Esperanto topics
This article is part of the Esperanto series
Language
Esperanto | Grammar | Letters | Phonology | Orthography | Vocabulary
History
History | Zamenhof | Proto-Esperanto | "Unua Libro" | Declaration of Boulogne | "Fundamento" | Prague Manifesto
Culture and media
Culture | Esperantist | Esperantujo | Film | Internacia Televido | La Espero | Libraries | Literature | Music | Native speakers | Pop culture references | Publications | Symbols | Zamenhof Day
Organization and services
Amikeca Reto | Esperanto Academy | Kurso de Esperanto | Encyclopedia | Pasporta Servo | Plouézec Meetings | TEJO | UEA | SAT | World Congress | Youth Congress | Skolta Esperanto Ligo
National Associations
Australia | Britain | British Youth | Canada | USA | Labour
Criticism
Esperantido | Propedeutic value | Reformed | Riism | Vs. Ido | Vs. Interlingua | Vs. Novial
Related topics
Auxiliary language | Constructed language | Ido | Interlingua | Novial | Volapük | Signuno | Anationalism
Wikimedia
Portal | Vikipedio | Vikivortaro | Vikicitaro | Vikifonto | Vikilibroj | Vikikomunejo | Vikispecoj

Esperanto was conceived as a language of international communication, more precisely as a universal second language. Since publication, there has been debate over whether it is possible for Esperanto to attain this position, and whether it would be an improvement for international communication if it did. Image File history File links Flag_of_Esperanto. ... Look up Esperanto in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Esperanto is a constructed auxiliary language based on the languages of Europe. ... The creator of Esperanto, L. L. Zamenhof, did not specify phonemic-phonetic correspondences for his language. ... Esperanto is written in a Latin alphabet of twenty-eight letters, upper and lower case. ... The word base of Esperanto was originally defined by Lingvo internacia, published by Zamenhof in 1887. ... The constructed international auxiliary language Esperanto was developed in the 1870s and 80s by L. L. Zamenhof, and first published in 1887. ... L. L. Zamenhof Dr. Ludovic Lazarus (Ludwik Lejzer, Ludwik Łazarz) Zamenhof (December 15, 1859 – April 14, 1917) was an eye doctor, philologist, and the initiator of Esperanto, the most widely spoken and successful constructed language in the world. ... Proto-Esperanto (or pra-Esperanto in the language itself) is the modern term for any of the stages in the evolution of L. L. Zamenhofs language project, prior to the publication of his Unua Libro in 1887. ... Unua Libro por Rusoj (first edition, 1887, in Russian) Unua Libro por Angloj (first edition in English, 1888) The Unua Libro (First Book) was the first publication to describe the international language, Esperanto (then called Lingvo Internacia, inter-national language). It was first published in Russian on July 26, 1887... The Declaration of Boulogne (Bulonja Deklaracio) was a document written by L. L. Zamenhof and endorsed by the attendees of the first world congress of Esperanto in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France in 1905. ... The Fundamento de Esperanto (Foundation of Esperanto) is a book by L. L. Zamenhof, published in the spring of 1905. ... The Prague Manifesto (or Manifesto de Prago) is a set of seven widely-shared principles of the Esperanto movement. ... The language Esperanto is often used to access an international culture. ... An Esperantist is a person who participates in the diffusion of Esperanto. ... Esperantujo, also Esperantio, is a term used by speakers of the planned international language Esperanto to refer to the sphere of activity taking place in that language. ... // Feature films There are two feature films known to have been shot exclusively in the constructed language Esperanto. ... Internacia Televido is an Internet-based Esperanto-language television station, launched on the 5th of November, 2005. ... La Espero (The Hope) is a poem written by L. L. Zamenhof (1859-1917), the initiator of the Esperanto language. ... The following Esperanto libraries and collections of works in the Esperanto language are worthy of note: The Montagu Butler Library of Esperanto materials, maintained by the British Esperanto Association, whose collection of 30,000 items is often quoted. ... Since Esperanto is the largest planned language, there are over 25,000 books in Esperanto and the largest Esperanto book service at the World Esperanto Association sells over 4,000 books. ... Music in a variety of styles is written, recorded, and performed in Esperanto, a planned language used for international communication. ... Native Esperanto speakers (in Esperanto denaskuloj) come to be in families in which Esperanto (and usually other languages) is spoken. ... The constructed language Esperanto has been used in a number of films and novels. ... December 15 (Zamenhof Day, Zamenhofa Festo) is the birthday of L. L. Zamenhof, the initiator of Esperanto. ... Amikeca Reto (Friendship Network) is a directory of people around the world who do not necessarily