Thank you
Elisabeth Ward elisward@yahoo.com

I really should apologize for the length of my response – it wasn’t until after I posted it that I realized that it was actually longer than the original article. And I hope I didn’t come on too strong; I always strive to be factual and non-confrontational when talking about Esperanto, but looking back, I think maybe I was a bit aggressive in places. At any rate, I didn’t find your article tactless or spiteful, just a bit misinformed on a couple of points. And when I commented about efforts to promote MIE as the official interlanguage of Europe, I should have made it clearer that I was not directing my comments at you, but rather musing out loud about the group doing the promoting. I stand by what I said, but could have found a better way of saying it.

You’re right about the book being an interesting development. I have to admit that the first thing I did upon reading your post was to download the book and thumb through it. I find it amazing that modern linguistics can deduce so much about a long-dead language from its descendants, then posit a modern straight-line descendant from the protolanguage. While I disagree with making it the official interlanguage of Europe when there are much more manageable candidates (Esperanto, for example ), it will be interesting to see what comes of this MIE effort, especially whether a community of speakers forms.

Oh, and to answer your question, I found your post through Google.

I won’t censor the post, in order to preserve the relevance of your comment, but please note that I do agree with your points across the board and now consider my original second paragraph tactless. To be frank, I was not expecting anyone but our group members to read this. Can I ask how you came across this post in the first place?

Esperanto’s vocabulary wasn’t taken from a totally random assortment of living languages; its inventor, then the community after it was set free, drew mainly from Latin and its descendants, especially French, then, to a lesser degree, from Germanic languages, mainly German and English, and finally to a minor degree from Slavic languages. If there’s something wrong with that, then other Indo-European languages certainly leave at least as much to be desired, with the extensive borrowings among them, in particular English, which combines the vocabularies of a Latin language and a Germanic language and borrows heavily from a multitude of other languages.

Esperanto’s grammar is very simple and regular, yet extremely flexible. For anyone who speaks it with reasonable competence, the effect is one of harmony; as a fluent Esperanto speaker, I cannot think a word less descriptive of Esperanto than “kludgey”.

If Esperanto has “failed” because of its “inaccessibility” to speakers of non-Indo-European languages, how do you explain that two of the current hotspots of Esperanto growth are East Asia and parts of Africa, the very regions in which you claim it is inaccessible? While Esperanto is marginally less easy for such people because of its mainly European lexical base, Esperanto speakers from those areas nevertheless consistently find Esperanto easy to learn, much easier than, say, English. Esperanto’s ease of learning, regardless of the speaker’s native language, is attributable to its simple, regular grammar and phonology with lack of ablaut, regular and extensible derivational word-building system, and near-lack of idiom – all without compromising expressiveness in any way. In particular, thanks to the regular word-building system, which allows speakers to coin words freely, one’s effective vocabulary is at least five times the number of roots one knows; while the first 20% of the vocabulary is a bit more difficult to acquire for a non-Indo-European speaker, the remaining 80% come essentially for free. Esperanto speakers are scattered around the world and use it every day in every situation imaginable, making it a truly international language, even if not that many people speak it in each location.

Their main goal, while lofty, is admirable—they hope to facilitate “the adoption of Modern Indo-European by the European Union as its main official language”. Not just one of its official languages, the official language.

Hmmm… A language that, according to the grammar, has:

4 verb stems?
5 inflected verb forms?
6 persons for each stem/inflection combination?
8 cases?
4 declensions with separate singular/plural desinences?
3 grammatical genders?
Irregular correlatives?
Multiple ablaut/variants/irregularities every step of the way?

And has never been proven through large scale use in real life?

Compare that with Esperanto:

Invariant roots, no ablaut.
6 inflected verb forms, but the same form for all verbs and all persons.
One universally applicable case ending.
No grammatical gender.
Regular correlatives.
No irregularity of any kind.

And has been used extensively, in every aspect of real life, including family, spirituality, academia, literature, technology, business, culture, leisure and politics, by people from a vast array of linguistic and geographic backgrounds. And continues to grow.

It may still have a way to go, but I’ll put my money on Esperanto .