[jhbadger]

Actually, that's not how Esperanto works. There is a language that literally tries to be the "Frankenstein Monster of the most popular languages" for better or worse, but that is Interlingua. Esperanto on the other hand, while it takes roots from various Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages, instead modifies them to fit a rational system. As part of that there is a rule of "one letter one sound". That's why it uses diacritics. paĝo and pago are pronounced differently. Languages that don't use diacritics (which are very rare, English being one of the few examples) deal with it by accepting that spelling and pronunciation have little to do with each other. Which is a terrible system.

[ASalazarMX]

IMO building an artificial language should have been an opportunity to simplify phonemes and writing. Did Esperanto really need "g" and "ĝ" phonemes? Did it really need more diacritics than the simplest accented letters?

Spanish is surprisingly close to "one letter one sound" for being an organic language. If you see "papa" and "papá", and know the rules of syllabic stress, you can pronounce them without ambiguity. And it only uses acute diacritics on vowels, and the letter "ñ".

I acknowledge that I'm probably biased towards Spanish because it's my native language. And honestly, languages heavy on diacritics, like Vietnamese, spook me.