want to host other Esperanto speakers, but want to work together and exchange ideas with others around the world. ... The Akademio de Esperanto is, according to its website, an independent language institute whose task is to conserve and protect the fundamental principles of the language Esperanto and control its evolution. ... Kurso de Esperanto is a free language course software with 12 units for the constructed language Esperanto. ... The Encyclopedia of Esperanto is an encyclopedia about the Esperanto Movement. ... The Pasporta Servo (Passport Service) is a publication in Esperanto. ... The Breton village of Plouézec has hosted an International Meeting annually since 1997. ... TEJO is the Tutmonda Esperantista Junulara Organizo, or World Esperanto Youth Organization. ... The World Esperanto Association (in Esperanto UEA: Universala Esperanto-Asocio) is the largest international organization of Esperanto speakers, with members in 119 countries (as of 2000) and in official relations with the United Nations and UNESCO. In addition to individual members, 95 national Esperanto organizations are affiliated to UEA. Its... Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda (SAT; in English, World Anational Association) was founded in 1921 by Eugène LANTI. SAT is a world-wide worker movement active in socialist, peace, trade union, feminist and environmental issues. ... The World Congress of Esperanto (in Esperanto: Universala Kongreso de Esperanto) has the longest tradition among international Esperanto conventions, with an almost unbroken run of nearly a hundred years. ... The International Youth Congress of Esperanto or Internacia Junulara Kongreso is the biggest annual meeting of young esperantists in the world and participants usually number around 300 but have been know to have more than 1000 esperanto-speakers from all over the world coming for the entire week. ... The third universal congress of Esperanto was held in 1907 in Cambridge, England. ... Junularo Esperantista Brita British Esperantist Youth (JEB) is the organisation for young esperantists in Great Britain. ... SATEB (Workers’ Esperanto Movement) is the British affiliate of the non-nationalist world organisation SAT (Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda) which is a world-wide worker movement active in socialist, peace, trade union, feminist and environmental issues. ... Esperantido is the term used within the Esperanto and constructed language communities to describe a language project based on or inspired by Esperanto. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Reformed Esperanto was a reformed version of Esperanto created in 1894. ... Riism (Riismo in Esperanto) is a modification of Esperanto to simplify it, to make it symmetric, and to incorporate non-sexist language and gender-neutral pronouns into it. ... This article attempts to highlight the main differences between Esperanto and Ido, two constructed languages that have a related past but have since parted ways. ... This article attempts to highlight the main differences between Esperanto and Interlingua, two planned languages which have taken radically different approaches to the problem of providing an International auxiliary language. ... Wikibooks has more about this subject: Novial // Alphabet and Pronunciation Both Esperanto and Novial are written using versions of the Latin alphabet. ... An international auxiliary language (sometimes abbreviated as IAL or auxlang) is a language used (or to be used in the future) for communication between people from different nations who do not share a common native language. ... An artificial or constructed language (known colloquially as a conlang among aficionados), is a language whose phonology, grammar and vocabulary are specifically devised by an individual or small group, rather than having naturally evolved as part of a culture the way natural languages do. ... Ido (pronounced ), a constructed language, was created to become a universal second language for speakers of different linguistic backgrounds, easier to learn than any ethnic language. ... The constructed language Interlingua is an international auxiliary language (IAL) published in 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA). ... Novial [nov-, new + IAL, International Auxiliary Language] is a constructed language devised by Professor Otto Jespersen, a Danish linguist who had previously been involved in the Ido movement. ... Volapük is a constructed language, created in 1879-1880 by Johann Martin Schleyer, a Catholic priest in Baden, Germany. ... Signuno alphabet & numerals Signuno is signed Esperanto, derived from Gestuno roots and Esperanto morphology by an anonymous author. ... Anationalism is a term originating from the community of Esperanto speakers. ... Look up Esperanto in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... A second language is any language other than the first, or native, language learned; it is typically used because of geographical or social reasons. ...

