[cbsmith]

I think the "technically superior" bit wasn't really the right choice of words.

Esperanto isn't intended to be superior. It's value is on it being equally foreign yet approachable for all the salient parties and therefore a conceivable acceptable neutral turf for everyone to share.

Ironically, the case for Dvorak keyboards is kind of the opposite: QWERTY was intentionally designed to avoid jams, which if anything biased towards making it more difficult.

It's not so much technical superiority as having a design objective that is more appropriate for the problem space.

One can similarly argue about whether "QUEL" is really technically superior to "SQL", but the design objective is (at least as perceived by the author) better aligned with the solution space.

[k1t]

> QWERTY was intentionally designed to avoid jams

Minor quibble that this is not true (or at least strongly disputed).

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fact-of-fiction-...

[cbsmith]

I'm pretty sure the author was referring to the lore, regardless of what the truth might be. Otherwise they'd have had to present a much more detailed explanation.

[thaumasiotes]

> Esperanto isn't intended to be superior. It's value is on it being equally foreign yet approachable for all the salient parties and therefore a conceivable acceptable neutral turf for everyone to share.

This was not even attempted; Esperanto is a Romance language. Unless you think the only salient parties are Spain, France, Portugal, Italy, and Latin America, this "value" does not exist and was not a goal.

[mijamo]

Esperanto is not a romance language. It incorporates elements from most european languages families (balto-slavic, germanic, romance), and the grammar is most particularly inspired by slavic languages.

And it was pretty much a goal of its creator to be both familiar and foreign for different european language families, as he had experienced division in Poland between speakers of those different families and wanted to have something more universal to gather them all together.

[eska]

We're still ignoring the entire Asian and African continents then, though.

[cbsmith]

Yes, in the design context of the creation of the language, that was not in scope, though there are arguments that it's word-formation mechanism bears more resemblance to Chinese than European languages.

[cbsmith]

The vocabulary is primarily from Romance languages, but the whole story is more complicated. From the Wikipedia page: "Esperanto's phonology, grammar, vocabulary, and semantics are based on the Indo-European languages spoken in Europe. The sound inventory is essentially Slavic, as is much of the semantics, whereas the vocabulary derives primarily from the Romance languages, with a lesser contribution from Germanic languages and minor contributions from Slavic languages and Greek. Pragmatics and other aspects of the language not specified by Zamenhof's original documents were influenced by the native languages of early authors, primarily Russian, Polish, German, and French. Paul Wexler proposes that Esperanto is relexified Yiddish, which he claims is in turn a relexified Slavic language,[72] though this model is not accepted by mainstream academics.[73]

Esperanto has been described as "a language lexically predominantly Romanic, morphologically intensively agglutinative, and to a certain degree isolating in character".[74] Typologically, Esperanto has prepositions and a pragmatic word order that by default is subject–verb–object. Adjectives can be freely placed before or after the nouns they modify, though placing them before the noun is more common. New words are formed through extensive prefixing and suffixing."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto