Hi, I'm doing a project qualification at school and we had an open choice of things to research and make projects on. Naturally I chose Esperanto. My title is "To what extent has Esperanto achieved it's original purpose", I was going to just do it on EO in general but needed a question to answer. I also need independent research so I need to ask you samideanoj a few questions:

What was the original purpose of Esperanto?

To what extent do you think it has fulfilled this purpose?

Any other comments welcome.

Ĝis!

A good way of understanding the original purpose of Esperanto is by studying the man who created it, Ludovik Zamenhof. If you have access to it, you may find helpful Marjorie Boulton's biography Zamenhof: Creator of Esperanto.

I would also suggest a study of the Esperanto anthem La Espero, because it encapsulates the ideals and outlook of the community quite well. To put briefly, I would say that Zamenhof wanted to create a neutral international language that would help to put an end to intercommunal strife.

Its outward success in this has been limited, but a relevant question may be to what extent Esperanto has been given a fair chance to fulfil its purpose. France stymied its acceptance at the League of Nations, Hitler felt that it was a Jewish conspiracy and Stalin felt that it was a language of foreign spies. Today prejudices act against it, as well as the perception that English has more or less occupied the position that it were supposed to achieve.

So a better question might be: what good could the language do if it were given a free rein? During World War I Esperantists helped to bring together families that had been torn apart, and this is worth mentioning. Here's an internet article that may be helpful.

In my opinion Esperanto might in the future prove its worth as a bridge language for purposes of translation and interpretation because of the immense cost of translating between many languages. The late Claude Piron has written an article on the whole problem of translation.

Personally I feel that one part of Esperanto that has yet has yet to fulfil its true potential in diplomatic peace-making, is the 'internal idea', or the brotherhood of man, or homaramismo. In this connection
you might find helpful the late Don Harlow's online book, particularly chapter 11.

Good luck with your essay!

I usually say: Esperanto has and has not yet succeeded. Its goal is to facilitate communication and understanding between the people of the world. It does that between people who speak Esperanto, but many people do not speak Esperanto yet.

Momomomomo:"To what extent has Esperanto achieved it's original purpose"

I really hate to do this but the "it's" is actually a verb, and you mean to use the adjective "its". As for the question, there are so many pages on the internet about this, it drives my head crazy. Opinions from an internet forum is probably not the best resource though, but the Wikipedia has a lot sources for their interesting articles. I would check the sources for information, and use that for the essay.

Note that I do not necesarily trust the Wikipedia, but they have lots of links.

Greyshades:Note that I do not necesarily trust the Wikipedia, but they have lots of links.

I've manages to get credits and distinctions in university by using the links on some wikipedia pages so it should be alright for n(Mo) (where n represents the amount of times 'mo' is repeated because I'm too lazy to count )

Warning: I'm gonna try and give out helpful advice without actually knowing if its needed so if you already know this stuff my apologies

Rendering people's names as mathematical equations aside, n(Mo) you might find it easy to simplify the response to "To what extent has Esperanto achieved its original purpose" in order to have some kind of structure - if you cram too much information and takes on the subject you can end up with a really confusing mess of information (personal experience).

E.g. rather than finding a whole essay on "has EO achieved its purpose" on the net and then summarising that whole essay (which will probably be much more detail and unsuitable for what you need) just simplify the purpose and go "Ok, has EO become an easy and useful international lingua franca?" (essentially what an international auxiliary language is without the conlanger's jargon)

My answer: No, not yet at least. English, Mandarin and whatever still are much more useful nowadays in business etc et al (<- I wouldn't recommend that phrase being used in an essay or project), people are still paying money to translate, and EO has (at best) only a couple of million speakers. Furthermore people are still making other international auxiliary languages to try and improve on where EO is not necessarily strong, and while many of them could be considered descendants of EO like French is a descendant of vulgar latin, from a marketing point of view there isn't enough interests in Esperanto with "consumers" who generally are more interesting in well established natural languages.

In other words just look at Rogirs answer

To add to what was already mencionned, I would say that esperanto is a success in the sense that it prouve every day that artificial languages can last and even be more efficient than natural language does.

it's efficient because it's easy to learn (1/10 of the corresponding time to learn english for french people)
it's efficient because the construction of the language permit to speak fluently quite easily and also understand text quite easily.

And following that idea, in an economic point of view, the fact to choose an natural/national language for international purpose is less efficient than to choose an artificial one, which belongs to nobody. But this efficiency is to be considered according to a global point of view (of course for english speaking countries only, it's a loss to use esperanto instead of english).

To go deeper in the economic aspects of language, you can look for Grin, Pool, Selten, and also Van parijs and Cristal for counterarguments. But don't consider if you don't have to go in depth.

,