My Hacker News user profile discloses much of my background in studying human languages. Esperanto is a big disappointment to anyone who knows multiple language

My Hacker News user profile discloses much of my background in studying human languages. Esperanto is a big disappointment to anyone who knows multiple languages and knows linguistics well. It manages to be arbitrary and suboptimal in all kinds of ways that it didn't have to be arbitrary and suboptimal. And, alas, Esperanto has sucked all the oxygen out of the room for any more serious proposal for a constructed languages to serve as an international auxiliary language. The simple fact of the matter is that the international auxiliary language of the twenty-first century is English. New speakers of English added to the total for English each year by learning English as a second language strictly outnumber all Esperanto speakers combined. I have seen English used for that purpose in dozens of combinations of speakers of differing native languages. I have seen rather extensive use of English even for conversation among Chinese people with a certain level of education. (Although the younger generation in China is gradually becoming quite proficient in standard Mandarin in urban areas, Chinese people as old as I am or older sometimes find one another's Mandarin acquired as a second language more baffling than one another's English similarly acquired.) An extensive, linguistically informed write-up on the defects of Esperanto as an international auxiliary language, which is not my own write-up but which I recommend to friends like you, has long lived on the World Wide Web.[1] [1] http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/ http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/