Esperanto why it failed

I think your views of Esperanto in its spoken context would be more interesting, otherwise you are just nitpicking on bits of the languages. No language is perfect - you were just saying on twitter the other day how inefficient English is and now you are praising it You criticise the religious zealousness of Esperanto speakers, but all I see is almost religious bashing of Esperanto on your side. Other than traffic, I don't see the point of these rants.

Do you want the world to stop speaking Esperanto? I don't get what your mission here is.. Just to disentangle simple error of fact from your otherwise valid criticism I am unsure whether, during your brief study of Esperanto, you ran across the suffix -ad? For all intents and purposes, it functions like an imperfective verb ending. The alternate diagraphs for the supersigned characters, known as the X-system and the H- system are considered equally valid, and the latter was actually preferred by Zamenhof.

As to the simplicity of typing supersigned characters, I have no difficulties because of the program EK! Ultimately though, I think that enabling Esperanto characters is a trifle given today's technology, where a single device can type in Cyrillic, and Latin, and Devangari characters - relative to the state of affairs at the time of Esperanto's conception, when it would have been necessary to design a machine adapted specifically for typing in Esperanto.

Obviously, there have been many artificial languages created since which have solved the 'problem' of unorthodox orthography, but they have garnered far less support than Esperanto's "meagre" community. You must admit that it is only speculation on your part that kiu, kie,kio,kiam etc.

There is no question that for a beginner who has not yet learned to deconstruct the correlatives and realize that kio, tio, nenio and so on are composed of a regular series of elements, will have difficulty associating them with a precise meaning and will rely on pure memorization initially. But none of this interferes with comprehension between competent speakers - I can, at least, attest to that, since I have spent significant periods of time among Esperanto speakers, even in places where communication is traditionally inhibited for ALL languages, such as discotheques with blaring music.

Other than that, I enjoyed your thoughts. On a personal note, I have no qualms regarding Esperanto's lack of standards for vowel reduction and consonant dropping - it certainly helped to improve my diction in Italian, so that I don't commit some of the atrocities common amongst Anglophones struggling to keep the schwa from filtering in when speaking Romance languages.

Perhaps you don't understand because you don't see my email box. All you see is the latest post on my site, or the latest tweet in my Twitter stream. But I see all the ridiculous arguments from zealots who completely mischaracterize my words. This post was meant as a serious, objective look at the language and what I consider to be major flaws, and I managed to write more than words about Esperanto here without attacking anyone who speaks it.

Now, if you want to know why I have such a problem with Esperantists, come back here in a couple of days and read through all the replies I get. That will be all the evidence anyone needs. I should learn to edit rather than making revisions after the fact!

I can appreciate that, but the way you criticise it invites those kinds of e-mails! To be frank, I think you're mixing up cause and effect. People are "religious" because of the constant dissing you give. That would happen with anything. If I said how hairdressers are a useless part of society in my blog, for example, then I'd get a bunch of hair-dressers e-mailing me and commenting me, with lengthy angry explanations why I'm wrong.

Could I claim that hairdressers are religious fanatics from that? I wouldn't get the volume of replies you are getting from Esperanto, simply because Esperanto has a louder voice by people who tend to frequent language blogs. I've seen angry comments at people complaining about English many times, with defences of why the language is fantastic.

If you stop dissing Esperanto so frequently you'll stop getting all the negativity I wouldn't have the patience to invite such stress into my life, so I commend you for that! Claiming to eliminate bias, when speaking about Esperanto, and then to give a less than general overview, is not helpful. If English should be the international language, should we then eliminate the letters i and j? Are not the dots above those letters diacritic marks?

Of course they are. Or if English is to be the international language, perhaps we should eliminate the dot! Consider then this ridiculous argument - in an unbiased way - with regard to Esperanto :.

