Miland:This is pure speculation.

It's a reasonable hypothesis.

Miland:I would call the isolation facility in Esperanto a work of genius.

I would as well, but that doesn't mean that Esperanto is any easier for the world outside Europe. Like I said before, it's not always the core grammar that makes a language difficult.

Miland:It is not. Piron states in a well-known video that meetings in Esperanto enable contributions from an intenational audience that ones in English do not.

If someone can give me a link to this video, that would be grand.

Miland:This forum, by the way, is for those who wish to learn and use Esperanto. If you don't, you are welcome to leave. You are not welcome to knock the language itself (as distinct from anything written by Piron, or myself), and therefore should not waste time doing so.

Never have I said that I don't want to learn Esperanto. But I would only promote it as a European IAL.

razlem:

darkweasel:Really none?
A bit more than a year ago I took a little language guide of Japanese and wrote down words that were similar in Japanese and Esperanto. Not all of these words were in that guide, some are from other sources. I posted these in an IRC channel exactly a year ago (what a coincidence ):

All of those are European loanwords.

So what?

Miland:
If you don't, you are welcome to leave.

How to do that?: "Hugging and kicking in the bum."

Remembers me to a German song of Wir sind Helden: Wir sind gekommen um zu bleiben/Sorry, we came to stay.

Aber wir sind schlau, wir bleiben hier für die Gesichter, die empörten/ But we are foxy, we stay here for the faces, the disgusted ones.

qwertz:

Miland:
If you don't, you are welcome to leave.

How to do that?

That's how.

Jo. Schön, dass du gekommen bist; du kannst gleich wieder gehen/ Nice that you made that efforts to come, but you have to leave right now. Seems to be part of that famous "Interna ideo" I heard about.

So Esperanto is easier for Europeans, actually also Americans (North and South), Australians and New Zealanders) - so what.

It remains true that nobody has a native speaker advantage. That's the important point. You can argue about the word 'neutral', but that doesn't change the essential truth.

Edit: Maybe Razlem, it might be a canny move to promote Esperanto as a solution for Europe (and speakers of European languages elsewhere in the world) and stop harping on about its relative simplicity for the Chinese and other Asians.

The important thing is to get Esperanto accepted. Once established, one could turn to its promotion in global terms.

razlem:It's a reasonable hypothesis.

What proportion of linguists of the calibre of Piron, that you know, would agree?

Miland:Piron states in a well-known video that meetings in Esperanto enable contributions from an intenational audience that ones in English do not.

razlem:If someone can give me a link to this video, that would be grand.

Here (3:16-3:38).

razlem:I would only promote it as a European IAL.

It is certainly an IAL made in Eastern Europe. "I" of course stands for "International".

Miland:"I" of course stands for "International".

Which is not necessarily the same thing as "worldwide".

How to make a telephone call to the ISS? They should know where on earth the flags flutter in the wind.

sudanglo:So Esperanto is easier for Europeans, actually also Americans (North and South), Australians and New Zealanders) - so what.

It remains true that nobody has a native speaker advantage. That's the important point. You can argue about the word 'neutral', but that doesn't change the essential truth.

That's not true at all. People who have a romance language as their first language have a massive advantage.

This doesn't make the language bad, however according to Esperanto propaganda it's another feature that's meant to make EO better than Natlangs. So, basically, this is like saying that Esperanto is worse than an imaginary version of it that's perfect. I guess that could be misconstrued as me saying that Esperanto is therefore not perfect and therefore bad

Let's not remember that beauty and perfection are in the eyes of the beholder, and thus there's no point in trying to make Esperanto look universally beautiful or perfect. I think we'd be better off selling it on what we like about it, rather than trying to argue that it's somehow factually universally better than everything else for so called factual reasons when we don't necessarily know if they're grounded in reality or not.

----

darkweasel:A bit more than a year ago I took a little language guide of Japanese and wrote down words that were similar in Japanese and Esperanto. Not all of these words were in that guide, some are from other sources. I posted these in an IRC channel

There's a lot of Japanese terms that come from English. But there's a lot more in Japanese or derived from Chinese. Then there's the many loan words from Sanskrit too, and the fact that many English words are heavily modified or the meaning has been changed.

To drive home the point:
"Kiom kostas via pluvombrelo?"
vs
"How much does your umbrella cost?"
vs
"Kimi no kaban wa ikura desu ka?"
(you-POSSESSIVE-umbrella-SUBJECT-howmuch-COPULA-QUESTION)

There's shared vocabulary, but not enough to really benefit someone that much.