Obviously, this page is critical of Esperanto; Esperantists who aren't
comfortable with criticism of their language will thus read on at
their peril. If you're an Esperantist who's stumbled across this by
mistake and who is looking for some less objective material about the
language, you'd be better off looking at the pro-Esperanto pages
mentioned in the References section. Some devout
Esperantists have been known to be upset by this critique; if you're
among them, you really ought to ask yourself why, and if it really
matters.
Contacting the author
I take this opportunity to express my gratitude to all my
correspondents, including some very polite and friendly Esperantists,
who contacted me in reply to this page with corrections, criticisms
and general comments. I'll gratefully accept this kind of critcism, as
long as it's level-headed and objective; but I will IGNORE flamage and
attempts by annoyed Esperantists to persuade me that IALs in general
or Esperanto in particular are a Good Thing. Perpetrators of
particularly lame flames will be named and shamed; if you can't take
criticism, you aren't allowed to criticise in return.
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.
Myth: Esperanto is naturally euphonious and beautiful, a
masterpiece of constructed language design.
Reality: This is a matter of aesthetics and personal taste, and thus
meaningless; for what it's worth, my personal opinion is that
Esperanto is straitlaced, rather uninteresting, and actually quite
ugly, especially to look at. The very fact that it was intended as an
auxiliary language, rather than a work of art, militates strongly
against it having more than a very few of the features which make the
best constructed languages so fascinating. And as for Esperanto being
a conlang masterpiece, there are hundreds more interesting
conlangs out there.
Myth: Esperanto is very easy to learn, hear, speak and use.
Reality: Unless you are familiar with at least two or three European
languages, Esperanto will clearly contain many unnecessarily
complicated and awkward features. The more European languages you
speak, the easier you will find Esperanto; but the less you will then
actually need it! In any case, the number of people who have learned
Esperanto says nothing about how easy the language is to learn, since
the vast majority of these have learned the language through choice
and conscious effort. Rather, you need to consult those - especially
monoglots from non-European linguistic backgrounds - who have tried
but given up; a lot could be learned from their reasons why. The
remarks in [RHD], especially those concerning the
"eternaj komencantoj", are relevant here.
Myth: The grammar and vocabulary of Esperanto are made up of
elements common to many widely-spoken European languages.
Reality: A barefaced lie; many grammatical
rules, and especially items of vocabulary, are derived from idiosyncracies
common to at most a very few languages. For example, the plural ending
- one of the most important grammatical markers - takes its form not
from something internationally recognisable (such as the -s of
widespread languages like English, French, Spanish and Portuguese),
but the -j from one noun declension of Classical Greek.
Myth: Esperanto can reproduce the idioms of any other language
exactly and without ambiguity.
Reality: No constructed language could ever do this, unless it was
very complicated. Esperanto, in fact, ignores many subtleties
of expression found in the natural languages it purports to be able to
replace.
Myth: Esperanto is a consistently logical language, with a
clearly-defined grammar free from nonobvious idioms, and thus allows
you to express yourself clearly and unambiguously.
Reality: As you will discover later on in this webpage, Esperanto
grammar contains many grammatical usages which are nonobvious,
unstated, inconsistent or illogical. These provide plenty of
opportunities for ambiguity or unnecesarily fine subtleties of
meaning, and there are aspects of the grammar which Esperantists
disagree over.
Myth: Esperanto is internationally neutral, and is the best (some
say the only) candidate for an eventual world-wide auxiliary
language.
Reality: Esperanto is overwhelmingly European in design, content and
aspiration, and has nothing in common with most non-European languages
- such as Arabic and Swahili, two other languages which are widely
used as linguae francae in other parts of the world. It is thus
woefully deficient for world-wide auxiliary use - a role which
English, for all its faults, has been fulfilling perfectly well for
decades.
[DH] has a good account of the history of the more
successful auxlangs. For now, I'll mention that Esperanto first
appeared in 1887 as "Lingvo Internacia de la Doktoro Esperanto",
created by Dr. Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof, an oculist who lived in what
at the time was Tsarist Russian Poland. The pseudonym Esperanto
caught on and has been used as the name of the language ever
since. [I'll be fair here: for all its failings, Esperanto does at
least have a better name than many of its competitors. But a good name
does not by itself a good language make.]
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.
What is it for, anyway?
Some sources, including [TYE 1], claim that Esperanto is "in no way
opposed to the national languages" and is intended for use alongside
them. But others think otherwise and insist that Esperanto should be a
universal second language, with national languages used solely within
the countries in which they are spoken; once you've learnt Esperanto,
you should never need (or even want!) to learn another language ever
again. One correspondent even expressed the opinion that, because we
have Esperanto, we don't need specialist language schools any more.
