nornen:Adding a distinction between voiced and voiceless sounds also adds difficulty, but we have this in Esperanto. Why dont we have tenuis, aspirated and voiced instead? Or leave it out copmletely (like around where I live)?

The voice distinction with consonants (and marginally also the distinction between single and double) is essential in order to assimilate the latin-greek-based international lexicon. Other properties like aspiration, or short vs. long vowels are not necessary and hence absent.
A minimal phonemic inventary like Trubetskoy has proposed for an IAL would render many internationalisms unrecognizable.

BTW: If I were to remake Esperanto I'd get rid of the article and an inflected relative pronoun (and some other stuff).

Quoting and only responding to a few points.

Tempodivalse:
An a priori lexicon, similar to Volapük's, would definitely level the playing field, but it would make it equally difficult for everyone instead of very easy for some and fairly difficult for others. Esperanto's lexicon is going to be, on average, much easier.

Much easier on average??? I honestly think that the concept of "on average" does not apply when it comes to learning and using languages. I really don't think that there is an "average" learner, just individuals with different backgrounds and aptitudes, albeit that they may cluster into groups. What is difficult to one may be easy to another, but the notion of "on average" is meaningless in this instance.

There are those auxiliary language advocates who have deliberately and knowingly argued for some concept of "fairness" (however they describe that), precisely so that European (cluster) speakers will not have an advantage, as a matter of justice (and Volapük's vocabulary, as a matter of fact, is not strictly a priori -- I can recognize quite a few, admittedly distorted, roots in it). On the other hand, something like Kenneth Searight's Sona (I can supply links to online resources if requested) may have a very few mnemonic hooks here and there for a tiny handful of speakers of this and that non-Indo-European language, but in practical terms it is going to be approximately equally difficult for everybody. And some people claim that that is a Certified Good Thing.

As to J_S' Korean acquaintance, she will not find Esperanto as easy as (say) a Frenchman would. This is obvious. However, EO will be almost certainly easier for her, probably far easier, than any other "Western" language. Surely that counts for something?

Well, yes, it may "count for something," but what?

I'm willing to accept that Esperanto is going to be easier for some people and more difficult for others. Unfair? Sure. Esperanto is in many ways just like any other (living) language - "warts and all".

Sure. And no question, Esperanto is far, far ahead of all other constructed international auxiliary languages in history. But people still wonder, could the situation be even better?

First off, we do not TALK Esperanto, we speak it. The fact that we are writing in English favors me and disfavors the in English writing Nornen (how's that for avoiding a relative clause? Sounds sort of yucky in English but in Esperanto it is perfectly fine.) My point is, Esperanto is what you make of it. It's freedom allows all users to create new expressions not limited to ethnic preference (as in: that is grammatically correct - of grammatical - but we don't say it like that]. If you do not want to use the articles in Esperanto, you are free to avoid them. If you want to aspirate or use a variation of phonetic pronunciation [within a pretty broad bandwidth] you are (one is) free to do so. I hear many Americans use the American English variant of /r/ and their language is still quite understandable. If speakers of languages that do not use relative clauses make adjectival or nominal clauses instead, it works fine in Esperanto.
If you are one of those people for whom there is a problem for every solution, then you have a rather unhappy life. Sorry about that! I am not trying to be a Pollyanna nor a Dr. Gloom - just trying to appreciate what we have and use it to its "richest" (i.e. highest) degree.
Chin up, buddy, stick with it! Esperanto's wealth of expression is still being pioneered.

Thank you robbkvasnak. I will be more careful with these two words.

What did you mean by this:

robbkvasnak:It's freedom allows all users to create new expressions

bartlett22183:Much easier on average??? I honestly think that the concept of "on average" does not apply when it comes to learning and using languages. I really don't think that there is an "average" learner, just individuals with different backgrounds and aptitudes, albeit that they may cluster into groups. What is difficult to one may be easy to another, but the notion of "on average" is meaningless in this instance.

Of course there is nobody you can point to and say, "That's the average learner", just as there does not exist the "average taxpayer" or even the "average Joe". But this doesn't mean such concepts are unhelpful.

Look at it another way: If you were to put the times needed to learn Esperanto lexicon for speakers of different languages on a chart, you would discover that for some speakers the figure would be quite low (large degree of lexical similarity), and for others rather high (little to no lexical similarities). The average of those points would be somewhere in between.

Now suppose you had an a priori language, with no significant lexical similarities to any existing language. All our speakers would suddenly find themselves clocking about the same long times as the disadvantaged group from the first case. But the collective number of learning hours (of all the speakers on our chart) will be far greater, and the average per speaker will be far greater also.

On a utilitarian view, choosing Esperanto over the a priori language is a no-brainer.

Consider an analogy: Suppose you have three friends sick with an annoying cough. You have only two cough drops, but you know they are effective in making a cough go away.

