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Comment by hkt | Hacker News Reader

Weirdly judgemental.

Esperanto was designed to be easy to learn. It isn't an elite pursuit in the way you suggest, because its community isn't gatekept. I personally have met people of all social classes who have been interested in it.

It was also never meant to be a first language, it is an auxiliary language. It is possible for an English speaker to have a conversation with a Mandarin speaker with no intermediary if both know the (comparatively easy to learn) Esperanto. Its original purpose wasn't trivial either: it was created to stop groups without a common language in the same city (Warsaw, I think?) fighting, created on the basis that they'd stop doing so if only they could speak a common language.

Think of it as JVM bytecode for people.

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Auxiliary languages are kind of inherently doomed to fail to function as they're intended because in order for them to function as such, commitment needs to be made to adopt it multilaterally by governments with sufficient influence. If today the United States and China bilaterally decided to force Esperanto into their school curriculum it'd likely be adopted very quickly by everyone else, but that isn't the case and I doubt it ever would be under almost any circumstance, because learning English is just immediately more practical, even if it's a significantly more difficult language to be picked up.

And that's how it's played out. Nearly every developed nation teaches English as a second language or is a native population of English speakers. The universal language is English. The JVM bytecode for people is English.

Spoken like an anglophone. Tell that to Latin America and East Asia..

I don't have to, you can look at pretty much any of their language curriculum and find a huge presence of English in nearly all their education systems.

Certainly you will find people learning other languages for trade depending on the region, but even in East Asia, as you say, English is taught in China, Japanese, Korea. In Singapore English is the language everyone learns (and is taught in). In Vietnam the primary foreign language taught is English. In the Philippines one of its official languages is English. Argentina teaches English in elementary school. In Brazil students from grade 6 have to learn a language, which is usually English. In Venezuela English is taught from age 5.

So what exactly do I have to tell them?

Not sure about Latin America, but bring someone from each of China/Japan/Korea and they'll talk to each other in English.

> The JVM bytecode for people is English.

What are you telling me? That I need to drop English?

My takeaway is that nobody should speak English, but instead people should compose their sentences in a different language and then translate them to English at the point of speaking (with small pauses in the conversation for you to collect your thoughts on this garbage).

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