The Wall Street Journal mentions Esperanto in this Article

Do you think that English crushed Esperanto's chance of being the lingua franca of the world?

If we take Benny Lewis's advice in teaching English, maybe we can sow the seeds for a 2215 bilingual planet. Or we might just end up like India: Local dialect, National/Planet Language, English.

But one thing I wonder about the future of Esperanto comes from the article's analysis of young languages:

Wall Street Journal:[Creole languages] expanded these fundamentals into brand-new languages. Now these languages can express any nuance of human thought, but they haven’t existed long enough to also dangle unnecessary things like willfully irregular verbs.

Esperanto is great because of its simplicity, but will it still be simple in 3015? We've already seen one change to the 16 Fundamentals of Esperanto (adopting the x method over the h method of writing the diacritic letters), so I'm curious if and why there might be more. Granted, most likely I won't live long enough to see that fast of a change, of which I am glad.

By the way, Chinese is not any harder than English. The article makes a good point that if Beijing controls the world, it will be more convenient for everyone to just use English, but should they choose Chinese, it could actually help the Esperanto movement—not because Chinese is hard, but because people think it is.

If China get to become the world's largest economy it might just get to call some of the shots. Speaking English only serves to strengthen the economy of English speaking areas, so perhaps The Chinese might suggest the more neutral and proven groundwork of Esperanto for communication and international commerce.

Somehow I just can't see English becoming 'optimised' (discarding features that make it difficult to learn) even if it has been subject to this process in its historic past.

However the author does envisage a world in which one language is used locally and another for international communication, a recommendation long since advocated by Esperantists.

And the author also sees the process of 'simplification' as a natural one.

So instead of allowing this to occur by evolution over the years, which inevitably will be somewhat erratic, why not short circuit this historic process and adopt a language for international communication that was designed at the outset to be relatively free of unproductive complications that are burdensome for the adult learner and has features which facilitate use by speakers of different mother tongues.

In short, with a push the author should, to be consistent with his opinions, become an Esperantist.

His only counter argument would seem to be that there is some virtue in allowing the process of 'optimisation' to occur naturally, without design. But that seems doubtful.

In any case one could argue that Esperanto has already undergone this process since many features of modern Esperanto have arisen by being tested in an interlingual environment rather than being originally specified by Zamenhof.

Actually, I think his futurology is wrong. In 2115 international communication will be facilitated by some miniature translation device. The future is the Babelfish.

mjhinds57:If we take Benny Lewis's advice in teaching English, maybe we can sow the seeds for a 2215 bilingual planet. Or we might just end up like India: Local dialect, National/Planet Language, English.

But one thing I wonder about the future of Esperanto comes from the article's analysis of young languages:

Wall Street Journal:[Creole languages] expanded these fundamentals into brand-new languages. Now these languages can express any nuance of human thought, but they haven’t existed long enough to also dangle unnecessary things like willfully irregular verbs.

Esperanto is great because of its simplicity, but will it still be simple in 3015? We've already seen one change to the 16 Fundamentals of Esperanto (adopting the x method over the h method of writing the diacritic letters), so I'm curious if and why there might be more. Granted, most likely I won't live long enough to see that fast of a change, of which I am glad.

By the way, Chinese is not any harder than English. The article makes a good point that if Beijing controls the world, it will be more convenient for everyone to just use English, but should they choose Chinese, it could actually help the Esperanto movement—not because Chinese is hard, but because people think it is.

Are you talking about speaking Chinese or learning its writing system? My only knowledge comes from spending a couple months of hobbyist study in an intro Mandarin book with audio lessons, and I came to the conclusion that the language was not too difficult to listen to or speak except for the tonality. The reading and writing was the biggest barrier, and I've heard that even natives must spend a considerable effort learning it. Since most of the important use of an international business language is in reading and writing, I would find it hard to see Chinese becoming dominant unless they adopt an alphabetic approach. Correct me if I'm off base here.

I'd put my bet on binary being the only language used in 3015.

sudanglo:...
Actually, I think his futurology is wrong. In 2115 international communication will be facilitated by some miniature translation device. The future is the Babelfish.

