thank you to Officialhelpkenet, thelabyrinthmaker,
Robert Nielsen, Kleo3392, Norégveldi, Homemade Movies, Obras del Gabeto, and AlexRulesVGCP
for requesting this episode. [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.
