Esperanto is not my favourite artificial language (2002)

http://miresperanto.com/konkurentoj/not_my_favourite.htm

by adamrezich • 4 years ago

80 97 4 years ago

PaulHoule2• 4 years ago

Personally I like Interlingua which is basically a cleaned-up latin. If you've gotten a good dose of exposure to Romance languages you might be able to read it already:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua#Samples

Rendello• 4 years ago

I find Lingua Franca Nova very readable (I speak French decently as a second language), plus it has a very nice flag!

https://lfn.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca_nova

sshine3• 4 years ago

Both Interlingua and Ido are improvements over Esperanto.

But as it is with any language, programming language, or ecosystem in general: There is strength in numbers. Esperanto is great because it's easy to learn (Europeans have an advantage, ok) and it's the most popular constructed language, meaning there are good resources and actual people (few, ok) to talk to.

adamrezich2• 4 years ago

what's the general feeling on Lojban these days? used to know a guy who was a unix command line wizard and lojban enthusiast

vkou• 4 years ago

There's strength in numbers, as the author points out, if your goal is to convince a few billion people to speak the language, it doesn't matter much if you're starting with 5,000 speakers, or 5,000,000.

If your goal is to hang out with other language geeks, the latter one sounds preferable, but at that point, you may as well be learning Quenya or Klingon.

nmz8• 4 years ago

Interlingua isn't an improvement over esperanto, Interlingua is what esperanto tried to be and actually succeeds in it. Esperanto tried to be auxiliary and fails at it. instead of becoming an international language it becomes another language to learn. while interlingua is a language you already know but have never learned. you just have to learn to speak.

sdsd• 4 years ago

Personally I like Interlingua which is basically a cleaned-up latin.

I on the other hand like it messy and stick with good old fashioned Latin (as an added bonus, the language of my ancient and noble church). Et numquam mutabo, irrumo Interlinguam!

int_19h3• 4 years ago

Church Latin is quite different from Classical Latin, though - and surely only the latter truly counts as "old fashioned"? ~

stavros• 4 years ago

Wow, I can basically understand every word. It must be even easier for speakers of a more Romantic language (French, Spanish, Romanian, etc).

inawarminister2• 4 years ago

Yeah, I've been needling people in Discord servers by writing up Interlingua and most of the time most people are able to read it and respond back in English or Romance languages

Si solmente nos ha un sorta de interlingua traducentes del linguas major, assi le personas pote scriber in interlingua sin que non necessariamente apprender lo.

Koshkin• 4 years ago

Looks (too) close to Spanish. (Also, I’ve been under impression for a while now that Spanish is the closest thing to a “modernized” version of Latin that we already have.)

billfruit• 4 years ago

There is also another Interlingua which is also called as Latina-Sine-Flexione.

Sniffnoy3• 4 years ago

See also, Justin Rye's "Learn Not to Speak Esperanto": http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/

dang2• 4 years ago

We changed the URL from https://web.archive.org/web/20021210061212/http://www.cix.co... to what appears to be the article's canonical location (since the page says it's the author's website).

It's fine to post archive.org links if there's really no other way, but please search first. I found this one by simply googling the title.

adamrezich2• 4 years ago

when I initially made this submission 41 days ago the un-archived page looked like this: https://web.archive.org/web/20220212091844/http://www.cix.co...

but now that I've resubmitted it from the Second Chance Pool, you're right, it does seem to be back up. I had assumed the page had been taken down permanently.

dang2• 4 years ago

The URL that works is not on that domain but http://miresperanto.com/konkurentoj/not_my_favourite.htm

It was a good submission in any case!

alexambarch2• 4 years ago

If you want to pick up a new language purely for fun, I wholeheartedly recommend toki pona[1]. Its small vocabulary (<200 words) and simple grammar force you to break down complex thoughts into simple ideas. This feels limiting at first, but because there isn't a prescribed way to express certain ideas, it can provide an interesting look at how you see the world compared to others.

As a quick example, there is no word for "child" in toki pona, many speakers say "jan lili" (small person), while others choose to say "jan sin" (new person).

