From the article: "Four people had been listed as 'attending' on the Facebook page for the event, but by the time the meeting began, eight Esperantists were sitting in a rough semicircle of dormroom couches and hard plastic chairs." Ladies and gentlemen, that is in New York City, where a social club meeting on almost any topic might be expected to attract more attendance. Esperanto has severe growth problems if that is how interesting it is to prospective learners.
I have used some Esperanto textbooks to learn a bit of Esperanto, and I have read whole books about the artificial language movement and the development of Esperanto over time. If we take Esperanto to be a hobby, like stamp collecting, then I say "More power to you" if you are interested in Esperanto. But if we take Esperanto as a serious proposal to produce a practical "interlanguage" for worldwide communication, then we have to count Esperanto as a failure. Esperanto has had fewer speakers (to a given level of proficiency) and fewer readers (likewise) in all time than either English or Chinese gains in one year simply by natural increase and extension of education to the masses.
As I studied Esperanto, along with studying human languages such as Chinese (four modern Sinitic languages and also ancient Literary Chinese), Russian, German, Japanese, Biblical Hebrew, Attic Greek and Koine Greek, and assorted other languages, I was struck by how many design bugs Esperanto has. Many of the decisions made by Ludwik Zamenhof as he designed Esperanto reflected exactly the languages he knew in childhood in Russian-occupied Poland, but didn't reflect at all what makes a language easy to learn or to use as a second language with speakers of varied backgrounds. I used to think that I would have to do a write-up about the flaws of Esperanto myself, but then in the 1990s I discovered an online description of Esperanto by a sophisticated student of constructed languages,[1] and I see by checking the link again that that description has been continually updated over the last two decades.
The statement in the article kindly submitted here that "Esperanto is an artificial language, designed to have perfectly regular grammar, with none of the messy exceptions of natural tongues" is demonstrably false, and the link I have shared here will show the statement to be false. What ultimately turned me off to Esperanto as a movement and even as a hobby was seeing frankly incredible statements about Esperanto and about other human languages made by Esperanto-hobbyists who thought they were proposing a practical tool for world communication. If Esperanto is your hobby, more power to you. But if you propose Esperanto as a world interlanguage, you had best acknowledge the reality that Esperanto has always failed in that role, and always will.
Esperanto is a "failure" only if help up to standards and goals that are completely unrealistic.
Compare English: Britain spread it throughout a global empire for centuries. America is the world's fourth most populous country, possibly the most powerful and prosperous country in the history of the world, and nearly entirely monolingual in English. India is the world's second most populous country, where English is the major language of intercommunication. Nigeria, the Philippines, and other large countries use English in an official capacity. English is now the dominant language of science, and increasingly the language of intercommunication in Europe.
And yet for all that power, prestige, and influence, English only has 1.2 billion first- and second-language speakers, and is far from the world's only interlanguage.
So by those standards, English is a "failure" as the world interlanguage.
Edit: To be sure, Esperantists can be pretty off-putting. They are nothing if not...enthusiastic!
You have just related a lot of facts that show that English is a success as a world interlanguage. The British Empire has barely existed during my lifetime, and the great majority of people now living were born after its demise. English has a majority of speakers who live outside the "inner circle" on English-speaking countries, and a very widespread use of English is as an interlangauge among persons all of whom are not native speakers of English. I have seen numerous conversations in English in the country of Taiwan among people who grew up in various countries of Asia where English is not a native language, and I hear news reports literally every day with interviews in English from people all over the world.
English is perhaps the most successful world interlanguage in the history of the world. My point is that, it would still be considered a failure by the standards that Esperanto set for itself. I take that more as an indication that Esperanto's standards are unrealistic more than that Esperanto is a "failure".
As a polyglot, I tried to get into Esperanto several times, but can't get over its ugliness, complex phoneme inventory, unnecessary grammar complexity, strong European roots, abundance of consonant clusters, and overall language bugs. Sure natural languages are worse, but you expect a lot more from a language that was designed from scratch to be consistent and easy to learn. If you don't already speak a European language, good luck.
I really wish Reformed Esperanto had usurped Esperanto, which fixed a lot of the bugs.
> Most people I know despise Esperanto, but largely for daft reasons [from 1]
When I first read about Esperanto decades ago, I was immediately put off by it only using languages from the Indo-European language family as a source for vocabulary and grammar. Any good constructed language intended for worldwide use as a universal second language would also need to source vocab and patterns from Arabic, Swahili, Turkish, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Indonesian, all of which are from different language families, not to mention less numerically used language families.
Are you saying that Esperanto is harder to learn than English, Chinese, or Spanish?
Yes, definitely, depending on what language the learner has as a native language, and especially if active speaking and listening is included as part of the test of language proficiency to an equivalent level.
I have used some Esperanto textbooks to learn a bit of Esperanto, and I have read whole books about the artificial language movement and the development of Esperanto over time. If we take Esperanto to be a hobby, like stamp collecting, then I say "More power to you" if you are interested in Esperanto. But if we take Esperanto as a serious proposal to produce a practical "interlanguage" for worldwide communication, then we have to count Esperanto as a failure. Esperanto has had fewer speakers (to a given level of proficiency) and fewer readers (likewise) in all time than either English or Chinese gains in one year simply by natural increase and extension of education to the masses.
As I studied Esperanto, along with studying human languages such as Chinese (four modern Sinitic languages and also ancient Literary Chinese), Russian, German, Japanese, Biblical Hebrew, Attic Greek and Koine Greek, and assorted other languages, I was struck by how many design bugs Esperanto has. Many of the decisions made by Ludwik Zamenhof as he designed Esperanto reflected exactly the languages he knew in childhood in Russian-occupied Poland, but didn't reflect at all what makes a language easy to learn or to use as a second language with speakers of varied backgrounds. I used to think that I would have to do a write-up about the flaws of Esperanto myself, but then in the 1990s I discovered an online description of Esperanto by a sophisticated student of constructed languages,[1] and I see by checking the link again that that description has been continually updated over the last two decades.
The statement in the article kindly submitted here that "Esperanto is an artificial language, designed to have perfectly regular grammar, with none of the messy exceptions of natural tongues" is demonstrably false, and the link I have shared here will show the statement to be false. What ultimately turned me off to Esperanto as a movement and even as a hobby was seeing frankly incredible statements about Esperanto and about other human languages made by Esperanto-hobbyists who thought they were proposing a practical tool for world communication. If Esperanto is your hobby, more power to you. But if you propose Esperanto as a world interlanguage, you had best acknowledge the reality that Esperanto has always failed in that role, and always will.
[1] http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/