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.
Language or minority religion?
Here's a somewhat subjective, but nonetheless provocative,
viewpoint.
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".
How many speakers?
The back cover of [TYE] claims "eight million Esperantists", which is
surely an exaggeration; the real figure is impossible to determine
with any accuracy, but is generally believed to be between 50 thousand
and one million. Most of these are in Eastern Europe, where the
language's origins ultimately lie, and Japan and China, where its
principal attraction seems to be that it is not English.
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.]
Why Esperanto needs reforming
Zamenhof wisely never claimed that Esperanto was perfect, and he was
initially keen to receive criticism and suggestions for
improvements. Unfortunately, few people bothered to begin with, and he
later declared that no changes could be made to the language; many
Esperantists consequently like to claim that this proves that
Esperanto was (and still is) perfect and has never needed changes of
any sort at all. Ever since then, the desire to reform Esperanto has
often been regarded as some sort of heresy, and any attempt to fix
even the more obviously broken parts is doomed to failure.
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.
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.
Vowels
The vowels of Esperanto - the /i e a o u/ common to many languages -
are the only part of the sound-system which can be described as
sensibly designed; unfortunately, even this good point is compromised
by an over-reliance on vowel groups and diphthongs. My confidence in [TYE] is not increased by
its claim on the first page that "most national languages have twenty
or more" vowel sounds - in fact, the global average is somewhere
between 5 and 7. Even by the criteria of Esperanto, English has at
most fourteen, and some languages (Arabic and Quechua come to mind)
have as few as three.
Consonants
As is typical of much of Esperanto, the consonant system is clearly a
compromise between various European languages rather than something
sensible, and the spelling system similarly tries to reconcile several
European orthographic traditions. Here's the consonant system laid out
in the traditional manner, using the Esperanto spellings:
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.
One sound, two spellings
Esperanto's orthography is supposed to follow the sensible "phonemic"
principle of "one letter, one sound", but what this amounts to in
practice is that the internationally recognisable Latinate letters X Q
are replaced by the Slavic compound spellings KS/KZ/GZ and
KV. Weirdly, the principle is ignored by the single letters C CH GH,
which represent compound sounds better represented by TS TSH DJH;
Zamenhof's Slavic bias is the obvious explanation. Thus, and contrary
to [TYE 6] ("as a word is spelt, so it is pronounced, and vice
versa"), some words with the same pronunciations can be spelt in two
different ways; for example:
archata "bowed" artshata "appreciative of art"
placpaco "place of peace" platspaco "flat space"
sorchtrumpeto "magic trumpet" sortshtrumpeto "sock of destiny"
A possible reform
My first reaction to all this was, more or less, "yeuch! how
horrible!". It didn't take me long to improve the spelling-system to
get rid of all the accented letters, independently of the very similar
approach in [JBR], incidentally; this reform proceeds
as follows:
There really isn't much point in an accent which is used on
only one letter; why not spell the accented U (which comes from
Belorussian) as W?
There's no need to write the affricates as single letters.
Replace C by TS; you can now spell SH as C and CH as TC.
There's no harm in replacing J with the otherwise unused
Y. This allows JH to lose its accent, and GH can now be more
sanely spelt DJ.
Assuming that HH is really necessary, the unused X (from the
Cyrillic alphabet) can be used for it.
This orthography has the following advantages over Zamenhof's:
It's slightly less ugly!
Even though very few languages use C for SH, it's no more
confusing!
There are no new letters to worry about!
All compound sounds are represented by compound letters!
Regardless of how it's spelt, however, Esperanto's sound-system still
leaves a great deal to be desired; it's no coincidence that most of
the awkward sounds in Esperanto are those represented by the accented
letters, which represent distinctions of sound unknown to many
non-Slavic languages. And have a look at this page with letter frequencies - www.bckelk.uklinux.net/words/etaoin.html - in various languages: which are the least
common letters in Esperanto? The accented letters, C Z and H - the
very letters which represent the most contentious sounds!
How the extra letters mess up the vocabulary
I've read more than once that the extra (accented) consonants are a
Good Idea because they make it easier to compromise between different
forms of certain words in different languages; thus, because "garden"
is jardin in French and giardino in Italian, the
Esperanto is ghardeno. But why not just make it gardeno
(or the German equivalent, garteno) and do away with the GH
altogether? Similarly, "stone" is shtono, a strange blend of
German and English, whereas stono or steno would get rid
of the accent.
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"?
