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The value proposition of Esperanto never made sense to me. If the goal were merely to get everybody speaking the same language to achieve world peace, then the

The value proposition of Esperanto never made sense to me. If the goal were merely to get everybody speaking the same language to achieve world peace, then the efforts of pragmatists would go towards teaching more people English, since that language is the closest to the finish line. Of course that would be contentious in some political philosophies, it doesn't surprise me that some people drawn to the 'universal language for world peace' idea find the promotion of English unacceptable. However it seems to me these people are relinquishing any hope for success in order to remain principled.

olah_1 6y ago
As a native English speaker, I don't like English being the world language because I'm at a significant disadvantage because 1. I have zero incentive to learn another language 2. I do not have a secret/family language that I can switch into for strategic purposes 3. It gets watered down for the purposes of internationality to the point that we lose even our productive affixes. We can't even create meaningful names within English anymore. It loses its richness.
- emodendroket 6y ago
  > It gets watered down for the purposes of internationality to the point that we lose even our productive affixes. I have no idea what you're talking about. Nobody in English-speaking countries is changing the way they speak "for the purposes of internationality." And the way a bunch of languages are importing scores of English words wholesale isn't much richer in my view.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Tainnor 6y ago
    There have been studies, and I know this also anecdotally from native speakers, that e.g. "business English", at least in non-English countries, becomes its own, more restrictive variant of English because of the high percentage of non-native speakers. I know that some such native speakers have said that they feel their English got worse after living abroad for a while. Of course, overall, this is a very slow process. People don't stop applying the rules or simplify vocabulary over night or even within the span of a couple of years, but there is growing evidence in general that the more speakers a language has, the more it tends to simplify structurally, e.g. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.181274 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.181274
    - emodendroket 6y ago
      Sure, and materials produced by the government or for wide consumption are written in very simple language. But this is somewhat outside what "typical" native speakers are using.
- umanwizard 6y ago
  Nothings stops you from learning whatever second language you want. I think having English as a native language actually gives us a huge advantage: we can travel to a large chunk of the world and have a pretty good chance of being understood. We can work in globally relevant jobs with no language barrier. And so on.
  - olah_1 6y ago
    > Nothings stops you from learning whatever second language you want. A lack of incentive is what stops most. > we can travel to a large chunk of the world and have a pretty good chance of being understood. We can work in globally relevant jobs with no language barrier. And so on. You described the benefit of knowing English, not being a native English speaker.
    - Viliam1234 6y ago
      The advantage of being a native English speaker is that you do not have to waste years of your life learning English as a second language. You could spend the same amount of time learning a different language... but you probably can find a better use for that time. In the time I spent learning English -- which is still far from perfect, especially in spoken form -- I probably could have learned quantum physics instead. Except, I realistically couldn't have, because good textbooks on this topic do not exist in my language, I wouldn't be able to learn more online, etc. Now imagine removing an equivalent amount of knowledge from your life -- that is the price you would have to pay for not being a native English speaker. (The idea of Esperanto as everyone's second language is that instead of some people spending 10+ years learning the common language, and some lucky people spending 0, everyone would spend 2 years instead. Until people would hopefully realize that private languages are useless, and then it would be 0 for everyone.)
  - __sisyphus__ 6y ago
    > Nothings stops you from learning whatever second language you want. You're right, nothing is stopping one from learning a second language; unfortunately not only do most english speakers lack incentive, but also they lack the ability to practice in the way most other languages do. Most of the time when you run into non-native english speakers, they would rather practice their english with you, even when in their country of origin. Additionally, there's very little lingual diversity in the US as it stands. Sure, there are plenty of spanish speakers, but early education doesn't really focus on teaching spanish with any sort of fluency as a true end-goal. So situationally it just makes learning a second language that much more difficult. Nonetheless, I do agree with you that there are obviously huge benefits to it; the few that you mention, along with many others.
- dathinab 6y ago
  At the same time you have a major advantage by most of the internet being (language wise) accessible to you from the get to go. I can just say that if I would have been able to speak english in my teenage years it would have majorly influenced my life in a likely positive but at least more interesting direction. Sadly back then I neither had any reasonable english skills nor was I aware of how much it would help me. Through I guess by now it has become quite obvious how use-full english is (wrt. IT/CS).