Why Esperanto?

In the early years, one of the main arguments Esperantists used was that no ethnic language could ever gain acceptance as the international language of the world, owing to the natural opposition of speakers of other ethnic languages. Thus, they argued, the world will have to adopt an ethnically neutral language like Esperanto, if it is to ever have an efficient means of international communication.

Since the wide acceptance of English as a medium of international communication in the second half of the 20th century, this argument has seldom been used. Esperantists have instead placed greater emphasis on their other arguments. They emphasize three main points: The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... (19th century - 20th century - 21st century - more centuries) Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s As a means of recording the passage of time, the 20th century was that century which lasted from 1901–2000 in the sense of the Gregorian calendar (1900–1999...

Easy to learn

Esperanto was designed to be easier to learn than any ethnic or national language. The morphology is regular (that is, there are no irregular verbs or nouns), the spelling is phonetic (for each letter there is one sound), and the vocabulary, being based on the Romance and Germanic languages, is largely recognizable to anyone who already knows a western language. There is, in addition, a regular and productive system of affixes which are used to form new words, so that learners need only learn a fraction of the number of words they would need for the same level of communication in ethnic languages. Morphology is a subdiscipline of linguistics that studies word structure. ... A verb is a part of speech that usually denotes action (bring, read), occurrence (decompose, glitter), or a state of being (exist, stand). Depending on the language, a verb may vary in form according to many factors, possibly including its tense, aspect, mood and voice. ... A noun, or noun substantive, is a part of speech (a word or phrase) which can co-occur with (in)definite articles and attributive adjectives, and function as the head of a noun phrase. ... Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone = sound/voice) is the study of sounds (voice). ... The Romance languages, a major branch of the Indo-European language family, comprise all languages that descended from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. ... Look up affix in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

Neutrality

Esperantists believe that Esperanto would be a more neutral medium of international communication than English or any other national language. They criticise the current system where an advantaged group of native speakers don't need to make any effort, while everyone else is required to invest substantial time and money to learn English – something that many people cannot afford. To remedy this bias, Esperantists propose that an international language should accommodate all peoples, so that everyone can come together on a level playing field.

It is often pointed out that Esperanto is not completely neutral, as it is easier for some people to learn than for others. See neutrality below for more on this debate.

Linguistic diversity

The current system of international communication threatens linguistic diversity. Speakers of many minority languages may not pass their language on to the next generation, preferring instead that their children learn a language of wider communication as their mother tongue. Not only English, but Mandarin, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Malay, Hausa, Swahili, Hindi, Nepali, Russian, and other national languages are replacing minority languages in their areas of influence. On top of this, English is replacing other widespread languages like German and French in their positions as languages of diplomacy and science. This article is on all of the Northern Chinese dialects. ... // Headline text Bold text Not to be confused with the Malayalam language, spoken in India. ... Hausa is the Chadic language with the largest number of speakers, spoken as a first language by about 24 million people, and as a second language by about 15 million more. ... Swahili (also called Kiswahili; see Kiswahili for a discussion of the nomenclature) is an agglutinative Bantu language widely spoken in East Africa. ... Hindi (हिन्दी or हिंदी in Devanagari; pronunciation: ), an Indo-European language spoken mainly in northern and central India, is the official language of the Union government of India[1] [2].Hindi is also often considered as the National language of India, [3] although the Constitution of India does not nominate any language... Nepali (Khaskura) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in Nepal, Bhutan, and some parts of India and Burma. ...

Many Esperantists believe that if Esperanto were widely used, linguistic diversity could more easily be defended. With a more level and accessible system of international communication, the pressures involved in reaching fluency might be less. However, it is possible that Esperanto could start replacing other languages as well. See linguistic diversity below for more on this debate.

