Note to self: do not make a language intended for global communication by just mixing 3 European languages and taking the hardest to learn features from them.
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2026
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What do you mean by hardest features? It's been ages since i looked at Esperanto, but back then I didn't find it particularly hard to learn.
Let me guess: your native language is Germanic, Romance or Slavic.
Esperanto's phonetics, phonotactics, vocabulary and grammar are all overly Eurocentric and twice as complicated as they should be for a language that is presented as a tool for global communication. And don't even get me started on diacritics.
Anyone who grew up speaking a non-Indo-European language is going to have a hard time even getting the hang of the alphabet and all the sounds.
I agree with you there, but I think the problem is that they took the wrong base languages to build Esperanto from, not that they took the hardest parts of those languages.
That is also true.
esperanto is ridiculously easy to learn, even from a global linguistic perspective. the grammar, in particular, is predictable and avoids irregularities. you're probably referring more to familiarity than ease of learning. of course it is even easier to learn if you come from europe since it adopts many european words, but that doesn't change it's general simplicity.
That still makes it a poor tool for global communication. Within EU, maybe. But not global. More than half of global population is going to have to learn a dozen of new sounds and distinctions in pronunciation to even start.
I personally think we should use grunts and gestures
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Not really possible to make a language everyone is familiar with as languages globally are so different.
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one could of course try to make an easier or better suited language but calling it a poor tool is harsh critique considering that esperanto is the most sucessful attempt for an artificial global language today and already avoids many hard to learn features from other languages.
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So the solution would be to have Esperanto but with the phonetics of, say, Hawaiian?
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I maintain that the most realistically usable artificial global language would be something inspired by toki pona, but with actual effort put into picking words that are maximally understandable and pronounceable by as many people as possible and is designed to be incredibly difficult to mangle beyond intelligibility.
No even remotely complex rules, nothing fancy whatsoever, just an engineered caveman speech that literally anyone can learn from a pamphlet and reliably use to communicate basic normal things with anyone else. Like the way you end up talking when you just barely know a language and need to communicate "i'm allergic to shellfish, can you guarantee that my food won't have touched any part of an animal with a shell?"
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"But Esperanto is the future!"
Hot take: Everyone should accept that English is the common language, and only speaking one language is a setback.
also hot take: US schools should teach 100–300 most common kanji (their meanings and pronunciations in Mandarin) if nothing else to dispel the myth that logograms are "too hard to learn" for English speakers
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Only if you accept that English is a garbage language and reform it so the rest of the world has to learn a sensible language instead of the clusterfuck that is english.
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Yeah, as fucky as English is, as hard as it can be to learn, it's currently the lingua franca ;)
Plus, because it's a language that loves borrowing words and phrases, it's already set up with an ease of integration to a limited extent.
At this point, any effort to displace it as the default is going to cause as much trouble and hassle as it's place as the default does.
That being said, a language like Esperanto would be a better choice overall. It's kinda like how Latin can serve as a neutral and fixed language because it's dead. Esperanto isn't dead, but it's similarly fixed, and not tied to a single culture, so it would work. Then again, so would Latin
Yeah, English is the most spoken language in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers
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...
Use esoteric knowledge of jet streams to firebomb the Pacific coast of the United States with balloons.
but you can learn esperanto in like a month... estas tre facile stultuloj...
You can learn it in a month….if you are from Western Europe.
Two if you're from anywhere else, seriously the number of words you need to learn is minuscule compared with other languages because of the suffix and prefix system that esperanto has
You might as well just write it in Singlish. It's not a real language so it would be difficult to write a technical paper. What is Esperanto for hydrodynamics?
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Kiam oni konsciiĝas, ke oni povas diri ian ajn rubon sur la interreto per tiu ĉi lingvo, ĉar neniu komprenos sin
Intertanto, multo de personas poterea leger iste sin haber a aprender le lingua.
for one second i thought i was reading portuguese
I didn't understand the original comment, but does this mean something along the lines of "many people will be able to read this without having learned the language"?
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I've never looked at Esperanto. Is it at least easy to learn and use?
I have to look up it's history, like who and when thought it's a good idea, and why it didn't work out. Sounds like a fun rabbit hole.
It is ridiculously simple. Honestly, I don't understand why it wasn't chosen as a European language. We could have had an easy-to-learn, inclusive language that avoids grammatical irregularities. it doesn't give an advantage to certain nations or disadvantages to others and as an artificial language it doesn't prefer any culture over another. Just imagine how easy it would be to learn other languages if you already had that foundation. The pronunciation is simple, and even people outside the EU have advocated for it, since it is easy to learn worldwide. I speak German, English, and a little French, Japanese, and Spanish; Esperanto is far easier than any of those languages.
Because language is cultural and thus doesn't lend itseld to artificiality. Not that it doesn't happen but it is unpredictable as to what is adopted and what is left in the dust.
Most European languages are some almagation and standardization of a patchwork of dialects. English destroyed scots, Tours french destroyed occitan, hochdeutsch largely displaced bavarian, etc. The reason is the dramatic increase in state power in the 19th century (therefore giving importance to the language of administration), combined with policies of "cultural unification" and nation building. So there in fact very much is artificiality in language that is predictable.
The reason Esperanto wasn't adopted by states when it was invented is because internationalism was seen as either an utopia or a threat by states. The reason it isn't adopted by the UE now is because it would be a highly visible and unpopular move that would take decades to bear fruit and therefore politicians will never support it. The entire UE therefore learns english, massively increasing the influence of people who brand themselves its enemies.
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Honestly, I don't understand why it wasn't chosen as a European language
It has the same problem as Lojban - you can only use it to communicate with the sort of people that learn Esperanto.
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as an artificial language it doesn't prefer any culture over another
as long as it's European, of course
Indo-European. That is, 3.4 billion native speakers. And only for the vocabulary and writing system: the grammar is pretty universal.
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It was a good idea for the time it was created, when Europeans were constantly killing eachother all over the place.
Finally, it was forming the EU that got them to stop. So creating a common language kinda felt unnecessary after that.
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Had it been chosen as a European language and been adopted by a large population, it would quickly stop being simple.
why it didn't work out
Hitler and Stalin. That's why.
The Esperanto bento
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