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[Google Translate voice] Esperanto
welcome to Conlang Critic, the show that gets facts wrong about YOUR favorite
conlang! I’m jan Misali, and in this episode, we’ll be looking at Dr. Hoper’s International
Language, Esperanto. I briefly considered doing that voice the entire time, but honestly
that would be more annoying than anything. at the very least, it would help me stand
out among everyone else who’s talked about the flaws in Esperanto. there is basically
nothing that I can say in this video that hasn’t been said before by people who are
more qualified than I am, and anything I say that hasn’t been said multiple times is
going to require a disclaimer. like, when I translated “Esperanto” as “hoper”
just now. I guarantee that someone is going to correct me on that, and say that “Esperanto”
means “one who hopes” and not “hoper”, as though there’s a significant difference
between those two things, even though I’m currently saying that I’m fully aware of
the way it’s usually translated, and simply chose to translate it as “hoper” instead.
the fact that I needed to say that shows just how many things there are that make it difficult
to critically talk about Esperanto in any meaningful way. however, Esperanto is basically
THE conlang. it wouldn’t make sense for me to keep doing this show about conlangs
without talking about Esperanto eventually, even though it’s not going to come anywhere
close to covering everything. so, I might as well do it now, starting by saying:
Esperanto is an international auxiliary language created by the late Dr. L Lejzer Z in 1887.
as an IAL, it was designed to be easy to learn and use regardless of your first language.
that little fact about what interlangs are supposed to be was the basis for my highly
controversial claim about how good Toki Pona is in the previous episode. however, I don’t
think it’s as big of a deal to say that Esperanto was meant to be easy to learn. Dr.
L Lejzer Z himself said that the primary goal of Esperanto was, and I quote, “To render
the study of the language so easy as to make its acquisition mere play to the learner.”
in the hundred thirty years since its creation, Esperanto has gained a huge following, with
millions of Esperantists around the world, as well as thousands of native Esperanto speakers.
hey, remember eight episodes ago when I said that I’d eventually discus the Esperantist
consonant inventory, and how it’s been copied a lot and is sorta treated like the gold standard
for internationali[z|s]ed phonology? well, here it is!
this consonant inventory has been copied time and time again by conlangers who want to make interlangs, under the assumption
that Dr. Lejzer did his research when making this. sometimes they’ll remove a couple
of sounds, like the alveolar affricate or the velar fricative, but the main features
keep showing up. two nasals, six stops, a /z/ /ʒ/ /dʒ/ distinction, and of course,
the “whatever” rhotic. the letter r in Esperanto is officially an alveolar trill,
but it’s sorta allowed to be pronounced however you pronounce the letter r in your
native language. some people say that that’s not true, and that it should only ever be
the alveolar trill, but the English version of La Fundamento says that r is pronounced
as in “rare”, without any mention of it being trilled. even though this notion has
been mostly abandoned by the Esperanto community, it’s still an influential aspect, and it’s
given as the official pronunciation of the rhotics in languages like Lojban and Novial.
the biggest problem with the whatever rhotic is that it automatically creates a divide
in the speaking community, where it’s immediately obvious what someone’s first language is
if they pronounce the rhotic a certain way. not to mention the fact that not every language
even has a rhotic sound. a whole lot of sounds in this consonant inventory are really uncommon.
according to PHOIBLE online, five of these consonants appear in less than a third of
all languages: the voiced postalveolar affricate, the voiced alveolar fricative, the voiceless
alveolar affricate, and the voiceless velar fricative. if Esperanto took how common sounds
are cross linguistically into account, the inventory would look something like this instead.
Esperanto does not, however, have this inventory, and instead has one that’s very likely to contain sounds that aren’t in your first language. Esperanto’s vowels are:
this is yet another example of the classic five vowel system, which I’ve already spoken
about a few times, so I have nothing new to say about it here. now, I usually don’t
talk about diphthongs, because there usually isn’t that much to say about them, but Esperanto’s
diphthongs are notably dumb.
like, what? why? what language even has all of these? seriously, what’s the most common language that’s actually completely compatible with Esperanto’s
phonology? Mandarin doesn’t have /v/, most dialects of English don’t have /x/, and
even those that do are still missing /uj/, Spanish doesn’t have /h/, Arabic doesn’t
have /o/, Hindi doesn’t have /tʃ/, Malay doesn’t have /ʒ/, Russian doesn’t have
/h/, French doesn’t have /dʒ/, Portuguese doesn’t have /tʃ/, Bengali doesn’t have
/x/, Urdu doesn’t have /tʃ/, Punjabi doesn’t have /ʒ/, Japanese doesn’t have /r/, Persian
doesn’t have /ts/, Swahili doesn’t have /ʒ/, Telugu doesn’t have /h/, German doesn’t
have /ei̯/, Italian doesn’t have /ʒ/, Javanese doesn’t have /ʃ/, Tamil doesn’t
have /v/, Korean doesn’t have /ʒ/, Wu doesn’t have /x/, Marati doesn’t have /x/, Turkish
doesn’t have /ts/, Vietnamese doesn’t have /dʒ/, and Yue doesn’t have /z/. that’s
as far as the Wikipedia article “List of languages by total number of speakers” goes,
and every single language on the list is incompatible with Esperanto’s phonology in some way.
and I didn’t even look at the syllable structure, which, by the way, is pretty poorly defined,
so you end up with a lot of words with difficult consonant clusters, like “scii”. this
should be unacceptable. like, I went through twenty six languages, all of which have over
sixty million speakers, and not a single one is compatible with Esperanto’s phonology.
you know what language is compatible with Esperanto phonology? Polish, which happens
to be Dr. Lejzer’s native language! as for the orthography, well, this is the single
easiest problem to notice about Esperanto, but I’m gonna say it anyway, “HEY! WHAT’S
WITH THE DIACRITICS?” Esperanto has six letters that are written with diacritics,
and also has four letters of the Latin Alphabet that it doesn’t use. now, I
don’t mind that it doesn’t use q and y, since that’s more of a style choice, but
the fact that it doesn’t use w and x even though it has the sounds that they represent in
the IPA is so dumb. to be fair, Esperanto is a bit older than the IPA, but that still
doesn’t excuse the fact that the labiovelar approximant isn’t written with w. other
than the fact that they exist, there’s still a couple of dumb things about the diacritics.
mainly, there isn’t any sort of internal logic to what exactly they mean. like, the
circumflex means “postalveolar” on ĉ and ŝ, so you’d think that the sound /ʒ/
would be written with ẑ, but nope! it’s ĵ. and then since there isn’t a voiced
version of /ts/ in Esperanto, that trend needed to be abandoned anyway for the voiced postalveolar
affricate. and of course once it was time to make a symbol for the w sound that couldn’t
be written with a w for some reason, the circumflex wasn’t used at all. Esperanto’s grammar
is needlessly complicated. there’s so much stuff that’s done with inflectional morphology
that easily could’ve been done with word order, like the accusative case. not only
are nouns in the accusative case given a suffix, but the same suffix is also put on adjectives.
the same thing applies to the plurality suffix. you sometimes even get both suffixes at the
same time. there’s actually no reason to do this. the object of a sentence can be indicated
through word order, and adjectives are already required to be adjacent to the
nouns they modify, so what the heck. all this does is make it harder to learn. I would go
into the grammar a bit more, but honestly I just have so much more to say about the
vocabulary that I just wanna get to it as soon as possible. the vocabulary is very bad.
first of all, it’s super Eurocentric. most of it’s from Romance languages, except it
doesn’t use words from Spanish for some reason, even though Spanish is the most commonly
spoken Romance language. it has a decent amount of words from Germanic languages, but they’re
frequently not pronounced very much like they are in the languages they’re taken from.
“biero” doesn’t sound like “Bier”, and “suno” doesn’t sound like “sun”.
on top of that, Esperanto kinda just ignores various words that are pretty international,
like “hospital” and “canine” and “feminine”. oh, also, notice how the word for “female”,
“virina”, is derived from the word for male, “vira”, with a suffix added onto
it. people do sometimes just say “ina”, but the way Dr. Lejzer intended Esperanto
to be spoken had people calling women “like men but female.” that’s how Esperanto
treats women in every situation: a word for a type of woman is derived from a word for
a type of man, with the “-in” suffix added, with actually no exceptions, even for extremely
basic things like “mother” and “girl”. there’s been some efforts to fix this, but
none of them are officially part of Esperanto, and they still don’t excuse the fact that
this problem exists in the first place. sexism is just one of the negative results that comes
from Esperanto’s derivational system. Esperanto tries to minimize its vocabulary by using
compound words whenever possible, such as the examples already shown. one of the most
common ways Esperanto does this is with the prefix mal-, meaning “opposite”. you know,
like in Vötgil! there’s a few problems with it though. first of all, since so much
of Esperanto’s vocabulary is from Romance languages, it makes sense that people would assume
“mal” means “bad”, which leads people to believe that any word that starts with
mal- is being called “bad”. however, the thing I think is the least excusable about
Esperanto’s vocabulary is the inconsistent way it handles toponyms. first of all, the
words are very rarely derived from endonyms. most of the time, you’re going to need to
learn a new name for the place you live in order to speak Dr. Hoper’s International
Language, which might not even be a particularly international word. like, people from Germany
are typically at least somewhat familiar with the Latin word “Germania”, so they can
probably understand why the name of their country is “Germanio”, but I, a person
from the United States, first heard the word “Usonian” when I looked up the etymology
for what Esperanto expects me to call my country, “Usono”. it gets worse though. someone
from Japan might be familiar with the English name of their country, but it’s far less
likely that they’d still recognize it after the pronunciation has changed to /japanio/.
but on top of the strangeness of where the names even come from, there’s also the inconsistency
of how the roots are used. sometimes, the root on its own refers to a person, like “Anglo”,
which means “an English person”, and then you add a suffix to refer to the country.
quick side note, that suffix used to be “-ujo”, which is the “container” suffix, so England
was “Anglujo”, or a container for English people. that suffix has been abandoned for
country names, and it was replaced with one of three new suffixes, -io, -lando, or -stano,
and you just need to memorize which one you’re supposed to use. anyway, that’s only for
some country names. for the rest of them, the main root on its own refers to the country,
like “Kanado”, which means “Canada”, and you add a suffix, -ano, which means “a
person from”, so a Canadian is “Kanadano”. so, just to recap, there’s four distinct
ways that any individual toponym works, and there’s no consistent way of knowing which
one to use without looking it up. all in all, I feel like Esperanto fails at its goals.
it isn’t international, and it isn’t very easy to learn. don’t get me wrong, it’s
a fine language, it’s just that there’s so much there that would be so easy to fix.
that in mind, I’d say that I like Esperanto more than I like Lojban, but not as much as
Toki Pona, making it the second best interlang reviewed so far. thanks for watching, and
I’ll see you next time, where I’ll be reviewing Ido.