[Zrdr]

If we want to use only one official working language, it should be Esperanto. This would be neutral for any country (including Ireland and Malta). This would not be a threat to other languages and cultures.

Esperanto is easier to learn than any naturally evolved language. Its benefits are clear, it only needs a political support to thrive.

[samueloph]

> Esperanto is easier to learn than any naturally evolved language. Its benefits are clear...

Both of these statements are not true, arguable at minimum.

Sorry for not explaining properly but if you do say something like this, is very likely that you are aware of the discussions around it and knows that this is very far from consensus in the linguistics field.

[akvadrako]

It's obvious Esperanto is much easier to learn than English and there is lots of evidence for it. The studies estimate it to be about 10X easier to become fluent in EO vs EN.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/studies-in-second-la...

[YeGoblynQueenne]

I already speak English * and I can use it to communicate with people all over teh EU who also already speak it.

Why do we all need to learn a new common language? We already have a perfectly serviceable one.

In any case, if we're going to go for a different common language then that really should be my native Greek because it's the language of the country who gave birth to European civilisation, and it was already the lingua franca of the people of Europe in ancient times, so there (i.e. everyone in Europe will have an argument to support their own language being the new common tongue).

___________

* And French and Italian and my native Greek

[SirHound]

The majority of western media and communication is in English. This would be a humongous waste of time and resources.

[coldtea]

And in other centuries they were in French (the language of diplomacy), Latin, and Greek. Things change, and now is not the best time for the US empire (and UK has lost its imperial reach decades ago) -- so the "common" language could change too in 50-100 years.

[Creationer]

The cultural, scientific, and commercial works that have been created in English in the past 100 years dwarf anything created in French or Latin by a gigantic order of magnitude.

Why would we possibly switch to anything else, and lose 'access' to all that? All of the greatest movies and TV shows, the millions of scientific articles, the music, the computer code... English will never lose its position because of the amount of value that has been created with it.

How could English ever possibly change (in the way that Latin morphed into the various European languages after the fall of the Roman Empire), when we have access to perfect digital copies of how it is spoken and written?

[coldtea]

>The cultural, scientific, and commercial works that have been created in English in the past 100 years dwarf anything created in French or Latin by a gigantic order of magnitude.

I beg to differ. Compared to the Latin and French corpus, the body cultural works created in English is paltry and subpar. And that's the British ones, American ones, even less so. I can give you scientific and commercial if you feel any better.

>Why would we possibly switch to anything else, and lose 'access' to all that? All of the greatest movies and TV shows, the millions of scientific articles, the music, the computer code...

Yeah, pop music, movies, and TV shows. We'd lose Happy Days, I love Lucy, Breaking Bad, the Beatles, Michael Jackson, and Kanye West. OK, and Melvin and Henry James and Hemingway. Not much loss.

We would still have Racine, Rousseau, Rabelais, Rimbaud (and that's just part of the R).

Plus, all the huge variety and masterpieces of the peoples of the earth, before American commercial monoculture and its marketing power ate everything else.

[tluyben2]

I think it should be a common language that is already used; so English, German, French, Spanish. Of these English or Spanish are the most logical, but again; it won't happen (any time soon).

[scrollaway]

Even if we apply your logic, Esperanto is still a bad choice. Interlingua would be a better one in a European context.

[akvadrako]

Interlingua is not a practical alternative. It hasn't been shown to have any real-world advantage over Esperanto and the number of speakers and material is orders of magnitude less.

For example, compare the Interlingua wikipedia to the Esperanto one.

[lifthrasiir]

Let's get your facts straight:

> Esperanto is easier to learn than any naturally evolved language.

...only for many Indo-European speakers.

[skohan]

Esperanto was designed to be easy to learn and to lack many of the special cases and "gotchas" present in every natural language.

There are probably many cases where it would be easier for a native of some language to learn a specific similar language (i.e. for a Dutch speaker to learn German, or a Portuguese speaker to learn Spanish), but I would not be surprised if Esperanto minimizes the cost function for the net effort required for all native speakers/all second languages.

[lifthrasiir]

(While Zamenhof tried hard, unfortunately,) False.

- The vocabulary is a big part of the language learning and it is hard to even begin with when the target vocabulary resembles nothing in your original tongues. It can be probably argued that ESL learners can learn Esperanto more quickly, but it still represents only about 1/4 of the total human population.

- Rhotic consonants are particularly hard to pronounce correctly even for many ESL learners, and yet Esperanto retains them.

- Esperanto by itself does not have a word order, but it does have a preferred word order of Subject-Verb-Object which is equally probable as Subject-Object-Verb but much more familiar to Indo-Europeans.

- I think Esperanto, in spite of its original premise, has picked idioms and phrases up as well, as common in every old enough language.

It is now widely accepted that the difference between the native tongue and the target language greatly impacts the learning curve. If Esperanto does succeed, it would not be due to the easiness, because the easiness would be highly subjective.

[Oreb]

> - The vocabulary is a big part of the language learning and it is hard to even begin with when the target vocabulary resembles nothing in your original tongues.

While this is true for Esperanto, it is also true for any other language, natural or constructed. And the idea of Esperanto is to reduce the effort learning vocabulary not through familiarity, but by deriving its vocabulary from a minimal set of roots and a system of suffixes. In Esperanto, if you know the word for "big", you automatically know how to say "small", "huge" and "tiny". This is not the case in most natural languages.

