Esperanto as an international language
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Esperanto was conceived as a language of international communication, more precisely as a universal second language. Since publication, there has been debate over whether it is possible for Esperanto to attain this position, and whether it would be an improvement for international communication if it did.
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Why Esperanto?
In the early years, one of the main arguments Esperantists used was that no ethinic language could ever gain acceptence as the international language of the world, due to the natural opposition of speakers of other ethnic languages. Thus, they argued, the world will have to adopt an ethnically neutral language like Esperanto if it is to ever have an efficient means of international communication.
Since the wide acceptence of English as a medium of international communication in the second half of the 20th century, this argument has been seldom used. Esperantists have instead placed greater emphasis on their other arguments. They emphasise three main points:
Easy to learn
Esperanto was designed to be easier to learn than any ethnic or national language. The morphology is regular (that is, there are no irregular verbs or nouns), the spelling is phonetic (to each letter there there is one sound), and the vocabulary, being based on the Romance and Germanic languages, is recognisable to nearly every educated person. There is in addition a regular and productive system of affixes that is used to form new words, so that learners need only learn a fraction of the number of words they would need for the same level of communication in ethnic languages.
In practice it has been shown that Esperanto is learned much more quickly than ethnic languages when the same amount of effort is invested. Precise figures are hard to give, because it depends on the language background of the learner and which languages it is compared to. However, for a European-language speaker learning either Esperanto or another European language, Esperanto is said to be learned 5 to 10 times as quickly.
Neutrality
Esperantists believe that Esperanto would be a more neutral medium of international communication than English or any other national language. They criticise the current system in which an advantaged group of native speakers don't need to make any effort, while everyone else is required to invest substantial time and money to learn English, something which many people cannot afford. To remedy this bias, Esperantists propose that an international language should accommodate all peoples, so that everyone can come together on a level playing field.
It is often pointed out that Esperanto is not completely neutral, as it is easier for some people to learn than for others. See neutrality below for more on this debate.
Linguistic diversity
The current system of international communication threatens linguistic diversity. Speakers of many minority languages may not their language on to the next generation, prefering instead that their children learn a language of wider communication as their mother tongue. Not only English, but Mandarin, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Malay, Hausa, Swahili, Hindi, Nepali, Russian, and other national languages are replacing minority languages in their areas of influence. On top of this, English is replacing other wide-spread languages like German and French in their positions as languages of diplomacy and science.
Many Esperantists believe that if Esperanto where widely used, linguistic diversity could more easily be defended. With a more level and accessible system of international communication, the pressures involved in reaching fluency might be less. However, it is possible that Esperanto could start replacing other languages as well. See linguistic diversity below for more on this debate.
Common criticisms
Neutrality
As noted above, Esperantists often market Esperanto as an ethnically neutral means of communication. However, it is often accused of being Eurocentric. This is most often noted in regards to the vocabulary, but applies equally to the orthography, phonology, grammar, and semantics, all of which are thoroughly European. The vocabulary, for example, is about two-thirds Romance and one-third Germanic; the syntax is Romance; and the phonology and semantics are Slavic. Critics argue that a truly neutral language would draw its vocabulary from a much wider variety of languages, so as not to give unfair advantage to speakers of any of them. Although a truly representative sampling of the world's thousands of languages would be unworkable, a derivation from, say, the Romance, Semitic, Indic, Bantu, and Chinese languages would strike many as being more fair than the current situation.
There are two common defenses to this: One is to admit that Esperanto is not absolutely neutral in the sense that everyone can learn it with equal effort, but that nevertheless it is fairer than the current system, since everyone makes a step towards common ground, even if the steps are not equally sized.
Critics reply that the steps required vary substantially, and that Esperanto merely substitutes European-language speakers for English speakers as the advantaged group.
Another response is to point out similarities of Esperanto to non-European languages. Esperanto's agglutinative morphology in particular is said to make its grammar closer to many non-Indo-European languages, such as the Turkic and Bantu languages.