  - olah_1 6y ago
    I’m sure that it is better to learn English from a young age, yes. But as it stands currently, you have an advantage over me.
  - siltpotato 6y ago
    That actually brings up a point that upsets me somewhat: The Spanish Internet feels inaccessible to me because I don't know where the interesting parts of it are.
- stereolambda 6y ago
  I think that the advantages of being a native speaker in the end outweigh the disadvantages. You are exposed to the dominant economic and cultural ecosystems easier and much earlier. You may lack some ability to switch context and reframe things for different cultures, but it's not generally a practical necessity in life. On the other hand, you may sometimes be harder to understand for non-native speakers, especially if you speak some non-mainstream dialect or pronunciation. (Even standard British, in normal speech, is probably harder for me to process than American: depends on what you've been exposed to.) Coming from some other Latin script language, you'd probably have a better feel for oddities in English pronunciation (like 'thumb', or 'pseudo', etc.) and can easier adapt some more consistent 'euro' way of pronouncing as needed. Sometimes people won't understand you otherwise.
  - claudeganon 6y ago
    >You are exposed to the dominant economic and cultural ecosystems easier and much earlier. I don't think that early induction into specific ideologies as something to be described as blanket good. This kind of monolingualism certainly hasn't helped the intellectual life of the average American or its society writ large.
    - stereolambda 6y ago
      In the big picture perhaps, but I tend to think about the raw economic and having-a-say-in-the-world status of an individual. In that sense, it's statistically better to be at the center and the mainstream. You can luck and hack your way into something from the periphery but it's harder. The wider benefits of cross-pollination is another discussion.
- fr2null 6y ago
  While you might have a slight disadvantage if you ever really needed to talk about someone while they are standing next to you, I personally feel like I have a much bigger disadvantage since English is not my native language. My English is at a C2 level, and as such I am able to understand and explain complex concepts with ease, however my debating and small talk skills are nowhere nears as good in English as they are in my native language. I find it much harder to convince people using English. I know that the only thing that will make it better is practice, but this takes a lot of time and effort.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  Re. Point 2 Move to glasgow if you want to be able to switch into a "different" language
- JdeBP 6y ago
  Have you tried Brummie? Non-native speakers often have significant trouble with England's non-RP accents.
anewguy9000 6y ago
english is the language of the oppressor
- bigbubba 6y ago
  I understand that point of view, but desiring the creation of a universal language makes one an aspirational conqueror. The whole premise of 'a universal language for world peace' is oppressive (and for that reason I don't support it no matter the language chosen.)
  - rhn_mk1 6y ago
    > The whole premise of 'a universal language for world peace' is oppressive Could you explain that? I see it more in terms of creating a voluntary standard than forcing people to comply.
    - bigbubba 6y ago
      I think the universal language would gradually extinguish other languages. The more universal a language becomes, the more powerful the network effects get.
      - Viliam1234 6y ago
        Is being extinguished by a universal language somehow worse than being extinguished by a non-universal language?
        naniwaduni 6y ago
        A non-universal language doesn't imply extinguishing other languages.
  - jodrellblank 6y ago
    My reading of Esperanto wasn’t to make everyone have to speak it as their first and only language (though I’m sure some have suggested that), but to make it a simpler more convenient halfway house language that would put everyone at the same disadvantage, if you will. you show willingness to be friendly and negotiate by stepping away from your native language and learning another, but you don’t have to step into another’s native language and accept being at a huge disadvantage, and you don’t have to learn the union of every language of everyone you want to talk with. It’s an idea that can only really succeed from a combined goodwill not conquering oppression. All over Europe there isn’t room to put up road signs and menus and instructions in the union of all possible languages visitors could speak. It’s easy to say all visitors must learn the local language, but there’s often some concession to putting up signs in some other languages, Esperanto fits there. All road signs seconded in Esperanto isn’t as good for locals as all visitors learning the local language, it isn’t as good for visitors as signs being in their native language, but it isn’t as bad for locals as one group of visitors expecting signs in their language and it isn’t as bad for visitors as signs being in multiple native languages but not theirs. Expecting to go anywhere and speak English is rude. Expecting everyone to learn English is unlikely and going to trigger a lot of anger. Also supporting French shows some openness but privileges France in a national way. If you could get language away from nationalism, tourist information in Esperanto doesn’t privilege any one nation.
lukevp 6y ago
