DubstepKazoo's Dumping Ground o' Random Shit

Esperanto

Background

In the late 1800's, there were many different languages coexisting in the city where Polish eye doctor L. Lejzer Z. resided. Except they weren't coexisting, not really: their speakers were more or less isolated from each other. This made our good friend Ludwik realize the need for a common language for international communication. Sure, there was already Volapuk, one designed by a German doctor, and it had amassed a cult following, but Volapuk was frustrating to learn, unintuitive, and most of all, ugly as sin. So ol' Lazarus decided he could do better. He stripped Polish grammar down to its absolute essentials, tried to make the phonology sensible, and colored the vocabulary with influence from other language families, though mostly Romance. Under the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto, he published materials for his new language in many different languages, extolling the utopian ideals he held for a world where everyone could communicate in a common tongue.

Doctor Bloke-What-Hopes surely couldn't have anticipated just how successful his little pet project would be. A few short years later, it had an Academy and enough of a userbase to soundly reject a few reforms he himself attempted to introduce in order to fix some flaws in the language. That's foreshadowing for later.

At any rate, Esperanto's speakers were nothing if not zealous. They made countless pedagogical material for it, translated books, wrote original books, set up national organizations for it, and more. This can be attributed in no small part to the philosophies of its creator, preaching intercultural brotherhood and harmony and laying out visions of a utopian, peaceful world. Laughably unrealistic, to be sure, but who wouldn't want a world like that? I mean, except for the people who relish hurting others and the people willing to elect them to the highest positions of power in the world, but come on. I'm trying to make a point here.

Esperanto grew so much in popularity that in the early 1900's, the League of Nations seriously deliberated adopting it as an international language. The many obvious flaws in its design weren't enough to be a dealbreaker, as every single country voted to approve it... except for France. France didn't see the need for an international language, since that's what French was at the time. Which, you know, way to willfully miss the point. It needed a unanimous vote to pass, so there went Esperanto's ambitions of achieving its Fina Venko.

Despite this setback (and Hitler's later hate-boner), Esperantists continued to remain attached to their language, enthusiastically promoting and using it, to the point that it developed its own unique culture, just like natural languages. Even as other IALs cropped up, some of them with the stated goal of fixing what Esperanto did wrong, Esperantists held fast. The Esperanto community survives and thrives to this day, proving that "perfect" is the enemy of "good enough." Because for all the good things Esperanto does, it's not even a little bit close to perfect. It's deeply flawed. None of the criticisms I'm going to hurl at it are original; they've all been made countless times before by people much more qualified and eloquent than I'll ever be. But even though my takes may be reheated at best, they're still mine, and where else am I going to put them than my own website? Fuck you.

Phonology

Esperanto doesn't have the worst phonemic inventory in the world, but it's certainly not ideal, since just about everybody is going to have to learn at least one new sound in order to speak it intelligibly. The biggest language (in terms of speakers) that already has all the sounds in Esperanto is, surprise surprise, Polish. Zamenhof's native language. We English speakers are lucky: the only sound in the language we can't fudge is /x/, the velar fricative. That's the <ch> in "loch" or "Bach," which I'm willing to bet nobody reading this bothers to try pronouncing authentically. But even more fortunate for English speakers is that /x/ is a fairly rare phoneme in Esperanto in the first place, and the few places it does appear, people are replacing it with /h/ or /k/.

Still, most of the world isn't going to be happy being asked to distinguish /h/ from /x/, or /s/ from /z/, or the <s> in "measure" from the <dg> in "ledger," to list just a few of the distinctions Esperanto makes. Its consonant inventory is bloated, to the point that Ludoviko ran out of letters to spell all these sounds with and had to introduce diacritics in order to ensure each sound could be written with just one letter. That was all well and good for him and his French typewriter at the time, but anyone with an English typewriter? They were as out of luck as those of us with English keyboards are now. Actually, maybe we're a little okay. At least there's simple software we can install that lets us type them if we need to.

One thing Zamenhof didn't think about at all was phonotactics, i.e. rules governing which sounds are allowed to occur where. Polish has a lot of consonant clusters that are difficult for literally everyone else, a fact he very clearly didn't realize. Thanks to that, we have words like "ekzameno." Good luck not turning that z into an s! But that's not as bad as "scii." Yes, those i's are pronounced separately, but don't worry. It gets worse. That c is pronounced like the <ts> in "cats." And Lejzer thinks it's reasonable to expect people to pronounce that right after a /s/ sound. That results in the absolutely god-awful pronunciation of "stsee-ee" for this word, which is the verb "to know." So, something people would be saying fairly often. How is the study of Esperanto supposed to be "mere play" to learners who can't even pronounce it?

