Why I Won't Learn Esperanto

I apologize in advance, not for my words, but for my English: which I’ve been studying for over 20 years and still haven’t mastered. But this is by far the most absurd criticism I’ve ever read, on any topic, not just Esperanto. I’ll review your points one by one:

1. Esperanto has always been a means to a political end.
Completely false: the goal of Esperanto was to unite people through a common language, not to establish an ideology or political movement.
The fact that countries like Nazi Germany saw it as part of a Jewish conspiracy, the USSR as part of a pro-capitalist and reactionary bourgeois conspiracy, or the US as part of a Bolshevik conspiracy only proves that those countries are governed by conspiracy theorists like you who see evil in anything new or different. Your “conclusion” is nothing more than a sniper’s fallacy. You draw all that enormous amount of absurdity from Homaranism, a philosophical-religious movement that Zamenoff tried to develop, only to later reject and even regret having tried.
And your constant premise about “Esperanto extremists.” I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but there are extremists everywhere, in all spheres, and especially in religions like the one YOU represent.
2. Esperantistan is an ideologically homogenous landscape.
I’ve been an Esperantist for five years now and have met people from all over the world, with different ways of thinking and worldviews. This supposedly forced homogeneity only exists in your imagination.
The fact that you’ve met someone (actually, you didn’t, you just read a Reddit thread) who knew a woke group that likes Esperanto is quite rare, since Esperanto’s biggest detractors are usually from the woke movement.
All you need to be an Esperantist is a desire to learn the language and get to know other people and their culture, using Esperanto as a bridge and not belonging to one political faction or another.
3. Not only does it have no culture, but its adherents are delusional.
Behind English is the Anglo-Saxon empire, which has an enormous “cultural” industry, from Hollywood to Broadway, from CNN to Twitter, from Disney to Netflix. Does Esperanto (or any other language) have a similar arsenal?
Children are born watching Mickey Mouse, drinking Coca-Cola, and wearing blue jeans, taking this as a normal product of the prevailing “cultural globalization,” and becoming “fascinated by that country” (your own words).
Not to mention that the greatest defenders of English as a “lingua franca” are the people who speak it the WORST.
And regarding your definition of culture, I’ll just say that it seems rather limited to me.
4. Esperanto evangelists aren’t just passionate—they’re fanatical.
As I said, extremists and fanatics exist everywhere… especially in religions like yours.
But I don’t go around shouting that “Zamenhoff was the Messiah” or that “Esperanto is the only way”: I seek out people who share my interest in Esperanto and make new friends. I don’t indoctrinate or insult those who don’t share my way of thinking.
5. It might help you learn other languages, but at the expense of time best spent on the language most important to you.
Most people (like me) who have spent many years “learning” English through textbooks or schools will NEVER master a language unless they speak it daily. Why does a Turk, a Hungarian, a Chinese, a Malaysian, a Russian, or an Iranian need to speak English with the rest of the inhabitants of their country?
Well, studies have shown that when a group of students has been taught Esperanto before receiving another language, they learn it more quickly, regardless of the language, including English.
In addition, English is one of the least phonetic languages ​​in existence, and its pronunciation is a nightmare for speakers of languages ​​like Spanish, Chinese, or Turkish. The slogan that it is a VERY easy language to learn because of its grammar is just a story that the Anglo-Saxon empire has sold us: for example, Japanese grammar is MUCH simpler and Chinese is 10 times simpler.
6. Esperanto has failed – not that we needed it anyway.
Your “venerable” English language didn’t become the majority language in two days: less than 100 years ago, if you didn’t know French, you weren’t considered cultured. Esperanto is less than 200 years old, and English is more than 2,000 years old (I don’t think that comparison is fair or equitable).
Plus, as I said before, it’s not easy to learn and represents an unfair advantage for those like YOU who were born knowing it.
And regarding the language’s variants, that’s another absurdity: because for someone who doesn’t know Spanish and hears the “pure Castilian” of Spain and the Spanish spoken in Chile, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, or Cuba, they will seem like different languages.
Conclusion: not everyone in the world knows English, nor does everyone want to speak it.
Because as everyone knows, the objective of Esperanto is to serve as a BRIDGE between two people who do not speak the same language, and the objective of English is to REPLACE other national languages, as it has done so far, causing the disappearance of hundreds of minority languages ​​on all continents.

I will not address the points which you have given here, most of which I personally find slightly, or less than slightly, idiotic. And I am quite conserrvative myself. I will, however, point out that there is a big chunk of population in certain countries, who does not speak, or even refuse to speak, English, and consider it lingua franca. Esperanto has been, and still is, useful for connecting those people with each other. I will use blind people as an example, being one of themm myself. Esperanto is a connection between us, including those who don’t speak English, and yes, even some who are quite passionate about disliking it, almost as passionate as you are with disliking Esperanto. That being said, this article is nothing but a rant of a man who is, quite possibly, a conspiracy theorist, perhaps even an antisemite deep down, and who is, other than his chosen field, very uneducated especially regarding history.

I know you may not know this, but it’s FUN. Maybe get a grip and realise that its not effecting you.

I completely agree. I’m so glad that someone said this and I would never want to be apart of that community. Esperanto has been politically and ideologically charged since the beginning. If you are a language nerd who does not care about communicating with people or experiencing culture, then the Ido language is like Esperanto without being awful. It does not have the baggage and it was refined by a group of people tackling the idea of an international language. However, it is mainly for conlangers or a linguistic curiosity at the end of the day. As mentioned, English took the lead for international communication at this point.

You make the fundamental mistake that costs conservatives the culture war time and again. You perceive Esperanto as a thing that came from the left, therefore, it is fundamentally irredeemable and to be avoided.

Whereas a leftist looks at things that came from the right and just sees a potential tool to further their goals via subversion. Which always wins out, evolutionarily speaking. Be a bit more self-aware and learn from history.

I’ve been considering learning Esperanto since I already know a few European languages and from what I’ve heard this means picking it up should be relatively easy. I believe I am on of the far-left extremists you mentioned (lol) so I disagree with a lot of your reasoning, however I found your perspective interesting and your article amusing overall, so thanks for that.
I like to try and find common ground with people I disagree with, so I’m glad we both have an appreciation/passion for languages and culture - even if we approach it from different angles perhaps.

( I’m also an ex-JW so I liked that slander.)

Good luck with your study of Greek! I’m off to try my hand at learning Esperanto.

To say that Esperanto is political is to imply that other language choices, or non-choice, are not. And this is not true, I even want to say that you are the proof.

Your quote about Zamenhof is not accurate, so what you get out of it is of little value. Just as I find your view rather strange, Esperanto was never intended to make cultures disappear or pretend other thing. So yeah, the Esperantism’s arguments (or supposed to be) that you enouce about culture are lame, but really, that’s not even the point.
I can understand the off-putting aspect of an artificial language. But you don’t recognize the major advantage of it. You complain about ideology, but you do it yourself.
Of course there’s English, but that’s not satisfactory (to me) because it’s infinitely inequitable. And I don’t understand why, this fact is horrifying to you.... And that you are only in the rejection of people who would like to improve things.ou can not summarize the at least 2 million speakers of this language to extremism.

For me, the only argument I can hear is the one where you point out that a cultural background is essential for learning a language in some way. But in my opinion, the strength of an artificial language is that everyone can appropriate it and transmit their cultural background. Depending on your mother tongue, your Esperanto will not be the same as someone who has another one. And neither you nor the other person will be wrong, yet you will be able to communicate and you will have a direct unconscious access to how the thoughts of your interlocutor are organized.
I think this is fantastic and it is what makes me love Esperanto.

1. Esperanto has always been a means to a political end

It’s also economical. Languages and all the inconveniences related to them cost the world trillions. The reasons that these languages exist come from tens of thousands of years ago, where humans settlements developed mostly in isolation of each other, and that obviously doesn’t hold up today. Making languages more or less a cultural relic which is completely unnecessarily embroiled in everyday life.

You have to think that language in its pure form is really just a tool to communicate, nothing else.

2. Esperantistan is an ideologically homogenous landscape

Why make it sound like it’s Esperanto’s fault? Right wingers don’t join because they tend to not sympathize with anything “anti borders”. If you’re different, then simply learn, and make it less homogeneous.

3. Not only does it have no culture but its adherents are delusional

Finding fault in Esperanto not having geographical ties is like criticizing machines for automating work. The whole point it was invented was to overcome those.

4. Esperanto evangelists aren’t just passionate – they’re fanatical

Extremists exist everywhere. You normally just ignore them.

5. It might help you learn other languages but at the expense of time best spent on the language most important to you

Apples and oranges. Esperanto is a work in progress, which you can join as an early adopter. There’s no point really in comparing it to regional languages, which you might learn for very specific and personal purposes. You might do both, one of them, none, they’re not really competing, other that for your limited time, but this applies to any activities.

6. Esperanto has failed – not that we needed it anyway

It hasn’t failed, there’s an estimated 2 million people speaking it. A project of these dimensions obviously doesn’t succeed from one day to another.

I’ve been learning English in schools for over 15 years, but it is still hard for me to read and understand the article completely. I totally agree with the 5th reason. I started to learn Esperanto just for an hobby and a key to the world of Romance languages, maybe getting straight to learning Spanish or French, which can also help improve my English, is a better choice. After all, time is the most precious indeed.

I’m learning it because it’s :
- easy
- it has a passport program to allow you to go traipsing around the world
and couch surf with other Esperantists
- it’s a gateway language - like learning the “‘flute-a-phone” when I was a
was the start to loving reading loving music. I don’t want to STOP at
Espearanto but learn as many other languages, cultures, ideas as I can
(but probably not klingon or high valerian)

Life is short. Too short I believe to waste on useless projects such as learning a language that hardly anyone speaks. Esperantists appear to be religious in nature and will not tolerate any criticism of their made-up language, viewing it as an attack upon themselves. They are blind to the fact that Esperanto is a failed project and completely useless. Not only that but it sounds awful. Take some time to listen to some fluent Esperanto speakers on You tube and hear how contrived it sounds. I am learning French and have been for several years now. It’s difficult, challenging and annoying, but with each day I am coming closer to mastering a language that is spoken by approximately 270 million people around the world. My message to any would-be Esperantists: Forget it. Apply yourself to a real foreign language instead. It will be harder to do, much harder, but in the end your satisfaction will be immense.

Or you could just carry on with Esperanto, which, like a two-piece jigsaw puzzle, is dead easy, but ultimately quite pointless.

Point One- I understand your perspective but most Esperanto Speakers don’t care about the history of the language. For the vast majority, it is a fun hobby to meet people and nothing more. No language carries no baggage. All languages carry baggage from their past that can be harmful, limiting, or bothersome. It is to what extent you decide it is too much for your particular wants.

Point 2- You say Esperanto is ideologically homogenous but that is a stretch. Sure it is a rather left-orientated language. But the same can be said for most. If you learn Arabic, Igbo, or Russian for example, you will be met will communities that are heavily right-leaning wherever you go essentially. Esperanto is not unique in this fashion. It is only different in its political origin. I will say many people were murdered for using this language under dictatorships and in genocides like the holocaust. One other reason you may not see so many right-leaning folks is that they are not usually the type to like academics and globalization. We see this sort of thing all the time in right-leaning political rhetoric and politics. Though I welcome more of them to the community, for they are rather unique to come, their political stock is not the most akin to the same circles.

Point 3- It is rather disingenuous of criticism to call people delusional without expanding on that claim and instead focusing on other topics. It is also shallow to say that having any child speak Esperanto is just a circus act. You started your post qualifying your criticisms by saying you weren’t trying to shoot desires down in flames but you proceeded to use shallow insults like you couldn’t describe your thoughts in English well enough. Culture is yes more than the material circumstances in which people find themselves and pull themselves to, but taking those things away, you are left with a skeleton or shell, which can be regrown from, but not in the same way it originally was. Esperanto has a culture, a culture is a medium in which something develops. You yourself have admitted this with your claim of political baggage. It has jokes, phrases, and debates on language. There are repeated patterns while also being materialized in social events that bring people together. A similar claim could be said about the US despite it being ridiculous to claim that there is no greater culture there. Many in the mainstream claim America does not have a culture, everything significant is from immigrants and minorities, or things shared from foreign parties. Who has the final say on what a “genuine culture” is?

Point 4- I feel like this point of yours is born from confirmation bias from seeing the more passionate people who get magnetized to events (which is standard for most things) and on the internet (where the loudest voices are heard the most). Speaking from my own experience, the average Esperantist is just wanting to keep learning and chatting about life in a hobby language. They don’t know everything about it but are fine with that. They tend to usually be of the left-wing bend but I have yet to meet an “extremist”.

Point 5- Yes harder languages take a lot of hours and it is best to get early and intense practice, but if such a language was genuinely a priority then that would have come first. Very few people learn Esperanto to genuinely learn Turkish or French.

Point 6-Can you define failed? Of its original goal? Sure-but like most ambitions of movements, priorities change, politics change, people die and people are born. Esperanto started out as the strong ambitions of a man who saw his homeland broken, but now the movement is now more orientated around information accumulation writing in the language, and building friendly communities across the globe. If the opportunity struck would the more politically weighted take the chance? Sure- but that goal is on the back burner, again most Esperantists are just middle-class hobbyists. English didn’t differing rules because they were free to do so, they had more eagerly developed after the breakdown and collapse, leading to countries that were affected by their surroundings codifying rules to suit their populous. Most people who use English use it for business. It is an official lingua franca in 2 aspects: International trade because the biggest widespread economies were the US and UK, and International Airspace for the similar reason of Widespread military influence by the US and UK. English being the lingua franca is a direct result of colonialism and genocide. Esperanto has not committed these things. It does not have the same type of cultural or historical baggage as English, Spanish, French, or even Mandarin for that matter. Esperanto is more flexible and is more adaptive. There is no government enforcing rules that harm people or box people in. Imperial languages replace native ones, Esperanto was meant to stand side by side. Now it is relegated to hobbies and niche political discussions due to many factors such as genocide, political crackdowns, political vetoes, and propaganda.

Review- Regardless of what the language was destined to be or what matters of its position now, your concerns were rather poisoned by visible discontent and ire. I wish you the best but I would have appreciated something more fulfilling as an argument besides “Outside of a few crackpots who decided to turn their kids into circus acts by raising them with Esperanto as a first language, it has no inter-generational identity or national/tribal history”.

You’ve described Zamenhof’s outlook as “a cultish offshoot of Judaism”. So what do you mean by “cultish”, and what specifically is “cultish” about Zamenhof’s view of things?

100% agree. Besides what you said, there’s other problems with Esperanto. Ideally an independent international language must be efficient and good to sound. But there’s a technical problem with Esperanto, it having higher number of alphabets per words and higher number of words is most of its vocabulary. This makes it highly inefficient, where as for a truly international language I would prefer to have more compact words and sentences, that will allow me to type and speak less, as well as communicate faster. In the modern era, time is everything, and Esperanto is just archaic and pointless.

Also, Esperanto doesn’t really sound impressive to hear. But in comparison i would bet on English way more than anything, the everyday vocabulary has got shorter words and sentences as well as it sounds osumn. And the fun part, it continually is evolving adding more words to dictionary that are from from different parts of the world which have local context. Now that’s truly an international language which is open and inclusive.

The cultural elite is constantly green. It consists of those who know Esperanto (whose official color is green) and those who turn green at the mention of Esperanto.

Awesome and accurate. Esperanto learners honestly think that their language is useful. It is like a cult.

Gi eble ne plej bonas, sed gi plej bonas mi audis pri (krom Ido). Mi esperas <3

Maybe its not be the best, but its the best I’ve heard of (besides Ido). I hope :*)

I have no issue with you not having any interest in learning Esperanto. That’s your choice. I do have a serious issue with you repeatedly misrepresenting Esperanto as part of your explanation. There are MANY issues with your article (pretty much every paragraph), but here are few. 1. Zamenhof did not create Esperanto because he was some crazy cultist, nor does every Esperanto speaker who learns it today do so for that reason. It certainly does not represent the majority. It was not because he had some issue with religious freedom. In fact the opposite if anything. Look up ‘homaranismo’. It basically translates to ‘humanitarianism”, in other words loving your neighbor as yourself. He created it because he grew up in What is now Bialystok, Poland, which was under Russian control at the time & contained a mix of different groups who all spoke different languages (Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, etc;). They didn’t get along & Zamenhof thought it was because they couldn’t understand each other, so he created Esperanto, originally with only those slavic languages in mind with the idea of everybody learning it so they would get along. Later he reworked it to be suitable for speakers of non-slavic languages. Your picture above of the Esperanto flag overlayed with the communist symbol suggests that authoritarians would like it but it’s precisely the opposite. Authoritarian countries have actually banned it (or tried). 2. You say Esperanto has no culture. What do you consider a culture? Esperanto has a unique culture made up a combination of the different cultures of those who speak it. It also has many original movies, books, & songs written in Esperanto, not translations. You present anybody who would want to learn Esperanto as some radical leftist. several commenters have talked about the numerous conservatives who were run off lernu.net, because the owner is an extreme leftist. There are going to be radical leftists in any group. Again they do not represent the majority. 3. You present anybody who would teach their children Esperanto as a first language as nutjobs. Those parents tend to be people who met at Esperanto meetings, & often do not speak the same native languages. Since they are as a result likely to speak Esperanto to each other, it would follow that Esperanto would be the child’s first language, because that is the first language they hear & necessary to speak to both parents. They also learn the language of wherever they live, & sometimes more. Esperanto’s goal isn’t & never was to replace all other languages. It was to give everybody a neutral (as much as possible) second language to speak to others. The fact that it has no native country is inline with that because nobody besides denaskuloj, (native Esperanto speakers) has an advantage by being in a country where it is the national language. Esperanto is considered to be twice as easy as a native English speaker to learn as Spanish, & 5 times as easy as a language like Arabic, which is widely considered to be one of the hardest languages for non-native speakers. Icelandic too is considered to be one of the harder languages to learn. Good luck.