I agree it doesn’t make sense in the context of today, but in 1887 when it was invented, there was no internet, and you couldn’t translate between languages with a computer. The globalization hadn’t happened yet where everyone had to learn English, and learning some easier to use intermediate language made sense as an easy adoption for translating at a time that machine translation was inconceivable. Think about newspapers as a concept of information dissemination. It would be a lot lower effort to create a single newsletter and distribute it globally than to have a network of translators who can recreate it, redo the layout, and reprint it. Or think about travelers, where your queries are simple and someone could learn a language in a couple of weeks and be a tour guide for travelers from all places. At this point, English makes far more sense, but I get why they invented Esperanto, and at some point I could carry light conversations in it, though that has faded since it’s fairly useless.
- fanf2 6y ago
  My grandfather had a story from when he was travelling around Europe between the wars: he tried to have a conversation with someone in a youth hostel but they had trouble finding a language they had in common ... until they tried Latin!
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
I'm not particularly familiar with Esperanto, but I imagine the idea is that it's much easier to learn than English. English is stupidly complicated—not necessarily more-so than other languages, but well above what an intentionally-designed language could achieve.
- variaga 6y ago
  Esperanto (and all the other intentionally designed languages) are simple and logical only because nobody actually speaks them as a native language. They're consistent because everyone learned them from the same miniscule corpus of available books and the occasional film. If any of the intentionally designed languages were to actually come into common use, it would immediately be subject to the same kind of regional pronunciation differences, usage drift over time, coining of neologisms and idiomatic phrases, etc. that make real languages so complicated.
  - def_true_false 6y ago
    Updating the ortography once in a while would take care of most of the problems. There are real languages that have successfully made "updates" to reflect the shifts in pronunciation, or the usage of additional sounds (compared to Latin), unlike English.
    - kwhitefoot 6y ago
      > "updates" to reflect the shifts in pronunciation, Which pronunciation will you choose? If you are a prescriptive linguist from Newcastle you will presumably expect everyone to use a short a in 'castle' but someone from the south would use a long a. And which language do you have in mind when you imply that there are languages that are pronounced in the same way by all of its speakers? Anyway, there is no Academy in charge of English so if you want to get started on spelling reform just go to it. Promote your revised spelling amongst your friends and colleagues. Or should that be: 'Promoat yor rivized speling amongst yor frends and koleegs.'?
      - 6y ago
simion314 6y ago
But English is so broken, from what I see there are consts for spelling where you could create a language with clear rules and no freaking exceptions based on the history of the word. Maybe if you could reform/refactor English to drop the historical stuff and write words exactly how they sound - we would rename this language to not cause confusion or outrage, like a clean refactor.
- olah_1 6y ago
  When you consider that words are essentially the same thing as sinograms (chinese characters), the spelling is not a big deal. English spelling needs to remain the same because they are primarily visual. Native level English users just scan the general shapes of words and know the meanings in the same way that Chinese users just scan the general gists of the characters. The nice result is that you can have 10 wildly different English accents / dialects that all use the same spelling. It keeps everyone bound together. After all, if you went with phonetic spelling, which accent would you choose?
  - emodendroket 6y ago
    The comparison is generous to Chinese characters. Even the world's worst speller, confronted with an uncommon English word, could make a guess at the spelling that's probably decipherable. If you forget a Chinese character you may not even be able to put the first stroke to paper.
    - olah_1 6y ago
      Yes, of course. But that was not the point I was making. Personally I find alphabets to be superior for that reason. But to be fair, I also don't know Chinese!
      - emodendroket 6y ago
        There's an unbelievable amount of woo and magical thinking floating around this subject. It definitely requires more effort to learn and remember. But yes, point taken.
7thaccount 6y ago
Back in the day, French was the dominant language for international communications. As such, France was the only major League of Nations (might have been a different group) power to vote against Esperanto being pushed for international communications at that time. The USA was supportive at the time. Now the tables are turned and native English speakers have a significant advantage on the world stage, so the US and UK would not benefit as much. In recent years, Esperanto has pushed itself as more of an international auxiliary language. If it's much easier to learn than English, than everyone can continue speaking their national language and use Esperanto as an intermediary language. It's an interesting idea, but I figure we'll just move towards fewer and fewer major languages until only 5-10 are widely spoken (Ex: english, spanish, mandarin, Hindi...etc).
akvadrako 6y ago
It's because Esperanto is much easier to learn. Teaching everybody English will take thousands of hours of every persons life. It's about a 10x difference. You can actually learn it with negative time investment if you use it as precursor to learning English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant...

