Sorry, Ladies and Gentlemen but, I have been building my own Wordpress for a San Antonio study group and in doing research one inevitably comes up against the linguists/haters of Esperanto who SEEM at times to make a personal crusade of cataloguing Dr Zamenhof's 'stupid oversights'. I am curious about what movement or progress there has been or might ever be towards silencing these detractors with innovations/revisions or is the Esperanto movement generally UNINTERESTED in the arguments of these detractors-which,in at least on case, merit some consideration. The most extensive catalogue of reasons against Esperanto I have found is here:

Learn NOT to speak Esperanto
http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/

I am a very headstrong person so if I want to pursue Esperanto, no stuff-shirt linguist from Edinburgh is going to deter me but, it may dampen others' enthusiasm a bit.
Nonetheless, I put a link to his arguments on my main page because I think if you want to learn anything, you're going to have to decide to ignore detractors.

I'm eager to hear your input. If you prefer a more private communication, for whatever reason, message me Troyus23

I think most Esperantist are quite happy to ignore the criticisms of non-Esperantists. They are often ill-informed about the language.

From a quick peek the ranter seems, for example, to have not at all grasped the derivation system of Esperanto.

But then quite a few actual speakers of Esperanto are content to just relate this or that theory of Esperanto without examining more closely whether the theory actually fits the way they use the language.

The same phenomenon can be observed in relation to proffered grammatical explanations of their own language (ie their mother tongue).

Many of the criticisms of Esperanto come from people who do not know much about Esperanto. That doesn't mean they are necessarily invalid; but most komencantoj who propose changes to the language early in their learning later come to realise that almost everything Zamenhof did had a purpose to it, even if it seemed a little peculiar initially.

Over the years, I've learned to appreciate this point, and I'd like to share some of my experiences with the forum, in case anyone finds it enlightening . . .

Sometimes I enjoy dreaming up ways I might have created Esperanto had I been Zamenhof -- not with the intention of proposing reforms, but just to more deeply understand why Z did some things the way he did. Rather to my surprise, I discovered that almost all of my "ideas" introduced unforseen problems which Z's methods, although perhaps atypical to our Western ears, eloquently avoided.

Here are some of the things I've learned during my experiment:

The similarity between the personal pronouns always irked me a bit. So I decided to see what the practical result would be of changing "mi" to "me" and "vi" to "tu" or "vu" like Ido. Similarly, I tweaked "la" to "le" as in Interlingua since the former sounded uncomfortably like the Romance feminine article.

What I discovered was that "me" and "le" suddenly rhymed with "de", "se", "ne", "ke". This was most unfortunate, since they frequently appear immediately adjacent to one or more of these words (whereas mi, ni, vi rarely appear next to each other). Z's decision preserves the clarity of each two-letter word by varying the vowel.

I also tried ditching the noun-adjective agreement and/or accusative case, but quickly understood this would force EO into a SVO word order, which would open the door to other criticisms of Eurocentrism (to say nothing of the toll on poetry). Ambiguities also arose (such as when using a predicate, e.g. does "Mi farbis la pordo ruĝa" mean "I painted the door red" or "I painted the red door"?).

So this is just an example of the unintended consequences reforms can have. (Idists learned this the hard way.) I've looked at that "ranto" website before; some (not all) of its criticisms are understandable, but I'd challenge the author to come up with an alternative that didn't introduce difficulties of its own. The auxlang business is give-and-take. If you maximise simplicity, you obtain a very rigid and inexpressive language. Z's balance was about as close to the middle as any auxlang has gotten so far.

I agree with the comments so far!

A well known Esperantist, Claude Piron, once wrote a response to the article you link to:

http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/why.htm

Another point: I find it slightly ironic that the Ranto author criticises Esperanto for not being sufficiently "international" and accessible to non-Westerners -- but then turns right around and complains that the lexicon is not sufficiently "recognisable" to Latinate languages. You can't have it both ways.

My philosophy is that someone who wants to criticize Esperanto should learn it first - learn it well enough to write out your proposal for changing it with relative ease (that is, not looking up every word in the dictionary).

It would be rather arrogant for someone who doesn't speak English to make a whole list of 'improvements' that English should make. If someone won't take the minimum effort to know what they're talking about before making the proposal, then the proposal should be ignored.

If you get comments to your blog from people trashing Esperanto, I would just delete them. They're trolls.

There are plenty of things I don't like in the world, but I don't go to the blogs or websites of those things and tell them how awful they are. I have better things to do with my time than to waste it on things that don't matter. Evidently some sad and pathetic people don't have better things to do with their time than go to websites of things they don't like, and trash those things. These people don't deserve a response.

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Incidentally most fluent Esperanto speakers probably have one or two things in mind that they would have done differently if they were Zamenhof. But they tend to think that language stability is more important (even though most of them don't go so far as Tempodivalse and actually test out their ideas - thanks for sharing that, it was really interesting).

People have been criticising and or proposing changes to the English language for at least 100 years.
Some are native English speakers.
Some are people frustrated with trying to learn English as a second language.
Some reforms are the work of individuals, some are the work of well organised groups.
The reforms all have one thing in common.
They are IGNORED by the vast majority of English speakers.
So why be surprised when attempts to reform Esperanto are treated with similar disregard.

I feel that the most appropriate response is "Lol, who cares?"

Esperanto is not meant to be forced on people, that kinda goes against what it is. If they don't like it, that's cool. If/When Esperanto catches on, people will become better informed and opinions may changed.

Also, anyone who says anything bad about Esperanto is part of the Idist conspiracy and will have their judgement on the day of reckoning, when the green tide will pour across the lands, scouring out the unfaithful.

I'll address the specific website in question.

First of all, I want to say that though I disagree fundamentally with the author's views, I find the site amusing. I have shown his appendix on case to two friends in the past week because it is that well-stated.

However, I think the author fundamentally misses the point of what an IAL like Esperanto is meant to do. His criticisms generally fall into one of these two categories:

• Esperanto has a feature that is missing in many or some languages (e.g. mandatory tense-marking); hence it is not neutral.
  
• Esperanto is missing a feature present in many or some languages (e.g. a well-developed verbal aspect system); hence it is not neutral.

Never mind that in most of these cases, a choice simply have to be made; never mind that the choice Zamenhof made is invariably one that many languages follow (not to mention some of the most widely-spoken ones); simply, no language is going to cut it for this guy.

With regards to his "goofometer", I simply disagree with him. Learning to mark adjectives for case and number is not that conceptually difficult. It makes logical sense. Sure, it takes people who speak languages like English a bit of time to get used to, but it still makes sense. Its great advantage is that it makes parsing and understanding sentences easier; it shifts some of the burden from the listener onto the speaker. I think this achieves maximum clarity, simplicity and flexibility.

EldanarLambetur:I agree with the comments so far!

A well known Esperantist, Claude Piron, once wrote a response to the article you link to:

http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/why.htm

Thanks very much for your answer!I found it very informing and I put a link to the Claude Piron article on my page as a rebuttal to detractors