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Comment by gordonguthrie | Hacker News Reader

'designed without a global audience in mind' - it was exactly designed with a global audience in mind - but I think Zemnhof didn't have the exposure to the width of linguistic research he would have now

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It was designed with a global audience in mind at a time when (to the global elite) Africa and Asia weren't worth considering, and the Americas (including the US!) were of lesser importance. In other words, it was global for an audience who understood "global" to be synonymous with "European".

From a practical perspective - the nearest Uni was St Petersburg - if you had to guess how many comparative grammers of say Russian/Ndebele Russian/Cherokee Russian/Urdu were available in late 19th C Biyalostok? I would go for 0

Yes there are structural reasons that inform Esperanto as a Romance-lexified Western Slavonic - but it is hard to argue that it could be anything but structural - how could Zamenhof personally have chosen different?

I think the _idea_ of a global audience was in mind, but when looking at who was a part of the discussions & how the language exists, it's pretty clear that a lot of cultures, nations, languages, and speech varieties weren't a part of the design process.

Maybe it could be said that Zamenhof's conceptions of "global audience" were those who were closest to hegemonic and/or supernational influence, which I think I'd agree with.

But I wouldn't call his design nor process particularly culturally inclusive.

For an amateur, living at the fringes of both Europe and the Russian empire, I think the boy Zamenhof done good for the 19th century

He did good but not good enough for a true international language.

Except a couple of million speak it - to a degree - and it has been going organically for over a century and shows no sign of dying

So only around ~1/8000 of the people who need to speak it actually speak it. It doesn't show any signs of dying but it doesn't show any signs of growth either.

Zamenhof's Esperanto - it always felt a bit too, well, earnest in its aspirations to me.

If we're talking about universal communication systems, then my favourite will always be SolReSol - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solresol

[Note: I don't speak a word of either conlang]

Right. There is a very informative critical analysis of Esperanto’s problems at http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/index.html

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