Now, in response to your "rebuttals" Yes, other languages have non-Latin characters. But NO, they DO NOT allow for those characters to be written in half a dozen different ways -- there is one way to write that character. And if it's a digraph, it's not occasionally a completely different digraph, depending on which book you read. Perhaps you have not had a problem hearing the difference.

I have. You can call this complaint somewhat subjective, but you can't dismiss it. Maybe subjective. Doesn't take away from my point. The extent of my knowledge beyond those languages isn't enough to comment on grammar, but I'm confident that the majority of world languages if not all support this important concept.

What about the German and Italian examples I mentioned? There isn't only one way to write a character. Fair enough 3. Fair enough, but where is the example to prove your point? Without examples this isn't really a serious objective look.

It feels like more of a rant I feel like that one was plucked out of the air rather than being a genuine criticism If you find a particular thing hard to pronounce, fair enough, but without examples it's hard to take seriously. See Banjamino's response. You can easily express this concept in Esperanto using a suffix, and many people do when necessary.

I find Esperanto's time expressions more flexible than other languages. I'm still not an expert at Hungarian, but from what I can see it doesn't have an imperfect vs perfect. There are two past tenses, but they are definite vs indefinite, which is quite different.

All the languages you listed other than Philipino are Indo-European languages, and this concept is special to those languages. I'd find it just as logical to have one past tense with an auxiliary word or suffix to distinguish between the forms. Those languages probably use work arounds the same way Esperanto has a suffix designed for that purpose.

That's speculation on my part, but as you said it's subjective. First, I think it's dismissive of you to characterize my experience with Esperanto as "brief".

That's not helping the discussion. But it's still rather unclear and poorly defined. And moreover, not well-used. I have no difficulties typing the characters because all special characters are easy to make on a Macintosh. But not everyone uses Macintosh, and most people don't want to install additional software just to be able to type.

Moreover, where are those characters found on a phone? Still, the biggest point of my complaint about those characters is that results are inconsistent.

Even if you can make the characters, that's not enough. You have to know how other people might make them as well. I do not have to admit any such thing. Again, you're characterizing my experience as "brief" here, and that's a flat assumption, nothing more. I'm willing to speculate that I've logged more hours of experience with Esperanto than most students after 6 months. Please, try to keep that in mind. Other than that one complain, I appreciate you having a reasonable discussion with me on the topic, rather than an ideological or emotional one.

I wish all the responses I receive could be as friendly as yours! So how should we move to a common international language then! Presumably one without diacritic marks? No, you're right. There are similar problems with those examples. In particular, I've noticed that trailing apostrophe problem in Italian. It makes things hard to Google, and also muddles lexical parsing of a word. Don't make assumptions about my point of view I'm not saying everyone else is perfect and only Esperanto is flawed.

All languages have flaws. And who's to say I won't write about those, too? I've already written similar things about English! But I'm still willing to bet that it exists.

In fact, Google turned up this, among other results. I'm a bit confused now. I thought that the aim of Esperanto was to be a common international language. Please correct me if I am wrong. I think that skepticism towards Esperanto, Brian, doesn't stem from any Anglo-supremacist tendency, so much as an unwillingness to recognize the so-called 'world-language problem' at all. I once attended a seminar held for undergraduate students on the imminent extinction of endangered languages, and a large faction of the audience claimed to be indifferent to language death because they felt that it is a universal principle that languages die and that several majority languages become dominant in each era before ceding the throne to others.

Thanks for the link! Good to know - in fact it's a prefix to the word, exactly like Esperanto does with a suffix :P Sorry for making assumptions! I just don't think it's as objective as you say. Posts like this are not the best way of going about reducing the number of angry "zealots" in your inbox But I understand - when I get enough crap from people I feel like writing a post about them being wrong to make it more public, but that's just adding fuel to the fire!

Sometimes it's less stressful to just let wrong people be wrong :P. It's a fine line. One that I only choose to cross because I also happen to have other still hidden motives.

