No the grammar will be easily understood to anyone having a language with an accusative morphosyntactic alignment, that is, by far the most widespread one. The phonetic inventory is quite limited, so perfectly learnable for every culture. For the vocabulary I agree, but it’s linked to the most spoken languages of the world, so, not that bad.
There are 28 phonemes in Esperanto. 44 in English. 51 in Polish (probably less, in fact, I don’t speak Polish maybe someone who does could correct me?).
Haven’t seen any vocabulary from Mandarin in Esperanto.
Have you looked at which phonemes Esperanto has? If you look me in the eyes and say an international language needs to have a distinction between [h] (written as “h”) and [x] (written as “ĥ”), I can only make a conclusion you’re trolling. See also distinctions between:
fricatives and affricates
voiced and voiceless plosives
“r” and “l”
“v” and “w” (which is also for some ungodly reason written as “ŭ”)
We only need “th” to become a full fledged abomination.
Also, yes, all is not most. But it is concerning if the “most” conveniently all happen to be languages from the same family, spoken in the same relatively small region.
Esperanto’s not perfect, for sure. The existence of /x/ is indeed one of its flaws, but it almost disappeared in modern Esperanto because of that.
For the rest, a language do need some diversity in its phonology or the words would have to be very long and least recognizable. It won’t be a problem if you mispronounce most phonemes a little, as there’s no correct accent; if you pronounce ankaŭ [ankau] instead of [ankau̯] nobody will care… Again it’s not perfect, but perfection doesn’t exist and Esperanto works.
language do need some diversity in its phonology or the words would have to be very long and least recognizable
The existence of the distinctions I’ve mentioned is what makes words unrecognisable. In every somewhat widespread language in the world, at least once of those doesn’t exist, so to native speakers of that language, there will be at least one pair of words in Esperanto that straight up sound the same, but spell differently and means different things. Do I really need to explain how that’s bad for an international language?
Punjabi speakers will find Esperanto easier than any natural language. It will be harder for them than for, say, a French speaker, but in the absolute it will be easy for both.
It was a good idea for the time it was created, when Europeans were constantly killing eachother all over the place.
Finally, it was forming the EU that got them to stop. So creating a common language kinda felt unnecessary after that.
as long as it’s European, of course
Indo-European. That is, 3.4 billion native speakers. And only for the vocabulary and writing system: the grammar is pretty universal.
Not every Indo-European is going to have a compatible phonetic inventory or vocabulary. It’s specifically very limited to Europe, as is grammar.
No the grammar will be easily understood to anyone having a language with an accusative morphosyntactic alignment, that is, by far the most widespread one. The phonetic inventory is quite limited, so perfectly learnable for every culture. For the vocabulary I agree, but it’s linked to the most spoken languages of the world, so, not that bad.
If you’re Polish
Haven’t seen any vocabulary from Mandarin in Esperanto
There are 28 phonemes in Esperanto. 44 in English. 51 in Polish (probably less, in fact, I don’t speak Polish maybe someone who does could correct me?).
All ≠ most.
Have you looked at which phonemes Esperanto has? If you look me in the eyes and say an international language needs to have a distinction between [h] (written as “h”) and [x] (written as “ĥ”), I can only make a conclusion you’re trolling. See also distinctions between:
We only need “th” to become a full fledged abomination.
Also, yes, all is not most. But it is concerning if the “most” conveniently all happen to be languages from the same family, spoken in the same relatively small region.
Esperanto’s not perfect, for sure. The existence of /x/ is indeed one of its flaws, but it almost disappeared in modern Esperanto because of that.
For the rest, a language do need some diversity in its phonology or the words would have to be very long and least recognizable. It won’t be a problem if you mispronounce most phonemes a little, as there’s no correct accent; if you pronounce ankaŭ [ankau] instead of [ankau̯] nobody will care… Again it’s not perfect, but perfection doesn’t exist and Esperanto works.
The existence of the distinctions I’ve mentioned is what makes words unrecognisable. In every somewhat widespread language in the world, at least once of those doesn’t exist, so to native speakers of that language, there will be at least one pair of words in Esperanto that straight up sound the same, but spell differently and means different things. Do I really need to explain how that’s bad for an international language?
oh sure, i bet punjabi speakers find esperanto trivial to learn, and the latin script it’s written in just feels so familiar to them.
Punjabi speakers will find Esperanto easier than any natural language. It will be harder for them than for, say, a French speaker, but in the absolute it will be easy for both.
It was a good idea for the time it was created, when Europeans were constantly killing eachother all over the place.
Finally, it was forming the EU that got them to stop. So creating a common language kinda felt unnecessary after that.
Do you know if anyone has tried a similar language project that takes the entire globe into account?
There were many, many attempts. Most with a European bias tbh, but not all
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_constructed_languages#Auxiliary_languages
Thankyou vm for the references to go through. Cheers. Fascinating topic for me, who has never learned any language other than English.