You can do one of two things: 1) randomly select two friends to receive a drop, and accept that someone will have to be unlucky; or 2) throw both drops away unused, saying "We don't want to be unfair to anyone", and let all your friends be equally inconvenienced.

I think it's obvious that you'd choose option 1. But the a priori lexicon approach is equivalent to option 2.

Tempodivalse:Look at it another way: If you were to put the times needed to learn Esperanto lexicon for speakers of different languages on a chart, you would discover that for some speakers the figure would be quite low (large degree of lexical similarity), and for others rather high (little to no lexical similarities). The average of those points would be somewhere in between.

But today with internet, large text corpora and translation helps, with statistics about how many people speak natively which languages, it would also be a no-brainer to design a lexicon, where the distance between low and high bars (weighing each bar by the number of speakers of that language) on your chart is (if not minimized) quite small.

Obviously this wasn't an option for LLZ.

robbkvasnak: My point is, Esperanto is what you make of it. It's freedom allows all users to create new expressions not limited to ethnic preference (as in: that is grammatically correct - of grammatical - but we don't say it like that].

Not according to some Lernu denizens. I can't remember how many times I and others have been told exactly that ("well, we just don't say it like that" ) in varied verbiage, right here on this subforum.

nornen:But today with internet, large text corpora and translation helps, with statistics about how many people speak natively which languages, it would also be a no-brainer to design a lexicon, where the distance between low and high bars (weighing each bar by the number of speakers of that language) on your chart is (if not minimized) quite small.

Interesting. Would the average learning time per speaker be the same or lower, though, compared to Esperanto?

We could, for example, devise a lexicon that is intentionally unlike any other. This would presumably result in a negligible difference between low and high outliers on our chart. However, if the resulting absolute average time is far higher than Esperanto's, I don't see how that would be preferable.

One could, of course, simply reject my initial utilitarian premise, and insist that it is more important to be "fair" (i.e., not have a wide spread on our learning-times chart), even at the cost of a much higher absolute average.

I'm not sure why we'd want this, though, insofar as auxlangs like Esperanto aim to be quickly learnable for as many people as possible/practicable.

Certainly an a priori vocabulary would level the playing field.

If you took Esperanto, and replaced one-for-one every root with a different root not purposely drawn from any existing language, but otherwise left the rules in place, how much harder would it be to learn? I'm not sure it would be *that* much harder. The fact that I am an English speaker does give me a leg up with Esperanto to some extent in that some of the Esperanto vocabulary resembles English. But that's only true to some extent. There are a whole *bunch* of words that don't resemble English at all, and my English background gives me no advantage there.

Let's say just for the sake of argument (because I haven't analyzed this and have no hard numbers) that fully one third of the Esperanto vocabulary resembles English closely enough that if I don't know the meaning of a word within that set I can probably give a good guess as to what it means and be right most of the time (and, personally, I think a third is way too high of an estimate). And let's say that it "ordinarily" takes 150 hours to learn Esperanto for the average English speaker, taking what was said about averages earlier into account.

If we wipe out any similarities to English, and everything works all nice and linear and all, it should take me maybe 200 hours to learn this new, hardened language with all the familiar vocabulary removed. You know... a third harder.

Now, my math may be very suspect here*, but exact figures aren't my point. My point is, the new language might take longer to learn, but it probably wouldn't take *that* much longer, because the help you're getting from your native language might be time saving, but I'm not sure it's as time saving as people might think. The difference between 150 hours and 200 hours - or even 250 hours - is marginal when you are talking about learning a foreign language, where the usual hour requirements tend to run into the thousands. Honestly, just how much *does* English help? Some, yes, although I don't think anyone has quantified it. But a really gigantic enormous ton? I'm not so sure. In my probably wildly inaccurate example, that means two thirds of Esperanto right now is functionally a priori for native English monoglots. Honestly, I think in reality it's much more than two thirds.

So, like Tempodivalse, I tend to think that since that means Esperanto isn't really that much harder than a totally a priori language, and since Esperanto is already up and running, we should maybe just go with that. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good and so on.

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* I really wouldn't even call it math. It's more just finger-windy mathish blithering.

RiotNrrd:two thirds of Esperanto right now is functionally a priori for native English monoglots.

Indeed. I also find the lexical advantages conferred to Westerners overstated. I merely wished to point out that one can find Esperanto preferable to other "fairer" approaches even if this were not the case.

For me, as a native bilingual with considerable exposure to Romance languages and Greek, there are still many obscure Esperanto words whose meanings I would not understand without context (recent examples include: fripono, maroto, ĉarniro). Despite having a fluent, near-uninhibited grasp of Esperanto, I continue to expand my vocabulary every day with more precise or technical terms, etc. I imagine this will be the same regardless of language background.