Common criticisms

Neutrality

As noted above, Esperantists often market Esperanto as an ethnically neutral means of communication. However, it is often accused of being Eurocentric. This is most often noted in regard to the vocabulary, but applies equally to the orthography, phonology, grammar, and semantics, all of which are thoroughly European. The vocabulary, for example, is about two-thirds Romance and one-third Germanic; the syntax is Romance; and the phonology and semantics are Slavic. Critics argue that a truly neutral language would draw its vocabulary from a much wider variety of languages, so as not to give unfair advantage to speakers of any of them. Although a truly representative sampling of the world's thousands of languages would be unworkable, a derivation from, say, the Romance, Semitic, Indic, Bantu, and Chinese languages would strike many as being fairer than Esperanto-like solutions. See the Color argument for more information. Eurocentrism is the practice, conscious or otherwise, of placing emphasis on European (and, generally, Western) concerns, culture and values at the expense of those of other cultures. ... A vocabulary is a set of words known to a person or other entity, or that are part of a specific language. ... The orthography of a language is the set of symbols (glyphs and diacritics) used to write a language, as well as the set of rules describing how to write these glyphs correctly, including spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. ... The vowels of modern (Standard) Arabic and (Israeli) Hebrew from the phonological point of view. ... Grammar is the study of rules governing the use of language. ... In the main, semantics (from the Greek and in greek letters σημαντικός or in latin letters semantikós, or significant meaning, derived from sema, sign) is the study of meaning, in some sense of that term. ... Most of the many indigenous languages of Europe belong to the Indo-European language family. ... The Romance languages, a major branch of the Indo-European language family, comprise all languages that descended from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. ... For other uses, see Syntax (disambiguation). ...  Countries where a West Slavic language is the national language  Countries where an East Slavic language is the national language  Countries where a South Slavic language is the national language The Slavic languages (also called Slavonic languages), a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup... 14th century BC diplomatic letter in Akkadian, found in Tell Amarna. ... The Indo-Aryan languages form a subgroup of the Indo-Iranian languages, thus belonging to the Indo-European family of languages. ... Map showing the approximate distribution of Bantu (dull yellow) vs. ... In the constructed language community, color argument refers to an often-repeated argument that an international auxiliary language based on the languages of one area is only suitable for the inhabitants of that area. ...

There are two common defenses to this: One is to admit that Esperanto is not absolutely neutral in the sense that everyone can learn it with equal effort, but that nevertheless it is fairer than the current system, since everyone makes a step towards common ground, even if the steps are not equally sized.

Critics reply that the steps required vary substantially, and that Esperanto merely substitutes European-language speakers for English speakers as the advantaged group.

Another response is to point out similarities of Esperanto to non-European languages. Esperanto's agglutinative morphology in particular is said to make its grammar closer to many non-Indo-European languages, such as the Turkic and Bantu languages. It has been suggested that Agglutination be merged into this article or section. ... Morphology is a subdiscipline of linguistics that studies word structure. ... The Indo-European languages comprise a family of several hundred languages and dialects [1], including most of the major languages of Europe, as well as many in Southwest Asia, Central Asia and South Asia. ... The Turkic languages constitute a language family of some thirty languages, spoken across a vast area from Eastern Europe to Siberia and Western China with an estimated 140 million native speakers and tens of millions of second-language speakers. ... Map showing the approximate distribution of Bantu (dull yellow) vs. ...

Critics reply that Esperanto's morphology is much like heavily affixing European languages such as German, only more regular. The main non-Indo-European aspect is that the accusative plural inflection is formed by a sequence of the accusative and plural suffixes, rather than by using a separate portmanteau suffix, but this is a very minor part of what makes up a language. In other aspects, Esperanto is biased towards the European languages. Look up affix in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... The accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a verb. ... Look up Plural in Wiktionary, the free dictionary Plural is a grammatical number, typically referring to more than one of the referent in the real world. ... Inflection or inflexion refers to a modification or marking of a word (or more precisely lexeme) so that it reflects grammatical (i. ... Look up Portmanteau word in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

