Re: Esperanto as the Language of the EU

~benk writes about the recurring discussion of a "standard language for the EU".

I love this post. For years I've had an unsatisfying crush with Esperanto; I love the idea of it but I never have time to learn it and nobody around me is interested.

Just like I've written about distributed social media and the cycle of reinvention that we keep going through there, this too is a discussion that's been had before. More than a hundred years ago Esperanto was proposed as a global language. For a time around the turn of the century (1800-1900) more than a million people over the world spoke Esperanto.

As ~benk notes Esperanto has failed to have a global appeal, in large because it is so euro-centric in phonetics and grammar. Simply put: the major flaw of Esperanto as a global language is that Europeans have an easier time learning it than many other cultures do. I agree with ~benk's notion that this weakness as a global language can be considered a strength as a regional language.

That said I know some languages even in the EU are very different. Bulgarian uses the Cyrillic alphabet, for example. And I believe that Estonian and Finnish are very different in grammar from the Latin-based languages. I don't really know how Esperanto is to them, but in the choice between the irregular natural languages of English, French, or maybe German, or a constructed regular language like Esperanto... A simpler-to-learn language would win out any day, I assume.

Well. Regardless, I'd like to learn Esperanto. Maybe some day I will.

-- CC0 ew0k, 2021-03-16