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libereco wrote

Reply to comment by yaaqov in Thoughts on Esperanto? by 452

I think you should take more seriously the notion that Esperanto's eurocentricity is a problem

But if you started to mix all the languages of the world into one, wouldn't it become a mess and not easy at all? At least think the prefix/suffix system is very good since it requires speakers to learn less words (as well as enabling fluent speakers to make their own words). But that might be because my native language also uses suffixes.

I agree that Esperanto's eurocentrism is an issue but I don't think it's possible to create an easy language that wouldn't have similar problems.

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yaaqov wrote

The key to neutrality wouldn't be to mix the world's languages together; there are far too many, and they differ from each other tremendously. Rather, we could look to evidence from child language acquisition, to creole languages, and other sources, to see what patterns are most learnable and universal and create a grammatical system based on that. The vocabulary items themselves are arbitrary; once a sound system is designed, actual word forms could just be generated by a computer. That way, everybody has the same challenge ahead of them. Now, I could imagine an argument for maintaining so-called ''international scientific vocabulary". But you get the idea.

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