[peatmoss]

I love utopian language communities. I finished out the Duolingo Esperanto course. And of course, a Lojbanist would tell you that Esperanto is too Euro-centric to be truly international, and not nearly as linguistically precise as Lojban.

In other words, Esperanto is the worse-is-better universal language. Unfortunately for both Esperanto and Lojban, English is worse-is-better than both.

[gkya]

Esperanto is really better-is-better: most of the world today either knows some English or speaks a romance language. Also, the language has a very natural structure to it, an a lexicon that seemingly (I'm not a speaker, but I have some familiarity) could've formed under a rather natural process of elite dominance---the hyphothesised means to Latinification of northern Mediterranean, and Turkification of the region that constitutes modern Turkey and thereabouts, for example; see "Before Babel", Renfrew, 1991---in central or eastern Europe. Thus, knowledge of many prominent world languages is transferible to Esperanto, and the knowledge of Esperanto can be transferred to other prominent languages. That is very valuable.

WRT English, there's nothing inherent to it that makes it the lingua franca of the world, it's just that it's the language of the dominating socio-economic powers since the British Empire. How quickly Mandarin is becoming popular around the world is a modern evidence to how economics play a role in determining the cultural appreciation of a particular country.

[andolanra]

I am an Esperanto speaker, so I can say that this is not really accurate. Esperanto isn't a Romance language: it's got a lexicon that was drawn haphazardly from many different languages—not just Romance ones, but also Germanic and Slavic ones—in ways that render the source words difficult to pronounce and very often result in words that are confusingly non-similar to the original. For your past vocabulary to really contribute to knowing Esperanto, you'd probably have to know English, French, a dash of German, and maybe some Polish, and even then, the language is filled with false friends and idiosyncratic choices. (From English, for example, it drew the word boato for 'boat': pronounced "boh-AH-toh", making it sound nothing like the English word!)

And "the knowledge of Esperanto can be transferred to other prominent languages"? Only in the most cursory ways! Esperanto's vocabulary is also deeply minimal: for example, it makes antonyms from the prefix mal-, so that 'big' is granda and 'small' is malgranda, and it makes heavy use of affixes and word-combining to generate new chunks of vocabulary: a school is a learn-place (lernejo), lunch is day-eating (tagmanĝo), a dictionary is a word-group (vortaro), and so forth. This is great for making a minimal vocabulary that can be easily learned, but it means that you get only a tiny fragment of knowledge that's transferrable to other languages.

I could go on about how the structure is actually deeply unnatural and reflects several odd choices, or how the pronunciation involves tricky to near-impossible consonant clusters (e.g. because s is pronounced as 'ts', the word eksciis 'realize' has the cluster kssts!), but it's really not a well put-together language in the way that this seems to imply it is.

[tene]

The most comprehensive document I've happened to personally encounter discussing complaints with Esperanto is http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/index.html . I am not an Esperanto speaker, so I can't speak to the veracity of the complaints there, but when I've seen it linked before, I don't recall seeing people contradict it or claim it's from an inaccurate perspective.

[andolanra]

Again as an Esperanto-speaker, I can say that my only problem with this document is that it can come across as a bit snarky and mean-spirited, but this is pretty well addressed by the disclaimer http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/#00e

I have heard other Esperantists describe the document as maybe harsher than it needs to be, grouping in the mountains with the mole-hills, but I think most of the things it describes are pretty uncontroversially considered to be flaws with respect to the language's original intent. Most of the speakers I interact with would say, "Yes, but what's your point?" But on the other hand, neither I nor the Esperantists I interact with regularly tend to be the types that think Esperanto still has a viable chance of becoming a true international language: we simply think it's a fun language to learn and speak. So it's possible that more radical Esperantists would disagree with our position there!

[schoen]

I found it interesting the last time this came up on HN (not very long ago) to see http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/j.html, which includes several examples of the "boato" phenomenon.

[ebzzry]

I am an Esperanto speaker. Before I started learning Esperanto, I read that document. Now, I can say that a lot, if not most, of that document is FUD.

[gkya]

First of all, I have not said in any way that Esperanto is a romance language. I'm aware about the sources of the language's vocabulary.

For the rest, I really appreciate the "insider" view you give. A couple points, though:

- It's not said that a language that borrows a word will keep its original pronunciation too. The very word pronunciation, for example, the various pronunciations thereof in English, French, Italian, Spanish would not be easily recognisable as a cognate to the untrained ear. "Transformation rules" need to be learnt to make use of vocabulary similarities across languages.

- The "near-impossible consonant clusters" do occur in many natural languages. Armenian and Georgian, for one, are known for some wild consonant clusters they have. Furthermore, that "ksts" one exists in English: texts, sexts; and not radically more difficult than say the greek φθάνω.

[ebzzry]

People who claim that Esperanto is the worse-is-better do not really understand what is it. They merely see Esperanto from a strictly outsider’s view. Esperanto is the better-is-better.