olah_1 6y ago

As a native English speaker, I don't like English being the world language because I'm at a significant disadvantage because 1. I have zero incentive to learn another language 2. I do not have a secret/family language that I can switch into for strategic purposes 3. It gets watered down for the purposes of internationality to the point that we lose even our productive affixes. We can't even create meaningful names within English anymore. It loses its richness.

emodendroket 6y ago
> It gets watered down for the purposes of internationality to the point that we lose even our productive affixes. I have no idea what you're talking about. Nobody in English-speaking countries is changing the way they speak "for the purposes of internationality." And the way a bunch of languages are importing scores of English words wholesale isn't much richer in my view.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Tainnor 6y ago
  There have been studies, and I know this also anecdotally from native speakers, that e.g. "business English", at least in non-English countries, becomes its own, more restrictive variant of English because of the high percentage of non-native speakers. I know that some such native speakers have said that they feel their English got worse after living abroad for a while. Of course, overall, this is a very slow process. People don't stop applying the rules or simplify vocabulary over night or even within the span of a couple of years, but there is growing evidence in general that the more speakers a language has, the more it tends to simplify structurally, e.g. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.181274 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.181274
  - emodendroket 6y ago
    Sure, and materials produced by the government or for wide consumption are written in very simple language. But this is somewhat outside what "typical" native speakers are using.
umanwizard 6y ago
Nothings stops you from learning whatever second language you want. I think having English as a native language actually gives us a huge advantage: we can travel to a large chunk of the world and have a pretty good chance of being understood. We can work in globally relevant jobs with no language barrier. And so on.
- olah_1 6y ago
  > Nothings stops you from learning whatever second language you want. A lack of incentive is what stops most. > we can travel to a large chunk of the world and have a pretty good chance of being understood. We can work in globally relevant jobs with no language barrier. And so on. You described the benefit of knowing English, not being a native English speaker.
  - Viliam1234 6y ago
    The advantage of being a native English speaker is that you do not have to waste years of your life learning English as a second language. You could spend the same amount of time learning a different language... but you probably can find a better use for that time. In the time I spent learning English -- which is still far from perfect, especially in spoken form -- I probably could have learned quantum physics instead. Except, I realistically couldn't have, because good textbooks on this topic do not exist in my language, I wouldn't be able to learn more online, etc. Now imagine removing an equivalent amount of knowledge from your life -- that is the price you would have to pay for not being a native English speaker. (The idea of Esperanto as everyone's second language is that instead of some people spending 10+ years learning the common language, and some lucky people spending 0, everyone would spend 2 years instead. Until people would hopefully realize that private languages are useless, and then it would be 0 for everyone.)
- __sisyphus__ 6y ago
  > Nothings stops you from learning whatever second language you want. You're right, nothing is stopping one from learning a second language; unfortunately not only do most english speakers lack incentive, but also they lack the ability to practice in the way most other languages do. Most of the time when you run into non-native english speakers, they would rather practice their english with you, even when in their country of origin. Additionally, there's very little lingual diversity in the US as it stands. Sure, there are plenty of spanish speakers, but early education doesn't really focus on teaching spanish with any sort of fluency as a true end-goal. So situationally it just makes learning a second language that much more difficult. Nonetheless, I do agree with you that there are obviously huge benefits to it; the few that you mention, along with many others.
dathinab 6y ago
At the same time you have a major advantage by most of the internet being (language wise) accessible to you from the get to go. I can just say that if I would have been able to speak english in my teenage years it would have majorly influenced my life in a likely positive but at least more interesting direction. Sadly back then I neither had any reasonable english skills nor was I aware of how much it would help me. Through I guess by now it has become quite obvious how use-full english is (wrt. IT/CS).
- olah_1 6y ago
  I’m sure that it is better to learn English from a young age, yes. But as it stands currently, you have an advantage over me.
- siltpotato 6y ago
  That actually brings up a point that upsets me somewhat: The Spanish Internet feels inaccessible to me because I don't know where the interesting parts of it are.
stereolambda 6y ago
I think that the advantages of being a native speaker in the end outweigh the disadvantages. You are exposed to the dominant economic and cultural ecosystems easier and much earlier. You may lack some ability to switch context and reframe things for different cultures, but it's not generally a practical necessity in life. On the other hand, you may sometimes be harder to understand for non-native speakers, especially if you speak some non-mainstream dialect or pronunciation. (Even standard British, in normal speech, is probably harder for me to process than American: depends on what you've been exposed to.) Coming from some other Latin script language, you'd probably have a better feel for oddities in English pronunciation (like 'thumb', or 'pseudo', etc.) and can easier adapt some more consistent 'euro' way of pronouncing as needed. Sometimes people won't understand you otherwise.
- claudeganon 6y ago
  >You are exposed to the dominant economic and cultural ecosystems easier and much earlier. I don't think that early induction into specific ideologies as something to be described as blanket good. This kind of monolingualism certainly hasn't helped the intellectual life of the average American or its society writ large.
  - stereolambda 6y ago
    In the big picture perhaps, but I tend to think about the raw economic and having-a-say-in-the-world status of an individual. In that sense, it's statistically better to be at the center and the mainstream. You can luck and hack your way into something from the periphery but it's harder. The wider benefits of cross-pollination is another discussion.
fr2null 6y ago
While you might have a slight disadvantage if you ever really needed to talk about someone while they are standing next to you, I personally feel like I have a much bigger disadvantage since English is not my native language. My English is at a C2 level, and as such I am able to understand and explain complex concepts with ease, however my debating and small talk skills are nowhere nears as good in English as they are in my native language. I find it much harder to convince people using English. I know that the only thing that will make it better is practice, but this takes a lot of time and effort.
mhh__ 6y ago
Re. Point 2 Move to glasgow if you want to be able to switch into a "different" language
JdeBP 6y ago
Have you tried Brummie? Non-native speakers often have significant trouble with England's non-RP accents.

