ppk89:

And why* you feel offended? What's going wrong?

I am not offended. Just all this sounds to me as if the next step in that little site will be...''Well, this is like Latin, that's like Latin so why do you waste your time on it and don't start learning English (as it's deriving from Latin as well) or maybe take up the sheer Latin.

A valid concern, but it's against my own personal reasons to encourage people to learn only one language because it's "good enough".

On the flipside, I'd happily encourage people to learn Esperanto AND Latin at the same time .

But ultimately it's to counter the "Esperanto's a hodge-podge of languages" argument, which lately after thinking about this is invalid, since if we look at French, that's got borrowings from all sorts of languages, let alone something like Indonesian which has very little of its roots left in its word stock

ppk89:But not say what the language is and what isn't.

True, but I'll add that me discussing this topic is purposely aimed at a single reason. I leave the actual practice to people who want to promote that, since that's not something I can easily promote when I only use it as a hobby and never much at all

darkweasel:+1 [to not seeing the point]

Well, I was semi expeting you to say something like this Let's just say that you're not in the target group, since you're obviously made up your mind to learn Esperanto regardless of its true nature. This is targetted at people who need encouragement to see how Esperanto can be seen as being just a normal language, by showing that it's hypothetically possible for a language to have evolved "naturally" and end up just like Esperanto, and that the only difference between a natural language and what Zamenhof did is knowingly, or not, he shortened language evolution into a lifetime of a man rather than an empire.

To supplement this though, I feel I might need to balance it with some comments about how Esperanto's existence isn't nullified by its resembling a native language that isn't neutral - god knows I'm going to have that come up eventually