There is, however, a more substantial defense, at least in terms of the vocabulary and orthography. It is remarkable that, despite Zamenhof having been an ardent supporter of the Russian language and also having had a good knowledge of Hebrew, there is practically no Slavic or Semitic vocabulary in Esperanto. He believed that, while including these languages might help people from the Russian Empire or the Middle East, it would only hinder the accessibility of Esperanto to the rest of the world. The Romance and Germanic languages, on the other hand, were (and are) learned in schools all over the world, and so their vocabulary would do the most to make Esperanto as easy as possible to learn for the largest number of people. The same philosophy applies to not including vocabulary from other languages: While people speaking languages belonging to or influenced by the Bantu, Indic, and Chinese families will have likely been exposed to a Romance or Germanic language at school before coming across Esperanto, the reverse is not true. With a "universal" vocabulary, every learner would recognize only a small portion of Esperanto and find the vast majority alien, making acquisition universally difficult; while with a Romance-Germanic vocabulary, educated people around the world find the majority of the vocabulary familiar. Zamenhof's primary concern was ease of acquisition rather than theoretical equality. L. L. Zamenhof Dr. Ludovic Lazarus (Ludwik Lejzer, Ludwik Łazarz) Zamenhof (December 15, 1859 – April 14, 1917) was an eye doctor, philologist, and the initiator of Esperanto, the most widely spoken and successful constructed language in the world. ... Russian (Russian: русский язык, russkiy yazyk, ) is the most widely spoken language of Eurasia and the most widespread of the Slavic languages. ... Hebrew (עִבְרִית or עברית, ‘Ivrit) is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family spoken by more than seven million people in Israel and Jewish communities around the world. ... Official language Russian Official Religion Russian Orthodox Christianity Capital Saint Petersburg (Petrograd 1914-1925) Area Approx. ... A map showing countries commonly considered to be part of the Middle East The Middle East is a region comprising the lands around the southern and eastern parts of the Mediterranean Sea, a territory that extends from the eastern Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf. ...

This approach also leads to the opposite criticism, that Esperanto isn't European enough, or at least not Western European enough. For example, the regular morphology and extensive use of affixes to build vocabulary from a small number of root words may make the language much easier to learn for the non-European, but trips up Europeans who, learning the Romance root words, expect the vocabulary to come as second nature. An example is the word registaro for "government". This is regularly derived from the verb regi "to rule", and so is easier to learn for non-Europeans who would otherwise have to memorize a new root, but at first sight it is misleading to European-language speakers, who might expect a more familiar word. Look up affix in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... The root is the primary lexical unit of a word, which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents. ...

The writing system can be defended the same way. The Latin alphabet is the most widespread script in the world, and no one has actually proposed anything more universal. Also, the orthography dispenses with Western European etymological spellings in favor of regularity. Etymology is the study of the origins of words. ...

The syntax is harder to defend. The obligatory use of verbal tense, for example, is seen as an unnecessary complication for many such as Chinese, who speak a language without grammatical tense, and the case and adjectival agreement systems are widely condemned. However, even here there is some flexibility. For example, the European pattern of describing something with esti "to be" plus an adjective is being gradually replaced by a verbal pattern of the East Asian type, so that is it becoming increasingly common to see li sanas for li estas sana "he is well". Grammatical tense is a way languages express the time at which an event described by a sentence occurs. ... In linguistics, declension is a feature of inflected languages: generally, the alteration of a noun to indicate its grammatical role. ... In linguistics, the term grammatical number refers to ways of expressing quantity by inflecting words. ...

Artificiality

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 national European languages, more so than in many competing constructed languages. For example: English quarter, Italian quarto, Interlingua quarto, but Esperanto kvarono (derived regularly from the numeral kvar 'four', as German Viertel is derived from vier, and Russian четвертый (četvertyj) from четыре (četyre)); also English government, French gouvernment, Interlingua governamento, but Esperanto registaro (derived regularly from the verb regi 'to rule', as German Regierung is from regieren, and Russian правительство (praviteljstvo) is from править (pravitj) ). The constructed language Interlingua is an international auxiliary language (IAL) published in 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA). ...