anewguy9000 6y ago

english is the language of the oppressor

bigbubba 6y ago
I understand that point of view, but desiring the creation of a universal language makes one an aspirational conqueror. The whole premise of 'a universal language for world peace' is oppressive (and for that reason I don't support it no matter the language chosen.)
- rhn_mk1 6y ago
  > The whole premise of 'a universal language for world peace' is oppressive Could you explain that? I see it more in terms of creating a voluntary standard than forcing people to comply.
  - bigbubba 6y ago
    I think the universal language would gradually extinguish other languages. The more universal a language becomes, the more powerful the network effects get.
    - Viliam1234 6y ago
      Is being extinguished by a universal language somehow worse than being extinguished by a non-universal language?
      - naniwaduni 6y ago
        A non-universal language doesn't imply extinguishing other languages.
- jodrellblank 6y ago
  My reading of Esperanto wasn’t to make everyone have to speak it as their first and only language (though I’m sure some have suggested that), but to make it a simpler more convenient halfway house language that would put everyone at the same disadvantage, if you will. you show willingness to be friendly and negotiate by stepping away from your native language and learning another, but you don’t have to step into another’s native language and accept being at a huge disadvantage, and you don’t have to learn the union of every language of everyone you want to talk with. It’s an idea that can only really succeed from a combined goodwill not conquering oppression. All over Europe there isn’t room to put up road signs and menus and instructions in the union of all possible languages visitors could speak. It’s easy to say all visitors must learn the local language, but there’s often some concession to putting up signs in some other languages, Esperanto fits there. All road signs seconded in Esperanto isn’t as good for locals as all visitors learning the local language, it isn’t as good for visitors as signs being in their native language, but it isn’t as bad for locals as one group of visitors expecting signs in their language and it isn’t as bad for visitors as signs being in multiple native languages but not theirs. Expecting to go anywhere and speak English is rude. Expecting everyone to learn English is unlikely and going to trigger a lot of anger. Also supporting French shows some openness but privileges France in a national way. If you could get language away from nationalism, tourist information in Esperanto doesn’t privilege any one nation.

