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Comment by msla | Hacker News Reader

You can look at the whole rest of the page I linked to for ways in which Esperanto is irregular and parochial.

For example:

http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/v.html

There's a whole word class (words ending in AŬ) which is essentially a "Wastebasket Taxon" for his vocabulary: There is no regularity to what ended up there, merely arbitrary choice. That's acceptable in a natural language, but Esperanto is Modern and Scientific and Regular As Oat Bran, right?

> In China, for example, Esperanto was used to introduce western languages.

Really? Do you have any evidence for this? I follow a blog which frequently discusses such things (language use in China) and it's never been mentioned:

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/

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I think it's technically true that someone in China at one point used Esperanto to introduce Western languages to a few other people, because around 1900 it was part of a package of futuristic Western ideas like overthrowing the Emperor and Communism.

But the claim omits how utterly unsuccessful Chinese Esperantists were at their goal compared to the revolutionary Communists. (Even though they were sometimes the same people, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hu_Yuzhi )

For comparison, a few years after Zamenhof started Esperanto, Paul von Möllendorf (a German aristocrat working as a customs official in Shanghai) suggested in his Manchu grammar https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Manchu_Grammar that Westerners should study Manchu as an easier introduction to the Chinese classics, the Chinese Emperor at the time being ethnically Manchu. Then the Emperor got deposed and by now the last native Manchu speakers have probably all died of old age. Learning Manchu in order to learn Chinese would be a collosal waste of time.

Chinese Esperantists that I know don't really seem to make fewer or different mistakes when using Esperanto than when using English. The marking of tenses with -is, -as, -os may be perfectly regular, but that doesn't help much when grammatical tense itself is a foreign concept to you. Someone who usually uses present tense in English when talking about the past will tend to also use present tense in Esperanto when talking about the past.

On the other hand, Esperanto is one of the languages featured by Radio China International (https://esperanto.cri.cn), and there's also an official support for the El Cxinia Popolo magazine, and maybe others I'm not aware of. I'm not sure one can generalize 1) the antagonism between the communist government and Esperanto and 2) the lack of skills of the Chinese Esperanto speakers.

There is no antagonism between the government and Esperanto that I'm aware of, more like disinterest. As I mentioned, there was originally a lot of overlap between people supporting either cause, but Esperanto simply never got as popular as Communism.

As for China Radio International, the inclusion of Esperanto among the forty-odd languages they translate content into is transparently intended to propagandize to foreign Esperantists more so than promoting the language.

> Esperanto is Modern and Scientific and Regular

I don't know. There are irregularities indeed, but they are so few that it's easy to simply memorize them.

> Really? Do you have any evidence for this?

Unfortunately I have no URL to share here. This has been discussed a few times in some of the meetings I attended in the local Esperanto club -- and it makes sense, given the language's propedeutic properties. The geopolitical context has probably played a role (even here, in Brazil, part of our youth refused to learn English for some decades after the US sponsored a coup and a dictatorship in the country, and Esperanto was presented as an alternative pursued by a few of us).

Also, the Chinese government supports Esperanto. There's esperanto.cri.cn and maybe others, although I'm not informed about the nature of the contracts involved.

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