I'll let on just a tiny bit of the secret I spent all day yesterday working on some really cool stuff that I think the Esperanto community needs and will really like. I'm not all negative, after all But you're mischaracterizing my statements as if I were arguing for English to be a universal language. In fact, I don't care if there's any universal language. I don't see a need for it, and I certainly have no interest in arguing for it.

Haha, I should have known there was another dimension to this! Keeping the Esperanto traffic up before drawing the curtains on something they'll like? Sounds like fun! Can't wait to see :P. In terms of defending endangered languages perhaps the word "apathetic" might be more appropriate. Esperanto is now represented in the United Nations and is using its position to defend endangered languages.

I have to say that esperanto is not a language that I really like. Actually, I think that esperanto is terrible for motivation, because some esperantists seem to be like : "Well, all what I need is esperanto!

It's the international language! To speak to my friends in Russia, why should I learn Russian while they know esperanto? And, people who don't speak esperanto? Well, that's so easy that they should learn it! It's a kind of religion : you don't need to speak other languages to communicate, foreigners will learn esperanto.

Moreover, being a French native speaker, I feel like speaking French with an 'a' or an 'o' or an 'as' and so on when speaking esperanto. And this makes vocabulary difficult to learn. But it's not : the correct word is "varma", which has nothing to do with "chaud". This is very confusing. That's why I don't like esperanto. But here, in your article, your arguments are not really convincing. Letters with special diacritics exists in a lot of languages : it can be accents French, Spanish, Italian The six letters you mention are easier to learn than Russian alphabet imho.

Question words are similar, but were created in a very logical way, so you can learn them in no time! I agree with you about nuances, even if some natural languages may have a really poor vocabulary.

The less esperanto have nuances, the easier it becomes. I agree with you about the non-evolution of constructed languages, but that doesn't mean their failure. You know, I'm a speaker of toki pona.

It's a very easy language : words, ultra-simplistic grammar more than esperanto's one I took me only a few days to speak it, and I didn't know Anki at this time. It would probably take 1 or 2 days to learn it.

But I didn't learn it to speak with one of the few hundreds I don't really know the real number speaker of toki pona. I learnt it because it's fun, because it's easy, because it take only a few days.

Not to speak with people, or to surf the Internet. The complaint isn't the special characters. In general, I like special characters - they make sounds easier to symbolize. My problem is that 1 they're non-standard characters, and 2 they're horribly inconsistent.

With regard to "failure", the term failure denotes Esperanto's intention to be a "universal language. People too often forego learning real languages because they think they've got the world covered with this "universal language". Of course this problem also happens in English!

As much as I dislike Esperanto and usually agree with you, I think we differ on this post. I dislike it because it doesn't have a land and it's unnatural. I haven't studied the language, but I'm sure there are natural languages out there that have just as many inconveniences as Esperanto. While I agree all of the things above are definitely downfalls, I think they must all work themselves out in some way. Like pronunciation I guess what I'm trying to say is that I agree with you on my dislike for the language, but I'm not sure I agree why.

The tittle yes, there is a word for it above "i" and "j" is, technically, a diacritic mark, but the only language I know of that uses the Latin alphabet that doesn't use the tittle exclusively is Turkish, and most languages with the Latin alphabet use "i" and "j". If you were going to eliminate anything from English it would probably be the "w" sound or the "th" sound. This is completely unrelated, I know, but I just wanted to add that, haha.

I often heard fellow Norwegians say that they don't need other languages, because they already know English. But I have never ever heard that kind of statements form a fellow Esperanto speaker. In fact, Esperanto-speakers speaks on average two foreign languages in addition to Esperanto!

Where did you receive the information that Esperanto is "unnatural" bearing in mind that it has become a living language? Those families who speak Esperanto at home, and whose children speak Esperanto as their native language would not agree with you would they!

