-2M L1/L2 speakers (estimates vary … dramatically!) instead of 390M/1.1B (English), 74M/238M (French), 315M/90M (Arabic), and 990M/194M (Mandarin).

      • ResistingArrest@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        3 days ago

        hello!

        • you are right, but i think we can agree that calling attention to the difference between a linguist and a polyglot who made an auxlang is pedantic.
        • all nouns in esperanto end in “o”, unlike in spanish, where “libro” (book) is masculine and puerta (door) is feminine (there are less obvious examples like “lapiz”, masculine). I think its fair to say that esperanto has un-gendered nouns since you cannot delineate a gender from just looking at the noun itsself. any source on esperanto will corroborate this.
        • i dont neccesarily disagree with you about this, but esperanto does have fewer moods than spanish, so id call it easier than spanish on that front. it also has fewer declensions than russian (to my knowledge)
        • i say the french did it beause Gabriel Hanotaux was the one league of nations representative who didnt want to adopt it for international relations. esperanto is notably easier to learn than french on account of the ungendered nouns, fewer moods, etc. I think it would make sense for politicians to learn it and we avoid all the translator BS.
        • ZDL@lazysoci.alEnglish
          1·
          3 days ago

          we can agree that calling attention to the difference between a linguist and a polyglot who made an auxlang is pedantic

          No. We can’t. The difference between a linguist and a polyglot are the core reason why Esperanto is such a disaster as an “international language”. Zamenhof (like most polyglots without at least some education in linguistics, even if that education is mostly auto-didactic) had no clue how language is structured. He had no idea what a phonetic inventory is and what other languages outside of his narrow sphere had. He had no idea what allophony is and “resolved” the allophony issues by avoiding talking about it at all, really. He had no idea what grammatical structures were in use in the world to find something suited to as many of those as possible.

          He didn’t know language. He knew a handful of (related) languages. There’s a huge difference here.

          I think its fair to say that esperanto has un-gendered nouns since you cannot delineate a gender from just looking at the noun itsself.

          Are you smoking something? <patro> vs. <patrino>. One is masculine, the other is feminine. How do you tell? You look at the noun itself. THIS IS GENDERED NOUNS! Now how about <ĉevalo> vs. <ĉevalino>? Indeed the Fundamento has <studento> and <studentino> because things are masculine by default. A female student is a different word from a male student, both being gendered nouns.

          So, no, it’s not “fair to say” that the nouns are un-gendered since you can trivially delineate a gender from looking at a noun.

          but esperanto does have fewer moods than spanish, so id call it easier than spanish on that front. it also has fewer declensions than russian (to my knowledge)

          And it has literally infinitely more declensions than Mandarin (and a lot more languages in the Sino-Tibetan sphere).

          esperanto is notably easier to learn than french on account of the ungendered nouns, fewer moods, etc.

          To someone already familiar with specifically Continental European languages (at least two), sure. But to a speaker of Mandarin, or Tibetan, or Korean, or Japanese, or … well, a metric ton of languages (I haven’t even touched three more continents!) there’s no meaningful difference in complexity. But there’s a HUGE difference in utility.

          i say the french did it beause Gabriel Hanotaux was the one league of nations representative who didnt want to adopt it for international relations

          One person vetoed it for one use case once a long time ago (1922).

          What’s the excuse for the remaining century and a bit? (Hint: It rhymes with “not good enough to be worth learning given its complete lack of users” because identical rhyme is still rhyme.)

          • ResistingArrest@lemmy.zipEnglish
            1·
            3 days ago

            I’ll concede the whole argument because you’re well informed, but you’ve kinda just been an asshole from moment one. Do you want information exchange or do you want to be right?

            • ZDL@lazysoci.alEnglish
              1·
              3 days ago

              What “exchange” takes place when one side is saying things that are flatly incorrect? Facts don’t care about your feelings and all that jazz.