According to these critics, given Esperanto's lack of neutrality as a world language, it should at least aim to be a common European tongue, and therefore its lexicon and spelling system should be a consensus of the European languages. Defenders reply that by 'European', critics actually mean Romance, and that doing so would have resulted in an irregular spelling system, irregular grammar, and bloated vocabulary, which might be more accessible in the initial stages of learning, but which would soon make the language more difficult to learn even for Europeans.

Esperanto has no culture

This criticism is leveled by people who wish to learn a foreign language to gain access to or insight into another culture. Some Esperantists maintain that Esperanto does have an international culture, or interculture, developed over the past century, which includes among other things a significant original literature that provides the Esperanto community with a common background – a distinctive feature of any cultural community. Critics argue such things are superficial and don't add up to a true culture; Esperantists don't have an inherent conception of the world the way, for example, the French or Japanese do. The word culture, from the Latin colo, -ere, with its root meaning to cultivate, generally refers to patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give such activity significance. ... Since Esperanto is the largest planned language, there are over 25,000 books in Esperanto and the largest Esperanto book service at the World Esperanto Association sells over 4,000 books. ...

However, for many Esperantists, this is precisely the point. Esperanto is intended to be an ethnically neutral auxiliary language. The lack of an inherent culture is one of the things that makes Esperanto so much easier to learn and to use than other languages: In an ethnic language like English or Chinese, the student has to learn innumerable arbitrary expressions. It's not enough to learn the grammar and vocabulary; many perfectly grammatical expressions are unacceptable because people simply don't speak that way. In Esperanto, such considerations are much less important. Speakers can say what they'd say in their native tongue, or whatever makes sense at the moment, and Esperantists from other language backgrounds aren't likely to notice the difference. Don Harlow has noted that the difference in language background only becomes apparent when translating into an ethnic language: Novels written by English and Polish authors, for example, are equally easy to read for both English and Polish native speakers. However, an English author's work will translate easily into Polish, while a Polish author's work will prove much more difficult to translate into English. That is, Esperanto can accommodate either language more easily than they can accommodate each other, and this is partially due to the lack of culturally fixed ways of speaking. The Harlow Family Donald Harlow is an active Esperantist and former president of the Esperanto League for North America (ELNA), and also former editor of ELNAs magazine Esperanto USA. He is also author The Esperanto Book, about the Esperanto movement, which is available online. ...

Difficulty in achieving fluency

Key figures 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"). Author Kazimierz Bein, while attending a conference at which it was generally agreed that everyone in the world should learn Esperanto, remarked that the first who ought to learn it were the Esperantists themselves. Julio Baghy (13 January 1891, Szeged – 18 March 1967, Budapest) was a Hungarian actor and one of the leading authors of the Esperanto movement. ... An Esperantist is a person who participates in the diffusion of Esperanto. ... Kazimierz Bein (1872-1959), was an eye-doctor from Poland, who became a prominent Esperanto activist and author, writing a number of books in the language. ...

Defenders recognize that the problem may be one of overmarketing. Esperanto is often presented as "easy to learn", which many students misunderstand as "can be learned without effort". Learning Esperanto is relatively easy, but only compared to learning a new ethnic language. For an English speaker, the core grammar, basic vocabulary, pronunciation, and spelling can be learned in a matter of days. In theory, students now have a vocabulary equivalent to ten times the number of root words they know, due to Esperanto's highly productive word formation. However, fluency requires skills that are not so readily acquired. In spite of its systematic grammar, Esperanto, like any other language, can be learned well only through extensive practice. Many students become disappointed when they realize that the fluency hurdle is much harder to overcome than the basics, and give up. So, defenders say, the problem is not peculiar to Esperanto, but a general problem that any international language, natural or artificial, has to face, and that it has been shown that fluency is easier to achieve in Esperanto than in national languages. The word base of Esperanto was originally defined by Lingvo internacia, published by Zamenhof in 1887. ...

Another camp may accept the issues presented by critics, but believes that Esperanto may still be useful as a research tool to identify the difficulties in speaking a foreign language that are not due to irregular spelling, morphology, or syntax. In fact, it seems that concentrating on these deeper aspects of language learning is what makes Esperanto such a valuable educational tool, preparing students with the skills and confidence they will need to more easily learn other, more irregular, foreign languages later on in life. A foreign language is a language not spoken by the indigenous people of a certain place: for example, English is a foreign language in Japan. ... Interesting experiments have been carried out on so-called propedeutic Esperanto, i. ...

