From the article: "By the time Esperanto got out of the gate, another language was already emerging as an international medium: English." Yep. Esperanto is toast as a world interlanguage compared to English. The number of new speakers added to English each year just by natural increase of households in which English is spoken as a home language is, matched for levels of proficiency, comfortably greater than the total worldwide number of speakers of Esperanto. (The same is true, of course, of Modern Standard Chinese (Mandarin), Spanish, and Hindustani.) English is by far the language of choice in "interlanguage" contexts, as for example when a native speaker of Korean travels to Taiwan (I have seen this many times) or when a native speaker of Japanese travels to China (I have seen this too) or even when educated native speakers of various Sinitic languages meet up and some are not proficient in standard Mandarin (I have seen this plenty of times too). The use of English as an interlanguage in India alone (where mandating Hindi as the sole interregional language would be very politically contentious) ensures that English will continue to grow and thrive, even if the United States and Britain somehow disappeared from the world. (I have been watching a lot of films from India recently, as my town is blessed with more than one cinema that show current films from India, and even in a movie set in India with entirely Indian characters, you will hear little snatches of English embedded in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, or Malayalam dialog, and you will always see signs in English in street scenes even of very rural places.)
So, yes, what will the world speak only a century from now, as the article asks? Plenty of other languages, for sure, and I for one am glad I devoted years to learning Chinese and German and other languages, but there will be more and more people speaking English in more and more places as the years go by.
On the other hand, Esperanto is the only constructed language to have got anywhere at all, and is outlasting those smaller languages that are going extinct every few weeks and those natural languages on life support kept around by hobbyists with too much power, like Welsh.
It hasn't become a dominant inter language (yet), but it also hasn't failed, and nothing has come along to change that Esperanto is dramatically less effort to learn to usable levels than any evolved language.
Esperanto is dramatically less effort to learn to usable levels than any evolved language
That is a frequent claim in the Esperantist literature, one I encountered when I studied Esperanto, but it is dramatically untrue. There are very few people who have taken up Esperanto who can communicate well with it even after much effort. That's especially true for people of the majority of the world's native language backgrounds.[1]
By the way, how would you write your whole comment in Esperanto?
By the way, how would you write your whole comment in Esperanto?
I would struggle, because I'm not a fluent Esperantist; it would come out be omething like:
Alian ideon. la Esperanton estas la sola konstruitan lingvon kio havas multaj da parolistoj en multaj loĝoj. Ĝi ekzistas, dum ĉiu semajno aliajn malgrandajn lingvojn mortas, kaj ĝi havas pli vivo ol tiojn denaskajn lingvojn kio vivas de amatoristoj kun tro influo - ekzemple kimra lingvo.
La Esperanton neestas la plej uzata mondlingvon (nuntempe), sed ĝi ne mortas. Nenio ŝanĝis la fakto ke vi povas lerni ĝin, ĝis vi bonparolas, en malpli tempo ol iu denaska lingvo.
--
[I dropped English idioms "on the other hand" - which hand?, "have got anywhere" - languages don't go anywhere, some of the metaphoric stuff about a language being alive and "on life support". If I've written it reasonably well it should carry the same general meaning. Transliterating this comment back to English:
Another idea. Esperanto is the only constructed language which has many speakers in many places. It exists while every week other small languages die, and it has more life than those native languages which live by amateurs with too much influence - for example Welsh.
Esperanto is not the most used world-language (currently), but it is not dead. Nothing changed the fact that you can learn it, until you speak well, in less time than any native language.
]
I could surely learn Dutch to given level of proficiency faster than I could learn Esperanto to the same level of proficiency. And what's really sad about that for Esperanto is that learning Dutch would give me access to more speakers in more places than learning Esperanto does.
That's not a great comparison since Dutch is about as close as a foreign language gets to English. And when you learn it you can only use it in the Netherlands and some former colonies. More speakers yes, but ... More places?
You seemed to be quite confident in your use of the phrase "any native language," so I immediately suggested a counterexample. As the Justin Rye website, already linked above, points out, Esperanto is NASTILY hard to learn for the native speakers of many languages. I by no means accept the statement that Esperanto is easy to learn to a given degree of proficiency unless someone shows me a well conducted study to that effect published outside of Esperantist advocacy publications. (I know for certain that the United States Army investigated using Esperanto as a language for the "aggressor" force in war games, but that practice appears to have been abandoned. Other countries at other times would have had sufficient interest in investigating an easy-to-learn interlanguage that I have to conclude, on the basis of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," that Esperanto is not especially easy to learn for actual real-world use with persons who have other native language backgrounds.)
