Esperanto or English

Learn NOT to speak Esperanto: A critic Englishman’s criterion

• Posted by Dr.Esperanto on January 25th, 2007 filed in English

I found this personal website while surfing on the Net, looking for free resources for Esperanto students and learners.

I think it’s time to show a position more critic towards the adoption of Esperanto as International language. If you are an innocent lover of Esperanto, and you have a weak heart, then you shouldn’t visit it…

It is British Justin B Rye’s site Espe-ranto, and there you can find assertions like the following:

Esperanto was invented by an oculist from Bialystok, Dr Ludwig L Zamenhof (aka “Doctor Hopeful”, hence the name) in 1887. Even its proponents estimate there to be barely a million Esperanto speakers in the world (largely Central/Eastern Europe); cf Albanian with almost five million, Mandarin Chinese with 1000 million, and English with (depending how you count) 500 to 1500 million. Even Klingon appears to be outselling Esperanto round here.

Most people I know despise Esperanto, but largely for daft reasons - “Everyone speaks English nowadays anyway”, “It sounds a bit foreign”, “It has no cultural identity of its own”, etc. I, on the other hand, dislike it for being:

* Just good enough to inspire anti-revisionist fanaticism!
* Just bad enough to strike the general public as risible!
* Easily improvable enough to inspire constant half-baked “reforms” whose inventors argue amongst themselves!

So the result of Zamenhof’s labours is that it’s inconceivable that any artificial “Interlang”, however good, could succeed.

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