Mi tre ŝategas Esperanton. Saluton el Cilio!

Once I learnt Esperanto out of curiosity only. I like its characters, easy to understand, it tends to encourage the learner to speak without knowing too much irregularities, etc.

Yet, I found Esperanto is a bit like a cult too. This impression I got was after meeting some Esperantists in my country. It is just... A little bit odd. Furthermore, contacting some Esperantists via Telegram by joining their groups, the more they tend to have a “fina venko” ideology, the primordial Esperanto ideology i think. It surely makes my uneasy. It is like when you have dig deeper to Esperanto World, you suddenly bear duty to spread Esperanto. It is like an ideological movement masked with language learning in my opinion. Or, perhaps I just meet more frequently the finvenkistoj rather than raumistoj... Idk...

I still can converse in Esperanto (not so fluent), but I think it has no real usage except inside Esperanto community only. Yet, at least I can still make friends through this language. But, i don’t make Esperanto as the first priority to learn. And, I am not into something like Esperanto Movement. I just wanna use the language as a tool of communication, not like a salesman try to promote a language like a hardliners.

The real reason is that you have a financial stake in the current chaos.

So, what should a woman do, if she catches her man studying Esperanto?

“So long as Esperanto is disregarded, all these things must be.”
“Mr. Britling Sees It Through” by H. G. Wells

‘freely and publicly available’ isn’t fully realized as long as the language barrier hasn’t been addressed. Translation into Esperanto is the solution.

“It is foolish not to learn Zamenhof’s artistic language. I might not adopt all of the beliefs of the Esperanto movement, but I will at least learn it and dedicate some time to its study.”
-- Paul Doumer, French politician

In any case, whether you choose Esperanto, or not, you’re going to have to choose some language other than English, because English is dead. Its obituary was published in The Washington Post, on Sunday, September 19, 2010. The obit starts off, “The English language, which arose from humble Anglo-Saxon roots to become the lingua franca of 600 million people worldwide and the dominant lexicon of international discourse, is dead. It succumbed last month at the age of 1,617 after a long illness.”
Here is the link:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/13/AR2010091304476.html

Hi, I read your article, seems you put a lot of effort and had your own thoughts but let me please say a word:
Facts are the same facts *anyway*, I can’t say you wrote something totally wrong, BUT, and here’s the big “but”: It’s all about HOW one interpret the facts.
For ex. Let’s say ther’s actually a political issue behind the language, what’s wrong? There is politic in this world, so why making it sounds “dangerous”?? And who exactly go by that thought? I know a lot of Esperantis who have nothing with Politics, some enjoy the “international” environment, and culture also can be a common behaviour and way of thinking, not clothes and face’s shape.
Even tough I’m not very good at Esperanto I can totally understand why Esperantists get mad. Look how offended this article! You generalized speakers under your prespective of ideas, making it sound really negetive.
I learn Esperanto Okay? I learn it cause I love the environment of “international ship”, I like it because it’s easy, learned by funny ways, and the most beautiful thing: you can communicate with it freely after a little amount of time, We make connections with people , it is fun.
I’m an Esperantist and not a supporter of raising kids in that language, I’ve my own land’s culture, and I also agree with things like “if Esperanto would become international it may cause for death among natural languages”. Of course there are adventages and disadventages, but insteas of discussing it objectivily, you and some people like you seem like idealists in the same way you tell we are. You don’t think of Esperanto in a neutral way, but seems like you have an IDEAL to ruin that beatiful language. I agree there are disadventages and other Esperantist also agree with that, but then people come and attack this movement like it was a dangerous thing and tag us under your assumptions, like we are doing something that legalli wrong. It’s not wrong speak a language, you know what? even if there’s politic behind it, it’s not a thing that should be attack in that way. Anyone has it’s own political ideas, And believe me,, I’m an simple Esperantist, talking to simple Esperantists like me, no one talk about politics and that sh*t, no one has any plans to change the world and we all know that Esperanto isn’t and won’t be internation. That’s stupid to assume we learn it cause of a blind believe. We learn it cause we love it and that totally legal concepts, it’s funny to talk to other people, but you look from the outside and like to interpret the things as we’d never thought and believed, things no Esperantist really care about. I’m sorry for saying it like that, but if you would be an Esperantist you’ll understand how it really works today, not from articles, few people you heard. Just contact eye-to-eye with normal people and don’t look for those who are known by their own thing.
I’m an Esperantist exactly as I’m an Hebrew speaker, religous person, English sepaker and Japanese learner. Non of them is something special. They are all nice thing. so don’t be scared of “weird ideas” you’ll never find in a life of an avarage Esperantist, and don’t tag us please

Why would anyone want to learn another language if they already speak English. It’s the universal language. You’re never going to find yourself in a country that doesn’t already have English speakers all over. It would be a total waste of time to spend years of your life just to say something in another language. Even bigger waste of time to spend what few years you have on this Earth learning multiple languages. I find it funny when people try to equate being able to speak multiple languages with intelligence. Obviously if they were smart to begin with they wouldn’t have wasted so much of their life on such a useless goal. How is that going to help anyone in life?
It’s a cute hobby, but not much more than that.

Even if everyone in the world spoke English, and spoke it fluently, there would still be a need for another language. Every language is like a blanket with holes in it. The holes, however, are in different places for different languages. Therefore, the solution is simple: have an extra language on hand to fill the holes of the primary language when needed. Traditionally, French has served this role for English (to say nothing of the many expression from Latin used in English). For example, the plural of “Mr.” does not exist in English. When we need the plural, we simple use the French word for it: Messieurs. Thus, any “English only” policy would be self-defeating. One of the uses of Esperanto could be that of plugging the holes in whatever ethnic language is the primary one of a given milieu.

Actually, not true. English is not spoken universally. In the current political situation, there are actually people who will actively forsake it, and turn to other languages, including Esperanto.

You need to wake up to what’s possible.
Your grandchildren will speak the language.

Even Christianity had a political agenda: to undermine Judaism. The New Testament was written, in secret, by the Roman aristocracy for that purpose, Judaism being a thorn in the side of the Roman Empire.

“Esperanto has enormous potential as an educational tool, quite apart from its status as a global language.”
-- Mark Fettes, past president of the Universal Esperanto Association

One comment.
”I know this will probably stir up a beehive (I wish I could say I’m sorry but facts don’t care about hurt feelings) “
It’s not facts that hurt feelings here, it’s you representing your reactions, conclusions, opinions, and thoughts as facts.

None of your reasons to not study Esperanto is objectively valid.

Sæll.
I notice the author doesn’t respond to comments anymore, but I’ll post here since I’m taking a course in Linguistics too, and I have a presentation on constructed languages coming up, so of course I started researching Esperanto.

I have taken the author’s point that Esperanto is ideologically motivated. It claims to be a politically neutral language which will foster peace and understanding in the world. This is obviously an ideology. The author’s criticism, however, is not focused on the fact that it IS ideological. Rather, it is focused on the fact that Esperanto is a killer of diversity because it is ‘ideologically homogenous’.

So it seems we are talking about ideological diversity. Is ideological diversity beneficial or maleficial to world peace?
Where do we draw the line in ideology? If 2 people are both committed to ‘world peace’, but one would like to force his ideas on everyone on pain of death, and the other would like to talk things through with others, are these differing ideologies or differing methods within the same ideology? Conversely, if one person follows Islam, while another practises Buddhism, but both are committed to benefitting others around them (be these others co-religionists or not), is this a difference in ideology or a difference in method?

But the author has another kind of diversity in mind: that of linguistic diversity (see point 6). It is in vogue nowadays in the West to promote the documentation (if not rescue) of moribund languages. Wherefore? On one level, these languages have knowledge other languages may not have which would be useful to science. On another level, there is something connecting identity and language. And people in the West want to help others preserve their identities.
This is quite an obvious development, considering how the birthplace of nationalist ideology (which places great emphasis on identity) was what is now considered the West.
What if the community in question for various reasons (often economic) would rather lose their separate identity? I can’t think of any language in France right now that derives from any Continental Gallic languages - yet I also can’t imagine the average French person who would identify as Italian.

Identity is malleable. That is because thought is malleable. In fact, having a global language is not going to spontaneously turn the world into an ideological desert. Millions of people across the globe can manage English - but we haven’t seen all of them turn Protestant and adopt Westminsterian parliaments. And so with Esperanto. I accept that there are poor executors of ideology, and it seems many people here have been reviled by certain members of the Esperanto community. But I don’t believe that a world that speaks only Esperanto will suddenly be bereft of variety of thought. I would rather everyone strive for world peace, since it is ‘natural’ that they will disagree on how. But at least such people cannot legitimately claim to be striving for world peace if they threaten to punch their dissenters in the mouth.

In contrast, consider: it is possible to maintain diversity at gunpoint. That is called divide and conquer.

Esperanto has no country or geographical ties to an ancestral homeland.

That is a beautiful sentence.
And as Esperanto is fun to me, adds another reason to learn it.
Ties are a burden.

Great writeup ! Combines many thoughts I had sofar ontopic aswell.

I tried to learn Esperanto, but halfway there I realized that it is easy but useless.

Perhaps later the American culture will be hated and there will be a need to learn a language other than English. I really hate english.

Esperanto is THE MOSTLY WIDELY SPOKEN 2ND LANGUAGE. Fact. Period. But you ARE right about one thing, you ARE trying to shoot down aspiring Esperanto speakers. I’m wondering who the REAL intolerant radical is.

As a student in Esperanto I respectfully disagree that learning Esperanto is a waste of time. For some people like me, it feels more like a stepping stone to other Latin alphabet based languages. I have always had difficulties learning a second language due to my Autism and Esperanto is working well for me. I cannot speak for others with developmental disorders.

As for the original Esperanto community, they were very far left and had dangerously ideological views. Purely as a language I am cool with it. The original political intentions I do not like it.

It’s fun how Esperanto is perceived as a perverse threat to all cultures but the omnipresence of English, alongside the inherent advantage of its native speakers over the rest of the world must be regarded as a blessing for all the (English) culture it supposedly brings unto us. We, non native English speakers have to endure learning it, and we will always be second class speakers of English no matter how much money and time we throw into it. I learnt English because I had to, not because I chose to. So if there’s ever a more neutral language I can learn, I’ll be happy to do it. I’d love Esperanto or a similar language to become the lingua franca and put us all on equal footing. A dominant language will always have an impact on a less powerful one. We’ve already seen the negative impact of English over now near extinct native languages. Esperanto hasn’t done anything like that yet, so don’t try to scare us with that fairytale. We’ll take care of that when the time comes, if it ever does. There are people here who accuse esperantists of being fanatics but the strength and zeal those accusers use to attack Esperanto are not less fanatical, so perhaps there are people who should think again about their own motivations and feelings.

That last point about the lingua franca was so good and I agree--I disagree with the idea of a one-world language. I don’t know who else here believes in the King James Bible 100 percent, but I do, and in Genesis it explains how the world’s languages came from what many within the Christian circles would describe as “The Curse of Babel.” Well, I don’t think of Babel as a curse, I think it was a blessing, because in my opinion speaking would be quite dull without all the different languages we have today. Many view division as a curse, but I view it as a blessing, so long as it’s not taken to the point of violence. If we broke down the language barrier, culture would die with it--we would all influence each other on higher and higher levels until everyone had the same customs, and the world becomes one giant city. I don’t know about anyone else, but I don’t like that idea--I’d rather forget the language my best friend and I had in common and have to work to speak to her than have everybody speak a common language.
I enjoyed the post and I see your point--I was interested in Esperanto because it’s probably one of the most well-known conlangs out there, but if I can’t find a group of reasonable people to learn it with, I don’t think it would be worth it.

The common argument for learning Esperanto: it’s a far superior lingua franca to English. Look up “list of constructed languages” on Wikipedia; you’ll see a very extensive number of potential lingua francas. These could include fictional languages such as Game of Thrones’ “High Valyrian” - a language option almost as popular as Arabic on Duo Lingo - or for more relevance, the international auxiliary languages (IALs) such as Esperanto.

Esperanto was neither the first IAL, nor has it been the last. Language construction simply isn’t revolutionary. Esperanto is a relatively aged IAL, and quite far off from being the most inclusive compromise of worldwide languages. An IAL called “Lingwa de planeta” (Lidepla for short) was more recently developed. It’s far more inclusive of vocabulary from the dominant Asian languages. I’d be tempted to learn it.

However, how do I know this IAL will become the next English-tier lingua franca? How can Esperanto fanatics possibly imagine that their language, an even less inclusive IAL, will be more successful?

A good analogy I think are all the crypto-currencies on the market, with the most dominant one being Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a relatively dated, primitive crypto-currency compared to others, yet ironically remains the most popular. It is the most popular crypto-currency for a rather irrational reason: its first-mover advantage.

I wouldn’t invest in Bitcoin, nor would I invest my time learning the dated IAL known as Esperanto. A language is only as good as it is useful. It’ll take some significant political initiative for a world to settle upon an agreed language, and with the size of Asia, there’s little reason to believe it’ll be Esperanto.

Don’t take it bad, but I think you are completely delusional about English being successful as an international language. Maybe this is because you’re Australian and have a bias because English is your native language, but once you start traveling a bit, you quickly realise that very, very few people actually know English. It’s an extremely complicated language and it’s common to meet people who studied it for 10 years and are still unable to have a conversation, and people who do speak it as a second language often have a hard time understanding each other because of its random pronunciation. Countries around the world spend billions trying to teach their citizen English since the US started to force it as an international standard, and the success rate is desperately low. Data shows that if they spent 10 times less money on teaching Esperanto than they do with English, we would probably be much closer to have a common language for humanity by now.

Nice depth to your article. Just how easy is Esperanto for Hawaiian’s with a 13 letter alphabet and unique pronunciations and the monster formal Mandarin alphabet and very unique pronunciations ? There are words for cultural ideas that cannot be translated or understood by outsiders, and creating a word representing these words would make no sense to others. No one language stands any hope of improving what already exists except in a localized area where there is already similarity in the present languages.

So I only just discovered that this language even existed, and your article came up as I was doing research about it. I know this is your personal blog and all, but I do have some things I’d like to say about your viewpoints. Please keep in mind that this is all my subjective opinion, and I am not in any way trying to change your stances on anything, but for reasons I’m about to explain, I have a very different stance than you do on this language, and your ideology as a whole.

To start off, I noticed that throughout this writing, you rely heavily on very generalized assumptions that your way of thinking is the status quo to which everyone else should measure up to. There is likely a reason why you tend to think this way - being Australian, your lineage probably descends from somewhere in Western Europe, not to mention you have a relatively common last name. So it’s not exactly far-fetched why you would see absolutely no issue with English (***number of speakers notwithstanding***) being the no-brainer choice for an international language. And you might be right. With almost a billion speakers in the world, one could conclude that with statistics alone. But theoretically speaking, your points contradict each other; you say that English succeeded where Esperanto failed because of global colonialism, immediately after you are finished praising the beauty in the diversity of a language that is not only responsible for the eclipsing of several languages in it’s original region of the British Isles (Gaelic, Cornish, Welsh, Ulster Scots, Angloronami) but many indigenous Native American languages (Navajo, Yupik, Sioux, Apache) and even Aboriginal Australian languages (Alyawarre, Anindilyakwa, Anmatyerre). You fail to acknowledge that anywhere in this piece. Being an English speaker comes with the burden of knowing that all of these other languages had to be cast aside in order to make room. Personally, I find it far more comforting knowing that a universal language which works with cultures instead of against them exists. A bit of a shame that it isn’t more practical.

Now for my more personal reasoning behind why I am drawn to this language. You claim to know a whole ton about different cultures, but unless you were born into it, I don’t think that you will ever truly understand what it’s like to be from a family born from an obscure culture living in the western world. Especially, in my case, bearing a surname (which for privacy reasons I will not make public) so unorthodox that most people won’t even bother to even try and pronounce correctly because it sounds so different. Because I have my own sense of pride in my cultural ethnic background, I will never anglicize it, but that means that feeling different is something I will always have to deal with. So for me, knowing that there is a language out there that tries to bring all people of different linguistic backgrounds together (even if it’s not ALL of them) sounds incredibly pleasing.

Now I’d like to offer a rebuttal to your point about Esperanto being a culture-less language. I don’t speak it or anything, but do you really think that a culture is built and developed within a single century? Most other languages have had thousands of years to develop. Trying to compare a 100 year-old language to a millennium-old one is like comparing the knowledge of an 18 year-old college freshmen to a 60 year-old professor. We’re talking about a language that was created at an accelerated pace for the primary goal of trying to unify people of different backgrounds. I for one, actually find it liberating to know that there is a universal language that is is not only familiar and inclusive, but also void of any appropriation barrier. And coming from a dual-cultural American background, I can tell you, and I apologize if this might come off as a little offensive, but most white people rarely know culture. If you want to talk about artificial culture, look no further than neo-corporate America. From what I’ve seen, the Esperanto folks already seem to be more ‘cultured’ than most typical Americans, but of course, I’m going off of what I’ve only seen and read in the very short period of time that I’ve known about it. The cultural stuff will all come with time (so long as it’s allowed to be). I might not be interested in going through the effort trying to learn Esperanto anytime soon. But I like what it’s purpose is. I like what it stands for. And seriously, a language where people are encouraged to work towards changing and improving? An open-source language, who would have thought?