It's shockingly easy to learn and one can become pretty proficient in very little time. There's a great community to learn from on Discord[2], along with plenty of great online resources like /dev/urandom's toki pona page[3].

[1] https://tokipona.org [2]: https://discord.gg/nbgXCC6 [3]: https://devurandom.xyz/tokipona/

nmz8• 4 years ago

I don't like toki pona. if you're going to have 200 words, why make them long or random? hell, you could have a consonant and a vowel or 2 and you'd have have all of your words and now they could easily be composable together. votgil[1] is basically this but with a single vowel, I haven't dived too deep but it gets close to what it should be. There's also the fact that if you're going to go the toki pona way, you need to go even deeper into the fundamentals of life in order to achieve the right composability. (Think math but for objects). Blyss symbolics also seems to be a better option. Nevertheless it was fun to learn toki pona. and I probably would not have heard of interlingua,blyss, votgil, lojban without it.

[1] http://www.ostracodfiles.com/votgil/main.html

gerdesj• 4 years ago

A language should be complicated but only complicate enough to convey the concept in mind.

A 200 word limit will render a language too shallow to even discuss the concept of shallow.

Assertion: no proof. [soz, lol etc]

jazzyjackson• 4 years ago

why make them long or random?

To decrease their similarity, make it more difficult to confuse/conflate one word with another.

anon4002324• 4 years ago

Vötgil may also be written using the non-roman alphabet. Every character is a column of 3 cells. Each cell may be white, light gray, dark gray, or black.

Weird and delightful.

Except when drawn by hand with a pencil or pen ... seems like it would inspire a squinty guess-a-rune swearfest.

Is are these triple dots of grayscale unique to Vötgil? Inspired by another alphabet?

leke4• 4 years ago

I like the idea of a limited vocabulary and word building from there, but I think TP is way too extreme. Randall Munroe wrote a book called "Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words". In the back of the book, he lists the 1000 words he used to write it. Something like that would be suitable IMHO.

poulpy1232• 4 years ago

But a child is neither a small person nor a new person...

kangalioo• 4 years ago

Child is used in many contexts, and not all of them are covered by "small person" or "new person", true. But I think the point is that you can come up with a precise alternative term for"child" in most contexts.

anon4002324• 4 years ago

Myth: Esperanto is internationally neutral,

Somewhat. It is a matter of degree, relative to what came before.

and is the best (some say the only) candidate for an eventual world-wide auxiliary language.

I'm not in a position to say what is best for such a purpose.

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.

It is thus woefully deficient for world-wide auxiliary use - ...

This does not follow. What are some convincing supporting arguments?

... a role which English, for all its faults, has been fulfilling perfectly well for decades.

Perfect? This kind of reasoning is laughable.

msla• 4 years ago

English is the IAL as far as air traffic control is concerned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_English

Aviation English is the de facto international language of civil aviation. With the expansion of air travel in the 20th century, there were safety concerns about the ability of pilots and air traffic controllers to communicate. In 1951, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) recommended in "ICAO Annex 10 ICAO (Vol I, 5.2.1.1.2) to the International Chicago Convention" that English be universally used for "international aeronautical radiotelephony communications."[1] Despite being a recommendation only, ICAO aviation English was widely accepted.

monocasa2• 4 years ago

To be fair, the greatest aviation disaster of all time was caused by a mutual misunderstanding from English's complexity and diversity, causing two 747s to believe they both had right of way on an air strip and then they crashed into each other.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster

TulliusCicero2• 4 years ago

Perfect? This kind of reasoning is laughable.

That's not what "perfectly well" means. It doesn't mean perfect, it means doing an acceptable job. Honestly you could just remove the adverb "perfectly" and the meaning of the sentence there doesn't really change.

anon4002324• 4 years ago

Hard disagree. I haven't found any resources online to support your claim. I found several that support mine.

Also, contrast "perfectly well" with "well enough".

I'm curious why you see "perfect" as being demoted to "acceptable" in this phrase? Source?

Sniffnoy3• 4 years ago

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.

anon4002324• 4 years ago

I don't see why an auxiliary language needs to reflect all languages. How could it?