Critics reply that Esperanto's affixing morphology is very much like German, only more regular. The main non-Indo-European aspect is that the accusative plural inflection is formed by a sequence of the accusative and plural suffixes, rather than by using a separate portmanteau suffix, but this is a very minor part of what makes up a language. In all other aspects Esperanto is biased towards the European languages.
There is, however, a more substantial defense, at least in terms of the vocabulary and orthography. It is remarkable that, despite Zamenhof having been an ardent supporter of the Russian language and also having had a good knowledge of Hebrew, there is practically no Slavic or Semitic vocabulary in Esperanto. He believed that, while including these languages might help people from the Russian Empire or the Middle East, it would only hinder the accessibility of Esperanto to the rest of the world. The Romance and Germanic languages, on the other hand, were (and are) learned in school all over the world, and so their vocabulary would do the most to make Esperanto as easy as possible to learn for the largest number of people. The same philosophy applies to other languages: While people speaking languages belonging to or influenced by the Bantu, Indic, and Chinese families will have likely been exposed to a Romance or Germanic language at school before coming across Esperanto, the reverse is not true. With a "universal" vocabulary, every learner would recognize only a small portion of Esperanto and find the vast majority alien, making acquisition universally difficult; while with a Romance-Germanic vocabulary, educated people around the world would find the majority of the vocabulary familiar. Zamenhof's primary concern was ease of acquisition rather than theoretical equality.
This approach also leads to the opposite criticism, that Esperanto isn't European enough, or at least not Western European enough. For example, the regular morphology and extensive use of affixes to build vocabulary from a small number of root words may make the language much easier to learn for the non-European, but trips up Europeans who expect the language to be second nature. An example is the word registaro for "government". This is regularly derived from the verb "to rule", and so is easy to learn for non-Europeans, but at first sight is unrecognizable to European-language speakers.
The writing system can be defended the same way. The Latin alphabet is the most widespread script in the world, and no one has actually proposed anything more universal. Also, the orthography dispenses with Western European etymological spellings in favor of regularity, which non-Europeans generally find more important.
The syntax is harder to defend. The obligatory use of verbal tense, for example, is seen as an unnecessary complication for many such as the Chinese who speak a language without grammatical tense, and the case and adjectival agreement systems are widely condemned. However, even here there is some flexibility. For example, the European pattern of describing something with esti ("to be") plus an adjective is being replaced by a verbal pattern of the East Asian type, so that is it becoming increasingly common to see li sanas for li estas sana (he is well).
Artificiality
On the other hand, speakers of European languages often complain that the orthography and endings in Esperanto can be significantly different from their etymological cognates in national European languages, more so than in many competing constructed languages. For example: English quarter, Italian quarto, Interlingua quarto, but Esperanto kvarono (derived regularly from the numeral kvar 'four', as German Viertel is derived from vier, and Russian četvertj from četyre); also English government, French gouvernment, Interlingua governamento, but Esperanto registaro (derived regularly from the verb regi 'to rule', as German Regierung is from regieren, and Russian praviteljstvo is from pravitj).
According to these critics, given Esperanto's lack of neutrality as a world language, it should at least aim to be a common European tongue, and therefore its lexicon and spelling system should be a consensus of the European languages. Defenders reply that by 'European', critics actually mean Romance, and that doing so would have resulted in an irregular spelling system, irregular grammar, and bloated vocabulary, which might be more accessible in the initial stages of learning, but which would soon make the language more difficult to learn even for Europeans.
Esperanto has no culture
This criticism is leveled by people who wish to learn a foreign language to gain access to or insight into another culture. Defenders of Esperanto claim that Esperanto has indeed developed a culture during its more than a century long existence. Thus Esperanto is used nowadays to access an international culture of original as well as translated literature in Esperanto, Esperanto music and Esperanto drama. The Esperanto-community has a certain set of shared background knowledge, which is a distinctive feature of a cultural community. To some extent there are also shared traditions, like the Zamenhof Day, and shared behaviour patterns, like avoiding the usage of one's national language at Esperanto meetings unless there is good reasons for its use.
