Talk:Oepc esperanto

I have had some experience with Esperanto from time to time over many years and feel that Esperanto potentially has much to offer as an auxiliary language, though I feel that the children should be taught most subjects in their own language.

So the idea of having an Esperanto encyclopedia is something I like. It could potentially be used in many countries by people who have various first languages.

Yet, when I looked at the Esperanto text on the page I realized that, even though I have some knowledge of Esperanto, the text was not intelligible to me because, although I could recognize some words and could recognize the grammar structure, I simply did not have the vocabulary knowledge to understand the text.

What can be done?

One possibility would be to have every word linked to a dictionary structure in the first language of the child. This dictionary structure could perhaps be more than an ordinary dictionary as the meaning of every word used in the encyclopedia could be included, so that, for example, whereas an ordinary dictionary would have one entry for a root word, the dictionary structure would have one entry for each word used, so that there could be many entries relating to each root word. Yet this dictionary structure would only need to have the words used in the encyclopedia, not every word in the Esperanto language. Thus, as the encyclopedia would use some words more than once, the dictionary structure would be less than twice the size of the text part of the encyclopedia, maybe significantly less than twice the size of the text part of the encyclopedia.

If the encyclopedia were designed from the start so that clicking on a word displays the translation of that word in the local language then a useful facility could be achieveable. Can that be done without the text needing hyperlink underlining all the way through? There would then need to be one encyclopedia and a number of dictionary structures, one dictionary structure for each first language being supported. This need not necessarily be as big a problem as it sounds as there may be many volunteers who would not be able to translate articles into Esperanto yet may be able to help to produce the dictionary structure for his or her own first language. If this approach is thought to be of benefit then the encyclopedia software could be designed from the start so as to facilitate having such dictionary structures associated with it, with the necessary tools to update the dictionary structures as the encyclopedia is being produced and expanded.

Hm, you have an interesting point and an interesting proposal to the solution... One point that I would like to make is that, while Esperanto is considered a much easier language than others, it is still a language: students will have to put effort, however minimal, into learning it if they wish to reap the benefits. Phonetic spelling and an additive grammar structure (flexibility in creating compound words) help this but cannot change the fact that a vocabulary must be learned. If key words in each article in the encyclopedia can be linked to the student's first language, this will be a massive aid in giving them the necessary vocabulary to "get around" in Esperanto; and needless to say, getting a grip on Esperanto vocabulary will make the transition to English or other indoeuropean languages that much easier.

One issue that concerns me is that, as commented on this article page, the Esperanto-vikipedio is probably in general not nearly as 'simple' as the Simple English Wikipedia. The two solutions that come to mind are to rewrite every article (!) to simplify the vocabulary - meaning that much more work done by volunteer Esperantistoj - or to reference every advanced word to the dictionary, as you have proposed. I see two possible layouts for the latter option: 1) In-text: as is standard in Wikipedia, each word could be linked in the article's body text to the external definition; 2) Post-text: each article is annotated with a section "Definition links", which lists a link for each unfamiliar vocabulary, alphabetized or in the order the words appear in the article.

One problem with this solution: From where do we get the dictionaries in the child's native language? Is there a Wiktionary in each language to be used? And additionally, how would we alter the definition links in the Esperanto-encyclopedia to link to different dictionaries for each different languages? This is a great idea, but I think we need to develop it quite a bit.