Grammar

I suppose I shouldn't roast him too hard, though. It is true that Esperanto is remarkably easier to learn than any natural language, due in no small part to its grammar. Gone are the multiple classes of verb and six endings per tense that you'll find in Romance languages. Gone are the insanely common verbs that are completely irregular because fuck you. Gone are the arbitrary noun genders, where a table might be feminine and a bridge masculine.

In Esperanto, no rule has even a single exception, and you can tell what role a word plays in a sentence by looking at its ending. Nouns always end in -o, with an additional -j and/or -n to mark plurality and/or the accusative case, and adjectives end in -a. Adverbs get -e, and verbs have a few different endings based on tense and mood, though to be clear, that's just one ending per tense. I vidas something just the same as he vidas it. You can look at one form of any verb and immediately know how to use any other form of it you could possibly want to.

But easily the crown jewel of Esperanto grammar is its word formation system. The hardest part of learning any language is the vocabulary. There's no getting around the fact that in order to speak a language proficiently, you need to know thousands of words in it. To ease that burden, Zamenhof reasoned that people could build big words out of little words. The classic example of this is "hospital," which in Esperanto is "malsanulejo." This word is built out of five parts: "mal-," a prefix meaning "opposite;" "san," the root meaning "health;" "-ul-," a suffix meaning "person;" "-ej-," a suffix meaning "place;" and finally, "-o," which is, of course, what marks the word as a noun. So a "malsanulejo" is "a place for people the opposite of healthy." In this way, people can form complicated concepts out of simpler ones. Heck, you can even just change the ending of a word to turn the noun "broso," "a brush," into the verb "brosi," "to brush."

This system was massively popular, and most IALs that sprang up later included something similar to varying degrees. But once you get to about an intermediate level, you start to see the cracks. For example, that "brush" example I just gave looks pretty handy, doesn't it? Then you see the verb "kombi," "to comb," and say, "Ah! I know this one. I can change that to 'kombo' to talk about the comb I just bought!"

Except you can't. The word "kombo" isn't "a comb," but "the act of combing." Why? Because even though the original form of the "bros" root was the noun "broso," the original form of the "komb" root is the verb "kombi." And the basic noun form of verbs is an instance of the action of that verb. To get a comb, you have to apply the "tool" suffix and make it "kombilo." I've seen this referred to as the "broso/kombo problem." What you can do with a root depends heavily on what its original part of speech was, and as far as I'm aware, there's no good resource to look that kind of info up.

Here's another one: Esperanto has suffixes to turn intransitive verbs transitive, and vice versa. If you apply the transitive suffix to a verb that's already transitive, it becomes causative, like "allow/force/encourage someone/something to verb." Apply the intransitive suffix to a verb that's already intransitive, and it denotes the entry into that action, e.g. the difference between "sit" and "sit down." The problem? It's not at all clear what verbs are transitive and intransitive in the first place. You'll see "dormi," "to sleep," and figure, "Well, that's obviously intransitive, so it stands to reason that its opposite, 'veki,' 'to wake,' must also be intransitive because it's a related concept. To talk about how I woke up my roommate, I'll need a suffix." Nope! "Veki" is already transitive. You'll need a suffix to talk about how you woke up of your own accord.

To be clear, verb transitivity is something you just have to know in any language, but Esperanto masks that fact with its suffixes. I understand the desire to appear easy to learn in order to appeal to people who might not be too enthused about learning another language, but that appearance has to come from being actually easy to learn. Esperanto has plenty of aspects to it that make it easy to learn; no need to sugarcoat the stuff that does take honest-to-god effort. The transitivity thing and the kombo/broso thing both sucker-punched me once I felt pretty good about myself for graduating from being a beginner.

The "mal-" prefix is also a bit of a mixed bag, since literally every Romance language and English speaker will look at it and automatically associate it with "bad," when all it really does is create opposites. But even if it took a culturally neutral form, I don't think an "opposite" prefix is wise for word formation. Who's to decide which meaning is the base, and which is expressed using the prefix and therefore subordinate? For example, I'm a lefty, which Esperanto defines in terms of how I'm not a righty: "maldekstrulo." Bonus points for that ungodly cluster of four consonants that hardly anyone is going to have an easy time pronouncing.