May I ask again that an unbiased, and non-prejucicial approach, to Esperanto, should be taken. I think it's pretty ironic for an Esperanto apologist to demand a non-prejudicial approach to Esperanto. And when the entire world knows that Esperanto is a conlang, I think arguing over whether it's "natural" or "unnatural" is pretty laughable. Come on, Brian. I'd like to see a link to research accompanying any claims like that!

Just saying that the average Esperantist speaks 2 other languages is quite presumptuous. What's more I never claimed anywhere in this post that Esperanto was the only language with problems or failures. Try to keep that in mind. Pronunciation problems probably work themselves out But that doesn't solve glaring problems like the multiple ways of spelling words. What a chaotic mess! More prejudice perhaps? The entire world knows? Please define "entire world"Laughable?

A bit less bias please. Don't be an asshole Brian. If this is to be a debate, I would really prefer if this could be an honest and constructive debate.

To pretend that anyone knows of Esperanto but doesn't know that it's a constructed language is completely disingenuous.

Esperanto is not a hobby for children who have grown up using Esperanto as a home or native language. Absolutely a fair point. But how many of such people are there? I would be willing to bet that there are only a few dozen in the whole world. Thanks for calling me an asshole Randy. I take it as a compliment. I've always thought that when you're losing the argument, then throw insults. First: it's not an argument. If it turns into one, I'll just turn off commenting.

I don't have time for argument. Second: I simply asked you NOT to be one. If you chose to take offense to that, it's your problem, not mine. Firstly - I'm not arguing Randy - I'm only asking.

My apologies also for using English-English as opposed to American English. This man had one maybe naive thought: Conflicts among people would decrease if we all spoke one common language. Now, would a shared language solve these quarrels? By the s, Esperanto had grown both as a language and a linguistic community.

World Esperanto Congresses and the Akademio de Esperanto helped to increase its popularity. As a consequence, the world was on its way to establishing a shared international language!

But, then…. All of a sudden, the number of Esperanto speakers worldwide diminished drastically in a couple of years! Did everyone somehow lose interest in it? What was happening? These accusations led to many Esperanto Speakers being chased, put in jail, or killed.

Yes and no. Eventually, it regained some of its past success. In in the Montevideo Resolution , the United Nations pledged support for Esperanto to become an international language. Many Eastern European and Asian countries have incorporated Esperanto as well. Moreover, its body of literature has grown immensely. The internet has become vital for the further expansion of Esperanto.

Realize, folks, that its speakers are dispersed all over the world. In particular, mobile apps like Duolingo contributed their share to make Esperanto more accessible. Hence, are we only a couple of steps away from introducing it as a second language into school curricula? It would not be too much to ask for. How come? Esperanto might be the easiest language on Earth!

Also, it was regarded as a phenomenon in social psychology, which involves various ideologies, political, and psychological development. Language is a nature product in entire race and it has the own principle to develop itself.

It likes a creature, an animal. The nature creates it slowly and gradually. In 17 th century, the linguistic experts tried to change the principle and plan to create some languages. Until , an artificial language, Esperanto, was created. In , it is the th anniversary of the first textbook in Esperanto for inspiring its speakers. As can be seen, those ten languages are belong to the family of European languages. Zamenhof can speak five of them. The rank of the percentage of similar to Esperanto is between This diagram illustrates that the feature of Esperanto is European in the extreme.

It is too hard for people to learn a language without culture history, no indigenous literature and even first-language speakers. Without any backgrounds and history, Esperanto is just a boring artificial language hence it cannot attract people to learn and speak it. With the globalization, the majority of people who need to learn the second language are students, especially teenagers. If Esperanto becomes a national curriculum, it is necessary that the linguists have to find some materials as text books.

A language it is a natural product of the spirit of human beings. In education, lacking of civilization was exposed. In language world, some any international languages already occupied the primary status, such as English and French.

The United Nations communicates in only two languages: French, and English. Also, many countries have great pride and deep sentiment for their native language. Many western people feel confident and elegant when they speak French. On the other hand, English is the most widely spoken language of the world.