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Comment by msla | Hacker News Reader

Here's perhaps the only large-scale critique of Esperanto from a linguistic perspective, as opposed to a reactionary[1] or nationalist[2] one:

http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/index.html

[1] ("NEW LANGUAGE? DON'T WANNA! WAAH!")

[2] ("The language I happen to know best also happens to be the easiest and best and most universal. Funny how that worked out, neh?")

This seems to be the biggest unanswerable criticism the Esperantists face:

"It looks like some sort of wind‐up‐toy Czech/Italian pidgin. And if there's one part of this world that doesn't need a local pidgin, it's Europe, which is not only the continent whose languages are best covered by online translation services, but also the home of the current de facto global lingua franca: English."

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To be fair to Esperanto, when it was invented English wasn't nearly the lingua franca it is today, and the Internet didn't exist.

I don't think it's fair to critique it just because its original intent was as an auxiliary language. I would argue that intent failed. But it has native speakers, and it has communities who use it, and that itself justifies a language's existence.

Esperanto has nothing to be ashamed of as regards its history or current use, but if it's being touted as a modern auxlang which should be used more often, there are a number of problems its promoters have to come to grips with.

It's not perfect, but practically it's still the best option. Of all the candidates for an easy to learn international language, it has by at least an order of magnitude the most speakers and materials. For example, the Esperanto wikipedia is larger than the Arabic one.

I also haven't seen any of the other conlangs demonstrate they can be both as expressive and easy to master.

I don't think it's any worse than other auxiliary languages (which I think are all doomed to failure if that's really their goal as opposed to just building a community). I don't know if you can really attack the languages for "problems" if it starts being adopted to the point that it evolves like a natural language (as Esperanto has done). Anything "inefficient" or the like about the language will be changed to the point that native speakers find it suitable.

When Esperanto was invented, the major powers of Europe were pretty much England, France, and Germany, and French was already the primary language of diplomacy and high culture. At the time, polyglottalism was a feature of, e.g., scientific literature (French and German die out only in the mid-to-late 20th century), but practically speaking, learning just English, French, and German would give you a fairly "universal" coverage, and possibly even just French. So credible lingua francas already existed back then.

Esperanto arose at a particular time and place where linguistic and ethnic divisions fractured communities and even families. We all know that English, German, and French were long used--and are still used--to project power. But where Zamenhof lived this aspect of language played out in a much more complex, violent, and personal manner. While the late 19th century was an unprecedented period of peace and prosperity for Western Europe, it was exceptionally violent for the lower-classes in much of Central and Eastern Europe.

The point of Esperanto wasn't just to be a shared language. Much more importantly to Zamenhof and early Esperantists, the point was a language that wasn't bound to provincial, ethnic, or religious identity. This backfired in the early 20th century as Esperanto became associated with, e.g., Jewish and Anarchist groups. But it seems like in the latter 20th century Esperanto reverted to an internationalist language without association to any distinct political movement. And in that sense it's once again a reprieve from and perhaps an antidote to provincial power dynamics, notwithstanding its European language bias.

My biggest problem with the idea of a universal language is that it might lead us to understand each other better. This would cause no end of strife and suffering. Suppose it caught on. Imagine the trolling that would happen once anybody could troll anybody else, anywhere in the world!

The Esperanto Facebook group does invite some "interesting" political posts; viewpoints you never see in national language forums (for better or worse...).

Surprisingly this is actually the reason Esperanto is somewhat popular in China. My understanding is that it is often used as a "stepping-stone" language before teaching European national languages. (I have no source for this, beside anecdotes, and having met someone who taught such a course - among other languages - at a Chinese university.)

(I don't know why you're downvoted, you bring up a valid point.)

Pretty much spot on critique. I agree that Esperanto has a fairly thriving community but it doesn't cut as a proper auxiliary language.

I think the concept of Esperanto should be redone under current linguistics knowledge and technology. We will probably end with another half-backed attempt but maybe it would advance Humanity a little more towards having a shared neutral language.