Oh, and then there's the fact that the language is kinda sexist? Esperanto nouns that refer to people are considered male by default, and you need a suffix to specify that you're talking about a woman. To Esperantists' credit, there are movements to establish reforms to this, such as treating nouns as gender-neutral by default and introducing a specifically-male suffix, but like... Are you really going to look at "patro" and jump to interpreting it as "parent" instead of "father?" Or "filio" as "offspring" instead of "son?" Or "viro" as "person" instead of "man?"

To wrap up this section on grammar, I'll talk about the thing no commentator can resist mentioning: the accusative. If you were confused by the offhand mention above, here's where I explain it. The "accusative case" in a language is the marking of a word, be it by a suffix or a particle, as the direct object of a sentence. You know, the thing that's getting acted on by a verb, like the roommate you woke up a couple paragraphs ago. What are you doing in your roommate's bedroom? Did you accidentally wake them up because you were setting their hair in their sleep with the comb you bought? Weirdo.

So yeah, Esperanto marks the accusative with a suffix, a decision that never ceases to baffle, since so many natural languages show the direct object through word order, like English. In theory, this allows for more flexible word order, since the direct object can now be moved to different places in the sentence without change of meaning, but in practice, it just results in people forgetting to stick -n onto a noun whose position in the sentence couldn't be interpreted in any other way anyway. Oh, and any adjectives describing that noun, too. Since adjectives have to agree with nouns in case (i.e. accusative or not) and number (i.e. singular or plural). For some reason.

You might argue that this is a skill issue, as speakers of languages that do mark the accusative have an easy time with this, but I counter that studies show that speakers of inflection-heavy languages have an easier time adapting to languages that rely on word order than vice versa. There's a reason Esperanto and basically all of its successors got rid of as much inflection as they could, and Esperanto has no excuse for retaining this wholly unnecessary instance of it that does more harm than good.

The culture

Esperanto has been around for a hot second now, and it's developed a distinct culture thanks to the passion of its speakers. Even right down to inside jokes in the vocabulary, like how "krokodili" is a verb that means "to speak one's native language in a setting where Esperanto is expected." Another inside joke is people's tendency to forget the accusative: in one of the courses I link below, there's a line where a character says, "My stomach hurts like a missing accusative!" There's also congresses for the language held in places all over the world and for different purposes. There's one geared specifically toward Esperantists under thirty. Better get my ass to one of those soon, or I'll miss my chance.

Perhaps the most impressive part of Esperanto culture is the Pasporta Servo, to the point that there are people who learn Esperanto specifically in order to make use of it. The Pasporta Servo is a service by which Esperantists can offer to host traveling Esperantists at their house... entirely for free. It's like AirBnB, but it doesn't cost you a cent. All you need to do is be capable of speaking Esperanto to some extent. Pretty incredible, no? I mean, I've never made use of it myself because I'm young and therefore not allowed to have the kind of money to go traveling in the first place, but still.

Esperanto even has a presence here in Japan. Part of it is because there's a kooky cult that worships Zamenhof (no, seriously), but it's mostly because people who hear about it marvel at how easy it is to learn. Probably because they're either consciously or subconsciously comparing it to English, which is a mandatory subject all the way through high school and infamously horribly taught in this country. Oh, and also, famous author Miyazawa Kenji liked Esperanto. That's probably how a lot of people here learn of its existence.

The headquarters of the Japan Esperanto Institute is located right outside Waseda Station here in Tokyo. I've gone there once, and they have a couple meeting rooms, a small bookstore, and some flyers for Esperanto study groups. I want to stop by again sometime, but they're only open four days a week, and only from 11 to 5. So it's kinda hard to head out there, especially since there's nothing else particularly interesting in the area.

Resources

Esperanto has by far the most learning resources out of any IAL. All the other ones I talk about on this website have their resources centralized enough that I just have to link to one website to cover just about anything, but Esperanto has too many resources to centralize. Here I'll link to a few I particularly like, in no particular order. It's also, like, the only language whose Duolingo course is actually good. Or at least, it was at the time I used it. I've heard that since then, they've removed a lot of what made it good, since if Duolingo does a good job of teaching people a language, they'll eventually stop needing Duolingo, now won't they?