Sounds in combination
Unlike proper languages, Esperanto has no explicit rules specifying
which sounds may actually appear in combinations; appendix 1 uncovers what seem to be
implicit rules. Nor are there any rules which simplify awkward
groups of sounds to ease pronunciation; such rules aren't allowed
because of the necessity to retain complete regularity of
spelling. Esperanto consequently suffers from problems of
pronunciation which no naturally euphonious language would permit:
Consonant clusters often approach unreasonable lengths:
dekstra "right", transskribi "to transcribe",
eksscio "former knowledge" and ekscio "flash
of insight", postscio "hindsight" (with medial STSTS!),
altkreska "tall", pendshnuro "hanging-rope". [TYE
136]'s failure to define "easy to pronounce" doesn't excuse
these; not for nothing does "extra" appear in Japanese as
ekisotura. You can even make up nearly unpronounceable
words like lingvgvido, "language-guide"; this site< - plaza22.mbn.or.jp/~gthmhk/trmnr-e.html - has plenty more such, like malnovajhscienco,
traktdistingo, ekzercmuziko and
vibrnombro.
Several initial clusters are also problematic: scii "to
know" (which [TYE 45] admits is "difficult to pronounce"),
knabo "boy", skvamo "scale".
Groups such as those in ekzisti "to exist", sveni
"to faint", akvo "water" are awkward for people used to
assimilating for voice, such as (oddly) Slavs. kv is
obviously different from gv (e.g. in gvidi "to
guide"), and kz isn't the same as ks in
aksiomo, but why should we have to worry?
It's virtually impossible to pronounce the N's in banko
"bank", panjo "Mummy" and senbarba "beardless" in
the same way, especially if you're talking quickly; so much for
"one letter, one sound".
Tricky vowel clusters are not excluded, either: unuaeco
"priority", soifo "thirst"; while premii "to
reward" differs from premi "to press", and mato
"mat" isn't the same as maato "mate (on board ship)".
Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish and Arabic are among the many languages
which don't allow any more than one consonant at the start of a
syllable, while Hawaiian and Swahili - to name but two - don't permit
any consonants at the end of a syllable. Even Italian, which is more
lenient, is still very careful about which consonant clusters it
allows.
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.
David Peterson pointed out that the position of the stress can
distinguish these, but adding suffixes moves the stress and makes the
distinction much more difficult. It is characteristically sloppy of
Zamenhof's design that such contrasts exist, but are rare enough that
they could have been got rid of altogether with little effort.
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!
Articles are actually pretty rare in the world's languages; to
name but a few, Finnish, Swahili, Japanese, Chinese, and most
Slavic languages all do without. Millidge's dictionary
claims that "the use of the article is the same as in the other
languages", which is complete nonsense since the uses of
articles differ from language to language. How many languages
say the equivalent of la kvar "the four" when telling
the time?
What are "the other cases" referred to in rule 2, how are they
used, and why are they important enough to deserve a mention?
The usual answers ("the genitive is expressed with de",
etc.) betray what seems to have been a nineteenth-century
assumption that classical grammar is a constant of nature,
rather than a fluid and more or less accidental convention;
grammatical case is no more necessary than grammatical
gender. The kazo akuzativo is examined in detail later on; and surely there are better plural
endings than the unsightly and awkward -j? (See the introduction for where this comes from).
No less an authority than Zamenhof himself is on record as
conceding that agreement between the adjective and
noun is unnecessary ("superfluous ballast", in his own
words in 1894), and indeed there's no good reason why you
should have to say grandaj hundoj "big dogs", la
hundoj estas grandaj "the dogs are big", and mi vidas la
grandajn hundojn "I see the big dogs".
Note the oddity that the word for "one" has two
syllables while the rest have just one; and which part of
speech do numbers belong to, exactly?
Why is the pronoun system nothing more than a copy of the
English one, when something else would surely have been more
useful? Why, for example, is there no pronoun meaning "he or
she", and why is gender only differentiated in the third person
singular? (David Peterson refined my original point.)
The verbal system may look straightforward, but the grammar
doesn't mention that you can form no less than 36 compound
tenses with the various tenses of esti "to be" and the
participles. This is far too many, and many of them are likely
to confuse speakers of (for example) many Asian languages,
which manage well enough with something much simpler. And if
subjunctives, future tenses and participles are really
necessary, why are there no "subjunctive participles" like
vidunta? And is it a subjunctive mood, a conditional
tense, or something else?
Dutch and German get along fine without worrying about the
distinction between adjectives and adverbs: what else could
"love me slow and tender" possibly mean?
Most prepositions can actually govern the accusative case,
too; see rule 13. Esperanto is burdened with far too many
prepositions, many of which also do the work of conjunctions
and adverbs, and I've never seen a definitive list of them
all.
