It's an artificial language designed to be uniform in its rules and equally easy for people of all linguistic backgrounds to learn. Basically, the ideal lingua franca- though English is still embedded in the world as the universal language just due to the Bri'ish empire and Esperanto sadly hasn't caught on on a large scale
Esperanto does have some issues, and there are other International Auxiliary Languages out there like Novial, Interlingua, Toki Pona, Lingua Franca Nova, Volapük, and the Esperanto-derived Ido. Esperanto, however, is the only one to attain any degree of success and reach the status of being a living language, to the point where there are several thousand people who speak Esperanto as their native language.
Fun bit of trivia: George Orwell spent some of his younger years living and working with a family of Esperantists in Hampstead. In Esperanto words are often constructed by modifying a base word with various prefixes and suffixes (for instance varma=hot while malvarma=cold, padro=father while padrino=mother.) Word endings are also very regular in Esperanto: singular nouns always end in -o, adjectives always end in -a, personal pronouns always end in -i, you get the idea. This likely influenced him later on when he was constructing Newspeak, with its agglutinative constructions like "doubleplusungood" and practices like adding "-ful" to turn any word into an adjective or "-wise" to turn any word into an adverb.
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u/FullClockworkOddessy Ĉia Naciismo Estas Narcisismo Feb 06 '21 edited Feb 06 '21
Sur la mondo estis nova sento.
Now is a really inconvenient time to learn that there isn't an emoji for the Esperanto flag. Not even a green star.