Are you suggesting that an auxiliary language should have elements from as many languages as possible? That such a "balanced" or "blended" approach is better b/c it allows people from more linguistic traditions to feel a little more comfortable?

Maybe a little, but such complexity would sacrifice learnability.

English has been adopted as a common lingua franca though very different from Arabic and Swahili. The driving factors have more to do with geopolitics and economic power than linguistics or conceptual familiarity.

munk-a3• 4 years ago

I think the clear winner of functionality, form and easy of finding fellow speakers definitely goes to Ithkuil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil

Which, slightly less sarcastically, is probably a great runic language for us to start using for posterity on long lived markers (like at radioactive waste sites) since any Ithkuil manual or reference is so incredibly dense that it's rot rate can probably be measured on the scale of centuries.

gamegoblin2• 4 years ago

Wouldn't information density be a bad thing for such uses? If one part of the rune is damaged, you lose a ton of information. Contrast with e.g. Latin, Greek, Sumerian, etc. in which inscriptions are heavily damaged, but the meaning is still deducible.

Consider this fragmented sentence:

    T___reside_t_of__he_Unit___tates__s_Joe_B__en

A sufficiently determined future archaeologist will be able to figure out what it originally said with some degree of accuracy. The lack of density is essentially functioning as parity bits.

munk-a3• 4 years ago

If you think information preservation is important enough to warrant repetition wouldn't it be more efficient to repeat the few highly significant characters several times rather than hope that the deterioration of characters happens to allow significance to still be gleaned? If the sentiment takes 1/6th of the characters to express you could just replicate it six times which would probably have a better chance of surviving wear than a single sentiment written once.

Also - we, living humans, are very good at context based inference due to our high familiarity with the language - but someone who didn't know that "President" was a political position or had never heard of Joe Biden or the US would probably struggle to piece together even what that sentence was trying to convey. "They reside at of the Unit Potates. S'Cuppa Joe By Den"

elihu• 4 years ago

As a random tangent, looking at that wikipedia page sent me wandering across this example of english text as boustrophedon, and it made me wonder if it might actually be less visially/mentally taxing to read a book typeset that way, since you don't have to keep making big jumps from one side of the page to the other where you might lose your place:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon#Reverse_boustrop...

martinrue• 4 years ago

The article is well-written and makes some good arguments about things that could be better, but like all languages (including conlangs), they're never going to be perfect and they're always going to have biases and rough bits.

I started studying Esperanto 4 years ago and it has become a fluent second language for me at this point. I now almost have more friends who speak the language than don't. While the language could be improved (by fixing word order and dropping the accusative, among other things mentioned here), it's still clear to me that Esperanto is a very easy language to learn. My comparative experience with Spanish has been much harder going.

Thanks to Esperanto I've spent time living abroad with Esperanto-speaking friends from different countries, travelled to local and international hangouts, and met some of the most open-minded and lovely people.

Outside of the hobbyist and academic contexts, there are a surprising number of people who actively use Esperanto (as well as create things: books, music, poetry, apps) and a cool international community to explore.

Just wanted to add a positive take.

P.S. There are a few articles on my blog about my own personal experience with the language and some projects I've worked on, in case anyone's curious: https://martinrue.com/articles

F3nd02• 4 years ago

Another reason no language is going to be perfect is that people will disagree on what constitutes perfection. For example, I have always found the flexible word order and the accusative to be a very beautiful trait of Esperanto, and would consider it a downgrade if they were removed from the language. :-)

yieldcrv• 4 years ago

Pretty telling that they felt the need to make such a long prologue about why not to be offended

Is the Esperanto community better now?

gxonatano2• 4 years ago

I think it's more telling about the rant and the ranter than the Esperanto community. Although the Esperanto community is pretty used to non-Esperantists or Esperanto beginners denouncing the language without trying to understand it first, and so there are going to be objections to a rant like this, for sure. See my commment above.

mdorazio• 4 years ago

For those interested in languages... After studying Chinese (Mandarin), Esperanto has always struck me as being not all that great for a constructed language. Chinese is somewhat remarkable in that if you ignore the logographic writing system and tone-based pronunciation, the grammar is remarkably simple and clear. No grammatical gender, no conjugation, particles instead of prefixes/suffixes for basically everything important - you can pick up the basic rules in a couple days. Interlingua is (by design) much closer to this simplicity in a Western-based language.

