| What I wrote about Esperanto and its failure to go viral: "There's already an existing language that fulfills so many of those criteria that it's going to be very hard to organize a new one from scratch. And the existing language already has a deep legacy of literature and culture. That language is the world's second most widespread: Spanish. Spanish has been destroying the dreams of Esperantists and others over the years who hope to build a more regular, orderly, and easy to learn common language based on common Indo-European roots. Turns out that it's dang hard to design anything easier or more accessible to speakers of any European language than Spanish already is. The spelling and pronunciation are already completely regular and predictable. The grammar is straightforward and common to almost all European tongues. The vocabulary is mostly based on Latin with some Arabic variety thrown in, but it's been standardized over the centuries so that a lot of it has a simpler and more natural morphology. The sounds are a simple subset of what most languages already use. It's a great second language: it's fairly easy, the world's second most widespread tongue, and spoken in warm countries with very friendly natives. It's not likely to provide you with many lucrative business opportunities, though. None of the world's financial capitals use it." |
(lavar (present lavo lavas lava lavamos lavan) (past lavé lavaste lavó lavámos lavarón) (imperfect lavaba lavabas lavabamos lavaban) (future lavaré lavarás lavará lavaramos lavarán) (conditional lavaría lavarías lavaríamos lavarían) (present-subjunctive lave laves lavemos laven) (gerund lavando) (participle lavado))
And that's ignoring the twenty or so irregular verbs and roughly ten "irregular" patterns (e.g. querer). It's a lot simpler than French or Italian, to be sure, or Latin, for that matter, but it could be a lot easier.