I've dealt with this rule in depth above; it has nothing to do
with grammar or syntax!
This rule, which is curiously the same as in Polish, has
nothing to do with grammar or syntax either. The rigidity of
the stress causes some distortions: why should words like
nacio "nation" stress on the I, instead of on the first
A as in every other language which contains the word? And do
long words have any other secondary stresses?
Another rule of grammar which has nothing to do with
grammar! The problems of compounding are dealt with in the Vocabulary section.
This rule is pointless and makes no practical difference to the
language: multiple negatives are common in many languages, for
example "I don't know nothing" in colloquial English.
This rule would be unnecessary if the uses of prepositions had
been better thought through; see the section on the accusative case.
Counterexample: [TYE 176] provides six meanings for de,
and helpfully points out that la amo de Dio "the love of
God" is ambiguous: is it "God's love" or "some entity's love of
God"? Note too malamikoj de la urbo: is this "enemies of
the city" or "enemies from the city"?
Yet another rule which has nothing to do with grammar or
syntax, and it doesn't explain what to do with foreign words
which have sounds not resembling any used in Esperanto. Some
of Zamenhof's less fathomable creations, e.g. ghis
"towards" from French jusque, suggest that you either
guess or change them at random - which rather defeats the whole
point of Esperanto being an "internationally recognisable"
language.
Rule 16 is too trivial to deserve further comment.
All this suggests that the language could make do with just five rules
of grammar, namely numbers 2 through 6, with further simplification:
do you really need all those confusingly similar verbal tense forms,
when temporal adverbs would do just as well? (Cf Welsh rydw i'n
wedi siarad "I am after talking".)
More general comments
Esperanto propaganda and teaching guides place great importance on the
principle of marking a word's part of speech by its ending, even
though it isn't followed consistently; for example, numbers and
prepositions have no consistent endings, while pronouns take the same
terminations as verb infinitives, and the correlatives have a system all of their own.
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: cщ an fir, "the man's
dog".
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?
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").
Esperanto's vocabulary displays nineteenth-century mechanistic
ideology in full flourish. The underlying assumption - inspired by
Esperanto's predecessor Volapьk, 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 Volapьk'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".
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...
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.
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:
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)
or the roots which are distorted in nonobvious ways from their forms
in the source language, among which are:
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
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".
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:
Conversion - adding a grammatical part-of-speech
ending directly.
Compounding - joining two or more roots together.
Derivation - adding one or more affixes before
the grammatical endings.
As with the grammar, you're only told that these methods make new
words, but there are no rules to help you work out what the words are
supposed to mean. This is a surprising omission in a language which
claims to be "logical" and "precise", and it jars with Zamenhof's
remarks at the beginning of this section.
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.
Conversion
A mere change of grammatical ending gives no indication of the number
of derivational processes a word has undergone, nor of their nature;
Ido's sensible "principle of reversibility" fixes this rather
nicely. The following non-obvious results of conversion show what can
happen:
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...".
Compounding
The most glaring defect in the word-building system is the absence of
any rules which explain what happens when you combine roots together.
The dictionaries thus contain many compound words with meanings not
predictable from their components; for example, postvivo is
ambiguous between "survival" and "afterlife", and fruktodona
"fertile" and poshomono "pocket-money" are formed
idiomatically.
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"!
Derivation
You're supposed to stick to the "official" affixes and not make up
your own to remedy defects in the language; yet, as with the
prepositions and conjunctions, nobody seems to have a definitive list
anywhere. For example, [TYE 190-1] gives 10 prefixes and 31 suffixes,
but other sources suggest different numbers.
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.
Affixes you don't need
All of the following affixes are unnecessary and would be better
expressed by separate words.
mis- "wrongly".
fi- and -ach-, two derogatives; but there are no
affixes with the opposite meanings. Why?
eks- "former, ex-".
ek- "sudden or momentary"; this is easily confused with
eks- when applied to roots which begin with
s-. This has a place as a verbal aspect marker, but as
such it would be better as a suffix.
-ing- "holder for one object", which has no
relation to teni "to hold".
re- reproduces the ambiguity of its Latin source, which
means both "again" and "back", creating words with two
different, sometimes almost opposite, meanings:
re-skribi "to reply" or "to rewrite"; re-iri "to
return" or "go again".
Affixes with unnecessarily vague meanings
-ar- creates arb-ar-o for "forest" ("tree-collection"),
which could also mean a line of Lombardy Poplars. Less forgivable is
the misleading word ov-ar-o "collection of eggs", which
pointlessly duplicates the meaning of nesto "nest".
