The other International Language

For most educated people on earth English is the international language, the absolute necessary communication tool of the 21st century.

Huge amount of money and efforts are put into learning but even after years of studying its odd word order and unpredictable spelling most people feel inferior to mother tongue speakers of English.
The difference between the right and wrong order is so subtle that it is hard to explain beyond simply saying that it “just sounds right", not to mention the pronunciation of English words.

Apparently nowadays we need a common language to act globally. But the idea of having a universal language on hand is much older. The appearance of Esperanto at the end of the 19st century, seemed to be just in time. It was the first constructed language which really made it to a widely spoken language. However Esperanto never was officially really recognized and supported and somehow disappeared from the limelight. But why is it still around and not faded away like many other conlangs?

On DUOLINGO, the most used Internet language platform, more than
1.13M learners have signed in for a free language course. It is hard to explain what really attracts people around the world to learn Esperanto. Is it the fact, that Esperanto is the most easy language to learn with its logical structure and simple grammar? Or is it because many people feel a bit uncomfortable with English being the language of the most imperialist power on earth?
For L.Zamenhof, who created the basic of Esperanto, the language was much more than a communication tool. He called the underlying idea of the language "Interna ideo" which brings people together, emphasizes justice among the peoples, overcomes misunderstandings and rises an universal consciousness as precondition for world peace.

If you have never heard about Esperanto before and are curious to find out more, please carry on with reading:

Esperanto estas internacia lingvo, inventita antaŭ multaj jaroj. Ĝi estas facile lernebla kaj en multaj landoj de la mondo parolata...

Esperanto has a quite simple grammar (16 rules), and it is also completely regular with no exceptions. There are no irregular past tenses, no irregular plurals, no irregularly used prepositions… Additionally, the pronunciation is easy, and it is a complete phonetic language.

Nouns end in -o

Adjectives -a

Verbs are not conjugated and end in -as in the present tense, -os in future and -is in past tense

Plurals -j

Even most of the vocabulary comes from European languages the grammatical structure is rather non-European. Through a genial system of prefixes and suffixes added on to virtually any word you get a great variety of new words.

Lets take the word bela. Probably you already know, it is beautiful. Than we add to the word root the suffix -igi, means “to make, to cause to be”, so _beligi _means “make (something) beautiful”. If we furthermore use the prefix pli- means more, so _plibeligi _than means “to make it more beautiful”.

Instead of learning thousands of dissimilar words, you essentially need only a few hundred roots and use a few dozen affixes to become a fluent speaker.

Of course Esperanto is not perfect. It still evolves as a language and it needs a lot of effort to acquire it, however it works well.

What is your experience with language learning?

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