As I said before, this is all from a personal viewpoint. And yes, I know that this is your personal blog and everything, but this IS one of the first results that comes up when you google ‘Learn Esperanto’, and it’s quite an emotionally-loaded article with statements made which you seem to really believe as objective. I won’t go into anything regarding your obvious political leanings, but this kind of reads like a Breitbart article (you even pulled a Ben Shapiro with the “facts don’t care about your feelings” saying), so you can’t really blame anyone for disagreeing with their own strong opinions. What goes around comes around. If you don’t see many people who speak it who have the same ideologies as you do, maybe you could be the first. Write a book even. If you don’t like the way things are, don’t be afraid to try and change it. That’s how this whole language got started in the first place. I think it’s really cool what Esperanto is trying to do, and anyone who speaks it, more power to them.

That’s about all I have to say on this. If you read this whole thing, I really appreciate it. Conflicting strong opinions will always lead to some friction, but hopefully we can agree to disagree.

Anyway, that’s about it for me. Later!

wow.. you’re passionately against esperanto, I’ll give you that.. but you seem to be missing the bigger picture, and your vehemence itself to some extent cancels out the logic your argument does have. if it’s really that easy to learn, that’s a good thing, because then people can go ahead and learn it, and feel good about being able to speak another language that -does- actually have other speakers, and then use it as a branching off point for learning other languages. apparently elementary school children.. it works really great for them, then once they’re functional in -something- they can then start to add to it, presumably branching out in all different directions, exploring all kinds of different languages and cultures.. :-) and no, I don’t speak esperanto. I’m planing on learning it, I’ve been researching different languages, with my initial focus on elvish :-) turns out it’s not a fully functional language, however :-(

I find the determined assertion that Esperanto has no culture totally at odds with the determined assertion that Esperanto is founded and permeated with a political ideal.
Personal politics, an individual’s beliefs in how society should work and how individuals within a society should act, is one of the most fundamental levels of culture.
This rather ranty, evangelical article fails to recognise that those to whom Esperanto (and its philosophies) appeal are bound together by the culture of finding them appealing.
I also find it curious that Esperanto enthusiasts are accused of being Evangelical in their promotion of the language and by a fan of Arabic, a language that was forced upon a great many cultures on the edge of a sword with a fairly inflexible set of beliefs attached. I have nothing against Arabic, I think is a beautiful language which has been used to translate many of the cultural elements of the cultures that it has subsumed. Esperanto is also being used to translate the cultural elements of the cultures of the people that willingly come to it.
Now English... wow, as an English person I can testify to the cultural catastrophe that is Englishness, our language has been so successful, off the back of our imperial success, that we now don’t even know what our own culture is. Lol.

Are you aussie?

Yep.

I’m rather left wing and I agree with absolutely everything that you are saying about Esperanto and Esperantists (except I must admit that it seems that you are much more tolerant of them than I am!) So much for the tolerant left ;)

I a bilingual and i been struggling if i want to learn esperanto or italian

seems pretty clear -learn esperanto first, it’ll go fast, then learn italian. follow peters second law! :-)

I can’t tell if this article was written in sincerity to argue against Esperanto, or in jest as clickbait. Clearly, Poe’s Law is in operation here, so I’m going to not waste my time explaining why the author of this essay seems to be possessed of a willful ignorance toward Esperanto.

Hi! I am very late to reading this article, but I have to say it was a great read and I can understand why you hold those views towards Esperanto.

It also made me think about why I am so drawn to it. I realized it actually has something to do with the lack of culture in Esperanto unlike natural languages. As a mixed ethnicity/nationality person who also grew up in a third, completely different culture from my parents, I have had the opportunity to be immersed in different cultures.

However, as much as I found my place wherever I was, I never quite fit in anywhere or with any particular culture. I always stuck out both in looks (I have never been anywhere in the world where I am not asked where I am from, everyone automatically assuming I am foreign) and my own patchwork quilt invention of a culture. I’m drawn to Esperanto because I see it as liberation from this born attachment to culture and language that I’ve been trying to navigate my whole life (plus it’s just a wonderfully simple and logical language that I find fun to learn!).

Of course there are plenty of other culturally diverse communities out there, but as someone who loves and appreciates language, I see the Esperanto community, a community built around this shared language, the very medium we use to convey our thoughts and feelings, as... a parallel to culture for me? (I don’t know if I’m making any sense, sorry!)

Anyway, I was just scrolling through some comments and read lots of different reasons people are learning Esperanto and didn’t see one that I related to very much, so there’s mine :)

That’s really cool Sophia! thank you for sharing that story. Vi havas bonan tagon! 🙂

You make perfect sense to anyone who has ever experienced a sense of border-culture anxiety (myself included). I appreciate you telling your side of it!

Regardless of who invented ------the-----???
We should use wheels. The inventor is not important for something good, as time
goes on.
Esperanto, a universal smile, put into undestandable voice/throat/expressions.
Billions of people who jump into a secondary communication, as needed.
With the new learning electronic tools, it’s probbly going to happen.

You are giving too much importance to network effects. However, as Mark Fettes, the current President of the Universal Esperanto Association has said, “Esperanto has enormous potential as an educational tool, quite apart from its status as a global language.”

Yup, pretty much what you said. I am treating it like a novelty. Other than lacking the le/les distinction of French, it has allowed me to learn various French language elements absent in English, but in a more controlled setting. Thank heaven the French vetoed learning it under the League of Nations! And yes, they are the worst zealots ever. With no good arguments. My roomie thought I had developed Tourette Syndrome when I was learning it, I swore so much!

You are writing about how “facts dont care about feelings” but to be honest you hardly wrote about more than your own feelings you want to be fact.

You might for example try to google “propaedeutic value” to actually find out that studies suggest that 1 year esperanto and 3 years of french make you a better french speaker than 4 years of french.
Don’t create anecdotal “facts” about the opposite being true in your head.
Thats just self-deception.

For me as a non native english speaker its also quite laughable how you brag about the importance of English.
90% of all the people I know who were taught English for 10 years in school are so bad they could hardly ask for a sandwich in English.
And guess what they are not only still included in the joke statistics about how many “English speakers” there are. They also get along around the internet quite fine.

Whether you, Donovan Nagel, wish to learn or not learn Esperanto is a matter for yourself. However when you tell the world about your determination not to learn it and then show that you feel qualified to pontificate at length on a language, its history and background you do not know, you bring yourself and the internet as a medium into disrepute. You might read some of the books in English on the subject as recommended and be better informed, but unfortunately to know the mind of Zamenhof himself you need to read him in the original and similarly the more scholarly books on him and the language. As you declare you do not intend to learn the language or acquaint yourself with its literature you would be well advised to keep your uninformed views to yourself. However an anthology like ‘Star in a Night Sky’ edited by Paul Gubbins might have given you a jump start into its literature.

Those who do know Esperanto well can judge how successful it is as a language. Those like you who declare they do not know it are not in a position to judge. However anyone can, like you, judge Esperanto externally as a phenomenon, a movement, call it what you wish. Esperanto has evidently very few adherents compared to English. It has no countries behind it, no businesses dependent on it, no language bureaucracies living off it. It is a small, impoverished, mostly self-selected, internationally minded speech community and seems likely to remain so for the present.

Anyone who does not know English in the modern world has little choice but to learn it. Indeed as most non-English speaking countries start teaching English to their very young children in school , in practice the youngest generations have the choice made for them. Esperanto as a movement has little chance in that situation. It is a voluntary effort, in no way state-sponsored.

Justin Rye’s rant is more entertaining and more challenging than yours. He has made continuing efforts to get to know the language.

> “is a matter for yourself.”

Hence why I have a written post on my own blog about my own personal reasons.

Did I come to your website trying to convince your readers to stop learning Esperanto? No.

English, is of course, very easy to pronounce. For example:

”The seventh statistician’s sixth statistical strength—his sixth strength—was how often otolaryngologists and ophthalmologists ate cottage cheese for lunch.”

”Sixth strength” has the sequence “ksθstr” with no intervening vowels, and the most common (though perhaps not the most proper) pronunciation of R does not occur in other European languages.

”Cottage cheese” has either “ʃtʃ “ or “d͡ʒtʃ in the middle, depending on the rapidity of speech and the speaker.

And don’t even get started with Margaret’s margarine.

Okay, so maybe English pronunciation isn’t so easy after all.

IIH ahh naa wot yu meen. Aa woz bawn in nyucassel waay up nawth on tieensyde mann. Owa taakin is reet haard to say, an nee bodee sez pronowns.

My bilingual mother taught english to the children of a Spanish Royal duke and Duchess in the 1960s.

The children thought it funny when they asked her about the dialect spoken in her hometown and she put on a fairly good geordie accent for them.

They would later be educated in england and learn to pronounce queens english.
She always smiles at the thought of a royal duke saying ‘why I mann’ in reply to someone at some point in his life.

My point is I liked your post and wanted to say there is no English pronunciation as so-called proper english was scrapped decades ago in favour of recognising the diversity of dialects.

Even Donovan Nagel might agree that each language in every land has many dialects and many of them are naturally evolved because of ideological differences. Words get replaced for reasons which to some may seem political ideological such as for example my own use of the word subject. I will never use that word in a political context as I am a FREE individual and am a Citizen of the Earth, Though I was born in England I am a ‘subject’ of no-one esoecially not some person deluded enough to think they are superior to me because they were born in a palace and call themselves queen. Therefore i replace that word with the word slave when referring to her sickofans.

Language is an evolving medium including constructed ones and does and will include politics/ideology within its structures.

Again i say as this is a reply that i liked your comment and thus is not a critisism of anything you wrote.

I am new to this blog and esperanto
and have enjoyed many of the comments and replies posted.

I will post separately what I think of Donovan Nagels blog

I’ve had the fortune (or mis-fortune) of being brought up in Australia where there’s little push in school to learn languages. I’d love to learn at least one additional language, if not more.

After doing a bit of research, it turns out Esperanto can have a positive effect for people like myself. Obviously, learning any language helps learn additional languages. However, when Esperanto is taught as a second language, the effect is so profound that the time spent learning Esperanto is more valuable than time spent learning the language you actually want to learn.

In one specific study (Williams, N. (1965) A language teaching experiment, Canadian Modern Language Review), 1 year of Esperanto and 3 years of French resulted in greater proficiency in French that 4 years of French. This is not the only study proving such a link.

However, In point 5, you state that time spent learning Esperanto is time taken away from the language you want to learn. Given that this statement contradicts the many studies that have been performed on Esperanto, can you please provide a source that corroborates your opinion?

Hi Nagel.

Thank you for the fantastic work you make on your youtube channel, your statement right above is the only point I do not totally agree.

I know not to learn eo is a personnal decision which I respect a lot but I could not help raising some features which seems to me wrong.

But juste one, you said :

”Ever met a vocal Trump supporter at an Esperanto meetup? Genuinely curious.”

I am a supporter of Trump and I know some others esperanto speakers in that case.

So ? ? ?

Interesting.

Do you discuss your pro-Trump politics with the other, far-left Esperantists (who are the overwhelming majority of speakers)?

I recently made a very bland comment on an Esperanto forum about me liking two languages, Ido and Interlingua. The first reaction was the moderator getting bent out of shape about the comment being on the forum (even though I was also mentioning Esperanto). Egos were flaring a bit. And to my astonishment, people were behaving like groupies to this moderator (as if they were lemmings) and piled on to give my comment a lot of dislikes. You would have thought my comment was asking for the assassination of the Pope, the President, and Jesus Christ! I’m frankly astonished. I love the language, but......’well thank God, I’m not a lemming”.

Esperanto is began as a conlang but it is not one now. It appeals to people who are not conlangers. They actually speak, read, and write the language, and in insulting their language, you were insulting them personally. They constantly run into a lot of clueless misinformation about Esperanto. Imagine hearing a linguist say that “no one speaks Esperanto” after coming home from an Esperanto convention with 400 speakers or watching Esperanto TV. Imagine how irritating and insulting it is to read stuff like this.

Who cares if you don’t want to learn Esperanto? Just don’t learn it and leave us alone.

When you exclude culture, motivation, and ideology, Esperanto is arguably the best language altogether. It has 16 rules that are NEVER ever broken, and has a very simple word building syntax. 100 hours of study in Esperanto equates to 1000 hours of Spanish. Stop talking about the people who speak the language and start talking about the language itself. Don’t tell me it’s a bad language if you don’t even speak a word of it.

So your argument is that Esperanto has logical (constructed) grammar therefore it’s superior to all other languages?

I’d rather spend 1000 hours learning Spanish than 100 hours learning a propaganda tool. BTW, you can’t isolate a language from the people who speak it.

I find this article quite ironic and it gave me a good laugh. It talks about Esperanto as being a political tool, something I do not recognise at all about it, but the very stance you are taking against it is political. As a teacher I can attest to the fact it has many language learning benefits. It is an excellent way to introduce English first language speakers to a new language and it is not time wasted. Because, unlike in many other languages, English first language speakers must first learn grammar before they can really get to grips with another language because none is learnt in English. Tell a French teenager learning English that they are going to conjugate a verb they will know what you mean. An English student learning French would not. Esperanto is a good way to introduce grammar and gives students confidence because they learn the language quickly.

Here in fact is an international language I’ve been working on lately. It’s still in in its infancy, but the progress is good. I’m drawing words from even the most obscure indian tribes in Brazil, Colombia, and North America.

Sorry, but I don’t find this very persuasive. Plenty of non-European languages have diacritics, and many have much more difficult writing systems...an alphabet with a few “special” letters might be annoying to type on a standard Western keyboard, but it’s not exactly “not international”.
I’m also not convinced that Europe stands out in terms of brutality, in the grand scheme of world history, although it’s certainly been more successful in terms of colonization etc. in recent centuries (but if I had to guess, I’d say that was to do with better technology and natural resources, not because nobody else was trying).
I’m also skeptical that an idealistic Russian Jew spent a decade creating a language for the purpose of promoting white supremacy.
I might understand your comment better if you described what you think *would* make a good international language, though.

I certainly enjoy Spanish, but I wouldnt call it an international language. The idea is very obtuse. International for whom? While I am not attached to English, many of the Esperantists come from lands like Holland, Russia, Germany, Brazil, and obviously they merely don’t want to learn English but parade as if they were humanists. Really they are bitter about losing their empires to the USA. Many Esperantists from Europe appear not merely to dislike the American empire, but we know they had empires like Spain, where losing their world power came as a blow to the normal citizen, whose personal identity was attached to his nation’s empire. Esperanto generally appeals to these types. From the United States, often gringos who are too bourgeois to learn Spanish consider learning Esperanto. I’ve followed the movement a bit.

I recently started development of an international language from various indigenous languages. To my thinking, what makes a good international language are good words, words that stand out in the mind, like the Choctaw word for dog is “ofi”. If you say “ofi” you immediately think of a dog. Also this word has no double consonants. “offi” would less easy to remember the spelling of. I prefer also the standard Subject-Object-Verb sentence structure of Muscogee languages like Choctaw. The ability to create random sentence structure with accusative ‘n’ of Esperanto leads to wacky phrases. A standard sentence structure is preferable to accusative n constructions. Stuff like this.

This was so hateful that I couldn’t continue listening although I had quitted Esperanto before finding this blog. I quitted Esperanto simply because it was not that simple regular language I was hoping for. You know, all those accented letters like ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ or having j instead of y.

But you know what? After reading your blog I’m kind of considering to continue learning Esperanto just as a way to meet these special community. I found that there’s an alternative way of writing those accented letters as ch, gh, or cx, gx, etc. I was learning it by Duolingo spending 10 minutes a day for the past couple of days which I don’t think would heart if I continue to do so for at least a month and then see what happens. I guess it worth the possibility of getting to know one of those people who are into this mindset of simplicity like myself.
PS. You can see how desperately I’m in need of simplicity just by looking at those long sentences.

All *major* languages that use the Latin alphabet use letters with diacritics—except English.

English doesn’t benefit from the lack of diacritics because it’s difficult to tell the pronunciation from the spelling, for example, woman/women. We change the second vowel in writing but the first vowel in pronunciation. We contract a disease and sign a contract, but we don’t write it contráct and cóntract, which would make sense. I had a friend in high school who have an oral report in which he said that Washington DC is on the Pott-a-mac river because the spelling gave him no clue.

I suppose you will refuse to learn French until you find an alternate way to spell things like “Abientôt, Hélène.”

Esperanto has a one-letter-per-sound and one-sound-per-letter system. Why do people moan and groan because Esperanto isn’t as difficult as English? have in English?

Yes, that diacritical markers are not very international. In fact, latin and germanic orientation of Esperanto doesnt strike one as being very peaceful . Historically, well Latin is from Roman empire. It’s an odd choice for a world peace language. Europeans like to point out that they are really old, like old as the hills with a long history, but often they leave out that most of it is imperialism, slavery, exploiting other cultures and lands. Their recent liberalism after WW2 isnt particularly impressive and the EU isnt particularly Democratic. I dont think they even got to vote about the EURO money. Then the rotten history of the U.N. They produce this language Esperanto and think its better than English, but really it’s just more of the same Eurocentric white supremacy.

