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Yeah, but its mention on the main Esperanto page no longer mentions the details of the study where the Esperanto first group surpassed the 'Always English', and instead critiques the study.
The main Esperanto page? Which one do you mean?
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The entire list is just one huge Nirvana fallacy. Okay, so Esperanto is not literally perfect, it has some flaws... and therefore we should reject it, and instead use some language that has 10x or 100x more of exactly the same flaws? How does that make sense? Some of the objections, I am not even sure what the author tried to say. For example, point 01a, Esperanto has only 5 vowels, while English has 19. Uhm, interes…
I tend to agree with your three specific objections: - 5 vowels is actually a very good choice (although the diphthongs in Esperanto are notably odd) - pronouncing the R differently is unavoidable and probably fine - the x-method works okay in practice (although I subjectively don’t really like it) The linked page is “the page” on the problems with Esperanto, and I still think that it has a lot of insight, even if I…
I think it is likely that many mistakes could be recognized and avoided.
The attempt would probably still fail, because after all the obvious mistakes are fixed, different opinions would still remain, and people would start fighting over that. Anyone joining the discussion would feel qualified enough to propose their own ideal language, and none of the proposals would get enough fans to create an actual community of speakers.
Sadly, Esperanto is only easy to learn if you already speak a European language, and even then it helps even more if you speak one of the languages Zamenhof, its inventor, spoke. http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/#01 > Zamenhof included in Esperanto every Polish phoneme with a consistently used letter or digraph of its own, leaving out only the ones that are harder to recognise as phonemes: the nasal vowels, “soft” (palatalised…
That's a very common misconception about Esperanto. It's true that most of Esperanto's etymology is of European origin, but cognate vocabulary isn't all, or even most, of what makes a language easy to learn. Just to pick one example: in most languages, you need to conjugate verbs according to their subject; in a lot of others, you need to decline nouns, too, according to their cases. And then there are the exceptions: there are hundreds of irregular verbs in English, and thousands in some other languages. Esperanto has none of these difficulties. Even if we were just to consider vocabulary, Esperanto vocabulary is so much easier to learn, because it's agglutinative: it's made up of composable, modular parts that can be recombined into other words. That means, if you know fifty words, you actually know five hundred.
Just talk to Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Esperantists, and they'll tell you that Esperanto was a hundred times easier to learn than English, other European languages, and other Asian languages, too.
It is, in fact, his fault. Esperanto has an estimated 2–5 million speakers worldwide, but this guy goes to one conference, meets a handful of them, and decides the whole language and culture is stupid. Imagine you went to a French language meetup, and had a bad time, but then decided that the whole Francophone world was a bunch of nerds, and that French isn't worth learning. It's incredibly narrow-minded.
There are countless Esperanto-speaking communities around the world: clubs, online chatrooms, groups of friends, conferences, special interest groups. Check out telegramo.org for an idea of the diversity of interests that Esperantists have. If there isn't a chat room for your personal interest, don't write blog posts in English complaining about it—create one.
Even if Esperanto had no speakers at all, and even if they were all old and weird, (which isn't remotely the case, in reality), it'd still be worth learning, for the same reasons that people learn Latin: it's a beautiful language, a great mental exercise, and a rich literary language. There are tens of thousands of books written in Esperanto, many of which haven't been translated to other languages. And even if Esperanto had no books, stop complaining and write one already.
Esperanto as "hippie Klingon" is a very neat turn of phrase, even rolls off the tongue perfectly...