Some Chinese examples for fun (hoping HN supports Unicode)...

To make something plural, you just add 们. I/me is 我, so we/us is 我们. He/him is 他, so they/them is 他们. No need for separate base words - learn the normal nouns/pronouns and one particle and you're done.

Same concept for possessive, you just add 的. Using the above, my is 我的. His is 他的. Their is 他们的. Easy.

Want past tense? Don't mess with the base words; again just add a particle, in this case 了. Go is 去 so went is 去了. Eat is 吃 so ate is 吃了. Easy. Learn the verb once and it never changes.

Forms of "to be" are similarly simple - the base words again don't change, you just add the "to be" word you want and get on with your life. Want to say "I am American"? America = 美国 and person is 人, so American is literally "America person" 美国人. Am for non-adjectives is 是. "I am American" = 我是美国人. "We are American" = 我们是美国人. Easy. Compare this to something like Italian, where "I am American" = Sono americano, but "We are American" = Noi siamo americani. Absurd in comparison.

wingerlang• 4 years ago

Similar to Thai, a lot of particles.

satvikpendem• 4 years ago

Composition over inheritance, not only useful in CS but also in linguistics. It makes sense not because both use languages but because both manipulate non-physical abstraction and thus come up with similar paradigms.

Composition is akin to agglutinized languages where there is a base and affixes are added to convey concepts like subject, object, plurality etc, such as Chinese or Thai.

Inheritance is akin to fusional languages, like Latin, where each word is a root and changes (or declines) based on the aforementioned concepts by for example changing the word itself.

frankus• 4 years ago

I've always thought that English is like the PHP* of natural languages: ubiquitous, borrows from every other language, and wildly inconsistent.

*I cut my teeth on PHP3 and haven't used it in over a decade, and I hear it's gotten a lot better.

cageface• 4 years ago

Vietnamese is similar. Aside from the pronunciation it’s a fairly easy language to learn.

thrtythreeforty2• 4 years ago

My Achilles heel for learning Chinese is typing and reading the characters, and I suspect they are two sides of the same coin - if I had to make the characters I'd be much better at memorizing them. All the learn-Chinese apps appear to gloss over this by letting you drag and drop the letters when writing.

How do you type Simplified Chinese on a phone? On a Linux/Mac desktop? I know it has something to do with an IME but this is one area of i18n that has never been explained to me.

dafelst• 4 years ago

There are a few input methods, but as a native English speaker and complete novice, I found that pinyin input was the easiest for me. Basically you type the pinyin and you get suggestions for characters. Super easy if you know the pronunciation.

haneul2• 4 years ago

Imo Skritter is the best iOS app for this.

vore4• 4 years ago

There's a lot of complexity to Mandarin grammar and syntax under the surface though.

1. A rather common grammatical gotcha in everyday Mandarin is what is the grammatical function of 把 and when do you use it? Native speakers are able to easily tell when it's correctly and incorrectly used, but for learners it's completely inscrutable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C7%8E_construction

2. Syntax is constrained by prosody, which is also extremely unintuitive to Mandarin learners. For instance, you can say 我在走路 ("I am walking [the road]") but 我在走 ("I am walking") sounds syntactically incomplete, even though it has all the semantics of 我在走路 and you have to insert the meaningless 路 for the prosody to sound correct (you would say "我在走路" even if you weren't walking on a road at all!).

3. 了 is not a past tense marker at all, you can also use it in certain non-past tense constructions, e.g. 他要吃了吗 for "Is he going to eat?" and you must omit it in certain past tense constructions, e.g. 我还没去过北京 for "I haven't been to Beijing yet."

4. 们 is not always a pluralizer: sometimes it is e.g. 同学 (classmate) -> 同学们 (classmates) is fine, but 牛 (cow) -> 牛们 (cows) sounds a little weird. 们 is much more similar in function to the Japanese 達 and means something more like "and company", e.g. you could say 李先生们 to mean "Mr. Li and company" and definitely not "Mr. Lis". In fact, most of the time, plurals in Mandarin are actually completely implicit and you have to figure it out from context!

haneul2• 4 years ago

My understanding of Mandarin is not strong, so these questions may sound terribly silly:

Is “我还没去过北京” considered past tense? It’s something that hasn’t been done, so I’m confused as to how that could be in the past.