Linguistic diversity

As noted above, some Esperantists feel that if Esperanto were widely used, linguistic diversity could more easily be defended. They believe that the main reason that speakers of smaller languages prefer to raise their children speaking a regional or national language is the fear that their children might not learn it as well as a native speaker later in life, and thus be disadvantaged economically or politically. However, if Esperanto were the medium of wider communication, they believe fewer people would have this fear, because Esperanto is easier to acquire than ethnic languages, and because one doesn't need to be a native speaker in order to speak it well.

Critics counter that Esperanto could simply take over from national languages and continue the destruction of linguistic diversity that is already taking place. The very ease of acquiring Esperanto might even accelerate the process. They point to other simple languages such as Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea which may be having this effect. Tok Pisin (tok means word or speech, pisin means pidgin) is the creole spoken in Papua New Guinea (PNG). ...

There are however those, primarily the anationalists, who see the substitution of the national languages by Esperanto as a desirable goal. Anationalism is a term originating from the community of Esperanto speakers. ...

Special characters

While Esperanto is written in the Latin alphabet, it uses six modified letters (ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, ŭ) not found in other languages or the ISO Latin-1 character set, and these have caused problems with typesetting. For many this is Esperanto's prime fault. Zamenhof purposely created unique letters to have a phonemic script which was not too much like those of existing national languages, but critics have argued that the philosophy of one character – one sound does not justify new characters. The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. ... Ĉ or ĉ (C circumflex) is a consonant in Esperanto orthography, representing a voiceless postalveolar affricate (either palato-alveolar or retroflex), and is equivalent to or in the IPA. Esperanto orthography uses a diacritic for all four of its postalveolar consonants, as do the Latin-based Slavic alphabets. ... Äœ or ĝ is a consonant in the Esperanto alphabet. ... Ä¥ in different fonts (Code2000, Sylfaen, Pragmatica Esperanto Ĥ, or Ä¥, is a consonant in the Esperanto alphabet. ... Ä´ or ĵ is a consonant in the Esperanto alphabet. ... Åœ or ŝ is a consonant in the Esperanto alphabet. ... Ŭ or Å­ is a letter in the Belarusian language, when written in the Łacinka alphabet (based on the Latin alphabet), and is also a letter in the Esperanto alphabet. ... ISO 8859-1, more formally cited as ISO/IEC 8859-1 or less formally as Latin-1, is part 1 of ISO/IEC 8859, a standard character encoding defined by ISO. It encodes what it refers to as Latin alphabet no. ... In human language, a phoneme is a set of phones (speech sounds or sign elements) that are cognitively equivalent. ...

Zamenhof recommended the use of the digraphs "ch", "gh", "hh", "jh", "sh", and "u" when reproducing these letters proves difficult, but in practice the diacritics were often written in by hand after typing a document. With the recent advent of computer fonts and especially Unicode support, however, the problem has largely been resolved. Today digraphs have been relegated to email and chatrooms, with either Zamenhof's system or a more computer-friendly set of digraphs in "x" being used. Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ... A diacritical mark or diacritic, sometimes called an accent mark, is a mark added to a letter to alter a words pronunciation (ie. ... Because of technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ...

Sexism in Esperanto grammar

Esperanto is frequently accused of being inherently sexist, because the generic form of nouns is used for males while a derived form is used for females. For example, doktoro is a doctor (male or unspecified), while doktorino is a female doctor. (The use of -in to form the feminine of nouns is reminiscent of German, as in Maler "painter", Malerin "female painter".) Pronouns are similar. As in English, li "he" may be used generically, whereas ŝi "she" is always female. Also, there are a couple dozen nouns which are inherently masculine unless made feminine, such as patro "father" vs. patrino "mother", and others such as damo "lady" which are inherently feminine. The sign of the headquarters of the National Association Opposed To Woman Suffrage Sexism is commonly considered to be discrimination and/or hatred against people based on their sex rather than their individual merits, but can also refer to any and all systemic differentiations based on the sex of the...

