Esperanto

[keyholekatebaron]

Are there any views on the use of this artificial international language and why it didn't take on?

[boxtops]

I seem to remember that it was invented so that there would be one language which anyone could learn without having to learn another existing langage - but it's been supplanted now, the international languages are surely English, Spanish, and ?Mandarin?

[starone]

No - odd isn't it. Perhaps it's because there is already an international language - English.

[jno]

in some ways it's more complicated than English. Latin has endings on words - you might say 'this is a red hat' but if it was the object of the verb it would be 'I put on the redam hatam'. Most of these endings have faded away in English (except S for plurals), and yet Esperanto re-invented them. What was the point?

At the moment, English is fairly useful as an international language, thanks to America using it. In 100 years, the international language may be Chinese.

[heathfield]

One of the criticisms was that, supposedly international, it was mainly made up of words based on European source words. I seem to recall someone pointing out that there was only one Japanese-derived word in it.

[DavidW]

It's useful for about two million people who speak it (http://www.panix.com/~dwolff/docs/). It's intended as a second language that everyone can have in common, and you can learn it about four times faster than other languages because the grammar is very regular and fairly simple (http://esperanto-usa.org/en/node/77). It hasn't caught on even more yet because it's a language for friendship, and economically the big national languages are more necessary to people... but I've learned it (fluently!) even though I already speak the dominant/dominating language.

[DavidW]

It's useful for about two million people who speak it (http://www.panix.com/~dwolff/docs/). It's intended as a second language that everyone can have in common, and you can learn it about four times faster than other languages because the grammar is very regular and fairly simple (http://esperanto-usa.org/en/node/77).

It hasn't caught on even more yet because it's a language for friendship, and economically the big national languages are more necessary to people... but I've learned it (fluently!) even though I already speak the dominant/dominating language.

[mike b]

Esperanto was a good idea, but sadly suffers from some unnecessary problems, in addition to grammatical inflections.
The vocabulary was drawn almost at random from a number of European languages, which means that individuals might recognise some words from their own, but anyone with even a smattering of more than one language has to remember from which one the Esperanto word is taken. (It would have been more consistent to try to develop a simplified Latin, as others have in fact done.)
Zamenhof also seems to have been paranoid about homophones; "post" in Esp means "after", so post as in mail and letters has to be "poŝto "...
Equally unfortunately, a Polish speaker is not really the best person to judge ease of pronunciation! For example, the everyday verb "to know" is "scii", with the c pronounced "ts" - a pronunciation nightmare for many nationalities...