trojo:
And really, the only truly fair way to do roots would be to have a completely a priori language. FIRST, come up with a sound inventory and a set of phonological constraints based on an in-depth survey of the most common patterns in languages world-wide, then come up with a list of permitted syllables based on that, and then assign the meanings of words randomly with a computer. Simple, fair, no one discriminated against. Of course, this isn't an "improved Esperanto", and is in fact starting over fresh, but like I said earlier, starting over with a new IAL would be easier than reforming Esperanto.

If I recall correctly, Sen:esepera did that in reverse. It has sounds most common in languages, and forbids certain consonant clusters and just makes Esperanto conform to these.

trojo:
Maybe, but it wouldn't help a speaker of Hausa or Quechua or Vietnamese or Thai or Sango, all of which are unrelated to the eight most widely-spoken languages of the world. Since Loglan's roots are not really "equitable" either, why bother?

The main reason is, greater equality or possibility of 'linguistic handshake' for the greatest possible number. It would be a move in a better direction. If it could be done, and no-one pretends that it would be easy, given the number of language groups. But the idea is worth not being dismissed too quickly.

For now, we have Esperanto, and we use it and promote it. That's fine. Nor do I think that the Fundamento should be changed, and so on. But the problem of difficulty for the far East won't go away.

I work for a company that makes construction machines. My job is to travel to our customers' workplaces, install their machines, and train them on how to use their new equipment.

One thing I have learned about engineering... Whenever I finish, the customer ALWAYS comes up with a way that they think would improve the machines. Many of their ways are illogical and simply wouldn't work. Frequently, their opinions are in direct conflict with other customers who also think they could have improved the machines. I have grown to accept this as a fact of life in my industry.

Esperanto is an engineered language. As such, it suffers from the three major rules that every engineer has to learn during his first year on the job.

1) You can't please everyone.
2) Everyone has an opinion.
3) Everyone thinks they could have done a better job than you did.

This is a hard message to accept. From what I've read, Mr Zamenhof was humble enough to learn these lessons rather early in his career. Now you know why we need more people in America to become engineers.

andogigi, I'm an engineer as well, I completely agree. And for what it's worth, I think that computer programmers would have a similar story. I've heard lots of stories from programmer friends about clients who wanted to change "just this one little thing" in a computer program - unaware that changing this "tiny" thing would actually involve restructuring the entire program from its very basis.

erinja:andogigi, I'm an engineer as well, I completely agree. And for what it's worth, I think that computer programmers would have a similar story. I've heard lots of stories from programmer friends about clients who wanted to change "just this one little thing" in a computer program - unaware that changing this "tiny" thing would actually involve restructuring the entire program from its very basis.

Forgive me for playing devil's advocate, but I'd like to elaborate on this a little bit. Now, I'm only 23, and I only have five years of professional programming experience, although now I'm just a software engineer. I do not have a formal education in the subject, but from my experience, those that I hire who are formally educated are far less useful then those with just one year of professional experience.

Anyway, many changes that are suggested to myself, or my team, are often valid. A capable team should be able to handle any reasonable suggestion, it's just that we like to talk about the "stupid" suggestions much more frequently.

I constantly see threads trying to improve Esperanto, or complaining about certain features.... and I'm sure Ido and Interlingua have the same sort of people trying to improve their languages as well. One thing to point out, is that the suggestions to improve Esperanto are usually the same... remove the accusative, create an opposing male suffix, standardize the alphabet, etc. If Esperanto was an application, it'd most definitely be improved. Esperanto, however, is not an application, and improving the language would cause many of its components, texts, or spoken works, to be obsolete. When I started learning Esperanto I too had complaints about the language, but in the past week I've learned that the language needs too much work, and improving it to be 100% regular, or YACC validated, is impossible without forcing it to be 100% schematic... then it'd just be an easy to learn Lojban.

I'm learning Esperanto because it is:
1. More regular and logical than natural languages.
2. Much easier to learn than natural languages.
3. Full of free learning resources to easily understand the language.
4. Host to a large enough community to help the learning process.
5. Host to a helpful community, especially when compared with those on the Interlingua forums.

It comes down to the number of speakers. It's useful enough, as I can chat with those in many different countries, and so far that has been quite the learning experience. It's easy enough, especially when compared to Japanese or Mandarin ZH. If Lojban had the speakers, then I'd be learning Lojban.

So, to sum it up, Esperanto is not an excellent language because of grammatical quality, it's an excellent language because of the EO community quality.

~Aaron

Tomo S. Vulpo:This is one of the many weaknesses of English! It’s so confusing not to know whether somebody talks about a man or a woman!

I agree with your point that Esperanto is fine as is in this respect, but I don't see the ambiguity in English as a weakness. On the contrary, there are cases where one might deliberately be trying to conceal the gender of the person about whom they are talking.

Tomo S. Vulpo:

Oŝo-Jabe:... there are cases where one might deliberately be trying to conceal the gender of the person about whom they are talking.

I don’t see why, but fine.
However, if you want to explicitly state that somebody is female, you have to put the adjective "female" in front of the noun in most cases. Now I find it very hypocritical of critics to claim that Esperanto is the language where male gender is presumed even though you can tell by the noun itself what gender it is and do not have to describe it with an additional adjective for women.

Yeah, we know that viro is assumed masculine, and that virino is the feminine form, patro/patrino, onklo/onklino, etc. I think the critics are attacking the fact that the family names are masculine by default... where as in English we have separate words, uncle/aunt, mother/father, sister/brother, and they largely have an equal syllable count, showing no preference.

We don't say "female aunt", just "aunt". I wish that in English we had some means of expressing an aunt or uncle without gender, but I don't think that will happen without lots of Urban Dictionary hits.

OK. Everyone who is arguing about Esperanto's use of a male-first-gender are the same people arguing that Esperanto uses almost exclusively European vocabulary and grammar. There is, in my opinion, a very good reason for this (which I touched on recently in another discussion):

Esperanto was formulated in Central/Eastern Europe in the late 1800s; not the 1980s, certainly not the 1990s! Over 100 years ago when most women in the world did not even have the right to vote. Many languages take a male-first stance. English has words like "Engineer" and "Doctor" and "Explorer" but for many years it would have been assumed these were male titles unless you specified different. That's not a grammatical issue that's a social issue. However, English also has generic terms for animals such as "Cow" (vs. Bull), "Duck" (vs. Drake), which are female-first. Why? I don't know.

The 1870s was also a time when Europeans thought very little of non-Europeans and considered themselves above all else. Dr. Zamenhof mingled with people similar in social standing, ethnicity and background as himself. Why would he have have thought to make women empowered or Asians important in the 1870s? He simply would not have. He probably didn't believe anyone outside of the "Eurozone" would ever use Esperanto. He certainly would not have imagined people from Nepal, Swaziland, Peru and New Caledonia speaking it together, even if he dreamed of that happening. That's our modern world making it possible now.

Unless we want to reinvent the wheel, and I get the feeling we do not, then let's stop arguing about WHY Esperanto is how it is, and start using it for its purpose: world change; harmony, peace and freedom...cxu ne?

I think "aim to perfect the language" is not the right way to go, but solving the gender issue is not that hard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riism

Since there's already a proposal, you only have to adept it. Personally I've adopted it.

I think it was Don Harlow who described Ido and other attempts at a perfect Esperanto as "painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa"

As far as Ido goes, I agree!