You, Sir, are a hypocrite, perhaps not knowingly, but nevertheless.

You, as a native English speaker must have noticed that your mother tongue happens to be the official language of two of the current economical and political superpowers. Rationally, nowadays, it makes little sense to invest time to anything but English for the first foreign language to learn, if we want to be succesfull outside of our country. (This might change to Russian or Chinese or who knows, maybe Hindi or Arabic, the core of my message remains the same.) Many people from young age are exposed to English in its original format, because who wants to learn English from a non-native if the real material is ready and already out there?

American and British culture thus conquering the world piggybacking the language hegemony, making room for your ideologies and customs too, like your accusation based problem handling (see pictograms and messages on plastic bags and microwave ovens), your neotribalism, your political correctness to the point of being unable to talk about problems, your role models for communicating between age groups, being a teenager, courting someone you fancy, handling conflicts, just to mention the most obvious ones.

Make no mistake, I would not change you guys for the Russians (being an old enough Hun I experienced their friendly hug too) or Chinese, or any other _nation_ for that matter - and I think that is my point.

I don’t speak Esperanto (yet), but if I were religious I would pray every day to God to make English obscure again and rise Esperanto instead. Or Latin Sine Flexione, or Lingua Franca Nuova. Or a random dead language without a nationstate behind, for chrissake. Or perhaps even Choctaw...

The current, de facto lingua franca, English, supports cultural imperialism, of which your nation currently hugely benefits from.

You were pointing out Esperanto being a mean to a political end? Not good enough.

Choctaw is an excellent choice. Nahuatl is also very interesting, but the ease of reproducing Choctaw sounds and its very easy going sentence structure make it my personal favorite. As soon as you learn to make sentences in Choctaw, you keep going back to it. They are a very peaceful indigenous group from North America. Learn some Choctaw and you wont regret it. As a plus, I learned how to forage and eat wild plants for free like Lambsquarters, which they call “Tvnashi”. Free meals and good language.

The native American language Choctaw is as easy as Esperanto and doesn’t connect you to European assholes. I personally promote Choctaw as a lingua franca. Historically, various native American groups even spoke pidgin Choctaw in order to trade with each, as Choctaw is an amusing language.

Really easy, huh? I might have to go learn my first Native American language now....

I’m interested in Spanish, German, Russian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Hindi.

And now Choctaw.

Still NOT Esperanto though.

On the other hand, Navajo
was used by the US in
WW2 as a code language.

I disliked Esperanto, because you could never get away from nationalism. Americans would speak Esperanto and say “America is great” and Russians would speak esperanto to say “Russia is great”, and like many liberal movements, patriotism is important, because through patriotism you seek to change your nation. For example, to change the USA and make it better, i.e. more palatable to Esperantists. In other words, being disaffected in your own nation is not tolerated overly much. They want you to vote, to be an activist, to support gay rights and feminism rather than be an eccentric who is not really taking part in his or her own nation. Their lack of neutrality ultimately is not interesting.

For me esperanto is only a language. There is no political goal behind.

The only problem is that in real life I never meet someone speaking esperanto and not languages I speak. Example I meet a chinese who speak chiness and Korean and esperanto. I could talk with him with esperanto.

The other point community philosophy etc... that does not interest me

”4. Esperanto evangelists aren’t just passionate – they’re fanatical”

Hahaha, I have to say I have two Samenhoff’s portraits and a Esperanto flag above my bed :P

Wow !!!

What a brilliant argumentary ... from BOTH SIDES !

I am an esperantist ... I am not a ‘communist’ neither a ‘neo-nazi’

I followed that thread because until now I saw good points from BOTH SIDES ...

but now it’s just too much ... I’ll unsubscribe that thread ...

Sometimes people can do great things together, respecting the point of view of the others, sometimes human can demonstrate how ‘unpolish and rude’ they can be !!!

Human beings are not always at their best I presume ...

Good grief, you don’t know Esperanto very well. I encountered Esperanto in 1995, and the main web site I found was atheist and communist. It really turned me off, but I didn’t realize it was an outlier. Then Esperanto popped up in YouTube in 2016, and I discovered it is much more larger and more diverse community than I thought, and, in the aggregate, not ideological at all beyond being astonished “I can talk to people from other countries!” Your impression of Esperanto is a big puzzle to me. I have, for example, a quality paperback that is a translation of Sherlock Holmes into Esperanto, and an Esperanto Bible. I don’t think those are either communist or socialist. Maybe your exposure to the language is very limited.

Ever met a vocal Trump supporter at an Esperanto meetup? Genuinely curious.

A lot of the reasons not to learn Esperanto have to do with what it used to be. It used to be a conlang invented by a Polish ophthalmologist with dreams of humanism and international harmony. However, a conlanger can think of lots of ways that he could have made it different, or even better. Zamenhof’s goal was not achieved. Esperanto as a conlang failed.

However Esperanto has achieved that goal, not on the level of nations, but of common people. Esperanto hasn’t accomplished Zamenhof’s grandiose purpose. He designed his language to be a second language for everyone, and for most Esperanto speakers (note: speakers, not hobbyists), it is. However, it has developed native speakers, whom you can find on YouTube if its whacky search engine lets you. This is a development that Zamenhof did not want at all.

The Vatican, China Radio, and Le Monde use Esperanto, and a science academy in San Marino uses it as their language of instruction. There is a music company in France that has only sold Esperanto music for the last 20 years. There is an Esperanto public that is large enough to support vlogs on YouTube that are completely in Esperanto.

Most conlangs are small enough that all the proficient speakers can comfortably go out to dinner together. In some cases that would be a table for one. Esperanto, on the other hand, is the working language of an annual conference of up to 2,000. The last one was in Korea.

Conlangers critique Esperanto as if it were still 1887, and if that were the case, their arguments stand up well. However, this is the 21st century, not the 19th. Esperanto is now a living language that originated as a conlang. It has not been under construction since 1905. It is in the public domain. Esperanto can only change by natural processes now.

Most of the reasons for not learning Esperanto are not valid because conlangers evaluate it as if it were a conlang. I’ve read critiques about how Esperanto is hard for Asians, and I have read explanations by actual Asians in Esperanto that explain why it is not.

If you don’t want to learn Esperanto, that’s your choice, but Esperanto doesn’t compete with conlangs any more. This isn’t 1887. Zamenhof is not a teenager tinkering with a Esperanto in his bedroom and trying it out on his school friends. It’s way past conlang status now.

The fact that it’s not the 1800’s anymore doesn’t mean that Esperanto is no longer a political instrument.

Communism/Socialism is a 19th century idea too and there are fools everywhere still trying to make that work.

Espereranto is the most popular conlang, and you find most people learn it instead of learning French or Spanish, which are more difficult, thinking that it’s why to choose the most popular conlang if you are learning any conlang at all. In fact, learning the most popular conlang immediately puts you into a trend-following reality, and that’s what most of Esperanto is about: a trend.

Instead, it would take more moxy to learn Interlingua, which has fewer speakers and is closer related to Spanish and Latin, making it instantly more useful with the large masses of Spanish speakers in the world today. Frankly, a lot of Russians speak Esperanto, and unless you want to talk to them and the wishy-washy Western European liberals, you are better off with Interlingua.

When perfection does not exist. If the perfection is P and we use an option EN at a distance X of such perfection (P-EN = X). If a new EO option that is at a distance less than P (P-EO <P-EN) appears, is it smart to remain in the EN solution, which is not P, because EO is not P?

I completely agree with every single word that you’ve mentioned in this article. Esperanto had been a failed project since it started. calling it as “International language” & “language of humanity” without considering any eastern language system during of basing it. This Fake language Even does not have its own alphabet and uses latin ones instead. English is International language hands down. The big power of economy, Media & internet, science and so on is behind it.

English doesn’t incorporate any “eastern language system” and uses the Latin alphabet. And no one would disagree that English is predominant now. If you want to argue, find something to argue with.

Well, nearly no one considers Esperanto to be perfect. At least it has a system of stems which cannot change, just as Chinese has.

English is certainly not better in this regard.

The problem is, we are not living in a perfect world. So we have to take the best solution we find.

It is said that Chinese people need five years for English and one year for Esperanto. This is a huge rationalization. Esperanto speaking people in China often have a basic knowledge in English and a much better knowledge in Esperanto.

It is sad that someone who know almost nothing of the history of Esperanto or the many cultural and philosophical strands that weave in an out of it, should choose so blithely to undermine it. I will answer only one of the attacks, which it seems for you, as a christian, to be central to your opposition.

Your assertion that:

”He also quite intolerantly spoke of free religious expression as a “barbarity”.
It’s this ideological baggage and taint that’s attached to the language that turns me off it completely.”.

is a completely incorrect characterisation of Zamenhof’s personal philosophy, expressed perhaps in its fullest form, and from a religious humanist perspective in his beautiful poem “Preĝo sub la verda standardo” (“Prayer under the green banner”). From the rarely cited verse 6:

”Kuniĝu la fratoj, plektiĝu la manoj,
antaŭen kun pacaj armiloj!
Kristanoj, hebreoj aŭ mahometanoj
ni ĉiuj de Di’ estas filoj.
Ni ĉiam memoru pri bon’ de l’ homaro,
kaj malgraŭ malhelpoj, sen halto kaj staro
al frata la celo ni iru obstine
antaŭen, senfine.”

I have difficulty believing that anyone, save for a religious fundamentalist or a rabid nationalist, could find such sentiments objectionable.

As Humphrey Tonkin put it

”Ultimately [Zamenhof’s] language was and is more than a proposed solution to the language problem: it is an attempt to confront the spirit of inequality, of intolerance, of hatred that is tearing apart our world”

If you are really interested in knowing more about the history and philosophies of Esperanto I would suggest both Peter Forster’s “The Esperanto Movement” and Esther Schor’s “Bridge of Words”.

Coming from a land of a great deal of intolerance and hatred I find the Movement in its many forms and with its many debates both intellectually challenging and inspiring.

In peace.

You’ve got the wrong end of the stick, Donovan. Esperanto isn’t a project, or an ideology, and whatever Zamenhof might have thought, he died a hundred years ago, and is history. Esperanto isn’t the solution to war or racism, although a lot of its speakers, including me, aren’t too keen on that sort of stuff either.

Esperanto is just a good idea. Learn all the other languages you want. I speak six languages fluently and can do basic touristy stuff in a dozen others. And at the end of the day, Esperanto is just another language, even if it’s ten times easier to learn than any other, but ...

You get a load of ordinary people from different countries and different language backgrounds together round a table and have them ALL participate as equals, as if there were no language barriers, then Esperanto is the ONLY way of doing it. And then maybe you’ll find that we are all different too. That’s what’s fun.

Actually, it’s quite an amazing experience. Sorry if saying that comes across as breathless and culty, because, honestly, I’m the LAST person who would be taken in by anything like that.

Great points, Ed!

I’m one of those so-called circus freaks who learned the language as a child, So, thanks for that. It’s never been about ideology for me. It’s been about community. I could care less about the Final Victory or other out-moded nonsense.

What kind of community though? What do you eat? What music do you listen to? What news do you read or watch? Who do you vote for? Maybe you don’t identify with the labels of certain ideologies, but what if you’re still a rose by any other name? Glad to meet you. :)

Good point Izaak... His circus freak comment was one of the many ways he undermined his opinion. I’ll never understand why people think that they’re having an intelligent discussion when in reality they’re just insulting others and pushing their own ideological viewpoint. It would be really interesting to hear your experiences growing up

Hi. Thanks for a thought provoking article. I especially enjoyed the discussion it led to on how far Esperanto is a political movement. As a learner of Esperanto, however, my main concern is whether learning Esperanto helps with the learning of other languages.

I took French and German for years at school and ended up with a great sense of failure as I felt that I would have great difficulty in carrying on a conversation in these difficult languages. Also, I have not had the opportunity to live where I get the chance to practise them and so improve.

I am hoping that studying Esperanto will build up my confidence in learning foreign languages.

I think your analogy with learning music was flawed. You said, I think, that, if someone wanted to play the violin, time spent learning to play the guitar first was not a good idea, as the time would have been better spent on the violin. But what about spending time on learning a simpler musical instrument first? What about the recorder - the block flute as it is called in some countries? Some schools start young children off on the recorder for that reason. And even if they do not go on to learn any other musical instrument they have the joy of being able to play one instrument.

In the same way children who learn Esperanto will know they can learn a foreign language, one that I think is worth learning in its own right as well as being a confidence booster.

Hey Donovan,

Something you didn’t touch on directly, but is implied is, that Esperanto is the single most boring language I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter.

Now that’s just my personal opinion. And my experience, as someone who had to learn 3 Indo-European languages and one Niger-Congo language as a child is different from most (Let’s just say, I’m comfortable with complexity.)

But real languages (and Esperanto is Not Real) develop an expressiveness that brings feelings of satisfaction as people play with grammar, simplify, introduce complexities, and develop the subtleties of expression that give users in the living community those little tingles of pleasure.

Think about how the black community in the United States have developed an English accent and a style that reflects their shared experience and attitudes, or the fact that Scottish people still have an accent that reflects the pronunciation of Gaelic.

I’ve heard Esperantists (great neolgism BTW) rail at the fact that English has diverged to the point where someone from Kentucky can barely understand someone from Edinburgh. That’s not even the worst. An Arabic speaker from Syria can barely understand what an Arabic speaker from Morocco is saying.

But where’s where the E-cultists don’t “get” it. That’s feature, not a bug!

Completely agree with you, Harry. Spot on.

I wish there was a “like” button for comments here. :)

Here in Brazil, the Esperanto language has a religious end, more specifically a Spiritism end, because there are many material this religion made in Esperanto.
This is the secret, you make material in this language that refute or persuade that ideia or thought.

It seems to me that Spiritism has a lot of material in Portuguese as well - so, is this a reason against Portuguese?

Esperanto is a language. As a language it does not have another end than to serve as a communication tool. As the Boulogne Declaration said already in 1905: “All other ideals or hopes tied with Esperantism by any Esperantist is his or her purely private affair, for which Esperantism is not responsible.” Today we would say “Esperanto” instead of “Esperantism”.

Esperanto scales. English does not. The scalability of Esperanto is why Esperanto will ultimately prevail as the international auxiliary language. The non-scalability of English is why there are various regional varieties of English: British English, American English, Indian English, and so on. Moreover, the non-scalability of English is not ‘fixable’, any more than the situation regarding entropy described by the second law of thermodynamics is ‘fixable’. Those who believe otherwise (trying to build perpetual motion machines) are just spitting into the wind.

So-called ‘international English’ will continue to diverge from the Queen’s English, and itself be made up of an increasing number of distinct regional varieties.

Esperanto keeps outliving its obituary-writers.

Never said it was dead.

Just unnecessary and overtly political.

There is something I didn’t understand: On the one hand you wrote, “Esperantistan is an ideologically homogenous landscape”. On the other hand you quote someone: “There are some great people at NASK and a lot of people willing to argue without getting offended, but a whole bunch of extreme far leftists who are OF COURSE politically correct (...)”. So at least at NASK there are three groups, “some great people”, “people willing to argue without getting offended” and “a whole bunch of extreme far leftists”.

I am sorry to say so, but this landscape does not seem to be “homogenous”.

Furthermore I would like to draw your attention to the fact that one regular Esperanto meeting can’t be taken as a proof for a homogenous landscape in the Esperanto speaking language community. A regular meeting is a bit similar to a circle of friends, to a party - and such circles tend to be a bit more homogenous as society in general. If someone is a leftist, he or she can live with the fact that the guy next door is not. But an Esperanto meeting with about 50 participants with whom you share the whole day for some days or even a week or more is something different. You don’t want to hear a group there say that your political opinion is bullshit. If you hear this, you may not want to go there another time. So after some times every Esperanto meeting has a special character and a special group of people whose opinion is not very divergent - but this does not say that the Esperanto community as a whole would be so homogenous as you seem to think. You should read some discussions in great Facebook groups or in the comments of big news sites to understand this...

By the way: There are a lot of different religious groups, catholic, protestant, atheists... Can you really imagine that a language community has at least half a dozen of religious groups, but is “ideologically homogenous”? How would you explain such a contrast?

Just to condense the arguments, here is what I posted in the group “Stop talking down Esperanto”:

1) Donovan Nagel seems to think of Esperanto as a “movement”... Maybe he didn’t get the fact that it’s just a language everyone may use as he or she wants. There is a language community.
It’s interesting to know what Zamenhof wanted - but everyone can use the language for any purpose. It’s free, as was stated in 1905 already.
2) Esperantoland is less ideologically homogenous than some outsiders think. To see this, it’s enough just to have a look at all the ideas outsiders link with Esperanto; this is not homogenous. But, yes, for the moment being, the political landscape in Esperantoland is probably less wide than that of big language communities. Why should I feel sorry about this? No language can give you everything.
3) No doubt the Esperanto culture is still developing. And every Esperanto speaker has his or her own culture. So, where is the problem?
4) Yes, some Esperanto “evangelists” may overact. I am really sorry. But why should I stop speaking Esperanto because of them? Do I stop speaking English for some guys? Would I recommend to people _not_ to learn English because of this?
”Most Esperantists however are self-appointed evangelists.” Is there any scientific study about this? Is the same true about “Esperanto speakers”?
Or is it just that those who write in forums are those who are more convinced and more evangelistic.. How about getting a good sample?
5) It seems Donovan didn’t read the publications about the effect of learning Esperanto before other languages. Helmar Frank and others published about this.
6) When Donovan shows his enthusiasm for English as a world language, he goes a lot too far. He wrote: “The Internet is basically unusable without English too.” This obviously is wrong. The highest estimations about the number of English speakers is two billion people. More than three billion people are linked to the internet... What do they do there without English? :-D
I do not speak Esperanto to make it the most spoken language on earth - I speak it to communicate, to enjoy it.
But I would like outsiders to present the language and the language community as they are - not just as they think they are...

