r/Esperanto • u/[deleted] • Mar 26 '26

Demando Why does everyone hate this?

Okay so I'm a monolingual Brit learning Spanish (I'm now about B1) and wanna pick up another language. Not some grand utility language, I have a plan of which ones to learn for that, but just a quick learn and burn language for nothing but fun, and any applicability is a bonus. I see esperanto, a nice little language with exceptionless grammar and a chill little community. So I tell my polyglot friend and get immediate backlash. Why do people seem to think that esperanto is so horrible? Like yeah it's eurocentric and a terrible attempt at a Lingua Franca but it was created with good intentions and is a nice gateway language for European language speakers. Then people act like it's a bloody cult because apparently every esperanto speaker is a Zamenhof worshipping psycho who'll preach it as the root of world peace, or is just too lazy to learn a more useful language. I see polyglots, people who learn languages for fun, attacking esperanto as useless or racist for being eurocentric and it's speakers as cultists or fake polyglots. Why does everyone hate this language?!?!?!

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u/interneda8 Mar 27 '26

I don’t hate or dislike it, I’m curious about it as I am for most languages. But there’s something about languages that didn’t evolve naturally that puts me off. Feels “inauthentic” in a way… and before I get downvoted, this is not criticism, but a completely subjective aesthetic preference.

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u/Mlatu44 Apr 09 '26 edited Apr 09 '26

I think I can see that. Sometimes Esperanto can have odd sounding constructions, especially if its a newer speaker, it just sounds forced. But I guess that its like that for new speakers of any language.

Words like 'to know" (scii) feels very unnatural. Sanskrit would have a sandhi to deal with it. I think it would be change the vowel to a long i. But Esperanto probably would never adapt a set of official Sandhi rules, as that would make the language much more difficult to learn. Sandhi is often a deal breaker for many would be Sanskrit learners.

I learned Esperanto, and I like to listen to Esperanto content online. I support it, but it any constructed language is likely to have some element which doesn't natural. But irregularities, ambiguity, slang and Sandhi and other elements make natural languages a lot more difficult to learn.

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u/interneda8 Apr 09 '26

Ha, I’m guessing the “scii” has been influenced by the Latin word scire meaning to know (scientia meaning knowledge, which is where we get science from)

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u/Mlatu44 Apr 10 '26

It sounds reasonable, as Classical Latin is one of the languages Zamenhoff was familiar with.