Esperanto was invented in an explicitly Eurocentric colonialist context.

A nice early Esperanto song goes:

En densa Afrika ĝangalo sovaĝaj nigruloj sen Di' jam solvis la lingvan problemon, per tam-tam' disiĝas la kri'...

This sounds very ominous now.

Wow, I didn't think about its origins that way at all, but it makes sense given the timing/context of how it began.

For the unenlightened (like me), Google Translate renders this as:

"In a dense African jungle savage negroes without Di 'have already solved the linguistic problem, by so-called'" [1]

Yeah, not sure if I'd say "ominous", but it's definitely a double-take.

It reminds me a bit of the Indian scene from Disney's Peter Pan (1953) [2]. When it was made, I guess it was supposed to evoke a sense of wonder about the fantasy/dreamlike-nature of their adventure. But in the modern day, it just comes off as "wow, that's incredibly offensive."

What's funny is the cultural/time context. I saw the Peter Pan film as a child (in the 1980s) and I do not remember thinking it was patently offensive. In fact, iirc in US in the 80's it was not considered politically incorrect to use phrases like "Indian giver" or play games like "Cowboys and Indians" with your friends, etc. I think Esperanto's early history might also suffer from this sort of cultural baggage.

[1] https://translate.google.com/#auto/en/En%20densa%20Afrika%20...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Pan_(1953_film)#Controve...

"Di'" is a poetic rendering of "Dio", or God.

Thanks. And now it's even worse; the phrase they were going for (and Google didn't pick up) must have been something like "godless savages". Just lovely.

Suddenly JoJo's have more sense now.

I have young kids and watched Peter Pan recently. My kids actually thought nothing of it, even when I cringed. I think the offensiveness of it would never have been obvious to you as a kid.

Maybe my parents were cringing when we watched it decades ago, I don't remember. I'm curious how old your kids are, and what region of the US you're in? My SF Bay Area-schooled kids called out the blatant racism at age 7/8; call it environmental factors if you will.

Canada. 5 year old. (My 2 year old doesn't really count here haha)

I know that my parents definitely did not watch the movie with us.

Thanks and please forgive my assumption that you were in the US. Apparently I still have some work to do on my own inappropriate presumptions :/

I'm doubtful my kids would have noticed anything awry at age 5, and definitely not at age 2!

"per tam-tam' disiĝas la kri'" should be translated "the cry [shout] is broadcast by tom-tom".

One thing I've noticed about the Esperanto community is that, owing to its small size, it is very easy to make one's voice heard. So you get a lot of, "rough edges" shall we say, in the published material. (Ex: I came across about a year ago at an Esperanto book sale a book of jokes or "ŝercoj". Unfortunately almost without exception the jokes were crude and sexist. I don't know why it was even up for sale, alongside works of much higher quality.)

Apart from the thing that another commenter has clarified about tom-toms, "sen Di'" is an abbreviation of "sen Dio" 'Godless'.

Edit: I just noticed that still another commenter also already clarified this part too.

This is from "La lingua por ni":

https://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_lingvo_por_ni

One could argue that Esperanto's reliance on derivation through affixes makes it in a practical sense a Semitic language in European clothing.

English is common, but it has some serious flaws:

  * ambiguity
  * tons of exceptions
  * in my opinion, it's too simple for its own good, which results in overloaded words. Because individual words, especially the short ones, carry little meaning, you bang two or three of them together and get a completely different meaning.

My only real gripe with English is the spelling being almost completely not phonetic. If only we could fix that...

And additionally, the phonetics itself is more complex than needed. Spanish has only 5 vowel sounds, corresponding to the 5 vowels of the Latin alphabet, as does Japanese. English has 20. This is quite a big deal for learning when your native language has a smaller phonetic inventory. My English level is officially C2 (the highest level in the EU framework) and still, I have to think for a second or two before using the words "sheet" and "shit"...

> English has 20.

I never even realized this... wow.

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