Esperanto doesn't have 'engineered perfection', it has either awful, awkward, or endearing flaws and irregularities depending on how you want to look at them. (

Esperanto doesn't have 'engineered perfection', it has either awful, awkward, or endearing flaws and irregularities depending on how you want to look at them. (Kombo - not a comb, but an act of combing something, even though it's a noun word ending; Norda, Suda the compass directions north and south instead of Norda, Malnorda, "kaseto" a cassette or a small "kaso", and so on, k.t.p.). They could be avoided in an engineered perfect language, and even the creator of Esperanto went on to make another language (Ido) using what he learned the first time to improve on some of the flaws he saw, which nobody took up and he later abandoned. My layperson's view on it is that "everything is regularised" means "no convenient shortcuts" for the benefit of "anyone around the world can use it". That's a huge problem for day to day use when you and your friends have to willingly choose to say an inconvenient sentence over and over and over, just so that a person from a thousand miles away could understand you if they were ever here. It's a bit of a tragedy of the commons - you do what's more convenient locally in the short term, and the long term wider scope suffers for it. Esperanto's original ideas were to have many compound words - make them up on the fly, to keep the vocabulary load smaller. It took off early in French speaking regions and gained a lot of French-root loan words, and then got compound word alternatives, so there ended up being multiple ways to say the same thing. e.g. eyeglasses are okulvitroj (eye + glasses). They're also okulvitro (singular) because imperfection. And they are nazumo, from pince-nez, which is nose+"related in a non-specific way" suffix. Then you get really weird words built up from suffix games like "estonteco" which is a "play with words" way of saying "the future"; there's no way I'm going to create or deconstruct that on the fly, possibly no way you'd work it out without learning it.