You're right about Esperanto being the elephant in the room for the whole article (for those who know of it, anyway).

I have some issues with the notion of machine translation, even in the far future, without necessarily intelligent/thinking (if not sentient) computers. I don't discount the possibility of such programs, but if they occur we may have more serious issues than international translation. In order to properly translate complicated text/speech, some level of understanding is required, and not just of the two languages or their grammars, but also of the meaning of the text/speech itself. That is both frightening and exciting.

For me, the notion of a strictly pre-programmed machine capable of translating every possible sentence is just prohibitively complex, especially since its problem domain is constantly changing. Such "brute force" machines will likely only have good support for translation between only a few dominant languages. We can get good translations from these types of approaches, but they will never be perfect, or even great.

I make these comments as a teacher of (American) English to students of other languages. It is true that I understand written English from different parts of the world. I do not understand spoken English from many other parts of the world. Yes, I can make myself understood and understand for simple needs (I was in Sri Lanka for month and experienced this) but my communication with the Sri Lankans was hardly "a language" - it was simple communication without nuances or often even clues as to the mood, intent, culture, mores, etc. of the two speakers between themselves (there are Tamils, Singhalese and others in Sri Lanka). I never heard our Singhalese guide speak English with his son (who accompanied us). I see English developing independently in different parts of the world - and that is fine and natural. When new students of mine use "learnt" and "shall" I do not "correct" them. But they soon leave these markers behind and use the American forms. When I am reading and come across expressions that I do not know from other areas, I usually simply "read over". An exception was when I was reading a novel from South Africa. I had to ask an acquaintance from SA many times about things in order to understand the book. We came up with a list of some 180 expressions that were native to SA English and unknown to me.
Email and texting are interesting developments and from my experience as a translator and interpreter at an international software company in SF where we had teams from around the world, that people from GB use different forms of these than do, say, Canadians, who use different forms from US Americans. I saw that these short forms are influencing writing at college and even in the media, subtly and slowly, but they are occurring. English is developing much as did Latin and will probably continue to do so.
That is where Esperanto has an advantage - it is hardly anyone's first language and where it is those "denaskuloj" are hardly a model for new learners. The different Englishes, however, do use local models which are evolving according to local needs and feelings of belonging to a specific community.

sudanglo:
And the author also sees the process of 'simplification' as a natural one.

I've always wondered how people like the author explain how languages got to be (supposedly) non-simple in the first place.

English may not have a lot of declinations or grammatical gender (at least as expressed by articles) but - believe me! - it is very complex. Try to explain the vernacular expression 'you better not shout, you better not cry, you better not pout I'm tellin' ya why!" And don't just put it off as slang. It plays every year for a month in all the store here and my foreign students go crazy. Yes, I know, "you had better not...." but that is not what people say! And I have even seen it in writing in he daily media. To put it off as a prescriptionist would is dishonest. If people are to live in and use this language, then you must adapt to it. And there is plenty more - on the radio, on TV - when the lights are out it is dark, when the sun is out it is bright .... and more and more and more

robbkvasnak:English may not have a lot of declinations or grammatical gender (at least as expressed by articles) but - believe me! - it is very complex. Try to explain the vernacular expression 'you better not shout, you better not cry, you better not pout I'm tellin' ya why!" And don't just put it off as slang. It plays every year for a month in all the store here and my foreign students go crazy. Yes, I know, "you had better not...." but that is not what people say! And I have even seen it in writing in he daily media. To put it off as a prescriptionist would is dishonest. If people are to live in and use this language, then you must adapt to it. And there is plenty more - on the radio, on TV - when the lights are out it is dark, when the sun is out it is bright .... and more and more and more

{{OFF TOP}} Completely off-topic but you made me wonder about the word "declination". Is this a synonym for "declension" or is this the American English variant? Until now I was convinced (obviously wrongly) that declination had something to do with astronomy and declension had something to do with grammar. Can these two words be used interchangeably? In Spanish there is only "declinación" for both things and I always thought that "declinación gramatical" and "declination" were false friends.