INTRODUCTION
(FIRST DRAFT)
In the Beginning, There Was Japanese
I found out about Esperanto by accident when I studied Japanese at Waseda University in Tokyo in 2004/2005. I was on my way home when I came across a large book flea market on campus. There I found an English self-study book for Esperanto. It looked interesting, and since it was cheap, I bought it. During my long journey home, I read a good chunk of it and decided that I wanted to learn this weird language. However, I soon had to postpone that because of my studies, but learning it remained in the back of my mind until I started studying it seriously in 2016, after I became a father.
One of the reasons I wanted to learn it was that, by that time, I had realised that I would never become fluent in Japanese. The language is simply too difficult for me, and I had to settle for being "reasonably good" at it. The main reason is that I do not really have a talent for languages. I compensated for that with sheer persistence, but it was not enough. So I hoped that Esperanto, this proclaimed "quick to learn and easy to use" language, would be something even I could master. But after 10 years of studying it, I still struggle with it. There is something holding me back, and after giving it some thought, I think I know what the problem is.
The first reason is that Japanese completely wrecked my assumptions about how a language "should" work. Being so different from my native Swedish and from English, I had to rewire my brain in order to adjust to Japanese logic. So now, when I see Esperanto grammar, my brain does not try to translate it into how I would say it in another European language, as you are supposed to do, but instead tries to understand it on its own terms, which does not always make sense. But this is a minor issue, and not actually all that different from Japanese. The Japanese language has, in fact, a very simple grammar. It is almost perfectly regular and has a limited but clear structure. But if so, why do I struggle with both Japanese and Esperanto?
Because of the second reason: both languages have large vocabularies. There are simply too many words you need to learn, with far too many nuances. Granted, the Japanese vocabulary wins the size contest by a landslide, but Japanese never claimed to be quick and easy to learn. Esperanto does, by focusing almost exclusively on how small and regular the grammar is. Every Esperanto book will tell you about the brilliant suffix system that reduces the size of the vocabulary by a factor of ten (!).
But you only have to open a reasonably modern dictionary to realise that this suffix system is often discarded in favour of new root words for practically everything. Sure, you do not have to use them. You can still rely on the easier suffix system, but as a learner, you can never be sure which words you are expected to learn in order to sound "grown-up". So you are stuck learning everything, just in case. And unlike grammatical rules, which you only need to learn once and can then apply to a wide variety of expressions, words can only be learned one by one through brute-force memorisation. This nullifies whatever advantages Esperanto has over its successful rival, English.
Enter the French
How did this happen? According to Claude Piron, in his excellent book La Bona Lingvo from 1989, it happened basically because of French Esperanto speakers. In 1895, Zamenhof published a piece by the writer Tolstoy, which not only resulted in a ban on the journal La Esperantisto, but also made the language seem suspicious in the eyes of the Russian authorities. This effectively made Esperanto semi-illegal in the Russian Empire and threatened to doom the language. But not long afterward, the French Esperantist Louis de Beaufront took over the mantle and began successfully promoting the language in France and beyond, including within political and academic circles. Without exaggeration, Louis de Beaufront saved Esperanto. But this also shifted the centre of the movement to France, and as it turned out, the French had different ideas about what a "good international language" should be.
The French at the time, especially the well-educated, had a very French-centric view of the world. France was the cultural centre of the world: the country of reason and progress, and French was the language of art and science. So they wanted to make Esperanto more like French. Esperanto is deliberately vague, whereas French is pedantically specific. This meant that more and more words with slightly different nuances crept into Esperanto. Also, French tends to create completely new words for new things instead of creating variations of existing ones. This meant that similar-looking words felt strange to the French, especially the mal words ("mal" gives a word the opposite meaning in Esperanto; dekstra = right, maldekstra = left), so they started replacing them with entirely new words (liva = left).
According to what criteria? By the criterion of: does this word exist in French?
After a while, French words, French nuances, and French language conventions became a large part of Esperanto, making the language larger and more difficult to learn (but much easier for speakers of French).
The State of Esperanto
I do not think this is why Esperanto is so unpopular today. This is mainly because English is now widely viewed as the international language, even among those who do not speak it. This is tied to the Esperanto movement's chronic inability to reinvent itself. For many decades now, the movement has ceaselessly spoken about the need for change, but its actions show that it does not actually want change: it wants the old way of doing things to magically start mattering again (a common problem for dying movements). So even today, Esperanto is presented as a solution to the language problem and to language inequality, even though the world stopped listening a long, long time ago.
But I do think this creates another problem. Before, "eternal beginners" were a problem: people who supported Esperanto for ideological reasons but never learned it. Today, the problem is "eternal intermediates": people who know the basics but never master the language. Because people still discover and learn Esperanto. Maybe not as much for ideological reasons anymore, but because some people simply want to learn a language, and Esperanto is supposed to be easy to learn. But what happens when you reach the intermediate stage and notice that you are no longer progressing? Well, you either settle for that and add to the pool of speakers who keep making mistakes (thereby confusing everyone), or you give up and abandon the language altogether.
The solution La Bona Lingvo offers is pretty simple: strive to speak as simply as possible. This is excellent advice, in theory. But how do you know what counts as simple? There are no complete guides out there telling you what to learn and what to ignore. My first idea was to try to create such a guide, with simplified rules and a smaller vocabulary. But I gave up on that idea when I realised that it would be an enormous task, and because of the criticism I faced when presenting my idea. "Bonlingvismo" is not universally accepted. There are many defenders of the current state of Esperanto (and many of them are, notably, French speakers). They insist that a large vocabulary enriches Esperanto, and that highly specific words are necessary for academic texts (as if Esperanto plays any significant role in such contexts nowadays).
Enter Toki Pona
There is another constructed language that has always held a place in my heart: Toki Pona. For those who do not know, it is a minimalist language of only 120 words that is, arguably, one of the most popular constructed languages out there. It also appears to still be growing.
Why? I can only guess, but I think it is a combination of it being a fun little language without any of the seriousness associated with other constructed languages, and the fact that it is so small that it genuinely is easy to learn. The reason I do not speak it is because it is so radically vague that using the language for anything beyond the most basic subjects is very, very difficult. Which is probably why most discussions about the language are conducted in English rather than in Toki Pona. This is in no way a criticism of the language. Toki Pona is not suitable as an international language because it was never intended to be one. But it is not for me.
This got me thinking: if Esperanto is too cluttered, and Toki Pona is too limited, would it not be possible to create a simplified version of Esperanto that solves the problems of both languages as an everyday international language?