But why surely? What makes you suggest Dutch would be easier than Esperanto to learn to fluency? Dutch looks as daunting as any other natural language to me, whereas the simplified patterns in Esperanto make it much more attractive. No more (goose->geese, but bed->beds). No more (swim->swam, but jump->jumped). No more (row/row) spelling and pronounciation weirdness. (X/malX instead of X/Y) dramatically reducing vocabulary to say the same thing. Looks much easier than Dutch.
(Albeit not Easy because how easy can it ever be to learn to say everything in another way?)
Other countries at other times would have had sufficient interest in investigating an easy-to-learn interlanguage
If they really had "sufficient" interest, they would have funded some linguists and had an interlanguage designed from scratch, then mandated that it be taught in their schools and solved the problem[1]. Language work requires minimal technology, minimal physical resources, and minimal space, so funding from a government scale budget would be a non-issue ... so why haven't they?
All of the central European governments with multiple neighbour countries speaking different languages, international organizations like the EU, the UN, WTO, ISO, any of these people - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intergovernmental_organ... - which of them had sufficient interest to actually try and solve the problem - in whatever way, picking any of the myriads of constructed languages or having their own designed and agreed upon?
Your suggestion is that they investigated Esperanto and found it too difficult, right? But why haven't they done anything, except be happy that English or French is good enough for them and ha ha sod the entire rest of the world who find English and French difficult to learn to fluency.
[1] I conclude, either the problem of agreeing on a more-simple shared language is unsolvable, or they didn't have "sufficient interest" in solving it.
I have read large parts of this rant, and I started off thinking "wow, he's really ripping into Esperanto, there will be nothing useful left afterwards!". Then I started thinking about it; on the high level his arguments are weak. E.g. the overall theme of his rant seems to boil down to "If Esperanto has flaws, it can't be good", and on the low level, his arguments are weak, he gets right down to "A flaw in Esperanto is that the 1905 published book on it contained a typo". That's someone with a real axe to grind.
I'm not linguist enough to follow very closely, but pages and pages of this are essentially. "Here's what Esperanto did. It's bad because it's not what I'd have done". Look:
The actual forms of these inflections (‐os? ‐inta?) are unconvincing. Worst of all is ‐u, the imperative. Most languages, for obvious reasons, arrange it so that commands can be given via the most basic verbal “stem” available, not a special, uniquely inflected form!
Well I disagree, I like that basic stems and imperatives are clearly different. Now what?
B3: I wouldn't have chosen those sounds.
F1: It uses words people knew!!!!!
F2: I wouldn't have chosen those words!
F3: It's plausible that a hypothetical language could do better.
G2: He wasn't even a real linguist!
G5: I don't like how this looks, therefore it's bad.
M1: Unsurprisingly, Esperanto's phrase structure rules and so on turn out to be hardly distinguishable from the ones Zamenhof grew up with – they're pretty good simple ones, but it's sheer blind luck… - Really? You can't even give him the benefit of the doubt? He spent ten years working on this and the only way he did something you like was blind luck?
On and on, sour grapes and "hypothetically it could be done differently and more to my taste" by the author.
Yes there are some valid criticisms in there, the way "Three twelfths, 32nds and Thirty halves" are written the same, numerically.
But then we come back to... what's the point of the article? "If there are problems it must be completely useless?" or "If I can find no problems then everyone would speak it?" or "it's possible to design a language that nobody would find any flaws with?".
Anyway, let me not whinge forever, since I'm not a fluent Esperantist or a linguist. See instead Claude Piron's response to that deconstruction: http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/why.htm (He being a UN translator working on translating English, Russian, Chinese and Spanish into French, and was fluent in Esperanto).
There are very few people who have taken up Esperanto who can communicate well with it even after much effort. That's especially true for people of the majority of the world's native language backgrounds.
Languages such as Esperanto are no easier for non-Europeans to learn than French or English.
When I observed communication in Esperanto in Eastern Asia, especially among Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Koreans, I made it a point to ask people how much time they had devoted to acquiring the language. [..] Most of these Asians with a rather crippled English had devoted some 2000 hours to learning it; those who used Esperanto had studied it for less than 200 hours. Yet, their level was much superior whatever the criterion (fluency, lack of misunderstandings, spontaneity, nuances, humor, etc.). Obviously, your conclusion is based on erroneous data. (See my research report "Esperanto: l'image et la realite'", Cours et Études de Linguistique contrastive et appliquée No 66, Paris: Institut de Linguistique appliquée et de didactique des langues, University of Paris-8, 1987, and my book Le defi des langues, Paris: L'Harmattan, 1994, e.g. pp. 243-254; a review of this book can be found in Language in Society, 26 (1), 143-147, 1997).
Also, ref. Bjarne Stroustrup's quote 'There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses'.
So, yes, what will the world speak only a century from now, as the article asks? Plenty of other languages, for sure, and I for one am glad I devoted years to learning Chinese and German and other languages, but there will be more and more people speaking English in more and more places as the years go by.