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Non-smart smart move
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2026
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I've never looked at Esperanto. Is it at least easy to learn and use?
I have to look up it's history, like who and when thought it's a good idea, and why it didn't work out. Sounds like a fun rabbit hole.
It is ridiculously simple. Honestly, I don't understand why it wasn't chosen as a European language. We could have had an easy-to-learn, inclusive language that avoids grammatical irregularities. it doesn't give an advantage to certain nations or disadvantages to others and as an artificial language it doesn't prefer any culture over another. Just imagine how easy it would be to learn other languages if you already had that foundation. The pronunciation is simple, and even people outside the EU have advocated for it, since it is easy to learn worldwide. I speak German, English, and a little French, Japanese, and Spanish; Esperanto is far easier than any of those languages.
It has the same problem as Lojban - you can only use it to communicate with the sort of people that learn Esperanto.
Had it been chosen as a European language and been adopted by a large population, it would quickly stop being simple.
as long as it's European, of course
Indo-European. That is, 3.4 billion native speakers. And only for the vocabulary and writing system: the grammar is pretty universal.
oh sure, i bet punjabi speakers find esperanto trivial to learn, and the latin script it's written in just feels so familiar to them.
Punjabi speakers will find Esperanto easier than any natural language. It will be harder for them than for, say, a French speaker, but in the absolute it will be easy for both.
Not every Indo-European is going to have a compatible phonetic inventory or vocabulary. It's specifically very limited to Europe, as is grammar.
No the grammar will be easily understood to anyone having a language with an accusative morphosyntactic alignment, that is, by far the most widespread one. The phonetic inventory is quite limited, so perfectly learnable for every culture. For the vocabulary I agree, but it's linked to the most spoken languages of the world, so, not that bad.
If you're Polish
Haven't seen any vocabulary from Mandarin in Esperanto
There are 28 phonemes in Esperanto. 44 in English. 51 in Polish (probably less, in fact, I don't speak Polish maybe someone who does could correct me?).
All ≠ most.
Have you looked at which phonemes Esperanto has? If you look me in the eyes and say an international language needs to have a distinction between [h] (written as "h") and [x] (written as "ĥ"), I can only make a conclusion you're trolling. See also distinctions between:
We only need "th" to become a full fledged abomination.
Also, yes, all is not most. But it is concerning if the "most" conveniently all happen to be languages from the same family, spoken in the same relatively small region.
Esperanto's not perfect, for sure. The existence of /x/ is indeed one of its flaws, but it almost disappeared in modern Esperanto because of that.
For the rest, a language do need some diversity in its phonology or the words would have to be very long and least recognizable. It won't be a problem if you mispronounce most phonemes a little, as there's no correct accent; if you pronounce ankaŭ [ankau] instead of [ankau̯] nobody will care… Again it's not perfect, but perfection doesn't exist and Esperanto works.
The existence of the distinctions I've mentioned is what makes words unrecognisable. In every somewhat widespread language in the world, at least once of those doesn't exist, so to native speakers of that language, there will be at least one pair of words in Esperanto that straight up sound the same, but spell differently and means different things. Do I really need to explain how that's bad for an international language?
It was a good idea for the time it was created, when Europeans were constantly killing eachother all over the place.
Finally, it was forming the EU that got them to stop. So creating a common language kinda felt unnecessary after that.
Do you know if anyone has tried a similar language project that takes the entire globe into account?
There were many, many attempts. Most with a European bias tbh, but not all
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_constructed_languages#Auxiliary_languages
Thankyou vm for the references to go through. Cheers. Fascinating topic for me, who has never learned any language other than English.
Hitler and Stalin. That's why.