Miland:

Vilinilo:In my opinion, .. Esperanto is .. not an ideal auxlang for international communication.

Do you have a better alternative?

I do. Firstly, I shall steal the time machine made by baldrick from the new years/christmas special of blackadder, go into the future, retrieve Esperanto v12.05 Alpha, go through a quick bug fix, then bring it back. Hopefully, provided all goes well, we will be speaking a better version of Esperanto by next year. Additionally, this process can be repeated over and over because the future version of Esperanto will be even better than before and so forth.

My other plan is to evolve the human brain through genetic research so that we can all learn lojban and find a practical use for it.

My last plan is to set a whole bunch of mind numbed monkeys down on computer keyboards and hopefully one of them will make the perfect conlang - oh, I forgot - I am one of those monkeys!

But seriously, we live in a universe with endless possibilities, might as well see if there is a better alternative. If there isn't, Esperanto wins by default, If there is, then meh. Esperanto does have a good future ahead of it though, conditions are just favourable for it. When Folkspraak becomes complete (by which it will hopefully be very comprehensive and well done), that will probably be preferred for inter-germanic conversation but what sets EO apart from auxlangs like FS is that it is much better established, has a larger 'target audience' (if you think of conlangs like marketing), and it already has a community.

And @ Mnlg:
English has a 'strict' word order and has a very VERY long poetry history, and we have been translating to and from english from other languages. German and many other Germanic languages too, even though the distinction between lexical classes is less important in our languages. Somehow that's worked out
Plus, no matter what, second hand poetry never sounds as good as the original

In closing, I agree with Vilinilo and tommjames, but meh, I'm too lazy to stress

And sorry for my constant messaging, I'm hoping that this isn't like spam

ceigered:... Firstly, I shall steal the time machine made by baldrick from the new years/christmas special of blackadder, go into the future, retrieve Esperanto v12.05 Alpha, go through a quick bug fix, then bring it back. Hopefully, provided all goes well, we will be speaking a better version of Esperanto by next year.

A cunning plan!

ceigered:

Miland:

Vilinilo:In my opinion, .. Esperanto is .. not an ideal auxlang for international communication.

Do you have a better alternative?

I shall .. go into the future, retrieve Esperanto v12.05 Alpha .. we will be speaking a better version of Esperanto by next year.

Good idea, apart from some itsy-bitsy difficulties with travel into the past, like it being impossible. But come to think of it, if Esperanto survives to version 12.05 in the future, maybe it is the ideal auxlang after all.

ceigered:And @ Mnlg:
English has a 'strict' word order and has a very VERY long poetry history,

I have a great deal of respect for English poetry; I am not an expert on the matter, but I can remember the awe and appreciation I felt when studying Romanticism in my English Literature class in high school. Yet, I still tend to consider any kind of word order as an obstacle to the free flow of thought on which poetry thrives. On the other hand, I won't claim that the accusative ending is much better...

Miland:

Vilinilo:In my opinion, .. Esperanto is .. not an ideal auxlang for international communication.

Do you have a better alternative?

Many. There is a handful of auxlangs better than Esperanto in many ways that already exist, but they don't have a strong community.

You could ask me why won't I learn those languages, instead of criticizing Esperanto. Well, first of all because I like the idea of Esperanto, I totally support an international, neutral, easy-to-learn language. Yet, I don't think Esperanto is neutral nor that easy.

Well, I may admit that Ido has some advantages over Esperanto, objectively speaking…but then it has its disadvantages too. First, the differences between the languages is (in my opinion) far less than the difference in number of speakers (factor of about 1000). And second, it has some problems of its own, including the “plural” article, redundant third-person pronouns and unschematic substitutes for the table words…not to mention the variant stress and relative difficulty of pronouncing the common final “-ar”.

Not that I’m smashing Ido—if it had more speakers than Esperanto I’d be speaking it—but it makes me cringe when I read it, from the use of “w” and “y” to the missing accusative and adjective noun agreement (yes, I know this is actually a relative advantage, but not to my biased sensibilities).

jchthys:“plural” article

I don't think there's a plural article, unless you mean the plural ending -i. I kinda like it. Except for it fails me for one reason - when you have more than one friend, what is it? 'Amiki' - with a hard 'k'. Anyone who speaks italian would know this is a horrible monstrosity of a crime against international linguistic

and mnlg, I have to admit I never liked poetry in school because I'm biased. However, I guess I pretty much agree with you now. But I think it could be easier if we had a prepositional accustive case rather than a suffix, that way people won't go "al lernejon"

andogigi:OK. I found an answer/rule that semi-makes sense. Apparently, "good" can be used as an adverb when it is modifying a "linking verb". A linking verb is a verb that does not express an action. Examples include to be, look, feel, appear, prove, smell, remain, etc. It seems these verbs allow us to express most adjectives as adverbs, in English, since they reflect back on the subject.

Example:

The building remained stable after the earthquake.

Technically, "stable" is an adjective which is being used as an adverb. (It is describing how the building remained, not the building itself) However, since "remained" links it back to the subject, it is allowed.

This can be a double-edged sword, since the part of speech is determined by the usage of the verb.

For example:

1) The rose smells beautiful.
2) I smell the beautiful rose.

In sentence 1, 'beautiful' is an adverb. In the second, it is an adjective.

Anyway, I've never heard of "linking verbs" before in my life. This is new to me.

I learned this very similarly at school, in my English courses when I first heard that there is even something like a difference between adjectives and adverbs

We learned that there are many verbs that take an adjective because they actually modify the noun, not the verb. The most important such noun is actually "to be". Also "to smell", "to look", "to sound", "to stay" etc are such verbs. At least in some contexts.

"The dog smells well" = "La hundo flaras bone"
"The dog smells good" = "La hundo odoras bona"

Or do I misunderstand something there? Maybe I'm absolutely wrong, some native English speaker there who can check this?

Vilinilo:

Miland:

Vilinilo:In my opinion, .. Esperanto is .. not an ideal auxlang for international communication.

Do you have a better alternative?

Many. There is a handful of auxlangs better than Esperanto..

So name half a dozen auxlangs that you think are better than Esperanto.

ceigered:

jchthys:“plural” article

I don't think there's a plural article, unless you mean the plural ending -i. I kinda like it. Except for it fails me for one reason - when you have more than one friend, what is it? 'Amiki' - with a hard 'k'. Anyone who speaks italian would know this is a horrible monstrosity of a crime against international linguistic

Ido distinguishes between “la” and “le”. It’s to replace the missing adjective plural—in Esperanto one can distinguish between la ruĝa and la ruĝaj. However, Ido cannot do this, so they have a plural article to distinguish “la reda” and “le reda”. The “plural” article is not used ordinarily with nouns ending in “-i”.