Personally, I would have gotten rid of inflections/affixes. What would you have changed?

I don't see an eye rolling emoticon...so I won't respond to this thread.

I like it just the way it is.

As for the affixes, they're delicious. They create a very real potential for wordplay.

Philodice, here's the eye-rolling emotion:

KetchupSoldier:I like it just the way it is.

As for the affixes, they're delicious. They create a very real potential for wordplay.

Philodice, here's the eye-rolling emotion:

Pli dankon por la okulĉirkaŭilon. (Sorry for the made up word for eye-rolling tool but I couldn't resist.)

Honestly, you can't write poetry in any language that doesn't have those things, and I'm a poet.

I personally wouldn't have made the language. Natura evoluo, laŭ mi, sufiĉas. If I was forced to make EO, I would have made it with a sound set half way between Germanic and Chinese, and with a structure that promoted the growth, healthy transmission and integrity of information, logic, and ideals (While Zamenhoff saw a problem in the diversity of languages acting as a blockage to communication, I see that blockage as being at a much more core level where humans are unable to express even in a common language how they feel, even to themselves).

@ Philodice etc:
Technically, that eye-rolling emoticon is actually "senkulpa" = innocent. (see how the eyes stop rolling up the top? Maybe it needs to whistle to itself inconspicuously though).

(Note: Message heavily redacted)

ceigered:I personally wouldn't have made the language. Natura evoluo, laŭ mi, sufiĉas.

Technically, that eye-rolling emoticon is actually "senkulpa" = innocent. (see how the eyes stop rolling up the top? Maybe it needs to whistle to itself inconspicuously though).

Konsenti. Mi estus tro pigra.
True. I am too lazy.

I think, the question in the thread title is legitimate, because it asks, how you would have taken on the task of building a language from scratch. But then in his article, the author writes what he would change and asks what others would change in Esperanto. That's a totally different question. Many have tried to change Esperanto in the past, and the result was almost always nonsense or a completely new language (but it has to be asked if that one was any better). When you start changing anything about Esperanto grammar, you get into a landslide of other changes you need to make your language consistent again.

About the affixes: It's not clear if Arpee wants to get rid of the grammatical suffixes (-o, -a, -e, -i, -u, -j, -n, -(i/a/o/)(s/t/nt)) or the helpful little words like -ar-, -ej-, -uj- that enable you to derive words. Well, I think it's clear that the latter are really useful. But many have already proposed to ditch grammatical suffixes. But where would you end up without them? They help making clear the structure of a sentence, even if you don't know the meaning of each word. English has only little of them, and here is an interesting example:

Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like a banana.

The same in Esperanto:
Temp'o flug'as kiel sag'o.
Frukt'muŝ'o'j ŝat'as banan'o'n.

You immediately recognize what flies and who likes what. If you leave out e. g. noun and verb markers, you lose this advantage. In Esperanto, you often simply change the -o, -a, -i and make a verb from a noun or vice versa and so on. If you haven't got those, you need other means of changing word classes, and you'll end up with the same thing in different clothes. Or plural: if it isn't shown in the word, you need other words making it clear. The agglutinative structure of Esperanto enables you to understand what role the word "ilojn" plays in a sentence if you know what o, j, and n mean as a suffix, because the single letters all have their own constant meaning.

After all, I think there isn't so much that needs to be changed in Esperanto.

philodice, I think okulrulilo would be better, because a "ĉirkaŭilo" would be an "around-tool". I'd resort to maybe "okulrululeto", "a little guy rolling eyes"

pohli:You immediately recognize what flies and who likes what. If you leave out e. g. noun and verb markers, you lose this advantage. In Esperanto, you often simply change the -o, -a, -i and make a verb from a noun or vice versa and so on. If you haven't got those, you need other means of changing word classes, and you'll end up with the same thing in different clothes

Well, technically this isn't quite a clear cut truth.

For example:

last tag frukt muŝ flug al banan

Here, we know yesterday (or the last day if greater context tells us that we're talking about another time period than the current one), a fruit fly flew to a banana. In fact, frukt muŝ flug banan almost makes enough sense, if we assume that flug can double as "fly to" (this is as if Esperanto never had cosmetic word categories).

If we wanted to say that the fruit fly flew like a banana ( not a very straight flight path?) then "frukt muŝ flug banan kutim" could indicate that without needing an adverbial suffix (essentially, word endings are the same as if we had abbreviated labels on the end of words telling us what they do).

Even with loose word order, we generally can get the idea that with "flug banan frukt muŝ" that either:
A banana flew to a fruit fly (the brain goes "least likely")
A banana fruit flew to a fly (the brain goes "unlikely")
A fly flew to a banana fruit (the brain goes "possible")
A fruit fly flew to a banana (the brain goes "very likely")
And all this occurs within an insanely small amount of time (most of the time).

Even things like "the cat bit the dog" could be phrased as "mord kat mord hund" (bite-cat bites dog, ~ the biting cat bit the dog), and things like "the dog bit the biting cat" could be phrased as "hund redon mord mord kat" or something like that (signifying that the dog gave back a bite to the biting cat), or "mord hund al mord kat" (the dog gave a bit to the biting cat).

(I'm not disagreeing with your points, just adding to the discussion of word endings. It's all interesting - one method puts the onus on the minds ability to quickly categorise and sort data (no word endings), and the other puts the onus on the minds ability to recognise and remember the meaning of certain symples (a, o, e, i, u, as, -ant-, -ar-, etc). Of course, in practical EO, both processes should be occuring at the same time (although recognising and remembering what things mean should be happening a lot more), thus why we can pick up when errors occur in ones speech.)

Radio~!:I really don't understand the point of threads like this.

Would you go to a French/German/Spanish language forum and tell them what you think ought to be changed in their languages?

It's likely though someone would go and ask "what would X language be like if X didn't happened/happened?" (e.g. if the normans never came to britannia, what would happen if Gothic never died out, what would French look like if the Romans never imposed Latin on Gallia, etc).

Let's try to keep the whole troll/anti-troll thing to the "infected" threads and answer this as it's asking literally speaking, and avoid presupposing any ulterior motives.

(Perhaps Arpee, a better question would have been "if you were around during Zamenhoff and the other turn-of-the-century conlangers' time, what sort of conlang would you have made", as the topic of alternative forms of Esperanto seem to illicit negative reactions, but that's in the past now anyway, and I suspect such a safely worded title is unfortunately too long to be possible).

You are quite right Radio. People wouldn't discuss on a French language learning Forum alternative versions of the language. They would know that they are on hiding to nothing.

(Though I've got a few suggestion on how French could be improved.)

However, a lot of people, including some fluent speakers of Esperanto, and a lot of beginners, have doubts about about whether Esperanto is a 'real' language.

Debating that question can be pretty fruitless, but what is highly relevant to the Esperantists is why so many people do believe that Esperanto isn't 'real' language and are therefore happy not to take it seriously.

It clearly isn't an issue about the origins of Esperanto, in my view.

Nor is it about the number of speakers. There may be tribes of a 150 in the Amazon jungle who speak some particular language that no one else speaks.

Rather, it is linked to the fact that there is no population that uses the Esperanto exclusively for their day to day business of living.

In the popular mind, that is what makes a language 'real', IMHO.

However, if Esperanto could claim 100 million speakers, I think then we wouldn't have to put up with people taking the piss.