Bemused:

oreso:

Bemused:Perhaps "broken English" will become the new "crowd sourced Esperanto equivalent", and native speakers of English will find themselves an irrelevant minority in their own language.

... I only hope we can agree on a spelling system that makes more sense than the current one.

The English Spelling Society have been working on just that... for at least 100 years

Yes, spelling reform proposals are "as old as the hills" (as we say in my dialect of American English). Time and time again people have proposed reforms, and time and time again (with the partial exception of only minor reforms in US spelling of over a century and a half ago, pace Webster), all these reforms have failed. I myself speculate, as an older educated native speaker and good speller of General American English (I do make typographical errors) that English spelling is not likely to change, even as much as the partial simplification of Chinese orthography in mainland Chine in recent generations.

That is why a phonemic orthography such as that of Esperanto (I have read that Finnish orthography is nearly so, but I do not know that tongue) is so desirable along with other factors.

AllenHartwell:The language problem. Esperanto is meant to give a linguistic common ground for every human regardless of their native language or nationality. It's a halfway point for everyone to meet each other so there's none of the inequality between a native English speaker and a native Spanish speaker having to converse in English.

Being myself a native Spanish speaker, I hesitated to express more or less what you have written. I'm glad to see that a (presumably) native English speaker has said precisely that.

Regards,

Daniel

sudanglo:Allen, it is clear that Esperanto replaces the unbridgeable gap between a native speaker and the non-native speaker with the more bridgeable, and psychologically different, gap between a spertulo and a komencanto.

However it seems clear from the evidence on the ground that the use of a national language (eg English) for international communication is not seen as such a big problem by those who need to communicate with foreigners.

It therefore seems a legitimate question as to what problem Esperanto is actually the ideal solution, or is likely to be perceived as such.

Putting it in different words - in what domain is Esperanto the killer application.

Maybe it is as an introduction to foreign language learning. Perhaps it is as a language for package holidays in countries whose language is not widely spoken outside their frontiers. It might be for purely educational purposes for teaching grammar, or even purely as a brain exercise.

I do not have the answer. But rather than promoting Esperanto as the ideal interlanguage (the solution to the language problem), we might be well advised to concentrate on defining the problem that Esperanto actually most efficiently and convincingly addresses.

Edit: Why is it that the London Esperanto Club appears to be in terminal decline, when there are some 200-300 different languages spoken in London, yet Esperanto Clubs in more monolingual cities outside the UK in relatively good health?

Since so many people want to learn English, a killer app might well be to offer Esperanto-hosted support for it. Anyway, I am offering exactly that:
I explain English – for those who wish to learn it – by means of Esperanto:
Cross-Reference Kingdom