Esperanto

Discussion: Critiques

Esperanto favors Central European learners

A.Z. Foreman:

it didn't take much time looking at it before realized that Esperanto is, in virtually every way that matters, chock-full of features that, thought not all drawn from European languages per se as people claim, nonetheless clearly favor European learners.

Then came the conversations in Esperanto. It became apparent to me that, though many can craft written sentences in Esperanto, a far smaller number were actually able to communicate with any fluency- whereas the number of people who try to learn the language and then give up is quite high.

Still, I thought for some time that it might make a passable Lingua Franca for Europe, even if such a thing was functionally impossible. Several years and one linguistics degree later, I realized that, of European learners, it favors most especially central and east Europeans. (And for some time I didn't realize just how profoundly the latter was the case.) Moreover, the schematic derivational morphology coupled with the propensity of European speakers to import European borrowings has had the unintended effect of giving the learner an even greater burden than most regional languages would or could. At the same time, it contains features that absolutely no language on earth uses and which speakers themselves seem to find weird enough to avoid in many cases, leading to the features being applied inconsistently and contributing to the lexical burden. On the other hand, it's still definitely worth learning for other reasons.

The only person on the internet with a good knowledge of linguistics who gives Esperanto a thorough structural autopsy is Justin B. Rye whose page can be found here. Indeed, it was through long email-debates with him that I came to some of my conclusions. He makes a number of good points (and a couple which seem suspect to me, which I myself endlessly debated with him in a couple long email threads over the past three years or so.) His basic point is that Esperanto is in nearly every way more central European than anything else. I differ in that I think the features aren't central European themselves, but certainly do favor European learners. (But that's academic at best.) Anyway, I will try not to repeat what Rye has said since I don't like typing for no reason. Moreover Rye's observations -which do have a good deal of merit to them- seem to be based not on Esperanto as it is actually used but as it was designed, or else just taking the rules and just running with them. My concern is more with the practices of the Esperanto community. I'll try and make points that he doesn't, mainly having to do with the language's ostensible learnability as actually spoken, its morphological quirks, how in some ways Esperanto actually violates linguistic universals, as well as the outright false, and sometimes downright bigoted, claims made by its more zealous proponents. "http://blogicarian.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/esperanto-international-auxiliary.html) (