Critics still argue that these don't add up to what is intended by the word "culture" when talking about the culture of certain ethnic groups. Thus there is no Esperanto clothing or Esperanto cuisine.
A very different defense is that it is precisely the point of Esperanto not to have a culture, since it is supposed to be a neutral auxiliary language. In fact, the lack of a fixed culture is one of the things that makes Esperanto so much easier to learn and to use than natural languages; in an ethnic language like English or Chinese the student has to learn innumerable arbitrary expressions. It's not enough to learn the grammar; many perfectly grammatical expressions are unacceptable because people "just don't say that". In Esperanto, such considerations are much less important. You can say what you'd say in your native tongue, and Esperantists from other language backgrounds aren't likely to notice the difference. Don Harlow has noted that the difference in language only becomes apparent when translating into an ethnic language: Novels written by English and Polish authors, for example, are equally easy to read for both English and Polish speakers. However, the English author's work will translate easily into English, while the Polish author's work will prove much more difficult to translate. That is, Esperanto can accommodate either language more easily than they can accommodate each other, and this is partially due to the lack of a culturally fixed way of speaking.
Critics see a dilemma between these two possible defenses, since if Esperanto does have a culture, as many defenders claim, then the second argument becomes invalid. A common response is that Esperanto culture is an inter-culture, bringing together people from different cultures in a framework, which has some properties of a culture, while being culturally neutral in other aspects.
Difficulty in achieving fluency
Some key persons within the Esperanto movement have lamented how few learners of the language progress to a high level of fluency. Notably, the author Julio Baghy critiqued mediocre Esperantists in his ironic poem "Estas mi Esperantisto" (I am an Esperantist). Also, author Kazimierz Bein, while attending a conference at which it was generally agreed that everyone should learn Esperanto, remarked that the first who ought to learn it were the Esperantists themselves.
Defenders recognize that the problem may be "overmarketing". Esperanto is often presented as "easy to learn," which many students misunderstand as "can be learned without any effort". Learning Esperanto is relatively easy, but only compared to learning a new natural language. For an English speaker the core grammar (fundamento), the basic vocabulary, pronunciation and spelling can be learned in a matter of hours. In theory, the student has now a vocabulary equivalent to 7000 words in English because he can build new words combining the 1000 roots he knows. However, fluent speaking requires skills that are not readily identified and taught. In spite of its systematic grammar, Esperanto, like any other language, can be learned only through lots of practice and memorization. Many students get disappointed when they realize that the last hurdle is much harder to overcome, and give up. So, defenders say, the problem is not peculiar to Esperanto, but a general hurdle that any international language, natural or artificial, has to face; and Esperanto is in fact better than average in this regard.
Defenders of Esperanto may fall into different camps; some may accept the general issues presented by critics, but still believe that Esperanto can be a good research tool, perhaps for identifying the real difficulties in speaking a foreign language which are not due to irregular spelling, morphology, or syntax.
Linguistic diversity
As noted above, many Esperantists claim that if Esperanto were used widely, linguistic diversity could more easily be defended. However, critics argue that Esperanto would equally, or even more rapidly, replace other languages, thus just continuing the destruction of linguistic diversity that is already taking place.
Some defendors of Esperanto would reply that the main threat to linguistic diversity is that speakers of smaller languages prefer to pass on the wide-spread languages to their children because they fear that otherwise they might not learn them very well, and thus be in a disadvantage over other people. However, if Esperanto was widely used as a means of communication between people with different native languages, then less people would have this fear, because Esperanto is easier to learn than other languages, and so one doesn't need to be a native speaker in order to speak it well.
Special characters
While Esperanto is written in the Latin alphabet, it uses six modified letters (ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, ŭ) not found in other languages or the ISO Latin-1 character set, which have caused problems with typesetting. Critics have argued that the philosophy of one character – one sound is not important enough for the new characters, and for many this is Esperanto's prime fault. Zamenhof recommended the use of the digraphs "ch", "gh", "hh", "jh", "sh", and "u" when reproducing the accented letters proves difficult, but in practice the superscripts were often added in by hand after typing a document.