For things like “我在走路”, is it not just needing a thing to receive the action, even if a filler? Or are there cases where you don’t need a filler?

Also, for “他要吃了吗”, is that not a statement from the past perspective of a (desired) completed action? Kind of like “我卖了这些车以后”?

danieltanfh953• 4 years ago

1. any example on how this is confusing? 把 is "to do to". like 你吃了饭 you ate rice vs 你把饭吃了you did eat the rice etc

2. Its grammatically correct to say "我在走" but it sounds better when its a "pair" so colloquially it uses a 词, which is a pair of characters which may just say the same thing. you could also say 我在走着 which adds no extra meaning but pads it to be a pair

3. 了 is meant for something in the past, past perfect tense is not the same as past tense, past perfect tense is about ambiguity not time.

4. 们 has the 人 radical, so its mean for humans. Otherwise you're to use counting particles instead, plus 很多 or 几 or some other particle to emphasise it.

dwohnitmok3• 4 years ago

Syntax is constrained by prosody, which is also extremely unintuitive to Mandarin learners.

Definitely true, but I don't think your analysis holds. Prosody is an important part of determining when you need bisyllabic or monosyllabic words in Chinese which doesn't have an equivalent in English, but you don't fill it in with what are effectively nonsense words.

you have to insert the meaningless 路 for the prosody to sound correct (you would say "我在走路" even if you weren't walking on a road at all!)

Not really. 路 still has some semantic content. E.g. if you're walking about indoors in your house it sounds weird to say "走路." I do agree that a bisyllabic word sounds better there. Other context and emphasis could also make 我在走 work (I am walking for example), but often times that ties back to prosody as you say.

们 is not always a pluralizer

It is generally a pluralizer with the constraint that it must be applied for people. That's why it sounds weird applied to cows. 李先生们 could actually mean "Mr. Lis" (i.e. a group of men all with that surname, or some slang usage of "Mr. Li" in the same way you might say "they're a bunch of Benedict Arnolds"). Indeed that was my first instinct when you wrote that phrase. I don't understand what you mean by "and company." That's not how I would understand 李先生们.

Also historically, 们 used to be an even more general people pluralizer that could be applied to demonstratives. E.g. in Song Dynasty Mandarin 那们 is perfectly acceptable and means "those people." It has become more restricted in modern usage.

In fact, most of the time, plurals in Mandarin are actually completely implicit and you have to figure it out from context!

This is true.

leke4• 4 years ago

Interlingua is (by design) much closer to this simplicity in a Western-based language.

If you like Interlingua for its design, have you heard about the Interlingue? It's a lot like Interlingua, but will less exceptions. Interlingue is also called Occidental.

Dhghomon-2• 4 years ago

Nice to see a comment on Occidental already. That's the one I've used and supported for 10+ years now.

danieltanfh953• 4 years ago

modern written chinese was designed and constructed as a lingua franca for hundreds of different cultures and languages within china, so the grammar is as minimal as it could be without being ambiguous. It is, in my opinion, the most ambitious conlang in history.

I believe esperanto to be a similar exercise but english is a far easier and more flexible language

dwohnitmok3• 4 years ago

modern written chinese was designed and constructed as a lingua franca for hundreds of different cultures and languages within china, so the grammar is as minimal as it could be without being ambiguous.

No written Mandarin was not invented in the 20th century. There was some pronunciation and orthographic standardization, but written Mandarin has been the lingua franca of at least the literate class since at least the Song Dynasty, maybe even earlier, and written Mandarin itself extends back to the Tang Dynasty.

Here's for example here's the Southern Song philosopher Zhu Xi complaining about "kids these days" in written Mandarin (these are his original words, not translated into modern Mandarin), with modern Mandarin spelling marked in square brackets.