To some critics, this aspect of the language has the implication that masculinity is the default, and that femininity is the exception. The feature is particularly irksome to some English speakers, perhaps because the corresponding suffix -ess is becoming less common in that language. The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ...

Defenders reply that this asymmetric treatment of male and female is not specifically a feature of Esperanto, but a general feature of 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 autorité = "authority" in French, guardia = "policeman" in Italian, and virilidad = "masculinity" in Spanish, which all have feminine gender even when referring to men). 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 Esperantists, "sexist language" is shown to be a matter of cultural assumptions and interpretations by the speakers, not of the language per se. The Romance languages, a major branch of the Indo-European language family, comprise all languages that descended from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. ...

Moreover, the number of inherently masculine words has gradually diminished over the years. It is now acceptable to use the originally masculine doktoro to refer to a female doctor, for example, and doktorino need only be used to emphasize femaleness. Sometimes virdoktoro (literally "man-doctor") is used to emphasize maleness. This is due to social transformation, rather than an inherent bias of the language. As for the pronouns ŝi and li, one can replace them by the neutral tiu ("that one") — which, unlike English "that", can refer to people. There are also proposals for dealing with inherently masculine words such as patro "father", but none of these have gained general acceptance. (See Esperanto gender.) The word base of Esperanto was originally defined by Lingvo internacia, published by Zamenhof in 1887. ...

Esperanto has failed

Esperanto has not lived up to the hopes of its creator, who dreamed of it becoming a universal second language. Many critics say that one's time would be better spent learning English or another natural language that brings significant benefits.

Many Esperantists concede that the language has little chance of ever competing with English. However, many people today learn it for other reasons. For example, many Esperantists have tried learning a natural language for years without success, but find that they can correspond in Esperanto, read its literature, and travel abroad using programs such as Pasporta Servo that cater to Esperanto speakers, and in addition enjoy the fact that many of the people they meet have similarly internationalist views of the world. The Pasporta Servo (Passport Service) is a publication in Esperanto. ...

Others advocate the propaedeutic value of Esperanto, noting that an elementary-school pupil learning Esperanto in the classroom for 15 minutes a day will be able to correspond with penpals abroad by the end of the year, and argue that such a positive experience will make it more likely for the child to go on to learn, and to be successful at, other languages later in life. It's also been repeatedly demonstrated that high-school students who study Esperanto for one year and then go on to three years of a natural language, whether French or Japanese, will speak that language substantially better than students who spend all four years learning it. Thus the improved access to more widely spoken natural languages more than makes up for the time spent learning Esperanto. This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ...

Other planned languages

Several planned languages that emerged in the twentieth century have attempted to address these criticisms. Yet despite numerous attempts, none has approached the number of speakers or the extensive body of literature that Esperanto enjoys. Some of these languages were independent creations, while some, like Ido, which enjoyed a period of popularity in the early 1900s, are modifications of Esperanto. An artificial or constructed language (known colloquially as a conlang among aficionados), is a language whose vocabulary and grammar were specifically devised by an individual or small group, rather than having naturally evolved as part of a culture as with natural languages. ... Since Esperanto is the largest planned language, there are over 25,000 books in Esperanto and the largest Esperanto book service at the World Esperanto Association sells over 4,000 books. ... Ido (pronounced ), a constructed language, was created to become a universal second language for speakers of different linguistic backgrounds, easier to learn than any ethnic language. ... // Events and trends Technology First flight by the Wright brothers, December 17, 1903. ...

The only other planned languages with any significant number of speakers at present are the Romance-based Interlingua and the Esperanto-offspring Ido. The constructed language Interlingua is an international auxiliary language (IAL) published in 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA). ... Ido (pronounced ), a constructed language, was created to become a universal second language for speakers of different linguistic backgrounds, easier to learn than any ethnic language. ...

External links

• Learn Not To Speak Esperanto, a detailed criticism
• Is Esperanto's Vocabulary Bloated?
• Farewell to Auxiliary Languages, critical discussion of the concept of an 'international auxiliary language"