Of course Esperanto will be much easier to learn for someone who already speaks some Germanic or Romance language than to anybody else on the planet. But even to a monolingual Chinese (or whatever) speaker, I believe building a working vocabulary in Esperanto is going to take less effort than in English, Spanish or German.

> It can be probably argued that ESL learners can learn Esperanto more quickly, but it still represents only about 1/4 of the total human population.

But far more than 1/4 of the total population of _Europe_, which is the only thing that matters in the context of this discussion.

[lifthrasiir]

> In Esperanto, if you know the word for "big", you automatically know how to say "small", "huge" and "tiny". This is not the case in most natural languages.

Oh? I have heard that "granda" means big, "giganta" or "kolosa" means huge and "eta" means tiny... :-)

Of course I know what you want to say. One can derive "malgranda" (non-big, i.e. small), "grandega" (more-big, i.e. huge) or "malgrandega" (tiny) from a single root "granda". But that alone does not explain all other words! For example, the Zamenhof's original dictionary [1] lists both "grand-" and "et-" as root words while "gigant-" or "kolos-" are missing (probably later additions, haven't checked). Why the heck do you need to know both "grand-" and "et-" when one is an antonym to the other? [2]

I'm not an esperantisto and I'm not able to discern the nuance behind all those different words, but I see a sign of the mature language here: once regular, now naturalized. It is not necessarily bad and the artificial origin can still help learning, but I would be rather careful to claim that it is "easier to learn than any naturally evolved language". And that leads to...

> But far more than 1/4 of the total population of _Europe_, which is the only thing that matters in the context of this discussion.

You have said universally, even though you didn't seem to realize it. And even when we concentrate to Europe, the actual number of ESL learners is not too different: 38% [3].

But yeah, most Europeans can speak either Romance, Germanic or Slavic languages [3] that form the Esperanto grammar and vocabulary. Still, in the same census most Europeans seem to be much more interested in ESL than others [4] and it would be very hard to convince them to learn Esperanto instead.

[1] http://www.akademio-de-esperanto.org/fundamento/universala_v...

[2] Of course, the answer is that it isn't. "et-" is described as "marque diminution, décroissance" i.e. "marks decrease or reduction" and not strictly an opposite of "grand-". It is therefore a fault of fellow esperantistos to use it as "tiny"! </joke>

[3] http://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinion/archives/e... (2006, p. 4)

[4] Ibid., p. 9

[akvadrako]

That's not true. Esperanto is easy to learn because it's very regular, has a small vocabulary, phonetic spelling, etc...

None of those advantages only apply to Indo-Europeans. It's not even fair to say Esperanto fits in the European language family. http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/europeanorasiat...

China is also one of the largest state supporters of Esperanto. You can take classes in it at University and Radio Peking has regular news broadcasts in it.

[lifthrasiir]

> Esperanto is easy to learn because it's very regular, has a small vocabulary, phonetic spelling, etc...

I had delved into Esperanto enough to see that this is not necessarily true. (I'm a native Korean speaker with a working knowledge of English as you can see. And I'm not even opposing to Esperanto in general.) It would be great to have concrete numbers to backup this claim; by comparison, it seems that the prior Esperanto knowledge actually helps learning European languages [1], which again indirectly shows the European influence to Esperanto.

> It's not even fair to say Esperanto fits in the European language family.

The article correctly points out that the "European" or "Asiatic" labels are not necessarily good groupings, but that's only because those groupings completely disregard both the history and the linguistics. It is absurd to say that Esperanto is very different from other Indo-European languages because Esperanto is isolating and others are not [2]. When we are gauging simliarities the historical influence cannot and should not be dismissed.

> China is also one of the largest state supporters of Esperanto. You can take classes in it at University and Radio Peking has regular news broadcasts in it.

There are several Esperanto courses around the world, I'm aware of one in Korea, and that doesn't make the state a sort of supporter. Talking about China Radio International (CRI, originally known as Radio Peking), it is comparable to Voice of America (VOA) in such that both are propaganda broadcasts and target as much languages as possible. It is not special for them to have Esperanto versions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paderborn_method

[2] That is, even after acknowledging the unusual statement that Esperanto is not agglutinative because its "affixes" can in fact freely move inside a word (and even concludes that Japanese is also not agglutinative to the similar extent). I think this is a fair assessment by its own, but it would be inappropriate to reframe the original question with a unusual definition.

[akvadrako]

>> Esperanto is easy to learn because it's very regular, has a small vocabulary, phonetic spelling, etc...

> I had delved into Esperanto enough to see that this is not necessarily true.

Do you mean esperanto doesn't have those features (regular, small vocab, phonetic) or that those features don't make a language easier to learn?

Because either claim sounds farfetched.

[lifthrasiir]

Yes, both sound farfetched because "easier to learn" does not imply "easy to learn". Those characteristics do make the language easier to learn, but its Indo-European lineage (that I have detailed in the sibling comments) makes it much harder to learn for non-Indo-European speakers.

[akvadrako]

The point is it's easier than all other human languages, not that it's easy in some objective sense - I don't even know what that would be.