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Regardless of what you think about the idea of an artificial international auxiliary language, Esperanto is very poorly designed as a language. Sure, it's easy

Regardless of what you think about the idea of an artificial international auxiliary language, Esperanto is very poorly designed as a language. Sure, it's easy to learn, because it has a small vocabulary and is very regular. But it's like a programming language designed by an amateur: full of bells and whistles and useless stuff that the designer thought would be cool, without regard to the actual challenges faced by language users. Let me explain a few ways that Esperanto is messed up. One issue is that it's hard to pronounce. Not from the perspective of an English speaker or a speaker of another European language, but from a global perspective. The problem is that it has a lot of complex consonant clusters (sequences of consonants jammed together without vowels in between) which are fine for someone coming from Polish (as Zamenhof, Esperanto's creator, was) but which are nightmarish for people coming from languages that don't have these clusters. Consider for example Chinese, which has no consonant clusters at all. Consider the closest Chinese approximation to the Russian city name "Vladivostok": 符拉迪沃斯托克 fuladiwosituoke (note also that there's no /v/ in Chinese nor many other languages, despite /v/ being very important in Esperanto). A Chinese speaker is not going to find Esperanto easy to produce, with all kinds of Slavic-esque words beginning with kv- such as basic words like kvam (how). Esperanto also has a number of distinctions between sounds which will be lost by speakers of most languages. For example the difference between horo (clock) and hxoro (chorus), involving a distinction between /h/ and /x/ that most languages do not make. Basically Zamenhof was coming from Polish and he did succeed in making Esperanto's phonology simpler than Polish, but it's still very complex from a global perspective. An international auxiliary language should be easy to pronounce. Relatedly, Zamenhof made up some new diacritics to spell these crazy sounds that he shouldn't have included in the language to begin with. ĉ spells "ch" in Esperanto and in no other language. If you want your language to catch on, why would you give it diacritics that no other language has, which people will have trouble typesetting and typing? Since Esperantists can rarely type ĉ and related glyphs, they end up typing cx, sx, jx, gx, etc. instead. Why not just ch or sh? Why not just ditch these sounds altogether? There are lots of other issues. The verb endings -as, -is, -us for present, past, and future tense end up sounding very similar to each other in fast speech (and the idea of making a tense distinction by changing the form of the verb is very European to begin with). The accusative endings -n are so confusing that (so I hear) the native Esperanto speakers have dropped this feature of the language. There is grammatical gender in the pronouns, and adjectives must agree in number and case with nouns. So to conclude the rant, ironically, if Esperanto ever does take over as an auxiliary language, it will be solely because it has the largest community of all the auxiliary languages, not because it is a good language. In other words, the same way that a normal language takes over. I guess it bugs me that it could have been done much better. It gives a bad name to constructed languages. Interlingua and Ido are big improvements, and you can also check out Lojban for a much more radical non-Eurocentric approach. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ido https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ido https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban

nelaboras 6y ago
All valid criticisms but especially the accusative critique misses that the language has unique features, such as the possibility to change word order pretty much freely, so you can stress different parts of the sentence. I am actively learnkgn Esperanto and find it deeply enjoyable - I speak English, German and French (mostly) fluently and have dabbled in Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, Malayalam, Mandarin and a tiny bit of Lojban. None of them have given me this sense of joy while learning vocabulary or practising as its really just a matter of 'recognising' a word - usually from your own native language and sometimes from others. I'd dare to say this is the key feature of Esperanto: its incredibly pleasant and beginner friendly. As to Lojban, I was incredibly motivated but just had to give up after a few weeks. Its like Latin or Sanskrit, a mostly theoretical written language with overly stingent rules. Lojban words can be used as verbs or nouns, but when used as verbs they have a strict fixed order where subject and objects go that you simply have to learn by heart. All words are 'averaged' from the most common languages and follow a common scheme - so pretty much none of them are recognisable to anyone. As such just a horror to learn. That said I still admire the effort. Learning different languages opens wide horizons and completely new conceptual worlds and anyone who doesn't try at least to learn a second language really misses out even on understanding their own language better.

nelaboras 6y ago

All valid criticisms but especially the accusative critique misses that the language has unique features, such as the possibility to change word order pretty much freely, so you can stress different parts of the sentence. I am actively learnkgn Esperanto and find it deeply enjoyable - I speak English, German and French (mostly) fluently and have dabbled in Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, Malayalam, Mandarin and a tiny bit of Lojban. None of them have given me this sense of joy while learning vocabulary or practising as its really just a matter of 'recognising' a word - usually from your own native language and sometimes from others. I'd dare to say this is the key feature of Esperanto: its incredibly pleasant and beginner friendly. As to Lojban, I was incredibly motivated but just had to give up after a few weeks. Its like Latin or Sanskrit, a mostly theoretical written language with overly stingent rules. Lojban words can be used as verbs or nouns, but when used as verbs they have a strict fixed order where subject and objects go that you simply have to learn by heart. All words are 'averaged' from the most common languages and follow a common scheme - so pretty much none of them are recognisable to anyone. As such just a horror to learn. That said I still admire the effort. Learning different languages opens wide horizons and completely new conceptual worlds and anyone who doesn't try at least to learn a second language really misses out even on understanding their own language better.