I understand where you are coming from. It reminds me of a recent visit I had to a Unitarian Church. They were having a book sale and the workers were in full ideological ego mode calling Trump supporters fascists and everything under the sun. I just have a low tolerance for what I consider to be bad manners. I would have to really build up my aura to stay in an environment that is like that.
I happen to like Esperanto as a language. Based on your experience, it makes me feel less motivated to attend a congress. I have spent time in an Ashram, and things can get very murky there with people going off on “spiritual” tangents. I guess some people are just looking for authentic connections, and maybe they are more sensitive and they tend to really feel overwhelmed in these environments where people’s egos are flaring.

Maybe just do not make plans to go to just one congress, but go to three of them. Maybe you’ll like people in one of them, but not in the others...

I am not going to discuss a lot. You wrote: “The Internet is basically unusable without English too.”
Very difficult to believe in this opinion... There are about 3 billion people who use the internet, but even the most optimistic estimations about the number of English speaking people do not exceed 2 billion (and not a lot of people believe in such estimations, at least not for the number of people being able to use English websites...)
It seems to me that a lot of other assertions you make have the same level of truth...

I came here, because on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i51ka9RDQ9w you spoke about “sources” here. Well, it seems we have a different understanding of the word “sources”... I would prefer scientific sources that back the assertions you are making. Do you know any? If so, please give them.

Ok then what solution do you give to have a neutral language? Why do I have to learn your language and not you mine? that’s the point. We need a solution, many times when I speak with English speakers that only speak one language (English) I think they are stupids or illiterate. Esperanto at the moment is the only solution more extended.

There’s no such thing as a ‘neutral’ language.

And one of the chief criticisms of Esperanto is that it’s heavily influenced by European languages which means that it’s still not an even playing field for speakers in other parts of the world anyway.

Of course it is true that it hasn’t been developed over time like other languages did. But just focusing on this fact will also not make it possible to create a culture.

Esperanto will never be like other languages that grew over time. But it could have a good chance and we all don’t know how our brains would work if we would use Esperanto instead of english f. e.
I don’t say it needs to be Esperanto, but it would be great to have a language that is simple to learn and use for everybody.

I am also convinced that everybody can learn everything so it would take more time but you’ll learn it anyway if you want. Like everything. But wouldn’t it be maybe more effective.... we’ll never know because we just talk about why we shouldn’t learn. We would start seeing whats good on it after using it and stoping to look only on the negative parts.

Newcomers to Esperanto (that’s not necessarily John) often find ways they think the language could be changed, not realizing that even though it is a constructed language, it is not under construction. Also, they often complain that it is too Eurocentric. They claim that it isn’t international, because it isn’t international among enough nations. Some, run out and try to improve Esperanto, paradoxically producing a Romance language, making it even more eurocentric. You know how widespread and popular Ido is.

Zamenhof knew about but could not speak English, and the only Romance language he knew was French, though he admired the sound of Italian. (The opera is probably the only place he heard it.) Esperanto has tons of German words, a few from English (but not pronounced as in English), but most are from Latin and French. The prepositions are from Latin (modifying “in” to “en” to avoid a collision with the -in suffix taken from German), expressions of time are from German, but most of the vocabulary is Romance even though the first grammar of Esperanto was printed in Russian. Romance vocabulary is familiar to people who speak Germanic and Slavic languages, but the reverse is not true. Choosing mainly Romance words makes it more international. All those vowel endings mislead people into thinking it is a Romance language, but the phonology is Slavic.

If you try to make a language that takes its vocabulary from all languages, in proportion to their size, and borrow grammatical features from all, you create a monstrosity that no one can speak. Someone already tried.

The Kiwanis Club is international. It has chapters in the US and Canada. Esperanto is much. more international than the Kiwanis Club because includes more countries, but not all the nations of the world. Not even the United Nations includes all the nations of the world.

Most people think that a language consists of a bunch of words. They see European words and say, “Ha! It’s a European language!” Try to learn French by reading a dictionary.

Esperanto’s grammar is agglutinative, which is not how European languages work. It is how Asian languages work. The grammar is very familiar to Asians. Asian languages are generally not related to each other, so even if they learn the language down the street, they have to learn a whole new vocabulary. Esperanto’s grammar is easier, and the vocabulary is no harder than any other language. That’s why there are so many Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Esperantists, and why China Radio has an Esperanto section of their web site, including even recipes.

Agreed that Esperanto itself can’t be changed, but I see nothing wrong with using it to derive something new. Also disagreed about the Eurocentricness of Ido. I found myself more drawn to Ido because of the derivation that fit much better with the Japanese and Korean I already knew. Esperanto on the other hand, which I like well enough but not enough to ever use it, had a more ad-hoc derivation that turned me off a bit. I wasn’t able to find the nearly one-to-one correspondence with Japanese and Korean endings and Esperanto that I would have liked (e.g. in Korean you remove the -da at the end of a verb and replace it with -gi in the same way that in Ido -ar to -o denotes the action of a noun, but in Esperanto it could be a related object or something else), but found them in Ido. Here’s a comparison of Ido with Japanese and Korean I wrote nearly a decade ago:

http://www.pagef30.com/2008/06/comparison-of-ido-japanese-korean-and.html

I thought you would write about how it’s a very Eurocentric idea of a “universal language”.

true, seems that way. but great way to break into all euro languages simultaniously :-)

Donovan, are you a Brit by any chance? I have noticed that Brits have a tendency to falsely present themselves as experts and pontificate endlessly on subjects they know nothing about. This is what you have done here. At best, you are describing Esperanto as it was more than a hundred years ago and has no relevance at all to the very different Esperanto world of today. The language is far different today too and has effectively become a natural language complete with native speakers and evolving according to the laws of natural languages.

Zamenhof spent his whole life starting from puberty developing his international language project, a total of perhaps 15 years. He had a strong knowledge of linguistics and would have been delighted to become a professor of philology in a university but such an aspiration was impossible for a Polish Jew born in Czarist Russia and he had to make do with becoming an eye doctor to earn his living. He originally developed a complicated language with a big vocabulary and an elaborate grammar but came to realize that no one man could create a whole language by himself. He spent many years stripping down his language to the bare bones, creating the sketchy, schematic version he published as the “International Language Project of one Doctor Esperanto. He decided not to create a whole language but instead a sturdy framework that the users of the new language could use to construct a full language on. This is roughly what happened but it was a long and often stormy road. The Esperanto that Zamenhof used 30 years later at the end of his life was far more elegant and polished than the early version he published in the First Book. Since the beginning, it took more than a century to fully develop Esperanto and create the living language of today, a language you know nothing about.

But you Sir, know effectively nothing about the real Esperanto. You basically accuse it of not being a national language, which Esperanto was never intended to be so you are belaboring at great length a complete irrelevancy. I am amazed that you feel qualified to pontificate at length on a subject you are so obviously abysmally ignorant of, but that seems to be a thing Brits do nowadays. The same point holds true of Justin B. Rye’s silly rant.

I am sorry to have to confront you with this Donovan but ignorance does not constitute knowledge and never will. You are no expert on Esperanto and your ill-informed opinion has no relevancy and substance. You seem to regard English as the great solution to International communication. I have a Master of Arts in Applied English Linguistics. I spent 7 years teaching English as a Second Language in the United States, Taiwan, Mexico and Saudi Arabia. Based on my experience, if we try to base the International Language on English, it will be some debased kind of pidgin English. Such a language is already forming and is called “Globish”. It is an awful travesty of the noble English language, the language of Shakespeare, Shelly and Hemingway. I fear it will eventually contaminate the English of native speakers if it gets too widespread. The fact is, English was never designed to be an international language and it is too difficult for the great majority, with the exception of native speakers of Germanic languages. To master English requires studying it or practicing the language for several hours a day for ten full years and you need to live at least a couple of years in an English speaking country. This is well beyond the means of most people. The result is that English is and will doubtless remain the ;language of big business, finance and diplomacy, the language of a privileged and much envied elite but will remain inaccessible to the great majority.

Esperanto was designed from the ground up to be an international language and it works brilliantly for this purpose. It is the international SOCIAL language, the language of those who want to make friends across language barriers and enjoy the culture of others. It is the language of the rest of us, those who are not of the elite.

Another useful purpose for Esperanto I think would be to help stabilize and define English. Esperanto fully has the precision and logical rigor of the Classical languages and is well suited for this purpose. Latin used to be used for this purpose, but it is so intractably difficult that hardly any ordinary student gains any real mastery of the subject and it has been abandoned for the most part. An English speaker who has never learned another language is as unaware of the soft mushy walls of the English language as a fish in an aquarium is aware of the water it swims in. If you study Esperanto seriously on the other hand, you become vividly aware of the foggy, ambiguous nature of the English language, It will force him to recognize the need for rules and discipline to give English the clarity it needs to be effective. I learned long ago when I read Esperanto to stop trying to translate it into English. I run all the time into words and expressions that have no equivalent in English although I understand them perfectly well. Translating from English, I am forced to work out the precise intended meaning that I need to express in the much clearer and more precise Esperanto. This sort of exercise would be of great value in teaching native speaking English students to use English with the clarity and precision it needs to be effective.

I find it interesting that you harp so much on culture, though in a way that is illogical and entirely inappropriate. An international culture is beginning to develop, especially in Europe. This culture reaches its fullest development in the Esperanto community. Note that it is an INTERNATIONAL culture, not an Esperanto one, as is perfectly fitting to the fundamental purpose of Esperanto. The Esperanto community is the only genuine multinational, multicultural community because it is the only one that has a common language to bind them. You think you can give an informed opinion on Esperanto culture based on knowing little to nothing about it. Such a thing cannot be. All that results is you show the deceitful sophistry of a lawyer arguing a case in court. It is not a way of reaching truth or genuine insights. I notice how much you do this in your arguments both in the original essay and your responses to others.

You should know that relatively little information is available in English and it tends to be hopelessly antiquated anyway. Most of the information, especially contemporary information, especially about the modern language, is only available in Esperanto itself. Since somebody linguistically sophisticated like yourself could go through a beginning course (I highly recommend the 3rd Edition of “Teach Yourself Esperanto”) and acquire a basic reading knowledge of the language in about a month. With the aid of a good 2 way dictionary (I highly recommend the most current edition of Weil’s 2 way dictionary, it even includes some of the dirty words in the Esperanto part) you should be able to access this literature for yourself, a good part of which can be found on the Internet if you look hard.
But to understand the current Esperanto community and it’s place in the world, you need to learn to actually speak the language and fluently. That takes about a year of consistent daily study. First, I would go to the learning materials on lernu.net (stay off the forums). No need to join up, just use it as a resource. Alternatively, try Facila Vento and SimplaVortaro. Afterwards, study Jordan’s excellent book, in English, called “Being Colloquial in the International Language Esperanto”. It details the many pitfalls English speakers stumble across in mastering correct Esperanto.
These pitfalls are due to 2 reasons. One is the large number of “false friends” in the vocabulary of Esperanto for English speakers. The only other language with a comparable number of “false friends” is Brazillian Portuguese. The other problem is that Esperanto strongly reflects the shared contemporary usage patterns of the major languages of Western Europe and English does not, which creates significant problems for English speakers learning these languages. Anyway, Jordan’s book is an excellent and much needed learning resource. Afterwards, you should pay attention to developing speaking and listening abilities. Go to Vinilkosmo and listen to the samples of fine Esperanto music there and become familiar with some of the groups performing fine original Esperanto music. Vinilkosmo is the major source of Esperanto music CD’s and you can purchase them by credit card. For free music, go to YouTube and look up the same names you found on VinilKosmo for music videos of mostly their older music and listen to some every day. This will be great for attuning your ears to the sounds and rhythms of the authentic spoken language. There are 3 terrible accents to have in Esperanto; Russian, French and English. Make a real effort to get rid of your English accent, or at least keep your vowels pure, trill your R’s and dont overly aspirate voiceless stops. This will make your speech much more agreeable to other Esperantists’ ears.
Finally, Take the Intermediate to Advanced Esperanto Course of Boris Kolker’s superb “ Vojaĝo En Esperanto-Lando”. This is a high quality completely professional language learning text lavishly illustrated in color. It takes months to work through it but it will really enhance and polish your Esperanto. An interesting point is that it presents many things from the point of view of the Russian Esperanto community. Eastern Europe has always been the homeland of Esperanto and the Russian community have played a core part. After all this, by all means go to an international meeting. I am not impressed by the ones I have seen in the U.S. and it is far more meaningful to communicate with Esperantists who cannot speak English. You will feel awkward for the first couple of hours but if you keep on speaking you will soon find yourself speaking Esperanto with an unselfconscious fluidity and ease you will probably never attain in any other language other than your native English.

You know nothing of contemporary Esperanto culture so you think it doesn’t exist. Does it? Well you will have to find out for yourself. You won’t be able to do that if you can’t speak the language. ^,..,^

Since the re-design, Lernu doesn’t let you access the materials or even the dictionary without signing in :-(. But at least the account is completely free and doesn’t require any personal info besides your email address, and they never send you spam.

P.S. I personally think a German accent in Esperanto sounds worse than a French one, but that’s just me.

P.P.S Another great resource, if one has specific questions about Esperanto language and/or culture, is esperanto.stackexchange.com .

Totally ill-informed diatribe. Almost every assertion quoted as “fact” has no basis other than the writer’s personal prejudices. What is there to say in reply?

The biggest error is the frankly ludicrous claim about “Esperantistan” being “ideologically homogeneous”. By his own admission, Donovan has not learned Esperanto and will never learn it. How then can he make a judgement about the Esperanto community and its imagined “ideology”?

Of course, there are a minority of fanatics and proselytisers among Esperanto enthusiasts, and presumably Donovan has met some of them and based his views on his dealings with them. He quite obviously hasn’t met the majority of enthusiasts - particularly from other countries who don’t have English as a language - who have no interest in ideology of any kind, but simply enjoy being part of a world-wide community.

Esperanto speakers are the most diverse group of people you could wish to meet, united chiefly by an acceptance of diversity. That is something that Donovan Nagel could learn from, before criticising something of which he clearly has a poor knowledge.

I agree. He may as well have addressed the local trumpet club about why he isn’t going to learn the trumpet, without even knowing anything about trumpets or trumpeters. The entire concept of the article is foolish beyond belief.

Sorry, I take no offense to these views, nor am I a passionate believe in Esperanto as a solution for anything but here are my blunt words in response too: A childish rant that confuses a language with a political movement, and culture that it denies exists.

So to clarify:

1) By all means, don’t learn it. Heck don’t learn Klingon either. Or Swahili. Who really cares? And who, do you need to inform about the grand decision not to learn something? Just curious.

2) I can guess at answers to 1, and they suggest soapboxing in response to a lamentable culture behind Esperanto, the thing in point 3 you deny exists. Phewey, it has one, and yep it’s full of extremists and nutters and it sucks. Just get your message clear. But you don’t like it and are railing against it. Fair enough. That says nothing about learning the language, and is like saying I won’t read that danged bible because Christians are all nutters ... a fair comment and not one I’m inherently critical of, just unrelated issues is all. Who really cares? Read it or don’t, but you might choose to read because Christians are nutters ...

3) Point 5 is just wrong. Ill conceived and foolish and not at all what experience suggest what research suggests. You seem literally to be unaware of the fact that you can speak this language (and any constructed language) with what, two weeks invested effort. If you think you can’t you haven’t really tried. In fact when I discovered a strong interest in language and wanted to learn one, I had Spanish or French or Chinese or Japanese in mind, and someone told me about Esperanto, promised in 10 lessons I could read with a a little help form a pocket dictionary for vocab and rapidly be consulting it less and less so that withing 2 months you could mostly do without it. 5 hours invested effort? I though, heck, if I can’t do that, I’m gonna drown in French ... so I gave it a shot. And it delivered. So, now I can speak Esperanto? Do I use it, not much, hardly ever. Do I care? Not much. Do I socialise with it? Not much, I mean as you observed the culture is dominated by oddballs and extremists. But was it a waste of time? Get real? The ignorance of that claim is so deep it grates. All you judgments are fine, but this is just plain wrong.

There is simply a lot to be said for learning to crawl before you work and I would seriously recommend any constructed language to anyone as a second language to help them let go of monolingualism, exercise new grammar and vocab all in context without exceptions, idioms, centuries of nuancal rhetorical meaning layers and soon. The reward is fast, rapid and you learn that you can learn, and discover that communication can work in weird and wonderful ways after and it’s not possible. Most flounder and fail at any natural second language, drowning in the complexity. If you don’t kudos to you, but then you’re probably be speaking Esperanto in a week if you pulled your head out of your ... and tried, but hey I am not attached and I don’t care if someone chose to learn Klingon, as long as they a) try, b) get reward and c) have a community of people to exchange with (without some practice you won’t learn it at all, that is the way the human body and mind work).

