"Esperanto does not work in practice"

In the Daily Telegraph today. Bonvole respond! 
 
Mi tre dankas se vi povus kontribui.
 
Dankon
 
Brian
 
 
 
 
Subject: Re: New comment posted on Parlez-vous English? Brits 'getting better' at languages on holiday
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2013 10:36:53 +0000




























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rewboss

Well, Esperanto isn't common (the most optimistic estimate says there are in total two million speakers of the language, about the population of the city of Hamburg, or twice the population of Birmingham, approximately a thousand of whom can be considered "native speakers"). Languages that are more common than Esperanto include such widely-spoken and well-known languages as Konkani, Mossi, Xhosa, Dhundhari, Czech and Zulu.
As for being easy to learn, it depends on your native language. Esperanto is very heavily based on existing Indo-European languages, with its sound system vaguely Slavic, and its grammar and vocabulary mostly coming from the Romance languages. That means Esperanto is very easy to learn if your mother tongue is Spanish, much less easy if your mother tongue is Japanese. Neutral it is most definitely not.
You can't expect everyone to start bothering to learn Esperanto until Esperanto is in common usage -- a classic Catch-22. It can't be done, not unless you force billions of people to learn it whether they want to or not.
Your question about which language to learn is disingenuous. Actually, developing language skills in any language early on enough will make it much easier for you to learn subsequent languages, and often being fluent in one language will enable you to get by in other, related languages: if you speak German, for example, you should be able to understand a menu in Dutch.
You also choose languages that are most likely to be useful to you. French and German will be most helpful in most of western Europe, while for English-speaking Americans, Spanish would be the foreign language of choice, not least because it is fast becoming the second language of the US.
Finally, of course, even in this day and age, as soon as Esperanto becomes widely spoken by the public, local dialects will spring up and evolve along different lines, inevitably influenced to a great deal by local languages. This will give rise to pidgins, creoles and eventually new languages. This is as unstoppable as the incoming tide, and is even happening now with English (try studying Singlish, for example, a creole which is currently in the process of dropping articles and concepts of number and tense).
Esperanto is a nice try, and has certainly been a lot more successful than, say, Volapük. But it can't work in practice.
6:36 a.m., Thursday July 18

 




 



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President Barack Obama wants everyone to learn a foreign language, as well, but which one should it be?  The British learn French, the Australians study ...
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