Entry posted by Jean Valjean
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You know the most popular constructed language in the world, created with the hope of unifying all of the peoples? Yeah, I hate it. L.L. Zamenhof designed it to be easy to learn, particular for people in his environment, and in that area, thee language succeeds. It is definitely easy to learn, due to its simplicity and familiarity, but in every other regard, I hate it.
First of all, it often sounds like someone just spoke Latin and then intentionally mispronounced everything. Seriously, why learn this language when you can just learn Latin, where everything sounds right? Okay, so Esperanto also uses words from English, German, and Russian, but that makes for a really ugly mixture of sounds. At least when you have words like "patro," "filo," and "frato," you have a feel for the language, with its flowy latin-esque vocabulary in there. But then you throw in words like "knabo," which really interrupt that Latin rhythm that it has. So even though this language sounds like some corrupted Latin overall, it doesn't have the rhythm that makes Latin so appealing.
For example, as someone who has studied Spanish, I look at the phrase "La libro" / "the book" and think to myself that the article should be masculine. I don't like that every single noun looks masculine. I'm used to a lot of Eurpean languages that Esperanto is based off of requiring adjectives to match the grammatical gender, grammatical case, or some other aspect of the nouns that they modify. Seeing phrases like "la granda libro," "la multekosta domo," and "la venenita pomo" just looks...malbela.
Speaking of gender, that leads me to the single biggest reason for why Esperanto sucks. I mean seriously, the way it distinguishes between male and female. The default gender is masculine, and in order to make the language easier to learn, all feminine words are derivatives of their masculine equivalents. Let me just give you a few examples:
Man/Woman --- Viro/Virino
Boy/Girl --- Knabo/Knabino
Father/Mother --- Patro/Patrino
Son/Daughter --- Filo/Filino
Brother/Sister --- Frato/Fratino
Male Cousin / Female Cousin --- Kuzo/Kuzino
Uncle/Aunt --- Onklo/Onklino (This last one is particularly egregious, because "onklo" stands out as a particularly English-y word, made to sound weird and kind of lame, making it stick out like a sore thumb, interrupting the Latin sound of the language. Also, if you call your aunt "onlkino," you sound like you're saying that she's unclean.)
Gah. I hate that. There are ways of distinguishing between male and female without increasing the number or root words that you have to memorize. For example, instead of having women being a derivative of man, girl being a derivative of boy, mother being a derivative of father, and so forth, all of those things could be derivatives "adult person," "young person," "parent," "offspring," "sibling," "cousin," and "parent's sibling," which are all grammatically neutral in gender. Then you could add suffixes that could alter the gender of these words. It's not that omplicated. As it stands, this language is pretty darn sexist, enough that I'm a bit incredulous that it's associated with such high utopian ideals.
So there you have it. Esperanto isn't that great. If you want to learn a constructed language, I'd encourage you to consider Lojban instead. It definitely could use more attention. Also, Ithkuil is the ideal language, philosophically speaking, but the grammar is so advanced that and requires such precision of thought that you basically have to be a genius to speak it.
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