-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.
Affixes of questionable benefit
mal- doesn't mean "badly" or "wrongly", but forms opposites - a
device Esperanto overuses to a ludicrous extent, for which reason it's
probably the most hated affix in the language (certainly by me!). Thus
common words like "small, short, narrow, old, left, bad, different"
have to be mal-granda, mal-longa, mal-largha, mal-juna,
mal-dekstra, mal-bona, mal-sama; and "loud" is the ridiculous
malkvieta. Not only do these words require unnecessary mental
gymnastics, they also gets monotonous if you have to use more than one
or two of them. Even a basic meaning like "to open" is not exempt;
it's mal-fermi, i.e. the opposite of fermi "to close"!!!
As ever, there are unexplained exceptions: "left" and "right" are
opposites (dekstra, mal-dekstra), but "north" and "south"
aren't (norda, suda); why? And David Peterson informs me that
some people like to say trista for "sad" anyway, rather than
the malfelicha you're supposed to use.
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.
Inconsistently used affixes
-il- is the worst offender: an Esperantist kombas
"combs" with a komb-ilo and razas "shaves" with a
raz-ilo, but brosas "brushes" with a broso, not
the entirely logical bros-ilo (which is what, exactly?). It's
also too vague: paf-ilo "gun" could mean anything which shoots,
from a peashooter to a cannon; indeed, as [RHG]
mentions, the official word for "cannon" (paf-il-ego "big
shooting tool") is often rejected in favour of the more precise
kanono.
-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.
Ambiguities
Because the affixes are short and arbitrary, many of them appear as
parts of longer roots and so give rise to words with several possible
meanings. An example for now is sukero, which means both
"sugar" and suk-ero "a drop of juice"; more such words may be
found in Appendix 2.
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.
Things which seem to be affixes but aren't
The four words debato, debeto, debito, debuto may seem to be
related derivations from a stem deb-, but they aren't. Worse,
some affixes mean different things at different times; thus the prefix
eks- "former" has its meaning changed to "out of" (which should
be el) in words such as eksciti "excite",
ekstrakti "extract", ekstrema "extreme" and
eksporto "export".
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".
Affixes which aren't there
The derivative apparatus is deficient in other ways too; one obvious
omission is an affix meaning "the result of an action". Thus the
nearest to "a piece of writing" or "something written" seems to be
somewhere between skribitajho or skribajho, but the
usual meaning for -ajh- doesn't imply this. Another try is
skribito, but this properly means "a person who has been
written", which is nonsense even in Zamenhofese. There's always
skribo, but that could be something else again; although, in
Ido, we can be sure that it's what we're looking for.
Other observations
The absence of any rules governing word-building in Esperanto and of
any guidelines for working out the meanings of the results mean that,
in practice, claims about the "expressive power" of the vocabulary are
really inducements to be clever at the expense of clarity. As the
great Otto Jespersen remarked in [JESP] (I have
reformatted the text slightly, but not change the meaning):
"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.
False friends
In Esperanto you can create false friends to your heart's content, and
in the process destroy any vestiges of "international
recognisability". Here are a few:
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.
[TYE 1] claims that syntax is just word-order; it's actually the set of rules which say what words mean when used in combination according to the rules of the grammar. Definite rules of Esperanto syntax are surprisingly hard to find, which makes a general criticism difficult beyond observations that it typically seems to be very European and thus problematic for non-Europeans. Nowhere, for example, are you told how to form questions and relative clauses, use capital letters and other punctuation, and so on; you're supposed to know that by intuition (or perhaps a classical education?). Instead I will provide a few specific results of Zamenhof's failure to consider this important subject properly.
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".
For further contra-propaganda, here are some other pages which criticise Esperanto.
[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.
Other pages of interest
Don Harlow's Esperanto site has a lot of information about
Esperanto, including a detailed history of the more successful auxlangs.
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.
Books
[TYE] Teach Yourself Esperanto is often recommended as a good
book to learn the language from; some sources claim that it's a sort
of definitive guide, even though as we've seen it conflicts with other
sources in certain details. After three years of searching for a copy,
I finally found one in a local charity shop; in a city in which
self-teaching texts for languages as little-used as Albanian are
routinely on sale in bookshops, this is a remarkable indication of the
lack of demand for Esperanto. The book is roughly the same length as
many other books in the series, with about the same amount of
material, for which reason it's hard to see how Esperanto can be
described as "much easier to learn than any natural language" (back
cover). Upon looking through it, two things struck me in particular:
how plain ugly Esperanto actually is in any quantity, and how
much more besides the 16 rules of grammar you actually need to
know.
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.
