Will Esperanto ever be the official second language of EU?
I'm a native speaker of English, but I use Esperanto too.Esperanto is no threat to English.
Esperanto hasn't yet gained the recognition it deserves. However, all things considered, it has actually done amazingly well. In just over 120 years, it has managed to grow from a drawing-board project with just one speaker in one country to a complete and living natural language with around 2,000,000 speakers in over 120 countries and a rich literature and cosmopolitan culture, with little or no official backing and even bouts of persecution. It hasn't taken the world by storm - yet - but it's slowly but surely moving in that direction, with the Internet giving it a significant boost in recent years.
Esperantomay not be linguistically perfect,but I've used it successfully in many countries. It works - and not just in Europe.
Any naturalistic language is better than esperanto, be it interlingua, slovio, folkspraak, or any of the many others.
France can convince Germany to use another language in European Union like Esperanto, Indoeuropean, Latin or another one
France and GErmany are not the only important countries in Europe, (UK; Italy, Spain, Poland) besides their power is less and less evident, particularly after the widening of the European Union. Even the relationship between France and Gemany is less stronger than in the past. EU is composted of 27 members and France and Germany can't decide anything on their own!
Esperanto may serve a purpose for some centuries, but then it also brings along the risk of becoming too dominant, same with Latin, Interlingua, Folkspraak, Slovio or any other "neutral" language.
With Latin comes a possible induction of renewed arrogance from Romance speaking countries. Interlingua, Folkspraak, Slovio may be good to bundle Romance, Germanic and Slavic groups together, but still it has little chance of success as they're boring soulless and simple constructs without any significant history added to it anyway.
My opinion: Esperanto may serve a temporary purpose, but it will face an eventual decline. It can be used as a neutral communication medium, but it can take over living languages and brutally wipe out cultures when it gets abused (and that for a language which history started with the fantasy of some XIXth century intellectual). Future linguistic strife between natural languages and Esperanto is a very realistic scenario.
Another downside of Esperanto is its lack of history. Latin, even in a simpler version (must have cases though) at least has 2000+ years of written history.
I still like Latin the most for a "neutral" European language. You can start with forming a Neo-Latin speaking elite, and eventually, over generations, learn it to little children from young age in kindergarten.
Israelis have done this with Hebrew. Yes, we can do this with Latin also.
Only sad that it's Romance-centered.
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-- No way. Esperanto sounds terrible.
Interlingua looks good. It has 5 vowels only.
Interlingua looks good. It has 5 vowels only.
All languages with only 5 vowels sound ridiculous and primitive: Basque, Greek, Spanish, Japanase, Macedonian
On the contrary. It must be an useful feature when many auxiliary languages have 5 vowels only: Interlingua, Esperanto, Ido, etc. Among these Interlingua does not sound bad at all.
Greek a primitive language? You must be joking. I can't think of a more classy language, aside from Latin ,Sanskrit or Etruscan.
In my view Spanish might be used as an auxiliary language.....