The language really is as easy to adapt as advertised.
Too bad it got clamped, but I wouldn't be too surprised if it suddently resurfaced among youth as some koombayah meme.
Takes 3-6 months to learn fluently, and a lifetime to find other speakers. ;-)
Maybe in the next 100 years, some neo hippie collective of a not insignificant size decides to make it the preferred language of their community. It’d be cool to walk into a part of a city where Esperanto is the norm, like Chinatown or the Jewish neighbourhood.
For government functions live translation is something skilled translators can do pretty easily, and for common folks, live machine translations is getting better and more accessible.
I for example read many tweets written in languages I don’t understand. And I think it is only a matter of time before other social platforms (including GitHub and HN) catches on to provide accessible translation tools so people can read and write in their native language, and have machines translate for them.
As for communicating face to face, surely there could be a device (or more likely a phone app) that does that, but mostly I think people will just continue to learn an auxiliary language or two and find a common language to communicate in, only using the translation app as a backup in emergencies.
I've met one such.
His parents met at a conference, and only had Esperanto in common.
I've been at music festivals where I met people who did not speak English, so Esperanto was our best common language.
The grammar is mostly regular. It seems like the thing a stubborn introvert likes: You can hardly use it anywhere, but it has nice properties. And unlike Lojban, Esperanto is something you can learn to fluency fast on your own on the internet.
Worth checking out: http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/westernlanguage...
I didn't know that! What a missed opportunity. I spent many months buried in archives reading old Esperantist magazines from around the world (Revuoj) to try to piece together this story. Was so much fun!
This may seem obvious - after all, Esperanto is an "easier" language than French or English – but I doubt it.
Much of what makes Esperanto easy for speakers of related European languages is the large amount of shared vocabulary, allowing even a beginner to guess the meaning of many words when encountering them for the first time.
Then there is the grammar that would be familiar if you already know a related European language: affixes on verbs to express tense, affixes on nouns to express gender and number.
Starting from Chinese, those advantages don't really apply. It helps a bit that the affixes are predictable: Whereas "sleeped" would be considered incorrect, though understandable, "dormis" is just the expected form. But while the root "dorm" is associated with sleeping in many languages influenced by Latin, from the Chinese perspective it's just a nonsense syllable (or three).
Then there's the thing that there's no grammatical tense in Chinese at all, only grammatical aspect. The perfective aspect (indicating completion of an action) often corresponds to past tense, but when used to describe completion in the future, that's no longer the case. So there's no simple one-to-one correspondence the way a French or English speaker can map their native language's tense system onto Esperanto.
Im my experience, Chinese Esperantists struggle with vocabulary and verb tenses about as often as they would in English.
(Consider also the case of Pseudo -Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-Chinese created by writing Japanese using as many kanji as possible and removing all grammatical affixes, resulting in text that often allows Chinese speakers to guess the meaning based on shared vocabulary. It's surprisingly good for Japanese → Chinese one-way communication, but pretty useless for anyone who doesn't have the shared context necessary to make sense of it.)
Its legacy lives on in the modern age in a Unicode character for the currency: ₷
When the core idea gets popular, the young and hip crowd will invent a new language (Rust) that does the exact same thing as an old language (Ada).
And do away with Esperanto.