kevinios

Just a suggestion, and I suspect I might have overlooked some drawbacks: what about hosting it on SEVERAL of those websites/platforms/services/communication systems (probably with a version "number" or a last updated date), and inside the book, provide several backup links, in case the first one was dead by the time they visited it?

Basically spreading the risk to maybe 10 platforms instead of 1, hoping that at least 1 always survives.

One issue would be that if you lose the login access to one of those platforms, their content might be deprecated on that page, and more recent content would be displayed on others. But that might be a small enough problem to ignore it. You could also encourage readers to visit 2-3 of the links, instead of 1, to increase the chances they read the one with the most recently updated content.

And/or maybe each of those pages could embed a system that "fetches" the status of the other 9 pages, and display the version number of the content of each of them, so that the reader can navigate to other pages if they see that another one has more recently updated content.

And/or you (the author) could manually have to go on the 10 pages every month/year and "confirm" that the content is still up-to-date. Each page would display: "the author has last confirmed the validity of this page on date X". This stops working after you pass away, though, but since all pages would show the same last confirmed date, that might be ok. You could also add a warning on those platforms: "If you see that I haven't confirmed the validity of the content in more than X months, I have either lost access to this page or passed away. Please check some of the other links from the book to see if their "last confirmed by author date" is the same, and if so, please try and check online whether I have passed away".

In any case, a fun problem to think about, thank you!

Indeed, and I suppose spelling bees makes sense for any language that is not written exactly as it is pronounced, French being one of them. From what I've read so far, Esperanto only has a single way to write every sound it uses, so it would be much less challenging.

Interesting!

Let me know what you think, but I suspect spelling is not exactly the issue, but rather the fact that there is not a single way to write each sound. There are several sounds possible for each spelling ("ough").

If there were a single way to write each sound, then the spelling in itself wouldn't really matter, as we would only learn the spelling of each sound once and be done with it; we'd always recognize it.

Makes sense. Although if the idea is to choose one language because it has been created with the purpose of being as simple as possible, it might be normal that we want this to be as optimized as possible. If I already know that I'm gonna have to install a fourth keyboard on my smartphone and switch to it every time I write in Esperanto so that accents are easier to type, that might an unnecessary barrier we could get rid of.

Basically, this was invented decades ago by a few people. It's 2018, I wonder what language would be produced if several thousands people collaborated online to simplify it to a maximum, while retaining its capacity to express any idea.

Guilty! Felt like it was the perfect audience to ask for a question that I could not ask people around me :-) On HN, there is usually always at least one domain expert on any given topic, so it's a pleasure to know that someone will probably have an answer for you.

Completely agree with you that sx doesn't look good at all! My suggestion was not to replace with something that looks worst, but ideally that looks cleaner (didn't actually even know of the sx form before I read all the great comments, I do not know Esperanto)

True, but I suspect they are sufficiently rare not to constitute an argument for a beginner not to learn English (also, correct me if I'm wrong but most of those words have accents because they come from other languages)

Exactly! And I see that typewriters were invented in 1878, so the difficulty to type Esperanto with typewriters was most probably not taken into account when it was invented.

Ok I see. By "Nowadays, you can just type the actual letters, it's not a big deal.", I had understood that you could actually just use the normal letter and it would still be understood.

Interesting! I see that this refactor was made in 1907.

This makes me wonder... in an age where we have tools to open-source and crowdsource software programming, would it be possible to crowd-source the creation of a new language? It could then be refactored regularly (with new major versions published every X years), the source of truth would be the main branch of the repo, and the role that an Academy usually assumes (approving changes to a language) would be given to contributors.

I suspect that a language created by a common effort from a thousand brains would be simpler and more optimized than one invented by a single person in the late 19th century, no matter how hard that person worked on it.