And that said, the culture seems to be shifting with the internet as most are, and I suspect as the old guard slowly die off and the new enter it becomes a little less aberrant, more “ordinary” people learn it and in total opposition to your faulty conclusion in 6 - again nonsense, not an opinion or judgment a claim and the claim is utter nonsense because any language with speakers has a use. Which brings us to one of the dominant uses of Esperanto. Seriously explain to me how you can give my children this:

A few months casual lessons and exercises, watching some videos, and then pen pals in Japan, China, Russia, Brazil, France, wherever with whom you can exchange in a language that you are peers at? Not yours.

This is one of its greatest gifts to English speakers. I bummed around Japan for two months in my 20s visiting among many people Esperanto speakers, and these were among my most valued relationships, because I spoke with peers, we both struggled with a a simpel toy language gifted to us, that cost us very little and neither of us owned or mastered,. With this I could and di stay with a Japanese family help them harvest their rice, played Go with Grandad, and I stayed in a monastery and wend mountain climbing and all with people who I had no access to with English and if I did, I was always the mentor, not the peer. And that distinctly changes our relationship.

And the same was true in China, and in Russia ... and and and ...

There is no better language to learn for a world vagabond as I was, that comes as cheaply, and opens as many doors, in ans many nations, as does Esperanto.

But if you’re not a globetrotting young vagabond, who cares? I mean I don’t preach it in the street, in fact rarely if ever mention to anyone socially that I can speak Esperanto. Why not? Because unless I see some reason they may be interested, why would I raise it? And I see only two real plusses at present maybe three:

1) Want to see the world and a globetrotting vagabond? Hitchhike and speak Esperanto. No two things will open as many genuine friendly doors for you as those, nope not even couchsurfing.com. These two things will offer far more spontaneous and genuine relationships I promise you, having done just that for a decade.

2) If you want to learn a second language, try Esperanto first. We’ll manage a simple conversation in a few days and you’ll be able to browse and understand websites in a week or two. You can of course potter around like any language and not get there, and not be progressing with it, but I promise you this, if that’s the case, you probably would not be different with another natural language only slower, and more frustrated. But crack this nut and feel the reward, and learn above all, about your learning skills and passion.

3) If you’re socially isolated, a tad eccentric, believe in world peace and the unity of mankind, well, there’s probably a local club that will take you in and entertain you for a weekly or monthly meet ...

Unless though I think you’re yearning for one of tose three things, you will probably never learn (form me) that I speak Esperanto.

Which is what takes me back to your motivations. Namely the lack of grace. An almost childish tantrum against a pile of eccentrics you don’t like, confusing that with a language.

But each to their own. You had your rant, and no I mine ;-).

And likewise, no disrespect intended at all! I totally get where you’re coming from and have felt similar and much of it resonates with my personal experience of the Esperanto world. Just in places you are plain wrong is all.

See, this kind of crap really pisses me off.
I would stake my life that not a single word of your globetrotting adventures is true. Not one.
I live in Japan and the people that are actually interested in Esperanto are so far and few between as to essentially be non-existent. One of the major exceptions is a fringe Shinto-based cult that sees the language’s founder as some sort of prophet. And you’ve apparently met a whole monastery full of speakers? They had no access to English despite it being a mandatory subject all through basic education? Look, if you’re so confident in the worthwhile nature of Esperanto, why do you have to make up stuff like this? It seems like a sad attempt at tugging at people’s heartstrings to win them over to your side - AKA propaganda.

English alone gives you far more access to people in all the countries you listed, and also ensures you’re more likely to meet people who aren’t fringe weirdos. It’s a far better tool for globetrotting than Esperanto could ever hope to be, because people are naturally attracted to a real language that lets you express all the intricacies or your feelings, and not just your most basic thoughts. It would be a better use of time learning International Sign.

Well Heinrich, welcome to the internet because you know, using your viewpoint, absolutely nothing you say is true either.

First of all thank you Mr. Nagel for your comment. The beauty of that world is that we, for many of us, still have the right and the liberty to express our opinions !

Also, I’m begging your pardon for all the mistakes I’ll may do. You’ll understand here that English is not my native language.

That said, let me explain :

Why I Learned Esperanto !

1- I’m using Esperanto just because there are people around the world who doesn’t care about politic bounds to any ideology or anything else. There are people out there who sees Esperanto as a tool. NO MORE, NO LESS.
And that’s fine ! :) Besides that, I’m a fervent capitalist, I’m an atheist, and ... WHO CARES ! It’s only related to my native culture ! Nothing to do with the fact I use Esperanto ! So, what’s the matter with the politic !

2- I’m using Esperanto as a vehicule in order to become more open-minded towards other cultures in order to improve and increase my knowledge of the other cultures. Just for that, it wins my favor. Openness is one of the key for improving our intelligence (Just a little research on the web concerning FFM (Five factor model) and OCEAN (Openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism) should convince you of the benefits of it ;) )

3- I’m using Esperanto for its CULTURE. (I won’t debate anything here, you have excellent comments about it on your own blog... I read them all)

4- I’m using Esperanto to counterbalance the fanatical English Evangelists who try to convince us, non-native English speakers that : “Hey just accept it as a truth. English win. It’s everywhere”
Wrong !

First thing first : It is NOT everywhere.
If you traveled a little bit, you will admit that outside the hotels and outside the highly touristic sites, you’ will find no one to help you in English. And those who will help, will do with a barely understandable English !

Second, the vast majority of the people who use English as a working language will :
Have a decent to poor vocabulary in English. Often it’s just enough to do the job but nothing more. I know what I’m talking about, I classify myself in that category. Actually it requires from me an effort to write this comment ! Thanks to my programmers job, otherwise I would probably not writing this comment.

5- I’m using Esperanto because it help me learn other languages. Surprisingly, learning Esperanto opened doors for me to access other languages resources : the Esperantists native languages. Exchanging with them allow me to learn their language and in return I have the opportunity to help the other learn my language. And all the exchange is done with the bridge that represent Esperanto.

6. Finally, I use Esperanto because it gave me tools I didn’t have before. I use it for all the reasons mentioned above and the most important thing, I use it because I don’t feel that I have to make excuses in advance for the possible mistakes I may do when I speak or write to someone else just because I’m pretty aware that my interlocutor is by far more agile with the language used. I feeling that I don’t get when I speak to someone in Esperanto !

An error in my final sentence, it should have been :

”A feeling that I don’t get when I speak to someone in Esperanto !”

Alternate title: “Here are my widespread anti-Semitic generalizations based on my own cherry-picking logic about the people speaking this language and how I hate them and how English is a such better language there’s no point.”

He likes Arabic too. You know Arabic is a Semitic language, yes? No?

Alternet comment: OH VEY!

Well it’s up to you. The problem is your diagnosis of its political motivations are hopelessly outdated. Like everything else in culture almost all political content (or political content that doesn’t reflect the currently dominant ideology) has been almost entirely stripped away. There was indeed a time when Esperanto had even been adopted by a worker’s movement, though that was not part of the regular Esperanto movement which was about as political as a harvest festival.

Your ‘many Englishes’ argument is spurious too. I hear this so often and from so many alleged ‘linguists’ who ought to know better. In truth English only functions as some kid of bloc when the differences are skated over. The places where it is a first language have quite a few differences, but not enough to create a barrier. On the other hand in places where it has fairly deep roots and is spoken relatively well, like India, there is still too much difference for it to be comparable to standard English. The grave mistake so often made is in accepting as the truth the myth that the world speaks English. The standard of English throughout Europe (the usual example given of ‘good English’ as a second language) ranges from good to fair to chronic to non-existent, at 5%, 45%, 25%, 25% respectively. The brute lies repeated about the level of English competence throughout the world sometimes beggars belief. The situation currently gives native English speakers the whip-hand in so many international arenas. Anyone promoting this situation is really a menace to international development. Particularly since its basis is utterly false.

Personally I’m not all that interested in the alleged ‘special culture’ of Esperanto, but what you’ve missed is that Esperanto somehow manages to allow you to speak with many people in a way that helps you see their cultural position, without having to learn ten or more languages. You won’t get to see this because you’re too afraid to have a go at it. That watery McCarthyism of yours, which makes you see the word ‘Esperanto’ as ‘Communist’ (not that the latter is particularly if a person is not drenched in 90 years of U.S. propaganda) does you no credit.

Strongly agreed! Well stated.

I cannot see how Esperanto can help with saving the dying languages. Esperanto is a destructive totalitarian pseudo-religious sect. It is evil, and it is a common knowledge that Evil cannot create. Esperanto itself it not a fair creation, it is a perversion of European languages.

The real languages, such as English, give you tangible (and also real) benefits. Esperanto just kills your soul.

The idea of Esperanto “saving” small/dying languages is based on the premise of enough people speaking Esperanto as an auxiliary language for it to be usable worldwide, which I certainly grant is not very likely. If people could learn Esperanto instead of being pressured to learn (say) English, then English-speaking culture wouldn’t come to dominate and eventually erase local cultures and languages....that’s the thought, anyway.
Naturally, since Esperanto doesn’t aim to *replace* anyone’s “real” language, it won’t steal your soul or deprive you of the nourishment you get from English (personally, as a native English speaker, I love our crazy language and the etymologies and histories of the words and sayings, etc.)
I won’t address your claim that Esperanto constitutes a “destructive totalitarian pseudo-religious sect” because it’s too far from what I recognize as reality for me to be able to say anything meaningful to you about it. Historically, it’s been Esperantists who have died at the hands of destructive totalitarian regimes, not the other way around.

Nice to read a thought-out, nuanced opinion for a change.

/sarcasm

This statement is too extreme to be true: “Esperanto is a destructive totalitarian pseudo-religious sect. It is evil, and it is a common knowledge that Evil cannot create. Esperanto itself it not a fair creation, it is a perversion of European languages”

It can’t’ be evil, because it created. William Auld was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Literature for his Esperanto-language works.

I think someone needs to cool down and meet some real esperantists.

Mi tre amas Esperantan lingvon. Mi ankaŭ legis viajn vortojn kaj kredas ke vi havas vian kredon.

Mi ne estas la unua ulo kiu esperantiĝas sen kredi la tutan filozofion. Fakte, Esperanto estas lingvo. Vi ne devas akcepti nenion se vi vere volas uzi la lingvon.

Mi uzi kaj tre ĝojas la lingvan sperton. Mi nun faras la multanojn kurso de Boris Kolker kaj estas tre kontente kun la libro kaj lecionoj.

Ĝis.

As a native speaker of English, I learned to read, write and speak English at a fairly high level as a maximum-security prisoner by doing pro se legal work in federal civil-rights actions. (See, e.g., Pratt v. Sumner, 807 F.2d 817 (9th Cir. 1987).) I studied classical logic for the sake of analyzing and tearing down the arguments of my opponents’ government attorneys. I am not impressed by ranting. As a form of argumentum ad hominem, the argument that I am not worthy of the laws of the group, of the country, and that I am only worthy of the exceptions to the protections of the law, was the constant drivel that I heard leveled at me and at all members of my class, both then and now.
I have given up on law. I understand that no law book ever jumped off a shelf and stopped anyone from doing anything. I understand that the law only takes on its life through people. There are good people who do good things, and there are bad people who do bad things, and the law is largely irrelevant.
I was raised in Nevada near Las Vegas, and I am very aware that I lack a culture. I have visited some culturally rich cities and lived in them for a while (such as the Bay area in California), and I am very conscious that the culture that I grew up in--with its casinos, cops, mobsters, whores, politicians and Mormons--is not much of a culture.
I am interested in learning foreign languages like Mandarin to get a better understanding of China’s rich and ancient gems of internal martial arts. I am interested in learning Spanish as a matter of personal mobility in a world where one sixth of the world speaks Spanish. I am interested in learning Russian as a growing and important force in international commerce and personal opportunities. I would even give Hindi the same consideration.
However, I am interested in Esperanto for a very practical reason: it is the only language with high-level speakers, readers and writers in virtually every corner of the globe. Although Esperanto does not have the same large number of functionally illiterate native speakers of English that can be boasted of in the United States, any good speaker and writer of Esperanto is going to have a better conversation. English may be more useful, in a practical sense, but a conversation in Esperanto, especially in writing, may be more enjoyable.
Hundreds of thousands of new Esperanto speakers, readers and writers are being hatched right now. It is an exciting time to learn Esperanto.
Ironically, I have entertained similar negative views about a language as the blog author has of Esperanto -- but precisely about the language that he loves: Arabic. I have violent feelings about learning or respecting a language used by mass murderers of Christians. (As a white maximum-security ex-con, I am no stranger or saint in the world of racism, even though I now disavow racism as a Christian.) I do not know that I will ever learn Arabic. But, most likely, I will do so a little when I meet my first Arabic friend who converses in Esperanto.

Mi estas komencanto, sed mi povas legi vian poŝton.

You aren’t obligated to learn any language. I just wonder why you felt it was necessary to defend your personal choice. Some of your arguments are accurate, but most are only approximately true, but it really doesn’t matter. It’s your thought process, to which you are entitled.

Esperanto has not and probably will not achieve the goal that Dr. Zamenhof had in mind, so you are partly right that it is a failure in that sense. However, making up a language that actually has native speakers is quite an accomplishment. There are more Wikipedia pages in Esperanto than in Danish, and there are more books in Esperanto than in Icelandic. William Auld was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999, 2004, and 2006 for works in Esperanto.

To borrow a turn of phrase, Esperanto failed at being a floor wax, but it turned out to be a great desert topping. So it is not only a failure, it is a huge success. However, you don’t want to learn it, and that’s okay.

”You aren’t obligated to learn any language.” FALSE, If you want to work in education, tourism, culture, ... you do not hire if you do not know English at high level, that is discriminatory by nationality and income. In the EU it goes against the fundamental rights of citizens (art. 21 and 22). Esperanto language helps reduce all these drawbacks to impose English, French, Spanish or Chinese.

You do realise that sooner or later, you were going to get a real anthropologist here who COULD and would critique your cherry picking and non-contextual use of definitions of culture.

So here I am.

PhD from ANU in Canberra. Been working as an anthropologist (paid) for almost 20 years. Oh, and I speak an agglutinative Australian Aboriginal language. Something most ‘language’ enthusiasts wouldn’t dare to try - they can’t be bothered living in a remote area.

I can accept that you don’t want to waste your time learning Esperanto. No qualms there.

However, I do want to take exception with your use of the term ‘culture’ to advance your argument.

You appear to be attempting to claim two things: that esperanto has no ‘culture’ and that it is suspended in some kind of cultural vacuum.

Really?

Esperanto is both a product of culture AND a sub-culture. How can it be anything else? It arose at a certain point in time, was ‘authored by’ and informed by the culture in which it arose. It is a cultural artefact that does not exist in a vacuum, but, like other forms of cultural knowledge, interacts with, negotiates and operates within tropes, flows, rules and norms of the cultural contexts in which its speakers/adherents are situated.

That is still exists today means that it is negotiated through the contemporary cultural contexts of its speakers/fans/adherents. It is, like any other language, EMBEDDED in culture.

I would argue STRONGLY that there is a culture associated with it (PhDs have been written on this) using the definitions you’ve wheeled out.

The definitions themselves are broad. Think about that. Re-read the quotes you’ve used then go away and think a little more deeply about this.

Let’s think about what culture is and how it is used politically at many levels by THE SAME individuals who claim membership to multiple cultures. Am I Australian (yes)? Am I female (yes)? Am I a Northern Territorian (yes?) am I an atheist (yes)? Do I identify with these groups who have readily definable “...shared patterns of behaviors and interactions, cognitive constructs, and affective understanding that are learned through a process of socialization. These shared patterns identify the members of a culture group while also distinguishing those of another group.” Yes

Can we identify those groups to which I have said I am a member using the definition you quoted?

Yes, of course we can.

The ultimate use of culture by humans (feel free to read Geertz or whomever) is say who is IN and who is OUT. No big deal. The things (the artefacts) are those unique properties that give a particular culture its uniqueness.

Sorry, but Esperanto HAS a culture. You’ve actually identified some of the unique parts of it in your critique. I’ll leave you to figure it out. Like culture itself, they’re slippery. They’re not ‘in your face’. They’re subtle and sophisticated.

But they ARE there. You’ve actually spelled a few of them out.

There is one other point that I’d like to discuss. The dominant political/ideological force in the west is ‘right’ wing conservatism. You seem to be a little upset that in one subculture, there are people of the opposite ideo-political position. Apart from overlooking that this is indeed an artefact of Esperanto culture, I find it amusing.

True ‘right’ wing conservatism does not exist. It cannot exist. It’s a fallacy, antithetical to human culture, and antithetical to one most important reason that humans exist today: cultures change. Always. Every day.

To be human is to adapt and change.

If we were truly social and political conservatives, we would all be extinct.

I agree with many of your points on Esperanto but I’ve never really understood why it gets criticized for not having a culture? If a language was invented as a easier means of international communication, then shouldn’t it try to be culturally nuetral?

Not an uninteresting article, but I do agree with most of the points you raise.

It might just be that my personal experience as an Esperantist (have just been one for a little over a year now) is limited, but I have so far found very little ideological fanaticism. Instead I’ve found friendly people sharing a linguistic interest, more than anything. I haven’t spoken to anyone so far who even believes in the “fina venko” (final victory; when the whole world speaks Esperanto as a second language—I do admit that term sounds a bit cult-like and I don’t like it very much but I think it is misleading and perhaps mostly used ironically); certainly not its likelihood, and probably not its desirability.

