John Rogers

This article from 23 November 2015 was followed up by a 3 December 2015 article by the same author (professor of linguistics Geoffrey Pullum) titled "English and Its Undeserved Good Luck," previously discussed on Hacker News.[1] The author is a renowned and very influential scholar of the English language, co-editor of the most authoritative grammar of the English language, the The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Alas, although Pullum is a very astute scholar of language (linguist), he is not a polyglot (learner of other languages) to any particular degree, and many of his points about the defects of English as a world language are unconvincing to any of us who know many different human languages. I know a variety of languages from several different language families (as disclosed in my Hacker News user profile), and I think the key point is that English is easy enough to learn, useful enough to learn, and geographically widespread enough to challenge the advantages proposed for any other language as a world language, including Chinese (which I speak well enough to have worked as a translator and interpreter and teacher of Chinese).

There is a whole website about why Esperanto never caught on as a world language (focused mostly on its linguistic features) by a writer who has considerably more acquaintance with formal linguistics and with a variety of world languages than the inventor of Esperanto ever had.[2]

[1] original…

Again as an Esperanto-speaker, I can say that my only problem with this document is that it can come across as a bit snarky and mean-spirited, but this is pretty well addressed by the disclaimer http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/#00e

I have heard other Esperantists describe the document as maybe harsher than it needs to be, grouping in the mountains with the mole-hills, but I think most of the things it describes are pretty uncontroversially considered to be flaws with respect to the language's original intent. Most of the speakers I interact with would say, "Yes, but what's your point?" But on the other hand, neither I nor the Esperantists I interact with regularly tend to be the types that think Esperanto still has a viable chance of becoming a true international language: we simply think it's a fun language to learn and speak. So it's possible that more radical Esperantists would disagree with our position there!

You might want to read Justin B. Rye's "Learn Not to Speak Esperanto" for way more detail on all of this: http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/

Edit: also, as to this

> > Reality: Esperanto is overwhelmingly European in design, content and aspiration, and has nothing in common with most non-European languages - such as Arabic and Swahili, two other languages which are widely used as linguae francae in other parts of the world.

> Sounds plausible, but I'll need to verify.

Like, just given the history of Esperanto's construction -- it was built from European languages -- this should be no surprise. How is it going to end up reflecting non-European languages, which vary heavily and include all sorts of features that are entirely absent in European languages, when it was built exclusively from European languages? I mean I suppose notionally it could happen, but it would be very surprising.

You can look at the whole rest of the page I linked to for ways in which Esperanto is irregular and parochial.

For example:

http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/v.html

There's a whole word class (words ending in AŬ) which is essentially a "Wastebasket Taxon" for his vocabulary: There is no regularity to what ended up there, merely arbitrary choice. That's acceptable in a natural language, but Esperanto is Modern and Scientific and Regular As Oat Bran, right?

> In China, for example, Esperanto was used to introduce western languages.

Really? Do you have any evidence for this? I follow a blog which frequently discusses such things (language use in China) and it's never been mentioned:

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/

Orthography influences pronunciation. In time people will start pronouncing those words as the orthography suggests rather than deducing it from the context.

is there any evidence for that?

anecdotal evidence in english for example suggests just the opposite: light -> lite, etc

however learning a language as a child growing up, vs as a second language later are quite different, and the dynamics that affect language change are hence very different too.

http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/m.html explains how esperanto is unlikely to change, and also why that would be a good thing.

back to your argument, i don't think the words with different pronunciation would be lost, but certainly the language would be harder to learn.

See also Justin B Rye’s more in-depth criticism of Star Trek, from a slightly different perspective: http://jbr.me.uk/trek/0.html

> My basic theme is the cracks in Star Trek's foundations. … Yes, television is a low‐IQ medium; it's easier to rely on action and special effects than on clever plots. But that needn't stop them making the background plausible.

Of course, Stross’s article goes some way towards explaining why these foundations have so many cracks in the first place.