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Comment by emodendroket | Hacker News Reader

If Esperanto were ever adapted in significant numbers it would develop irregular forms and all the other quirks that make natural languages difficult to learn.

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Maybe after a couple of centuries. Languages don't change that fast, especially after the introduction of the printing press and formal language education in schools.

You can read 200 year old texts without problems. Shakespeare is close to five hundred years old and you can still understand it with a little effort.

It seems like it would be exactly analogous to the formation of pidgins, which takes one generation, not centuries. Also, if I think back to high school I would challenge the idea that every speaker of modern English has "no problems" reading 200-year-old texts.

People have been learning foreign languages in school without developing a pidgin for a long time now. Pidgin formation seems much more likely if the language acquisition is not as part of formal training, but from an informal need to communicate like for trade.

Because foreign languages have a community of native speakers whose way of speaking is ultimately authoritative.

But often you're not missing meaning but simply context. Shakespeare is not hard per se due to the language but because its based in a world that is alien to you.

Not if it were only ever a second language, learned in classrooms and nowhere else.

Think modern Latin: It's not evolving anymore. It's adding words, but its grammar is unchanging.

But in the medieval period, when Latin was actually used as a lingua franca in just the way you suggest, it continued evolving, not just in vocabulary, but also in grammar and pronunciation, to the point where Latin users from different countries struggled to understand each other. If Latin today is really unchanging it's probably because there are few people who aren't classics scholars or in the Vatican who actually produce anything in it.

> If Latin today is really unchanging it's probably because there are few people who aren't classics scholars or in the Vatican who actually produce anything in it.

That's probably a big factor. Maybe Esperanto would achieve similar stability if it were only used by ISO working groups or in other official environments. But if that happens, it ought to come under fire for its Eurocentrism, its sexism, and its general quirkiness, all of which it has been able to skate on because it's never been taken seriously before.

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