Tempodivalse: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?

Ah, well, indeed... Lucky for me, she studied Esperanto in Korea. So, it's more a matter of me becoming comfortable quickly in a language in which she feels more fluent.

But what delightful and unexpected turns conversations can take. I'm a happy reader from the sidelines of this interesting exploration of the language.

RiotNrrd: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.

With all this in mind, I'm wondering if for lexical "gaps" (such as "cool" once was for E-ujo as a whole), instead of a borrowed neologism, maybe we could "assign" a previously unused "root" (a combo that doesn't appear in the Fundamento, such as e.g. "capa" ) for the gap? There are many such "plugs" available given the phonology as it currently exists.