今学者不见有奋发底[的]意思，只是如此悠悠地过；今日见他是如此，明日见他亦是如此。《朱子语类·朱子十八》

And here's the Northern Song Cheng brothers complaining about Buddhism (again in the original)

佛学只是以生死恐动人，可怪二千年来无一人觉此，是被他恐动也[this 也 is purely for effect, same as it is occasionally done in modern Mandarin]！《二程遗书·卷一》

sockfish• 4 years ago

I've always wondered if machine learning would help here - we already have language agnostic embeddings (LaBSE, LASER) - now all we need is a way to pronounce them. Perhaps you could learn one by training an autoencoder that is constrained somehow just like the human vocal chords are

gxonatano2• 4 years ago

Speaking as an Esperantist, I've heard arguments like this over and over, from disgruntled Esperanto beginners, who half-heartedly learned portions of the language, motivated by fallacious utopian impulses, and then abandoned it completely, after deciding that it isn't "perfect" or "international enough," or "easy enough," or something else. That's naive and short-sighted.

The fact of the matter remains that Esperanto is the most successful, most widely spoken international auxiliary language. It has the largest community, probably the friendliest community of any international language, and has the largest body of literature, with over 30K books published in the language, and with hundreds of new books published each year. It remains the easiest to learn, even for speakers of non-European languages. I know this because I've met tons of Chinese and Japanese Esperantists, who've all learned it after learning English, or Spanish, or Korean, and conclude that Esperanto is orders of magnitude easier and more intuitive than those languages.

It's not completely logical, obviously (Lojban is probably more logical) but is incredibly logical and intuitive, compared to any natural language. It's maybe not as easy as Toki Pona, with its vocabulary of 100 or so words, but it's still pretty damn easy. I learned Esperanto in a matter of weeks, rather than years. Esperanto is not as concise as a language like Volapuk, either, but that concision comes with too many trade-offs.

Sure, it's all a matter of personal taste, but if you learn Lojban or Toki Pona, or even Ido, you'll be able to speak with, at most, tens of other speakers, instead of millions, and read maybe ten books total, rather than tens of thousands in Esperanto. With Esperanto you'll be able to use operating systems like GNOME and websites like DuckDuckGo, Google, Facebook, and Mastodon, all using Esperanto. You'll be able to watch thousands of videos on sites like Tubaro and Youtube. You'll be able to follow hundreds of Twitter and Mastodon users. You'll be able to listen to thousands of Esperanto-language songs and podcast episodes. You'll be able to play games like The Expression Amrilato, and read comic books like Saga, which have Esperanto-language components. Best of all, you'll be able to travel the world with Pasporta Servo, staying for free with Esperantists along the way. There are also conferences attended by thousands of people, summer-long residential courses, and even universities which use the language. Virtually none of that stuff is available in other constructed languages.

As the writer of this article himself admits, Esperanto isn't perfect. Obviously. It was never intended to be. Nor was it intended to be perfectly international, with word roots derived from all languages throughout the world, equally. Nor was it intended to be perfectly easy, or perfectly well-distributed among easy phonemes. But Esperanto is an excellent compromise between all these factors, and is a hugely enjoyable, expressive language with a large and welcoming community. The proof, for me, of its expressivity, is that so many classics of western literature, and of world literature, including much of Shakespeare's works, have been very eloquently and poetically translated into Esperanto. That's not true of any other constructed language.

All natural languages evolve, and so does Esperanto. Esperanto reform and evolution has been happening since the beginning. What's absurd is the beginners, or even total non-speakers who insist on reform before even learning the language to a competent level. I think this has to do with utopian feelings. They think Esperanto should be perfect, and so when they learn enough of it to realize that there are faults, they give up on it altogether. But would anyone do that with say, German? French? It's a language. It has faults. Get over it. The difference is that Esperanto has probably 1% of the faults, irregularities, and idiosyncrasies of any other language.

I'd argue that everyone should learn Esperanto. It takes virtually no time or effort, compared to learning any other language, so it's basically a language you get for free. Like pseudo-code. And the worlds it opens up for you are so immense. Rather than debate about whether Esperanto is perfect or not, just learn it. You won't regret it.

Esperanto is not my favourite artificial language (2002)

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