And I do think English has not yet succeeded as a lingua franca in the sense that, as far as I can tell, it has not given equal opportunity to all. When you speak to, for example, many Asians (let’s say speakers of Mandarin Chinese or Japanese), you will find that their English is usually very limited. I’ve met several Chinese people who have such a hard time with the language, that they just cannot keep up in western international settings. It’s true that Esperanto probably also is less easy for people with linguistic backgrounds other than Romance, Germanic, and to a lesser extent Slavic languages, but it is still easier than English, for them too.

Anyway, those considerations—allowing everyone to have equal opportunity in the internationalized world—are why I am in favor of a universal lingua franca. I understand your argument that we’re losing languages, and that is unfortunate (although I personally tend not to feel as bad about it so long as they are first described scientifically/linguistically), but that’s another aspect of the story. The idea of Esperanto, at any rate, is of course that it would merely be a second language—peoples would still have their own primary language(s).

I will have to think a bit more about your arguments about culture. I agree that there’s more to culture than food and clothing and music. Personally, my argument would sooner be that the lack of culture can be a selling point for Esperanto, but this depends on each person’s individual perspective, of course. I myself learn languages out of linguistic and esthetic interest, not for cultural reasons. Not even to talk to people, per se.

As for your fifth point about it not saving time... for me the most valuable thing Esperanto did in my language-learning pursuits was that it showed me that it is indeed possible to learn a wholly new language from scratch to a conversational level. Sure, it won’t be this quick again with other, more difficult languages, but that’s just a quantitative difference. I was getting a bit frustrated and demotivated by my lack of success after many years of trying to learn, for example, Japanese. This feeling has been diminished by my success at Esperanto, and I feel more confident now. The same is true for my fear at actually starting to speak a new language. I am looking forward to getting back to other languages once I feel I am sufficiently fluent in Esperanto.

I might be confirming your idea that Esperantists are argumentative etc. (I do hope you weren’t trying to poison the well), but I hope it’s alright in this setting for me to speak out a little, given that you yourself were making arguments in your post. Of course, I do think it’s fine if you’re not interested in learning the language yourself; I’m just sharing my personal opinions.

Even though, as I said, I don’t agree with most of what you wrote, I’m still appreciative of (most parts of) your post. Thank you for writing it.

Oops, I made a critical typo in that first paragraph. It should have been “disagree”. I apologize.

I’m just worried about two things.

Such bad ideas are uttered by someone who majored in Applied Linguistics. Seemingly you have no idea what a language really is.

Your lack of critical thinking might severely affect your relationship with those Arabic speakers or those who listen from you about the Arabic world.

Please don’t learn my language, Korean. I don’t want my language ruined by such a horrible mind.

For an Arabic or a Korean learning Esperanto is easier to learn English, from any point of view: time, money, neutrality.
What could be more neutral and use words still Arab and Asian languages (and Americans, Australians, ...)? Yes, but we are comparing existent languages are: English - Esperanto with and behind a culture, literature, translation, music, etc.
Esperanto is better than English in all respects but one: number of speakers. But it takes longer and costs more money than they all learn English than they learn Esperanto all. Moreover, all new born human from now do not know English or Esperanto, and costs everyone less time and less money to learn Esperanto than English.
Esperanto discriminates more to Korean than to Western European, but English discriminates much more, 10 times more than the difference in time learning from each other. Please, read in Wikipedia the Propaedeutic value of Esperanto.

When Dr. Zamenhof first thought about creating a language, Poland was inhabited by russians, germans, jews, gypsys, polish, and all of these groups had their own language. He was always concerned about the situation of the jewish people, and an early proponet of zionism, but then he realized that the problem was not about the Abraham’s seed, but instead about the whole of humanity.

In Germany, Esperanto was the jewish, in Russia the burgueois, in America the communist, and in Iran the baha’i language. Nowadays, the Esperanto Movement fights against a process that will kill, until the end of this century, around 3k languages and dialects, and consequently, myths, native religions, medicines, perceptions about God, the universe, and mankind, “untranslatable” things. Is it about politics? Oh yes, definitely! Is it ideologic? Well, maybe, but what isn’t?

And, I must tell you that we actually have an authentic culture! It was constructed after many decades of international meetings. We have a vast original literature, rewarded authors and musicians. We have an anthem that glorifies the whole of mankind, and its necessary future of unity and peace (I hope it will come, because if my hopes fail, there’s only one alternative future left, and it is terrible!)

And and last, you say that “Esperanto has failed and English has succeed”. Well, I think 200 years is not time enough to construct a lingua franca. Specially we lack some kilotons of good arguments ;-)

I cannot see how Esperanto can help with saving the dying languages. Esperanto is a destructive totalitarian pseudo-religious sect. It is evil, and it is a common knowledge that Evil cannot create. Esperanto itself it not a fair creation, it is a perversion of European languages.

The real languages, such as English, give you tangible (and also real) benefits. Esperanto just kills your soul.

The difference, Heinrich, is that nobody says “Esperanto will unite all of mankind in everlasting harmony.”

I speak Esperanto, I´m not an Esperantist, the same way that speaking italian doesn´t make you an Italianist or whatever. it is just a system you use to communicate with others. A very efficient one btw. (It took me 3 months to get fluency back in 2001 and it allows me to say everything I could think of).

I love Esperanto being the size it is right now, if it goes mainstream, it would loose all the good things it provides today: free accommodation in pretty much every country in this planet; annual meetings where you re encounter old friends. Yes!! you are able to ignore people you don´t like, you know that?.

My point is that after 15 years I have encounter NONE of the situations that you mention in your post. I never had a religious based conversation in Esperanto, not even once. I actually never heard a religious conversation in Esperanto. I´m not jewish and actually I think I don´t know more than 10 jewish guys within Esperanto and if they are, I guess I´ll never find out, (if that somehow makes a difference to you).

It´s just people like you and me who have interests, hobbies, jobs, very different backgrounds and most probably are into languages.
Me and my friends created the Esperanto football team 3 years ago, I´m the captain of the team and we play official international matches once a year with other teams related to the NF Board, it´s so much fun. What I´m trying to say is that you can do pretty much what you want to do with it and no one will ever say anything to you.

I don´t know, your post is all wrong, man. And if I didn´t know about Esperanto, I would probably agree with you, you write well and I guess no one could really tell about your ignorance about the real facts of Esperanto because it does look like you know what you are talking about.

I mean, that´s ok, people will hate things without really knowing the details, I´m ok with that, I´m not trying to convince you to change your mind, actually you do look like those fanatic “esperantists” but the other way around.

You just have a very negative vision of something you don´t really know, I think that´s not the first or last time that´ll happen. But the fact that you actually wrote a super extensive post to explain why you DON´T want to do something, doesn´t make much sense to me. I would never spend an afternoon gathering information to inform people why I won´t get into a specific activity. Lol!

Therefore, my impression is that you are just like the guys no one likes within Esperanto, you try to convince others that Esperanto is evil and not good for anybody, that´s the exact same thing fanatic esperantists do but the other way around, they try to convince people to learn esperanto.

Do you see how this is hilarious? a neutral guy who doesn´t give a damn what you do with your life would never try to convince anybody to make a particular decision. If you did speak Esperanto you would be the kind of douche that would write a super extensive post to convince you to learn Esperanto. lol again!

Conclusion:
You are just an extreme Yin , being a fanatic esperantist an extreme Yang.

That´s all it really comes down to.
I´m sorry, mate.

Good luck!

Well said, Gonzalo ! What you wrote pretty much sums up my feelings on this post. Thanks!

”You spent a long time writing a negative article about something I like? Well that just proves you’re stupid. Here, let me write a long rambling comment about how you’re wrong. Self-awareness? What’s that?”

Enjoy your cult. And making up stories about how great your life is on the internet.

Excellent points Gonzalo!

Hey Donovan,
I don’t know much about Esperanto nor have I ever met someone who spoke it, so I am not going to comment on this particular subject.
I wanted however to thank you for coming out so bluntly and strongly with your opinion. It made me think about what I do and how I do it. At first, I thought “Yeah, but he already has a well-established website, so of course he can speak out like that, it’s easier for him”, but then I was still quite bugged by the fact that I would not allow myself to write my opinion as openly as you did yours. That’s not how I see myself. Thinking that I should wait before being able (given the permission ?) to better own my voice / territory / keyboard just isn’t right. Of course, sometimes, it’s wiser to shut up and sometimes it’s just impossible to speak out one’s truths, but most of the time otherwise ...
So again, thank you for the frankness of your article. I am not going to go into details, but you made me decide to “own my voice/territory” much more not only on my beginning website but also in my life in general.

Hey Olga.

Thanks for the comment.

You should always write your opinion openly and honestly, and not care if it bothers some people. Staying blunt and honest is why people enjoy following my blog.

At the end of the day, people will respect you for it. Some may hate you (who cares really?) but others will love you.

Here’s a good quote for you:
”You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.” - Churchill

I think you have some good ideas here and seem to have thought through your feelings on the matter. I am not fluent in Esperanto, but I feel there really is a benefit for the language as a tool for shaping the brain toward multilingualism, or boosting confidence for someone who doesn’t believe they can learn languages. It is a tool that would be better used if classroom instruction were more immersive, but that is another issue.

I can say that when I studied Esperanto I spent one week on it (I was really just satisfying my curiosity more than anything) and was able to muddle through simple stories and some of the threads on the Lernu forum at the end of that time. I did spend about 60 hours that week working on it, since I tend to go all-in in an obsessive manner on projects like that, but the rate at which I was able to progress was mind boggling. Having simple, unscripted email conversations in a language you knew nothing about a week earlier is a bit of a rush for a language nerd. Admittedly, chasing that rush is probably what allowed me to have such ungodly focus during that week.

For that reason and that reason alone; the fact that I could literally mop up the details in my spare time within a few months; I may return to it one day. Also for that reason I might would suggest its use as a first acquired language for a child if there was any anticipation of them being a polyglot. That said I would never encourage them to speak it natively, since that negates the benefits I see in it, and I would never encourage anyone to learn it if they had no interest in continuing with other languages.

But yes, the history and grand claims made by some of the more fanatical should be separated from the language itself, and I feel that as time goes on that is slowly taking place. Internet culture has really started to wash into the online Esperanto communities and dilute some of the ideaology. It is only these communities I have experience with, so your milage may vary if you go to a physical meet up.

As an add on, I hardly ever participate here but I have been casually following this blog for at least three years or so now. Keep up the great work!

There are other reasons to defend Esperanto: 1-leave a better world to future generations, 2-eliminate discrimination by nationality and family income. English as other national and irregular languages, is a factor in employment discrimination, it is proven that the level of English depends on the country where you live and the money spent on learning.
There is so much to learn Esperanto for its advantages, but put a grain of sand against serious losses of time and money, inefficiency, imposed with other irregular languages. Is fanaticism defend non-discrimination regarding the international language?

About the ideologically homogenous landscape, boy there is no truer complaint! As a long time speaker of Esperanto, I was constantly telling myself that I just hadn’t yet met any of the right leaning (or conservative Christian) Esperantists that just HAD to be out there somewhere.

But in my latest foray into the “community” (a term I use very lightly now) has proven this idea to be a fantasy:

(The following is my latest blog post on this subject)
I will probably be an Esperanto speaker for the rest of my days. I will continue to attend our local meet-up, as long as it continues, if only in support of the others that come.

I will not be burning any of my Esperanto books, but I will also not be renewing my membership in any Esperanto organizations; I will do no more “varbing,” and my will has been changed to divert all the assets that I had originally steered toward the Esperanto movement (the mid-5-figure range if anyone is interested; sorry, Esperanto-USA and Radio Verda) and give them to other, more worthy, causes.

You’re probably asking why the sudden attitude change. Well, yesterday saw more knife blades to my back from so-called “samideanoj” and I’m sick of it. The totalitarian attitude of one of the administrators of Lernu.com, and the slanderous language, mockery, and bullying I have received (especially the ones that were posted after yesterday’s blog entry) from other Esperantists around the globe has shown me that the “community” (a term I now use very lightly) is not worthy of any more of my time or money. I wash my hands of it.

Esperanto had such promise, but alas, the spirit of “more Zamenhof than thou”(no pun intended) not to mention the hypocrisy, arrogance, bigotry, slander, and condemnation I have received in the past few months over a perfectly correct, Zamenhofian, Esperanto word (albeit one that is rarely used, even though it is used in the Ekzercaro and also defined in the Universala Vortaro) has shown me that my time and energy can be put to better use elsewhere.

I wonder, though..........would the reaction to my use of that perfectly correct Esperanto word have been different had it not been out of religious obligation but out of a sense of equality and tolerance and other such nice liberal buzzwords? I guess that will never be known for sure.........however, based on some of the more outrageous comments I read yesterday, I really think it would have. It’s sad, really, that a community of people that touts itself to be oh-so-liberal and tolerant would allow such hatred and intolerance (no matter what the cause) to go unchallenged within its ranks.

1. A means to a political end

”Esperanto was created to create peace and harmony on Earth. This is deeply sinister and divisive. What if you wanted war and destruction? Esperanto is bad because it would be intolerant of that.”

(As for “a cultish offshoot of Judaism that looked like something straight out of the Communist Manifesto” -- congratulations on cramming so much anti-Semitism between a single pair of parentheses.)

2. Ideologically homogenous landscape

”So-and-so went to an Esperanto event, and not a single person agreed with him that Agenda 21 was created by the UN in order to build a giant highway from Mexico to Canada and force us all to learn Arabic and gay-marry. This proves that Esperanto is just a bunch of identical people who won’t listen to different ideas, including such valuable and interesting ideas as ‘All international cooperative projects, like Esperanto, are secretly Communist.’ “

3. No culture

”People say that Esperanto allows them to meet people from different cultures. But, Esperanto is just a bunch of people at meetings who WANT to meet people from different cultures. Does that constitute a culture??? Obviously not!”

4. Evangelists are fanatical

”People who are keen on an idea, are keen. Too keen! So emotional, sometimes, that they write poorly-researched blogposts with dumb blanket generalizations in boldface type. Therefore they are emotional, which proves that they are wrong. Therefore the idea is bad.”

5. It might help, but at the expense of...

”I have never actually looked at any of the scientific studies.”

6. Esperanto has failed

”Esperanto would mean that people wouldn’t be forced to learn the language and culture of their conquerors to get educated, and thus become alienated from their own culture. However, now that they have learnt the language of their conquerors, and all their kids are forced at great expense to speak it haltingly, that means that the conquest wasn’t really that bad and it doesn’t matter now, LOL.”

“a cultish offshoot of Judaism” = anti-Semitism?

Wow. Congrats on making the most moronic comment here.

I didn’t waste time reading the rest of your comment. I’m sure it was a great read though.

Thanks for stopping by.

This is the first time in my life I read something like this. My father, in early 50’s was esperantist, he spoke the language fluently, had friends all over the world, and he hated communism. He learnt it, nos for ideological purposes, but for easier access to a language, and cheaper way. I speak Esperanto not for political purpose either, but because I love all languages. I already speak Portuguese (native language) English, Spanish, Esperanto; and I’m learning Catalan, Papiamento, Italian, Swedish, German, Dutch, Albanian and Romenain. I want to learn more in future. Zamenhof wrote the first Esperanto book in 1887 before, communism, before the wars, as Jew, it would be easier for him to create an easier version of Hebrew or Yiddish. What you are saying is: I will or not will learn Arabic because I want to be or not Muslin; I want or not learn French because I love/hate French wine. If my father loved the communism, he would not learn Esperanto, but Russian. Nowaday I should be learning Chinese or North Korean. Your iten 4 is completely non-sense (sorry) I speak Esperanto as I said, and I’m also evangelist, but I don’t know any single person who uses Esperanto as religion, and none who uses the Religion to pray in Esperanto. I have been seen fanatical religious people in all religions, but never heard about a fanaticial religious esperantist/esperantist religious.

I agree on the violin analogy, but about esperanto being used for political agenda is just not true. All the esperantists i know are just hippies who want a world without language barrier.

So then it is true.

You make one or two good points, but I’m afraid most of the text is based in preconceptions.
Yes, Esperanto originally had a political end, to facilitate fair and easy communication between pople of different cultures and native languages, and that’s what attracts some of us to it. But that’s a large enough point, as to attract people of very different backgrounds.
In fact, that happened from the beginning, and the first International Congress already emphasized the difference between “Esperantism” (a political end) and the language itself, so that it defined that “Esperantist” is the speaker of the language, independently of their motivation.

I have many Esperantist friends, and they come of the whole political spectrum. Perhaps in the Western countries there is a majority of left-leaning tendencies, but this is by no means the whole picture.
I always emphasize this pluralism and even wrote a bog entry about it: http://www.delbarrio.eu/2005/08/el-pluralismo-del-esperanto.htm (in Spanish) to break that myth.

No, not every Esperantist is an ardent supporter. You will find the most passionate and fanatical in a discussion, just because the ardent supporters are the ones that enter the discussions! (including those of us that take the time to respond to your article :-) ) So, non-Esperantists do not get to know the vast majority of Esperantists. It’s obvious.

Yes, Esperanto has created its own culture, and not just music and literature. I’ve been at an international gathering two weeks ago, with Esperantists friends from a lot of countries, and we get the inner jokes, we understand some internal references. It’s just that non-Esperantists do not have the means to appreciate and even understand it.

