Esperanto is really a cool language. it’s a shame it’s so eurocentric because it’s the most widely spoken conlang and could have had a very strong connection with socialism (and throughout history it often did). I know Toki Pona exists and I love it but it’s more a language of general international communication rather than something formal.
there’s also globasa which is a pretty recent attempt at an international conlang but is making an effort to be less eurocentric
The problem with the auxlang movement is that they are run mainly by people with no project management skills and who have unrealistic prioritization in the language design. Zamenhof had made Esperanto successful due to his williness to collaborate with others on the Esperanto project, the lack of ownership of Esperanto that provides similar advantages to Linux/Unix project, and the restriction on unnecessary revision to the project goals.
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Did you read the post that you are reply to? Esperanto only gain widespread usage due to the unbiases, common ownership, and project management skills of its founder.
As a linguist this somewhat bothers me because this categorization of the language into adjective verbs nouns and etc, is based on a theory about language and it’s not by any mean a certain thing, and to use one thing in place of the other is often part of language, so I think Esperanto has a lot of good intention behind it but have a lot of quirks that probably would prevent it from becoming a first language for any large group of people, in part because any organic use of language would provably mess with all this regularity
Esperanto has suffixes to distinguish the different part of speech that has gramamtical relevance to at least most language families across the world, so I do not see any problems with the use of word class markers. There are also word class markers in natural languages like English <-ness>, <-ly>, and <-ful> and <-r> in Mandarin which does not make word class marker unusual. Also, what do you mean by quirks? Esperanto has a highly schematic orientation that makes it less Euro-centric, especially with the almost lack of gender inflection, that makes it more learnable by native speakers of non-European languages despite the “unnatural” perception by European and European diaspora.
I think that there is an issue with the suffixes created a priori, because those categories are full of fuzzy borders and having hardest rules that categorize them makes it vulnerable to being ruptured and when a big part of the advantage is this consistency it tends to be unsuited for first language, cause languages naturally learned mutate a lot and unpredictably, that is a near certanty, so it is a tricky thing because without it creating roots somewhere is a tall order for it being something of a universal language is complicated. And creating roots is further complicated because of cultural reasons, so I don’t dislike, the idea of Esperanto, or logiban or tokipona, but artificial languages face very rough difficulties and must be considered, the only artificial language that I saw being used historically, was a, if I’m not mistaken, a native south American language, that was exclusively thought as a second language to boys when they would be considered full grown men, and it was used, I believe, exclusively for religous purposes, therefore I would think that is one of the things that lead me to believe that artificial languages are somewhat ineffective for communication, save from an international organization, with some sizable recognition, using it as a resource for communication, I don’t see any way for an artificial languages to gain traction, so I’m kinda meh on the subject, I hope I’m wrong but I think that English is here for a while, likely to be replaced by Mandarin, but I’d like to see a language built wirh people from every continent (African and native south American languages are rarely considered in the creation of such languages) to be a better universal language.
Impressive? Expressive.