lukevp 6y ago

I agree it doesn’t make sense in the context of today, but in 1887 when it was invented, there was no internet, and you couldn’t translate between languages with a computer. The globalization hadn’t happened yet where everyone had to learn English, and learning some easier to use intermediate language made sense as an easy adoption for translating at a time that machine translation was inconceivable. Think about newspapers as a concept of information dissemination. It would be a lot lower effort to create a single newsletter and distribute it globally than to have a network of translators who can recreate it, redo the layout, and reprint it. Or think about travelers, where your queries are simple and someone could learn a language in a couple of weeks and be a tour guide for travelers from all places. At this point, English makes far more sense, but I get why they invented Esperanto, and at some point I could carry light conversations in it, though that has faded since it’s fairly useless.

fanf2 6y ago
My grandfather had a story from when he was travelling around Europe between the wars: he tried to have a conversation with someone in a youth hostel but they had trouble finding a language they had in common ... until they tried Latin!

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

I'm not particularly familiar with Esperanto, but I imagine the idea is that it's much easier to learn than English. English is stupidly complicated—not necessarily more-so than other languages, but well above what an intentionally-designed language could achieve.

variaga 6y ago
Esperanto (and all the other intentionally designed languages) are simple and logical only because nobody actually speaks them as a native language. They're consistent because everyone learned them from the same miniscule corpus of available books and the occasional film. If any of the intentionally designed languages were to actually come into common use, it would immediately be subject to the same kind of regional pronunciation differences, usage drift over time, coining of neologisms and idiomatic phrases, etc. that make real languages so complicated.
- def_true_false 6y ago
  Updating the ortography once in a while would take care of most of the problems. There are real languages that have successfully made "updates" to reflect the shifts in pronunciation, or the usage of additional sounds (compared to Latin), unlike English.
  - kwhitefoot 6y ago
    > "updates" to reflect the shifts in pronunciation, Which pronunciation will you choose? If you are a prescriptive linguist from Newcastle you will presumably expect everyone to use a short a in 'castle' but someone from the south would use a long a. And which language do you have in mind when you imply that there are languages that are pronounced in the same way by all of its speakers? Anyway, there is no Academy in charge of English so if you want to get started on spelling reform just go to it. Promote your revised spelling amongst your friends and colleagues. Or should that be: 'Promoat yor rivized speling amongst yor frends and koleegs.'?
    - 6y ago

simion314 6y ago

But English is so broken, from what I see there are consts for spelling where you could create a language with clear rules and no freaking exceptions based on the history of the word. Maybe if you could reform/refactor English to drop the historical stuff and write words exactly how they sound - we would rename this language to not cause confusion or outrage, like a clean refactor.

olah_1 6y ago
When you consider that words are essentially the same thing as sinograms (chinese characters), the spelling is not a big deal. English spelling needs to remain the same because they are primarily visual. Native level English users just scan the general shapes of words and know the meanings in the same way that Chinese users just scan the general gists of the characters. The nice result is that you can have 10 wildly different English accents / dialects that all use the same spelling. It keeps everyone bound together. After all, if you went with phonetic spelling, which accent would you choose?
- emodendroket 6y ago
  The comparison is generous to Chinese characters. Even the world's worst speller, confronted with an uncommon English word, could make a guess at the spelling that's probably decipherable. If you forget a Chinese character you may not even be able to put the first stroke to paper.
  - olah_1 6y ago
    Yes, of course. But that was not the point I was making. Personally I find alphabets to be superior for that reason. But to be fair, I also don't know Chinese!
    - emodendroket 6y ago
      There's an unbelievable amount of woo and magical thinking floating around this subject. It definitely requires more effort to learn and remember. But yes, point taken.

7thaccount 6y ago

Back in the day, French was the dominant language for international communications. As such, France was the only major League of Nations (might have been a different group) power to vote against Esperanto being pushed for international communications at that time. The USA was supportive at the time. Now the tables are turned and native English speakers have a significant advantage on the world stage, so the US and UK would not benefit as much. In recent years, Esperanto has pushed itself as more of an international auxiliary language. If it's much easier to learn than English, than everyone can continue speaking their national language and use Esperanto as an intermediary language. It's an interesting idea, but I figure we'll just move towards fewer and fewer major languages until only 5-10 are widely spoken (Ex: english, spanish, mandarin, Hindi...etc).

akvadrako 6y ago

It's because Esperanto is much easier to learn. Teaching everybody English will take thousands of hours of every persons life. It's about a 10x difference. You can actually learn it with negative time investment if you use it as precursor to learning English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant...