Geoff's homepage -> Artificial Languages -> Esperanto criticism
If you want to convince me that I'm wrong in general, you'll have to refute at least half of my points. Claims consisting of just one or two trivial "corrections", as at least one correspondent seems to have believed was sufficient, will be ignored.
Oh, you want my email address. For anti-spam reasons it isn't here, but you can email me from my homepage instead.
To start with, here are rebuttals to some of the myths which Esperanto propagandists like to present as fact. The remainder of this document, using some intelligence and a substantial amount of common sense, goes into considerably more detail.
Esperanto was developed in response to Zamenhof's unpleasant experiences of life, where there was much hatred between Russians, Germans, Poles and Jews. He believed that the hatred existed because the various peoples didn't speak the same languages and couldn't understand each other; he created Esperanto as part of a wider plan to overcome the linguistic barriers and improve cultural understanding, thus reducing or eliminate the potential for conflict.
While his aims were, and still are, laudable, his diagnosis was wrong; language is at most a symptom of cultural antagonism, rather than the actual cause, which is more likely to be a complex mixture of social, racial, religious and historical factors. It is highly doubtful that Esperanto would have prevented the American or Balkan civil wars, or the conflict in Northern Ireland, for example.
Occasionally, one encounters claims that, because Esperanto was originally motivated by peaceful intentions, using it will automatically make one dedicated to bringing about world peace. Similar claims are made all the time about religions, and there's an amusing counterexample: [WIRED] mentions that the US army used to use Esperanto as the language of enemy forces in mock battles.
A correspondent with inside information made the very interesting remark that part of the attraction of Esperanto is the feeling of belonging to a minority religion - or, if you prefer, an organisation which thinks it has the answer to everything. Some Esperantists indeed promote the language with an aggressive quasi-religious zeal, implying that some sort of linguistic revolution is just about to happen and you are morally obliged to take part. Such an attitude is, of course, more likely to put people off than anything else.
On this subject, a correspondent who wishes to remain nameless tells me that "Esperanto's popularity in non-European areas almost always has to do with various religions and cults that advocate some kind of globalism. For example, Spiritualists in Brazil, Baha'i in Iran and elsewhere, and Oomoto in Japan. There's also groups like the Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda (SAT, "World Non-Nationalists Federation"), who see Esperanto as a tool to join the world's proletariat and incite socialist revolution.". The quasi-religious mindset is well exemplified by [PR], a text which has been described as "reeking of L. Ron Zamenhof".
Indeed, aside from on the Internet, I personally have yet to encounter a single speaker of it; and it's a safe bet that in no country do as many as one percent of the population actually use it on a regular basis. Scotland, for example, has merely a handful of Esperanto speakers, the majority of whom are over fifty years old. The language has thus yet to succeed in its aim to be accepted as a global auxiliary, and I doubt it ever will; the vast majority of the world's population regards it with overwhelming indifference.
[Aside: Is there something special about eight million? This is the same number claimed - www.xenu.net/archive/COS_members.html by a certain other minority quasi-religious organsiation - www.xenu.net.]
Yet the language has been criticised ever since it first appeared. Many of its faults are clearly due to its method of creation and the prevailing attitudes of the time, in particular the late nineteenth-century "mechanistic" belief that all human language could be fitted into a fully logical and rational framework - "a sort of voiced Dewey Decimal System", as Mark Rosenfelder succinctly puts it in his analysis of the twentieth century - www.zompist.com/predic.htm.
The grammars of Classical Latin or Ancient Greek have often mistakenly been upheld as models of logic and rationality, and they clearly influenced much of the design of Esperanto, such as the unnecessarily large number of word-classes (Arabic, by contrast, has three). This rather silly attitude is explicitly referenced in some early editions of Teach Yourself Latin; here's a neat summary - www.middlebury.edu/~harris/LatinBackground/LatinandLogic.html - of it.
Moreover, because Zamenhof was a polyglot and not a linguist, Esperanto is not the elegantly designed lingua franca its supporters would have you believe; instead, as the vocabulary in particular bears out, it's a composite of several European languages clumsily mixed together with some of Zamenhof's own fetishes, but with little focus or guiding principles. In parts, such as the ridiculous spelling system, it's radical where it should be conservative; in others, such as the overcomplicated grammar, it rather feebly compromises when it should be bold and radical.
Some of Zamenhof's ideas were good ones to begin with, but one result of his lack of proper linguistic knowledge is that - frustratingly - all of them are compromised or botched in ways which would have been so easy to put right, without exception. It's only fair to award him one or two points for trying, but he should also lose them for making so many silly mistakes in the process.
Undoubtedly, a properly usable international auxiliary language, designed with modern-day linguistic knowledge in mind, would be totally different from Esperanto - assuming one is actually possible, of course.
None of this stops [TYE 3] from presenting a highly questionable argument that, because Esperanto is supposed to sound like Italian, it must be "one of the most beautiful languages on Earth". Any such resemblance, if not imaginary, depends almost entirely on the preference of both languages for words ending in vowels - a preference shared with Finnish, Swahili, Maori, Japanese and Chinese, to name but five.
Zamenhof, however, is guilty of a lazy (and, in what is supposed to be an international langugage, unforgivable) error typical of beginning conlangers (see, for example, see my own first conlang): Esperanto's phoneme inventory, as [JBR] shows, merely consists of the 34 phonemes of his native Polish dialect which are apparent from the spelling. This overlarge sound-system compromises the otherwise sensible decision to represent each phoneme consistently by its own letter; Zamenhof had to create the six extra accented letters shown below. From left to right, they are pronounced like the final consonants in "itch", "edge", "loch", "rouge", "ash" and the W in "wet".
Laying aside my impression that these extra letters are just plain ugly, you have to wonder. Surely Zamenhof would have wanted his language to be as easy to disseminate as possible; but how many printing-presses and keyboards actually feature these letters normally, or did so in 1887? (Come to that, when did you last see an Esperanto typewriter?) And from a beginner's point of view, these "new letters which look like the old ones" can only be confusing, slowing people down while reading and writing. Amusingly, some Esperanto journals still manage to forget the accents, or put them in the worng places [RHD]. And it's interesting that part of the artwork on Radiohead's album OK Computer misses the accent off the final J on a sign saying DANGHERA NAJBAR-AJO ("dangerous neighbourhood")!
The best I can do to represent these extra letters here in HTML, without spattering bitmaps everywhere as some people recommend, is to use Zamenhof's concession that the accents can be represented by a following H, with W in place of the accented U. Some people prefer to indicate all accents with following X's, which is very nearly the least attractive way around a problem which should never have been there in the first place; to prove my point I need only borrow JBR's example, cxirkauxajxojn (in my reformed spelling, tcirkawajoyn). This is a serious handicap; however difficult English may be to spell, it can at least be typed on any unaltered Roman-alphabet keyboard.
Labial Dental Palatal Velar Glottal
Stops p b t d k g
Affricates c (1) ch gh
Fricatives f v s z sh jh hh (2) h
Nasals m n
Liquids l r
Glides w j
A little thought shows that neither system is satisfactory; the table has some surprising gaps (i.e. irregularities), a clear sign that Zamenhof didn't really have much idea of what he was doing. (1) is DZ, a sound which most Slavic orthographies (including Polish) treat as a compound consonant (compare the Esperanto edzi "to marry"), while (2) is the sound of G in Dutch "negen". And if the spelling system was really consistent and logical, JH would be ZH, as in Czech, Serbo-Croat and most Roman transliterations of Russian; CH would be KH, otherwise GH looks distinctly out of place; and HH would be something else - or better, not there at all.
Indeed, the presence of both H and HH is one of the worst features of the consonant system; almost all of the Slavic languages treat them as the same consonant, and only Spanish of the Romance languages has either. There's no reason why an IAL should need these sounds; [TYE 6] even has the cheek to describe HH as very rare and not worth troubling about.
archata "bowed" artshata "appreciative of art" placpaco "place of peace" platspaco "flat space" sorchtrumpeto "magic trumpet" sortshtrumpeto "sock of destiny"
Another supposed advantage of the accented consonants is that they allow some roots to be changed to avoid homonymic clashes with others; thus "post/mail" is poshto to differ from post "after". This advantage is negated by Esperanto's ability to create homonyms in other ways (see Appendix 2); and in this case, there are better words for "after" if you follow the principles of vocabulary-building like you're supposed to - what's wrong with malantaw, the opposite of antaw "before"?
Esperanto, by contrast, allows up to three consonants at the beginnings of syllables and up to two at the ends, with no sign of any restrictions; think of the problems which monoglot speakers of one of the above languages would have with the five-consonant clusters in words like randstreki or transskribi. So much for not placing any particular linguistic group at a disadvantage.
About 75 uninflected words end haphazardly in consonants (detailed at the end of appendix 1); this is a small enough number to suggest that the system could very easily have been made totally consistent.
The strange case of J, W, and the diphthongs which aren't
Diphthongs are groups of two or more vowels pronounced in one
syllable, as in British English "I now toy". Authorities disagree
about whether Esperanto has them; my copy of Millidge's dictionary (in
the definition of diftongo, no less), says no, whereas [TYE 8]
says yes. This is because Zamenhof stated ([DYER],
"General Esperanto phonetics") that the letters J and W are always
consonants, whether before or after vowels, whereas vowels in groups
are always pronounced separately. J and W thus contrast with I and U
next to vowels, an unnecessary and annoying complication in the
pronunciation of the language. Consider the following pairs of words,
in which the first has two separate vowels and the second contains
what is, to all intents and purposes, a diphthong:
Note the comment on the same page of [DYER] that: "It was noted that out of 22 successive numbers of the British Esperantisto, six contained articles on the pronunciation of the aj, oj, uj. This would not have happened if the pronunciation were as easy for the English as claimed." Few people are likely to perceive any difference between pairs of words such as rejri and reiri, or to be able to pronounce frawlo, mejlo and so on according to Zamenhof's instructions without using diphthongs. Even worse, try pronouncing ia and ijo differently!
[Update: The proof of the pudding again! I'm informed that the plena analiza gramatiko de esperanto is 600 pages long - that's about the same size as Thurneysen's Grammar of Old Irish, a classic work on a notoriously complicated language. Apparently it even has an apology, in its foreword, for its length; even my Latin grammar is only 450 pages long. So much for "one sheet of notepaper"!]
The principle, despite its appearances of logic and rigour, is in any case of debatable merit, since numerous otherwise internationally-recognisable words have to be mutilated to make them fit into the language, with unpleasant results. Proper names come off worst; Edimburgo is just about acceptable, but Mario (yuck) for "Mary" is really not on; and nobody would realistically want to refer to the star Alpha Lyrae as Vego, when it's always been called Vega! Even a name like Asia - recognised the world over - has to be mutilated to Azio.
Moreover, Zamenhof was unaware of one of the principal features of all human language: redundancy. Esperanto is sometimes lauded for its succinctness, whereby it can express things more economically than most other languages; however, this in practice equates to a greater density of information, with a correspondingly greater likelihood of misunderstanding as a result of mistakes - especially since much of the grammatical information is carried in the unstressed final syllables which mark the parts of speech. The best examples of this are the pronouns and the very similar verb tense endings, which in a properly designed language would be easier to tell apart.
In any case, the claims of succinctness work both ways: la hundo de la viro takes five words and seven syllables to say what Gaelic and English say in three of each: cù an fir, "the man's dog".
All would be well if, as in Ido, the accusative case was only
obligatory when resolving ambiguities; surely Esperantists don't get
confused with sentences like la pomo mi manghas "I eat the
apple"? Unfortunately, it's also used in several nonobvious and
idiomatic - i.e. unpredictable - ways; [TYE 66] claims that it can be
used in place of any preposition, a rule which is asking for
trouble even if you don't take it to mean that it effectively renders
all prepositions equal in meaning. Thus you get strange constructions
like du futojn alta "two feet high" and jhawdon la 1an de
decembro "Thursday 1 December", all of which could be more clearly
expressed differently. You can even add the suffix to adverbs, a rule
which doesn't appear in the grammar (thus alten "upwards"); yet
many words, including the article, numbers and some correlatives, don't or can't take it at all.
According to one of my correspondents, who seemed very sure of the
point, the accusative case can only replace je; somebody is
fibbing somewhere! The confusion between the accusative case and
je, which is officially blessed in rule 14, gives rise to a
curious ambiguity. A commonly mentioned example of the use of
je is veti je chevaloj "to bet on horses", which can
also be veti chevalojn. So, since veti monon is correct
for "to bet money", veti monon chevalojn is quite reasonably
both "to bet money on horses" and "to bet horses on money"!
Rules 8 and 13 of the grammar mean that en la domon "into the
house" and en la domo "in the house" differ in the meaning of
the preposition, but express this difference by changing the
noun. This distinction does not extend to any other types of
motion; thus el la domo "out of the house"; and if compound
prepositions like de sur "off" (i.e. "from on") are permitted
[TYE 50], what's wrong with al en la domo?
Bizarrely, you need to use the correlatives in comparisons of
equality: mi estas tiel inteligenta kiel vi "I am as
intelligent as you", rather than something analogous to mi estas
pli inteligenta ol vi "I am more intelligent than you", which
would surely be clearer and more obvious.
"... everything you write in the international language will be
clearly understood at once (with a key or without it) by
anyone, who not only had never previously mastered the grammar of the
language, but had never even heard of its existence" (italics mine).
"... anyone learning my language without a text-book (...) will not
imagine that the structure of the language differs in any way from
that of his own native tongue".
Both of these amount to little more than wishful thinking, since
neither remotely approaches the truth; you need look no farther than
the grammar, which quite clearly differs in
structure from just about every language on the planet, to refute the
second. These quotes look particularly laughable in the light of
Esperanto's vocabulary, which despite Zamenhof's efforts, and the
insistence of his followers, constitutes by far the most baffling and
confusing part of the language.
According to [DYER] (penultimate paragraph of
"Adjectival suffixes"), Zamenhof originally attempted to build up
Esperanto's entire vocabulary with less than a thousand roots; later
on, because this number was patently inadequate, it was expanded to
nearly three thousand, but even this turned out to be not enough. A
rather telling consequence of this is that "... there is hardly an
Esperanto translation of length which does not contain some words not
to be found in the official vocabularies" [same source].
The result of all this is that Esperanto's vocabulary reproduces much
of the very same chaos of natural language which it is supposed to
have eliminated. Despite claims like those of [TYE 2] (the
"regularisation" of the vocabulary is "regular and complete"), the
reader will soon discover that the meanings of many Esperanto words
are idiomatic, illogical or inconsistent with others, or even with
languages with which a speaker may be familiar.
In any case, there's a fundamental problem with such a
vocabulary-building system: any potential gain in the reduction of the
memory-load is offset by the necessity of having to work out what the
words are supposed to mean, even without considering all the
exceptions, irregularities and idiosyncracies. A communication on the
auxlang mailing list to a learner a while ago gave it away: "Don't learn the
roots, learn the words". The proof of the pudding, as they say...
Many roots - those favoured by propagandists when giving examples,
strangely enough - are imported more or less without major change,
such as hundo "dog" and vivi "to live". However, many
more roots are unrecognisable for one reason or other, such as those
which retain the same spellings as in the source languages and become
unrecognisable when spoken according to Esperanto's rules; for
example:
or the roots which are distorted in nonobvious ways from their forms
in the source language, among which are:
Investigation reveals that the last two were altered to avoid
confusion with derivations from alta "high" and porti
"to carry"; there are surely better words anyway, since "alto" is not
really an everyday word for most people.
A few roots even undergo both of these Zamenhofian transformations and
become confusing twice over. If you don't know its Latin origins, one
such is kvieta, which neither looks nor sounds like its English
equivalent, "quiet".
The random polyglot origins of the root-stock unavoidably create many
"false friends", i.e. words with the same form but different meanings
in two or more languages. This means that many Esperanto words don't
mean what you might at first think; thus monoglot English speakers
would have trouble recognising the actual meanings of flava,
flata, logo and farti (respectively "yellow",
"flattering", "enticement", "fare"), not to mention the bizarre
contrivance adulto "adultery". Even something as basic as "to
read" is less than obvious; a speaker of English unfamiliar with
Romance languages who encounters lego (the derived noun) would
have to consult several words (including "leg", "legal", "Lego",
"legible", and "legless") before being told that it came originally
came from Latin.
Some meanings are expressed by more than one root: "master" could be
any one of estro, mastro, or majstro; "colour" is
hhromo in hhromotipo but natively farbo or
koloro; and [RHD] mentions that all three of
redakt-, redaktor- and redakci- are "commonly
used" to express "the idea of editing". And a few roots are completely
unnecessary: keno "resinous wood" is perhaps the best example,
especially since it has a much better equivalent rezina ligno,
leaving keno for something much more useful. We may never know
why Zamenhof felt it necessary to distinguish between kiso and
shmaco, both of which mean different sorts of "kiss".
The accusative case
The accusative case is without doubt one of Esperanto's least
necessary features, and thus one of the most heavily criticised. It
seems to exist principally as a concession to classical grammar (and
thus to boost Zamenhof's credibility with nineteenth-century
academics?), but the language would be far better off without it. It's
supposed to free up word-order, which according to apologists is
important for poetry and literature; but surely basic ease of
communication, without having to worry about the finer points of
grammar, matters more? Accusative cases have disappeared from many
languages in the past; even in German, from which Zamenhof took it,
it's used only on masculine singular nouns. And neither Chinese poets
nor Shakespeare had any problems with free word-order, despite not
having access to accusatives.Zamenhof's unnamed part of speech
The ending -aw appears on - to the best of my knowledge - a
mere 21 words, suggesting that Zamenhof once tried to create a new
part of speech of unidentified function but gave up without tidying up
the mess. Many of the words are both conjunctions and prepositions
(malgraw "despite", antaw "before", anstataw
"instead of"), but some are one or the other (aw "or",
cirkaw "around"), a few are bona fide adverbs and should thus
end in -e (baldaw "soon", apenaw "hardly"), and a
couple are neither (adiaw "goodbye", naw "nine").
The correlatives
Not mentioned in the grammar, but vital to the language anyway, are 45
"correlative" words which are formed by joining together one of 5
prefixes to one of 9 terminations; thus i-o "something",
neni-u "nobody", chi-a "all kinds of", ti-el
"thus". This is superficially one of Zamenhof's best ideas, and it
looks clever enough to have persuaded some Esperantists that it's some
sort of an indication of genius; but simple and transparently obvious
phrases like de tiu "that one's", tia ejo "that place",
and so on would be far better than arbitrary words which have nothing
to do with the rest of the language. In any case, Zamenhof as usual
contrived to make a mess of it, turning a potential silk purse into
yet another sow's ear:
Some strange words result from inflecting certain correlatives, such
as iujn, neniejn; and of course, you have to say kiuj
estas ili, with plural correlative, for "who are they?".
Vocabulary
The introduction to Millidge's dictionary contains a passage which
implicitly berates English-speaking Esperantists for not being able to
use the language properly, using the following two quotes from
Zamenhof in Unua Libro de la Lingvo Esperanto to make the
point:The theory
Esperanto's vocabulary displays nineteenth-century mechanistic
ideology in full flourish. The underlying assumption - inspired by
Esperanto's predecessor Volapük, as Zamenhof openly admitted - is that
every word ever spoken in every language can be converted to an
unambiguous and unique combination of "roots", which express basic
meanings, and "affixes", which modify them; and by keeping the number
of roots to a minimum, the memory-load is kept down, and a careful
choice of affixes compensates by adding expressive power to the
system. However, neither Zamenhof nor Volapük's creator appreciated
that meaning - like grammar - is in practice fluid and largely
unpredictable, and unsuitable for shoehorning into such a rigid
system. The English words "silly" and "villain", for example, once
respectively meant "happy" and "farm worker".The roots
[TYE 2] claims rather inaccurately that the roots come from "the most
important languages of Western civilisation"; in fact, working out the
exact origin of any given Esperanto root reveals much about the
essentially arbitrary nature of what is supposed to be a "logical"
language. The sensible thing would have been to choose roots which
would be recognisable to the greatest number of people; however,
Zamenhof's choices often seem to be as good as random. The only
obvious guiding principle seems to have been a desire to take obscure
roots from as many languages as possible, probably to avoid
perceptions or charges of bias.
word meaning source
boato boat English (gains two syllables)
birdo bird English (sounds more like "beard")
soifo thirst French (sounds completely different)
ohmo ohm German surname (the H has never been pronounced)
word meaning source
boji to bark French "aboyer"
lerta clever "alert"?
fulmo lightning "fulminate"! yes, really!
venko victory French "vaincre"
mejlo mile English
pordo door Romance
aldo alto Italian
Making new words
Before you can derive words from any given root, you have to worry
whether the root is inherently nominal (shton-o "stone"),
verbal (vid-i "to see") or adjectival (blank-a "white");
and there are plenty of inconsistencies here to trip you up: for
example, martelo "hammer" is nominal, but shoveli "to
shovel" is verbal. You also have to know if a verbal root is
transitive or intransitive, i.e. whether it takes objects or not when
not otherwise suffixed, since the distinction is unnecessarily
important for the syntax.
Having chosen your root, and reassured yourself of its category, you can make new words from it by a combination of three methods, which I've chosen my own names for since there doesn't seem to be any accepted terminology:
A thorough overhaul of the vocabulary-building principles was carried out in Ido, the most successful of the many reforms of Esperanto; the principles are explained in [DYER], and it's instructive to observe how Ido's vocabulary is so much clearer, more consistent and regular than Esperanto's. (This should not be taken to imply that I advocate Ido as la internaciona linguo, merely that I consider Ido to be a considerable improvement on Esperanto.) Even more thorough in combining precision and clarity with expressive power and logic is Rick Morneau's admirable monograph on Lexical semantics, the rigour of which shows up the inadequacy of Zamenhof's efforts.
Original word Derived word blanka "white" blankas "is white" fundo "bottom" funde "thoroughly" shteli "to steal" shtele "furtively" suno "sun" suna "solar, sunny" (a sanctioned ambiguity) vivi "to live" viva "alive, lively" (another sanctioned ambiguity) hundo "dog" hunde "like a dog? doggy-style?" legi "to read" lega "???"
Consider shtono "stone"; the converted adjective shton-a could mean any of "stony", "made of stone", "made of stones", "like stone", or possibly something else again. And there's no way to work out what the corresponding verb shton-as means, since you don't know if it's derived from the noun ("is a stone"?, with one step of conversion) or adjective (two steps, meaning something like "is stony", "is made of stone", "is like stone"). It could even be "stones", as a punishment for adulto.
And consider the arbitrary and idiomatic adjectives sata "satiated" and flata "flattering". These seem to be shortcuts for the more precise participles satita and flatanta, from the verbs sati "to satiate" and flati "to flatter", yet the adjectives have the same form, whereas one participle is passive and the other active. This is not "regular and complete" by any criteria I recognise.
It's no surprise, then, that an unnamed Esperanto textbook, quoted under "Derivation" in [DYER], recognises the problem and admits that "... it follows that the exact meanings of [words] have to be looked up in the dictionary...".
Strangely, the dictionaries also give many words which aren't built up from Esperantine roots at all; many of these words are Latin or Greek compounds with elements which would be more recognisable than their Esperanto equivalents. "Astronomy" is thus astronomio - a form reasonably obvious to everybody - and not the rather ugly Esperanto compound stelscienco, while mikroskopo "microscope" would provide the useful root mikra- for "small" in place of the nasty malgranda. prognozo is used in [TYE] for "forecast" as in "weather forecast", but some equivalent of "prediction" would be more accurate.
The individual elements of these international words sometimes clash with existing Esperanto roots, making a mockery of the entire system. The Fundamento, one of Esperanto's sacred texts, has this problem: fund- has something to do with bottoms or thoroughness, and ment- is "mint", so what should presumably mean "the Fundamental" actually means "mint of the bottom" or "thorough mint"!
It's not obvious why derivation is always treated as being distinct from compounding, since affixes are elevated to the status of roots by the rule which states that an affix may be used as an independent word when used with the appropriate grammatical ending (for example, ar-o is "collection"). All the books I've read quite clearly make the distinction, however, and I feel obliged to defer to them. Yet the distinction is actually meaningless in practice, and Zamenhof's hybrid system would thus be better replaced by a single set of properly recognisable roots.
Another problem with Esperanto's affix system is that, like the choices of parts of speech and roots, it is based upon an essentially arbitrary set of criteria. It's debatable whether it is possible to choose a universally useful set of affixes on purely objective grounds; Zamenhof's affixes are idiosyncratic and all questionable in one way or another. Moreover, according to Lexical Semantics, a logical system of derivational suffixing is only really possible with verbs; most of Esperanto's affixes, by contrast, are principally nominal.
-uj- "container" really shouldn't be used to make names of countries such as Skot-ujo "Scotland", nor is -ej- "place" justified in words like lern-ejo "school" and pregh-ejo "church". These last two words are literally "learn-place" and "pray-place", which are too general in meaning; they could equally well refer to many other things such as "classroom" and "prayer room" in a school building.
-ajh-, "something made from or possessing the quality of", is possibly the vaguest; it gives rise to idiomatic oddities like akr-ajho "edge" from akra "sharp", ov-ajho "omelette", ter-ajho "soil" from tero "the Earth", korp-ajho "flesh" from korpo "body", and others in [TYE 77-8]. It also creates pairs of words which pretend to have different meanings but don't; thus both kava and kav-ajha are given as "hollow" in my dictionary.
The augmentative -eg- and its opposite -et- reduce many possible degrees of size to just three. Thus the triplet vento, vent-eto, vent-ego "wind, breeze, gale" replaces the entire Beaufort Scale, and arb-eto (from arbo "tree") turns out to be "small tree, shrub", requiring the desparate-looking contrivance arb-et-ajho for "bush". Note also the typically idiomatic derivation rid-eti "to smile" from ridi "to laugh", which is clearly a lame attempt to keep the number of roots down; it would better mean "to chuckle".
eta, derived from the suffix, seems to be a synonym for malgranda "small" - but if it isn't, as many sources imply, why is the distinction necessary? Is mal-eta the same as ega? Can you use -et-eg-a and -eg-et-a to make finer distinctions of size? Together with the vagaries of derivation and conversion, these suffixes provide further scope for ambiguities: if rugh-eta (derived from an adjective) is reasonably "reddish", then shtoneta (derived from a noun) is equally reasonably both "a bit like a stone" (shton-eta) and "like a pebble" (shtonet-a).
And, for a language with supposedly high ideals and no grammatical genders, there's no excuse for the excusively feminine suffix -in-, which requires "woman" to be vir-ino "a female man" (not, strangely, the more neutral homino "female human"); the hypothetical converse, fem-ula for "man", is equally absurd.
-ec- "quality" is necessary to make abstract nouns from nominal roots. Thus homo, hom-eco "man, manliness"; but compare the inconsistent firma, firmo "firm, firmness". blanko, blank-eco probably both mean "whiteness"; a correspondent informs me that blanko is used in phrases such as "the white of the eye", for which something like blankajho would be better.
-an-, -ist- and -ul- all represent various types of people; note the inconsistency with mistiko "mysticism", mistik-ulo "mystic", but katolik-ismo "Catholicism", katoliko "Catholic".
Brendan Linnane points out that the suffix -on-, which is used to form fractions (e.g. ses-ono "a sixth"), is also used on the word for "million", miliono, which is not a fraction; note its similarity in form to "thousandth", which is mil-ono, and in sound miljono, which could be anything.
Further ambiguities also arise when you mix affixes together, since there is no indication of what affects what. The classic example is mal-san-ul-ej-o, ultimately from the root san- "health" with the affixes mal- "opposite", -ul- "person" and -ej- "place". You're supposed to work out that this means "hospital", literally "place for a person the opposite of well"; even with this derivation it could also mean "private hospital room", "epidemic zone", and so on. If instead you parse it as malsan-ulejo, you get something like "sick building syndrome". Likewise, malgrandeta is both the opposite of grandeta "largish" and the diminutive of malgranda "small".
There are at least nine ways of constructing something which looks equivalent to English "different", but probably isn't: alia, malsama, nesama, malsimila, nesimila, neidenta, malidenta, neegala, malegala.
Similarly, many words begin with pre-, which seems to mean "before", however there is no such prefix; the actual Esperanto equivalent is antaw-, which should really have been left as ante-. And a lot of words derived from Latin begin with kon- or its assimilated form kom-, retaining its meaning of "with" for which the Esperanto is actually kun; the unwary reader or listener must therefore wonder if the word is a compound with some form of koni "to know", or perhaps komo "comma".
"When in an Esperanto book one stumbles on the word ghistiamajn and succeeds in making out that it means 'previous' and is a compound of the following elements: ghis [...] 'up to', tiam then, -a adjective ending, -j plural, -n accusative, then one cannot help asking oneself in the face of so much ingenuity if it is really necessary for an auxiliary language to be made up of such utterly arbitrary elements - a question to which the whole of the subsequent history (and of the second part of this book) gives an emphatic answer in the negative."
Why would anyone want to say that for "previous", anyway, when the word-building system allows something like antawa? It isn't pretty, but at least it's reasonably transparent.
Word Meaning What it resembles but doesn't mean fingr-ingo thimble finger ring fos-ilo spade fossil for-esto absence forest ses-ono one sixth season virgul-ino female virgin female comma (from French "virgule")
virgulino has several other possible but incorrect meanings, such as a male gulino (by analogy with virbovo "bull"), or a hermaphrodite gulo. It's actually formed from the adjective virga "unspoiled" - which is also used of, for example, unploughed fields.
Example 1: consider the sentence estas shtelata la hundo de la viro, literally "is stolen the dog by/of/from the man". Not only is the meaning of the preposition de ambiguous in several ways [TYE 176], but it's not obvious whether the first two words mean "is being stolen" or "has been stolen and still is". Thus this innocent-looking sentence can mean at least six completely different things.
Example 2: you can't say both la domo brulas "the house burns" and mi brulas la domon "I burn the house", since the verb is intransitive (i.e. taking no object) in the first sentence and transitive in the second. Instead, since the root brul- is intransitive, you have to make it transitive by adding the suffix -ig-, regardless of the fact that the very presence of an object - marked, moreover, with the mandatory accusative suffix - is doing just the same: mi bruligas la domon. Conversely, to satisfy the Esperantists that by not providing an object you really mean to use a transitive verb intransitively, you have to use the suffix -igh-, and don't mix up your accents! These two suffixes have their uses with adjectival suffixes, viz. blankigas "makes white", blankighas "becomes white", although there's no real reason why the syntax should need them; mi blankas la domo is perfectly intelligible as it is. [TYE 178]'s appeals to "international usage" dictating the explicit difference between transitive and intransitive verbs just aren't convincing; simplicity would be far better here.
Example 3: for no obvious reasons, the syntax of numbers allows the inconsistency of mil bestoj for "a thousand animals" versus miliono da bestoj for "a million animals". This is because Zamenhof never made up his mind whether or not numbers should be nouns, adjectives or something else. (Thanks to Brendan Linnane again for this one.)
Example 4: "mine" as a pronoun looks like an adjective, la mia "the my"; surely it should be a noun like la mio? Arguably, it could also be la mii, with the pronominal ending, or even la miio.
Example 5: "it (the weather) is warm" is mysteriously translated [TYE 62] as estas varme: what's wrong with la vetero estas varma? And why (same page) should the idiomatic estas varme al mi be more usual than mi estas varma for "I am warm"? Since the accusative case can replace al, do estas varma mi and estas varme min mean the same thing? If so, this implies that certain combinations of grammatical category and case are equivalent, which is sure to screw up some other parts of the grammar somehwere. This is what happens when you combine ungrammatical idioms with mechanistic principles.
Example 6: Adverbs formed from participles are an unpredictable part of the grammar: how are you supposed to know that "having finished the work, he went home" is fininte la laboron, li hejmeniris [TYE 173]? This is another example of cleverness taking precedence over clarity; something like li finis la laboron kaj iris al hejmo is much clearer. The strange compound word hejmeniris, by the way, is exactly the sort of unwieldy and obscure compound word which Esperantists seem to think is a Good Idea.
Example 7: According to [TYE 158], and for no good reason, you can't use antaw "before" or post "after" directly before a verb. The constructions you have to use instead are inexplicably different: "I will work before resting" is mi laboros antaw ol ripozi, but "I will rest after working" turns out to be mi ripozos post kiam mi laboros, which suggests Zamenhof couldn't get past the Latin idiom with post quam.
Example 8: Even an innocuous sentence like mi amas la hundojn is ambiguous; it means both "I like dogs" in a general sense and the more specific "I like the dogs".
[JBR] Justin Rye's Learn Not To Speak Esperanto! - www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/index.html, written by a linguistics graduate who knows what he's talking about, is the thoroughly unmissable cannon to this page's peashooter.
[WIRED] Wired An interesting article about constructed languages, which makes the encouraging observation that "Esperanto seems to be on the wane".
The Problem of an International Auxiliary Language and its Solution in Ido by L. H. Dyer, 1923, is a long, rather rambling, but ultimately devastating exposition of the defects of Esperanto, in particular the vocabulary.
James Chandler's Ido page provides further information about Ido, plus another critique of Esperanto and a list of Ido's improvements over Esperanto. Objectivity is invited while reading these.
[JESP] AN INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE (1928), by the late Otto Jespersen, one of the greatest linguists of the 20th century. Largely a description of Jespersen's own IAL Novial; contains information about some of the defects with Esperanto.
Part of an essay - www.alexander.iofm.net/lang17.htm#g - about a reformed English called Lango. The page contains some material about Esperanto and its faults.
"A web geek's guide to artificial languages" also has a page about Esperanto - www.homunculus.com/babel/AEsperanto.html - and some about other IALs. The writer is critical, in a good-humoured way, of all of the languages, and even links to here!
Steve's place v 2.0 - www.steve.gb.com has, amongst other things, a succint rant against Esperanto - www.steve.gb.com/rants/esperanto.html, which quotes both this page and JBR's, and summarises everything quite nicely.
Rick Harrison's Artificial Languages Lab contains some interesting pages, such as a summary of a discussion [RHD], which contains some choice quotes and provocative anecdotal evidence, about the merits or otherwise of Esperanto's vocabulary. Also of note is his set of guidelines for an optimal IAL [RHG]; many of the points are pertinent - in particular the conclusion - and those who consider Esperanto's design to be perfect or optimal should take note.
Bruce Gilson has some pages with debates about auxlangs which cast further doubt on Esperanto's claims to greatness.
Mark Rosenfelder's Language Construction Kit has a short list of some of the irregularites of Esperanto - www.zompist.com/kitespo.html.
Here's an archive of the conlang mailing list which contains a debate about how complicated Esperanto actually is (it's a bit over halfway down). The feeling is that it does indeed seem to be more complicated than many Esperantists would like to admit.
If you want a view from the opposite side of the fence, Ken Caviness's so-called Esperanto FAQ - www.faqs.org/faqs/esperanto/faq/part1/ is actually a rather thinly disguised piece of PR in favour of Esperanto, and one of the original inspirations for this critique. As is typical of a lot of Esperanto apologetics, it goes to unnecessary lengths to justify those features of Esperanto which are beneath contempt and can't avoid occasionally patronizing the reader. Can't anyone who supports Esperanto discuss it without seemingly trying to put people off?
Psychological Reactions to Esperanto (here as translated by William Auld). It seems to say that anyone who claims not to like Esperanto is probably not being honest, rather than actually having good reasons for it.
Rick Morneau has some interesting essays about artificial language design.
The Loom of Language by Frederick Bodmer has a very interesting chapter about artificial languages, going into detail about many earlier projects, and is of course healthily critical of Esperanto.