Esperanto, the language of Brotherhood
The Finish linguist and Esperanto speaker Jouko Lindstedt make the following estimation for the number of Esperanto speakers:
1,000 have Esperanto as a native language,
10,000 speak it completely fluently,
100,000 can use it actively,
1,000,000 understand a large amount passively,
10,000,000 have studied it to some extent at some time.
<<About 200 years ago, there was a place (country) what was created for speak esperanto >>
Zamenhof was born in 1859 and Linvo internacia wasn't published until 1887 (120 years ago).
I've also dabbled in Esperanto, I find it an interesting exercise inspired by a noble thought.
I love the idea of Esperanto, but I think the language was rather misdesigned. I don't mind that it has imperfections (surely it has fewer than natural languages do!), but these imperfections can really hurt. There are too many consonant sounds and too many possible consonant clusters, some which are difficult even for English speakers to pronounce, let alone people who speak languages like Japanese which do not have consonant clusters at all! Requiring declension for the accusative case was also a mistake, in my opinion. If variable word order was a requirement, I think it would have been a better idea to always mark the direct object with a preposition when it precedes the subject, or something like that. For a serious language learner like me, declining objects is a minor problem. However, I can see it easily being something that will turn off people who have had no exposure to foreign languages. "I have to tack on an 'n' here? Why? But that's silly!"
Unfortunately, this is the problem when designing an international auxiliary language... if I came up with my own language that I thought was perfect, somebody else would come along and say I'm doing it all wrong and I should do it their way. It's a sad situation, but one that is unlikely to change in the future.
- Kef
Esperanto has some very silly constructions. I think Ido is designed much better.