Esperanto, Etc.

I see a few criticisms of esperanto in these comments, that in all honesty don't bear up very well under any scrutiny.

These comments seem to generally be of 2 kinds:

1) variations on "I'm too busy", or "I'll wait till it's more popular". OK, fair enough. That's for you to determine; maybe you'll find time for it later.a

2) the other comments basically boil down to "That's not how it's done in english" , or "It's not what I'm used to". Well guess what, there's 5 or 6 thousand languages in this world, and each one has its own way of doing things. What may seem like the 'natural', 'straight-forward', 'easiest' arrangement to a native anglophone may be equally inside-out, backwards, complicated and arbitrary to a native speaker of, say, korean.

Every gramatical feature is a trade-off, and Zamenhof not only theorised but extensively tested his language project before releasing the basic, proven framework. Over this 8-year testing period, he discovered that many seemingly great ideas didn't work well in practice. For example, eliminating case entirely was one of those ideas -- he found that relying on word order instead, quickly becomes more complex, and arbitrary, and difficult than a case to identify a direct object (especially for people accustomed to a different set of word-order rules).

3) (though this hasn't come up) While by far most proposals to reform or 'improve' esperanto amounted to attempts to make it more 'european'. On the other hand, some find it to european already. After having learned the basics, I myself fell into this camp, until I met some japanese and korean esperantists at the Calgary Winter Olympic Games. My 2 semesters of japanese night-school wasn't a lot of help. Their 12-14 years of english study wasn't much use either. Though none of us had studied esperanto for more than 6 months (part time), we understood each other quite well, and far, far better than in english. Their attitude was "If we don't find esperanto to be 'too european', you're just making excuses". I decided that maybe they had a point.

--http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/02/08/114917.php

An Esperanto Overview

Word Formation in Esperanto (And a general, very readable introduction to Esperanto's grammar as compared with other languages--from "The Global Village").

To Buy Pasporto Servo

Is Esperanto Too European? (Isolating, Agglutinative, or Inflectional?)

Argument on the wiki talk page of Interlingua Vs. Esperanto...

Hodiaŭ, etc. Plena Gramaro.

Esperanto Word Building (Don Harlow).

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