I do not understand your objections about native speakers. None of them speaks Esperanto as their only language, and the picture is quite similar to those children of immigrants that learn the languages of their parents and of the surrounding community at the same time. Do you still think (like people used to assume not so long ago) that this poses a problem for the kids? Actually, it’s just a very enriching experience. I know some of those boys and girls and they are a quite normal group of people (and I know their parents, and your characterization of them as crackpots is indeed not just unjust but quite insulting)

Finally, as to the failure of Esperanto, it depends on the perspective. Every Esperantist agrees that we have not attained the ultimate goal that everybody would speak it, and that governments would use it at their meetings (in the same sense that you can say that the pacifist movement has failed, because there are still a lot of wars). But the very fact that there’s still a large community of speakers, that the language has created a wealth of culture, and that this has been attained just with the contribution of volunteers, without the support, or even against the will, of governments and big corporations, says something positive about the language itself, and perhaps even deserves a bit of respect

I’ve really enjoyed learning Esperanto and meeting other Esperanto speakers. It has also giving me the confidence to start to learn other languages.

I had no idea Esperanto had such deep religious and political roots.
As far as a constructed languages is concerned I think that it’s a nice idea to have a language without all the inconveniences which have little value, such as gender and the subjunctive. However, I think you’re right that any such language will never naturally become widely spoken due to it being artificial. There’s an interesting story of a man who taught his son Klingon as his first language. They spoke it exclusively at home but after a few years his son stopped using it and eventually lost fluency because English was such more useful and widely used.

And the issue of discrimination, equal opportunities, economic cost, etc?
Esperanto is the tenth expensive in time and money to learn. It is far less discriminatory by nationality and income, language immersion in a particular culture is not necessary.
Who will pay me 60,000 euros for a monolingual English private school with native teachers for each child? Will you be?
Read “Rapport Grin” and “Propaedeutic value of Esperanto”. You have a new course of Esperanto in Duolingo, it is free.

I’m a little unclear on what’s so bad about Zamenhof’s (and thus Esperanto’s) “ideology”. People getting along, talking to each other? (Cats and dogs living together?) It just doesn’t seem like something to be feared.

While on the topic of constructed languages, do you have any opinion on Toki Pona?

I really disagree not giving Esperanto a chance based on its old political agenda. I’ve met many people who speak Esperanto because they are language learners and it is in fact a language. As far as culture, I hope it’s known that there are people in this world who’s first language is Esperanto and to say they have no culture is uncalled for. Comparing its origins from the 1800’s to today is wrong on many levels. If the language doesn’t interest you- or if you cannot learn it in a month or so, say that. But don’t poke at issues which go much further than needed.

”He also quite intolerantly spoke of free religious expression as a ‘barbarity’.”

Citation needed. If you’re quoting his homaranismo work, he actually said:

”Every offense or persecutions of people because they belong to a different ethnicity, with a different language or religion, I regard it as a barbarity.”
”Every attempt of a person to impose their language or religion to other people when it is not absolutely necessary, I regard it as a barbarity.”

The quotes make it clear that the barbarity is the interference with the free expression of religion, not the expression itself.

Your characterization of Zamenhof is exaggerated but not wrong for the most part. You are wrong, though, to suggest that modern Esperanto and its community (let’s avoid the loaded word “culture”) exists wholly or even mainly to perpetuate his homaranismo ideals. His religious thinking died with him and barely any Esperantists follow it sincerely.

There is certainly an ideological agenda in Esperanto that cannot be separated from the community as a whole -- that the language can in fact be used to cross cultural and lingusitic barriers. A lot of Esperantists speak it for that reason. Others, like me, use it for personal amusement and to make friends without having any interest in some kind of political movement.

Finally, I’m not sure which Esperantists you’ve been talking to, but I have no trouble believing that you heard crazy claims about it from the most zealous of the zealous. They don’t speak for all of us. We’re weird, but not crazy.

Esperanto is available on Duolingo :p

Indeed it is :)

Something tells me that if you had to choose one IAL to support (hypothetical situation so no picking ‘none of the above’) it would be Novial.

Why Novial?

Well, there are good things about Esperanto. So it’s not as negative as you wrote. I studied Esperanto and got a basic level until I went to an Esperanto meeting. It seemed like a religion to me.

Yep. I think a lot of people get the same feeling that it’s like a religion.

I thought that Esperanto was bad because it‘s just Polish with an Italian make up and it‘s grammar and phonology are just unfit for a real international language, but boy the issue was deeper than that. Thanks for letting me know Donavan.

You’re welcome.

Thanks!

I wouldn’t be surprised if a majority of Esperantists are on the political left, as you say, and I agree the movement is political, that’s not a secret. But neither point is objectively bad, nor a good enough reason to dismiss the whole project as you seem to have done.

For most of this piece you imply Esperanto is aimed at creating a monoculture. As far as I know it’s quite the opposite. It was always intended as an auxiliary, not a replacement primary language. You do say as much towards the end of the piece, that Esperanto was supposed to be “the lingua franca with no baggage or bias”, and then claim that English serves this role. So there is no bias involved in the massive advantage handed to native English speakers at birth over the rest of the world? What percentage of non-native speakers that you have met in your life do you think actually achieve the same level as a native, really? Very very few. The rest are at a disadvantage for life in education, travel, career, culture, personal prestige, you name it. Those that do attain a good level have to invest a great deal of time and resources into acquiring it. Simply put, that’s not fair.
And then there’s the baggage. I would argue Esperanto’s lack of culture is precisely one of it’s main strengths. When used as auxiliaries, languages with cultures are inevitably assimilators. If you don’t like monocultures or the death of minority languages, then the growing dominance of English should be a cause for concern. Nothing against the Anglophone culture, but I don’t want it to be the only one alive in Europe or the world in 200 years time, and I think there is a genuine risk of that happening. Just look at the history of Irish, or consider the near future prospects of Dutch.

Esperanto offers an alternative that is at the very least worth talking about - you are doing that here, but really not in a way that objectively weighs its pros and cons. I get it that people telling you that you have to learn a language are just as distasteful as people telling you to practice a certain religion or dress a certain way. And I can also agree that claiming Esperanto will save the world is probably a bit over the top. But I think the core principle of the movement is eminently good - a level, easy to reach playing field for all in international communication. If you think that’s far left extremism then I don’t know what to say.

You’ll never have a truly fair lingua franca. There will always be people who are at an advantage in the world. Completely unavoidable.

Any attempt to stop this will just result in new advantages and disadvantages.

And as I’ve alluded to in the post above, Esperanto (like all far left political movements in general) claims to be all for cultural and religious diversity and yet is totally, culturally ignorant and intolerant of non-conformity. Looking at the vision of Zamenhof himself, he only valued diverse identities where they aligned with his warped beliefs and you see this ‘fake tolerance’ alive in their community today.

So yeah, it is extremism.

Interesting that you say that being a native speaker is an advantage. I’m not so sure - I know a number of non- native speakers who kinda like having a “home” private language and a language of work and commerce.

Unless you believe that learning languages places you at a disadvantage- in which case you might be on the wrong forum...

I have never felt a greater desire for mutual respect/multiculturalism than at the 50 or so larger Esperanto events with about 20.000 participants that I was present in. Well said John.

I don’t mind at all if you don’t learn Esperanto. You are the one missing out. You remind me of a man who said he would never use a mobile phone / cell phone. On the basis of dubious principles he turns uo to meetings which have been cancelled.

I suspect that you are intelligent enough tom see the flaws in your own arguments, and I wish you well.

I’m intelligent enough to see the flaws in Esperanto and its politics.

Thanks for the well wishes.

I don’t mind if people dislike Esperanto or want to criticise it. All I ask ia for them to be fair. Unfortunately you were anything but. I’m not sure why, but for some reason you felt it necessary to throw an insult into every paragraph you wrote. You couldn’t just say that you dislike Esperanto, you had to do your best to imply that everyone who does is some weirdo.

Secondly, you make a lot of claims and have nothing to back them up. Where did you get the idea that Zamenhof disliked religious tolerance? The whole point of Homaranismo is to promote religious tolerance. The only link you do provide is to a reddit thread where many conservatives show that Esperanto is not composed of left wingers (how is that depressing?).

What makes you think all Esperantists are the same and they’re all extremists? Have you personally met some? Have you gone to meetups? Have you read online forums? Where is this coming from?

There are valid criticisms of Esperanto that can be made, but unfortunately this post doesn’t contain any.

I entirely agree with what Robert said. I’m always surprised to see people wasting so much time writing long articles against something that harms nobody and I find this rant particularly arrogant and disrespectful. If you think Esperanto speakers are “ideological clones”, you really should ask people who use it. Esperantists disagree about everything, including Esperanto itself. And, believe it or not, Esperanto is not “100% ideologically motivated”. Many people learn it and use it for the community, to travel, to learn about other cultures, to make friends, not for an ideology. The “cultish offshoot of Judaism” you talk about is, I assume, homaranismo; the huge majority of Esperanto speakers don’t care about it at all.

I find this part particularly offensive: “Outside of a few crackpots who decided to turn their kids into circus acts by raising them with Esperanto as a first language.” I have met quite a few native Esperanto speakers and calling them “circus acts” is really insulting. One of my best friends speaks Esperanto as a first language (as well as the language of her country) and she’s very happy her parents made this choice.

You apparently do not want to understand that Esperanto is a language. A real living language that people use to talk, sing, tell jokes, gossip, love and argue, not for an “ideology” or a “cult”.

Found the lefty ☝️☝️☝️☝️

I can’t say I disagree with anything in the post -good work!

The principle behind the language and culture seems self-defeating - it tries to be unique, yet is based on existing languages, along the lines of saying something like “let’s separate ourselves from other languages and cultures by borrowing things from the languages and cultures we’re trying to separate from.” Or “we want a ‘politically neutral language’” - this implies there’s a political motivation for making the language, not to mention it’s made up of languages that have political ideologies attached to them.

“I wish I could say I’m sorry but facts don’t care about hurt feelings”
You’ve been following Ben Shapiro lately, no?

Good point.

A truly neutral constructed language wouldn’t selectively borrow the way that Esperanto does.

Wow, you certainly don’t mince words, do you? ;) I totally agree with what you’re saying and the little I knew about Esperanto matches up with what you’ve said here. I find conlangs to be fun in theory (for example, I have a good time looking at some of the Slavic-based ones just for the fun of it because I’m a total language nerd), but not something I’d ever want to speak in practice. In real life, I want to speak real languages with real people. :)

Thanks Natalie. :)

I have actually been debating with myself on whether I should focus on Esperanto or French. I have experience in both of them. Which one do you think I should focus on?

I’m not especially interested in Esperanto as a movement. However there are two issues that you do not address.

a) there are only a few languages that have very much track record as a pivot language for purposes of translation: English,French, Russian, Arabic. Esperanto has been researched for that purpose.

None of the existing pivot languages are really all that good for that purpose, Including english. is being built for the ground up for that purpose to facilitate automatic translation.

What we know right now: the google translate team found it much less work to get Esperanto working than ANY other language they put into their list of supported languages. As someone that has played with this: Esperanto to English works much better there than English to Esperanto even though there has been _much_ more effort to get English to go to their intermediate working well.

Automatic translation is a hard problem. I think we are still ways from getting this working as well as human translators and it would be much easier to use Esperanto as a front for UNL than English. English is just too ambiguous for that purpose.

This may generalize to human/machine communications

2) Yes, folks are attempting to use english as the lingua franca and it has gotten further than others prior to english. There are about 1 Billion folks attempting to learn english right now. How many will ever get to B2 fluency even after lots of work?

The research suggests your claim that esperanto is a diversion is not true, at least for folks wanting to learn a language close to esperanto(English, spanish or french say). That effect was strongest for the folks that have the most trouble learning languages. I do not think that research is yet compelling but it at least needs more study. what I found: There was a lot about english grammar I just didn’t get until I learned a bit of esperanto. In my case, I studied German and Russian and got to where I could read them a little but never had any luck with listening/speaking skills. I am attempting to learn spanish now and saw the same pattern emerging. Using esperanto as a tool to help me learn spanish seems to be working. Do I think that is ready for prime time or for everyone? No. Do I think all the research that needs doing in that area has been done? No. Your unsupported claims are NOT helpful though.

c) right now there are over a billion folks that speak a minor language and have no access to the web via automatic translation(they speak a language with no support in that area yet). I think a niche the esperanto community has not yet developed is being a language that can be learned with fairly language neutral tools and used to learn a world language like English, Spanish or French.

To me, Esperanto is still heavily biased towards the western world. Since it is based on Latin Alphabet, it is still heavily suitable for speakers of alphabetic languages to learn then the others. I myself is Cantonese, and in Canton, and other parts of the world languages are character based no alphabet based. you cannot separate ”文字” into alphabets, it is 文&字. If a language is really universal, it should take consider of all the written and spoken form of language, not solely based on a contain area. Or else it would only be a tool to conquer other cultures, as a tool of politics as you said.

Bismi-Esperanto-al-rahman-al-rahim!

As the Great Iman of Esperantistan, I issue a fatwa against you. From this moment, you are condemned to a life in Phobistan among barbarians—people who do not speak Esperanto. You have one chance to ask for forgiveness. Do not delay, for Zamenhof is merciful. Amen!

Enough of jokes. Let’s return to your post. (It is going to be fun!) :D

Claim 1: Esperanto has always been a means to a political end.

Supporting evidence: The bloke who created it, Ludwik Zamenhof, developed a political and religious philosophy...Zamenhof envisaged his made-up, simplified language as facilitating the breaking down of national and religious identity which he despised in his own community...It’s this ideological baggage and taint that’s attached to the language that turns me off it completely.

My comment: First, I fail to understand, how does it logically follow that Esperanto is a means to a political end just because its founder—who has been dead for nearly a 100 years—had some strange ideas? A more convincing case would be to come up with some numbers or cases where a majority of Esperantists were witnessed actively espousing the Doctor’s philosophy?

Second, Russian and Chinese were two popular languages among communists during the Cold War. Will you say they are still a means to a political end? How about English?

Claim 2: Esperantistan is an ideologically homogeneous landscape.

Supporting evidence: An anecdotal claim on Reddit.

My comment: I am sorry, mate, but you are wrong here. Big time. I can go on and on, but two cases will suffice.

Anecdotal evidence: I am private to leftist ideology. I have a paper copy of Quotations of Chairman Mao and I like Marxists.org. (Wait, wait! Do not laugh!) But my girlfriend, whom I met through Esperanto, has clearly told me: “I will never talk to you, if you keep on attending meetings those with your comrades.” An Orthodox Christian taking her revenge on a poor, third-world communist. But she is an Esperantist and a vehemently anti-communist one.

Lernu Formus: Are you aware Lernu? When you have time, kindly have a look at their forums. You will find plenty of right-wingers there. Really. And that is not all. You will also find discussion on language, grammar, IT, science, the recent decision on same-sex marriage in the U.S. and many other subjects. And in many of these debates, participants show their typical online behavior are virtually at each other’s throats. (http://eo.lernu.net/komunikado/forumo/forumo.php?f=1) People from across the ideological spectrum learn and speak Esperanto. The only issue is their numbers. There must be a few dozen die-hard Buddhists, or a few dozen white supremacists, and a few hundred leftists. These numbers are pathetically small compared to what you will find in a natural language.

Claim 3: Not only does it have no culture but its adherents are delusional.

Supporting evidence: Several heavy-weight definitions of culture.

My comments: I am not in a position to say anything because I do not much about culture, anthropology, and society. :(

Claim 4: Esperanto evangelists aren’t just passionate – they’re fanatical.

Supporting evidence: Some anecdotes.

My comments: You are probably right here.

And before I run out of space, I will say I somewhat agree with your claims 5 and 6.

So it is 4-2. You win hands down.

(Sorry for typos. I typed like crazy!)

You’ve rebutted my anecdotal evidence with your own anecdotal evidence. :)

Yes the founder has been dead for a century but the point of what I wrote is that his ideals live on in the community to this day. In fact, if its ideological motivation was gone then I don’t think Esperanto would continue to survive as strongly as it has.

Russian and Chinese were popular among communists true but they’re natural languages not created for the sole purpose of fulfilling a political vision. Not really fair to compare them to Esperanto.

I don’t disagree with you at all that there are right wingers who learn Esperanto. I mentioned that in the post. I wish there was an international survey of all Esperanto speakers done so we had actual data to talk about instead of anecdotes but I’m not aware of any.

If you can link to studies that would be awesome.

Thanks for keeping the response positive! :)

Lernu’s forums are a joke. The self-important Queen of Lernu (my title for her) and her Minions are some of the most intolerant thugs i’ve seen in online communities in a long time. Erinja (the QoL) HERSELF is responsible for over a dozen people dropping off Lernu, and 3 of them were so disgusted with the attitudes they met being “right-wingers” they have abandoned Esperanto all together. She belittles, condescends to, and is hateful to anyone who expresses conservative (especially Christian conservative) viewpoints. And if that doesn’t work, she just deletes posts she doesn’t like and as last resort, deletes accounts of people who won’t bow to her will.

The funny thing about peoples who care more for people’s political alignment than people themselves is that they have an obsessive-compulsive tendency for cynicism. And cynicism is gangrenous. It allows one to repudiate small-mindedness without challenging one’s own. Such is the poverty and shortsightedness of modern liberalism and conservatism, the great yin-yang of the status quo. Be that as it may, language is inherently political. There’s no getting around it, any of it. Culture is political. Living and breathing is political. It’s everywhere so how can communication be anything but? Politics is still however only scenery. A distraction from whatever it is one truly cares about. The main thing, regardless, is just to be a better, kinder, more knowledgeable (aware) person from one day to the next. Nothing else matters. Not learning Esperanto because other people weird you out defines your life along the very lines you reject. Don’t succumb to such cynicism.

PS: Right-wing and conservative are not synonymous.