With the recent advent of computer fonts and especially Unicode support, however, the problem has largely been resolved. Today digraphs have been relegated to email and chatrooms, with either Zamenhof's system or a more computer-friendly set of digraphs in "x" being used.
In actuality, the letters "ĝ" and "ŭ" are used in Aleut and Belarusian respectively.
Sexism in Esperanto grammar
Esperanto is accused of being inherently sexist, because the generic form of nouns is the same as the male form and different from the female form. E.g., doktoro = "doctor (male or unspecified sex)", doktorino = "female doctor"; also doktoroj = "doctors (male, mixed male/female, or unspecified sex)", doktorinoj = "female doctors". (This use of -in to form the feminine of nouns is reminiscent of German, e.g. Maler, Malerin = "painter".) Likewise for pronouns: as in English, li ("he") may be generic, whereas ŝi ("she") is always female.
To some critics, this aspect of the language makes the implication that masculinity is some kind of default, and femininity is an exception (or, alternatively, exceptional (sexism works both ways!)). The feature is particularly irksome to some English speakers, since the corresponding suffix -ess is becoming less common in that language.
Defenders reply that this asymmetric treatment of male and female is not a feature of Esperanto, but only a general feature of most languages. In each Romance language, for instance, grammatical genders are assigned to all nouns — even to unsexed objects, or in opposition the biological sex (as autorité = "authority" in French, guardia = "policeman" in Italian, and virilidad = "masculinity" in Spanish, which all have feminine gender). In fact, given the arbitrary assignment of grammatical gender, Romance and German speakers generally do not make the sexist assumptions claimed by the critics. Viewed in this broader context, argue the Esperantists, "sexist language" is shown to be a matter of cultural assumptions and interpretations by the speakers, not of the language per se.
Moreover, since Esperanto does not inflect adjectives for gender (as most of those languages do) it is in fact an "unsexed" (technically, gender-less) language. Indeed, it has become acceptable in Esperanto to use doktoro even to refer to a female doctor, a custom that is compatible with the standard grammar. Thus doktorino only needs to be used to emphasize femaleness; and some have even proposed the use of virdoktoro (literally "male-doctor") when one wants to emphasize maleness. As for the pronouns ŝi and li, one can replace them by the neutral tiu ("that one") — which, unlike English "that", can be used for people, too. The alternative ŝ/li is also used, but it has the same problems as "s/he" in English (except that it is easier to pronounce).
Esperanto has failed
Esperanto has not lived up to the hopes of its creator, who dreamed of it becoming a universal second language. Many critics say that one's time would be better spent learning English or another natural language that brings significant benefits.
Most Esperantists concede that the language has little chance of ever competing with English. However, most people today learn it for other reasons. For example, many Esperantists have tried learning a natural language for years without success, but find that they can correspond in Esperanto, read its literature, and travel abroad using programs such as Pasporta Servo that cater to Esperanto speakers, and in addition enjoy the fact that many of the people they meet have similarly internationalist views of the world.
Others advocate the propedeutic value of Esperanto, noting that a elementary-school pupil learning Esperanto in the classroom for 15 minutes a day will be able to correspond with penpals abroad by the end of the year, and argue that such a positive experience will make it more likely for the child to go on to learn, and to be successful at, other languages later in life. It's also been repeatedly demonstrated that high-school students who study Esperanto for one year and then go on to three years of a natural language, whether French or Japanese, will speak that language substantially better than students who spend all four years learning it. Thus the improved access to more widely spoken natural languages more than makes up for the time spent learning Esperanto.
Other planned languages
Several planned languages that emerged in the twentieth century have attempted to address these criticisms. Yet despite numerous attempts, none has approached the number of speakers or the extensive body of literature that Esperanto enjoys. Some of these languages were independent creations, while some, like Ido, which enjoyed a period of popularity in the early 1900s, are modifications of Esperanto. The only other planned language with any number of speakers at present is the Romance-based Interlingua.