Esperanto as an international language
There is a continuing debate on whether Esperanto is the ideal solution for an international auxiliary language. This page collects some of the most common criticisms of that proposal, and the main counter-arguments advanced by its supporters.
Defenders of Esperanto rebate that although the roots are taken from European languages, Esperanto's emphasis on regular spelling and grammar endings, even at the cost of compatibility with European spellings, shows that Esperanto is at least not intentionally Euro-centric. Also, the extensive use of affixes makes parts of its grammar more similar to some Asian languages than to Indo-European languages.
Esperantists also note that the European-based vocabulary can expedite learning for all who have studied some European language, even if they are not fluent in it; which is the case for a large fraction of of people outside Europe. See La Espero, fifth stanza.
According to these critics, given that Esperanto lacks the neutrality to be a world language, it should at least aim to be an European common language, and therefore its lexicon should be some sort of average or consensus of all European lexicons, and ditto for the spellings. Defenders reply that doing so would have resulted in an irregular spelling system, which would have been worse. To illustrate, compare English with Esperanto:
Common criticisms
Neutrality
Esperanto is often accused of being too Euro-centric and lacking the neutrality which many, including Zamenhof, recognised as being essential to a world language. This refers in particular to the vocabulary, but also applies to the orthography and the grammar, which retains many features of European languages. Critics argue that a truly neutral language should draw its stems from a much wider variety of languages, so as not to give unfair advantage to any of them.Unfamiliar spellings
On the other hand, speakers of European languages often complain that the orthography and endings in Esperanto can be significantly different from their etymological cognates in European words, more so than in some competing artificial languages. For example: English quarter, Italian quarto, Interlingua quarto, Esperanto kvarono; also English/French pollution, Interlingua pollution, Esperanto poluado (Esperanto polucio is a false friend meaning "involuntary ejaculation").
| English | Esperanto |
|---|---|
| two | du |
| twenty | dudek |
| one half | duono |
| one twentieth | dudekono |
| four | kvar |
| forty | kvardek |
| a quarter | kvarono |
| one fortieth | kvardekono |
Defenders recognize that the problem may be "overmarketing". Esperanto is often presented as "easy to learn," which many students misunderstand as "can be learned without any effort". Learning Esperanto is indeed easy, but only compared to learning a new natural language. The grammar (fundamento) can be learned in less than one hour, the basic vocabulary (by English-speaking people) in 2 hours, and the pronunciation and spelling in half an hour. In theory, the student has now a vocabulary equivalent to 7000 words in English because he can build new words combining the 1000 roots he knows. However, fluent speaking requires skills that are not really identified and taught. In spite of its systematic gramamr, Esperanto, like any other language, can be learned only through lots of practice and memorization. Many students get disappointed when they realize that the last hurdle is much harder to overcome, and give up. So, defenders say, the problem is not peculiar to Esperanto, but a general hurdle that any international language, natural or artificial, has to face; and Esperanto is in fact better than averag in this regard.
Incidentally, Esperanto could also be a good research tool to identify the real difficulties in speaking a foreign language which are not due to irregular spelling, morphology, or syntax.
To some critics, this aspect of the language makes the implication that masculinity is some kind of default, and femininity is an exception. The feature is particularly irksome to English speakers, since the corresponding suffix -ess is much less used in that language.
Defenders reply that this assymetric treatment of male and female is not a feature of Esperanto, but only a general feature of most European languages. In each Romance language, for instance, grammatical genders are assigned to all nouns — even to unsexed objects, or in opposition the biological sex (as authoritÃÂé = "authority" in French, guardia = "policeman" in Italian, and virildad = "masculinity" in Spanish, which all have feminine gender). In fact, given the arbitrary assignment of grammatical gender, Romance and German speakers generally do not make the sexist assumptions claimed by the critics. Viewed in this broader context, argue the Esperantists, "sexist language" is shown to be a matter of cultural assumptions and interpretations by the speakers, not of the language per se.
Moreover, since Esperanto does not inflect adjectives for gender (as most of those languages do) it is in fact an "unsexed" (technically, gender-less) language. Indeed, it has become acceptable in Esperanto to use doktoro even to refer to a female doctor, a custom that is compatible with the standard grammar. Thus doktorino only needs to be used to emphasize femaleness; and some have even proposed the use of virdoktoro (literally "male-doctor") when one wants to emphasize maleness. As for the pronouns ŝi and li, one can use the neutral tiu ("that one") instead, which unlike English "it" can be used for people as well as for non-people nouns. (The alternative ŝ/li is also used, but it has the same problems as "s/he" in English.) See the Esperanto section of non-sexist language for more details.
Difficulty in achieving fluency
Some key persons within the Esperanto movement have lamented how few learners of the language progress to a high level of fluency. Notably, the author Julio Baghy critiqued mediocre Esperantists in his ironic poem "Estas mi Esperantisto" (I am an Esperantist). Also, author Kazimierz Bein, while attending a conference at which it was generally agreed that everyone should learn Esperanto, remarked that the first who ought to learn it were the Esperantists themselves.Special characters
Esperanto contains six letters which are not used by most natural languages, and are therefore difficult for most users to type. They are not available in the ISO Latin-1 character set, and thir use requires software with support for Unicode characters and Unicode fonts. Zamenhof recommended the use of the digraphs "ch","gh", "hh", "jh", "sh" and "u". Esperantists have also developed a system of using the letter "x" to signify these special characters; this system is called the X-System. The overall impact of this problem is decreasing as support for Unicode becomes widespread.Sexism in Esperanto grammar
Esperanto is accused of being inherently sexist, because the generic form of nouns is the same as the male form and different from the female form. E.g., doktoro = "doctor (male or unspecified sex)", doktorino = "female doctor"; also doktoroj = "doctors (male, mixed male/female, or unspecified sex)", doktorinoj = "female doctors". (This use of -in to form the feminine of nouns is reminiscent of German, e.g. maler, malerin = "painter".) Likewise for pronouns: as in English, li ("he") may be generic, whereas ŝi ("she") is always female. Other planned languages
Some of the other planned languages that have emerged in the twentieth century have attempted to address criticisms of Esperanto. Yet despite the flaws exposed by criticism, no other constructed language has approached the number of Esperanto speakers or has an extensive body of literature like Esperanto. Some of these other languages are quite different from Esperanto, while other languages, like Ido, are based on Esperanto, and enjoyed a period of popularity in the early 1900s. More recent spinoffs from Esperanto include the modified form Riismo which seeks to eliminate sexual inequality from the language. Other alternative languages include Idiom Neutral, Occidental, Novial, and Interlingua; some languages not originally intended as international auxiliary languages are also sometimes suggested, such as Lojban. Because Esperanto is the most well-known of constructed languages, many who have been interested were unaware of these other languages, but the Internet offers information about these languages as well.