garabik comments on The rational way to name rivers - Less Wrong

2 Post author: PhilGoetz 06 August 2014 03:41PM

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Comment author: garabik 07 August 2014 08:02:05AM 5 points [-]

learn Esperanto. The problem is that it takes up much more space than English

That's not how Esperanto works - it is not a philosophical language. While in theory it is 100% agglutinative, it is not used in that way, and the wordbuilding affixes serve more like a mnemotechnical device when learning the language (and it is very cleverly designed and very helpful).

As for the size, Esperanto is not longer or shorter than any particular other language - it is English that is somewhat shorter than the others, due to many mono- and disyllabic words. Also consider the fact that translations are usually longer than originals.