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I am also boggled that you don’t believe it is easier to learn than most languages. Even most anti-Esperanto people I know (who dislike or reject it or simply have no interest in learning it) at least acknowledge that a language with very regular grammar, no gender or irregular forms to remember, no maze of complicated endings, a consistent orthography, and so on has quite obvious advantages with ease of learning. In practice, everyone I know who has bothered to learn Esperanto finds it noticeably easier than national languages. I was able to speak and understand only in Esperanto sufficiently well to enjoy an all-day Esperanto meeting I attended about 6 months after I started learning it primarily through self-study. Compared to my experience learning national languages (some of which I studied for years, including living immersed in the country where the language is spoken, and never reached that level of competence I reached with Esperanto after 6 months), the difference is quite obvious.

Remush seems right on with his comment:

> I went to the swimming pool this afternoon and I noticed that there were several people swimming there as well.

> Can I prove to you that people can swim, if you don’t want to go to a swimming pool and check with your own eyes?

You sound like the medieval church officials who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope and so thus could deny that moons moved around other planets.

I see now that for you it is an article of faith that people don’t really speak Esperanto. And you use radical skepticism about anything typed on the Internet as a pretext to dismiss any information given to you about Esperanto which does not conform to your beliefs about Esperanto. (By that reasoning, I should believe nothing I read from you or others about Indo-European.)

It’s as if I described the game of chess to you and your response was “That game sounds too artificial. I can’t believe anyone actually plays it or that it could be an interesting game.” And then when people comment “Actually, I play chess and find it to be a good game”, you dismiss the comments as not being scientific enough. And because no one can tell how many people in the world play chess, you assert that this proves there aren’t really chess players. And if someone points to online chess servers and communities, you dismiss that as mere posing on the Internet, not any kind of proof that people really play chess in real life. And if you find some enthusiast making an absurd false claim about chess or some technical argument about chess, you use that to claim that no one really plays chess and that chess can’t really be a good game.

Meanwhile, out in the real world, people continue to speak Esperanto and play chess (sometimes at the same time!), whether or not you believe they exist…

Schubert, Klaus (1993), “Semantic compositionality: Esperanto word-formation for language technology.” Linguistics 31: 311-365.

Haitao, Liu (2001), “Creoles, Pidgins, and Planned Languages.” Interface. Journal of Applied Linguistics / Tijdschrift voor Toegepaste Linguistiek 15 [2]. pp. 121—177.

Gledhill, Christopher. The Grammar of Esperanto: A Corpus-Based Description. Second edition. Lincom Europa, 2000. ISBN 3-8958-6961-9.[3]

Furthermore you should consider the positive judgments of non-Esperantists such as Umberto Eco (In search of the perfect language; though otherwise a confused book) and Robert Philipson (English-Only Europe, 2003; good overview of language policies).

etc.

More at:

Ignorance may be excusable, willful ignorance not so. As a scholar you should lay aside your personal convictions and look at the facts.

kial? mi ne scias.

tio cxi estas tuta perdo de tempo.

tre amuza, kial iu fartas Indo-European helpus penson abstraktan, kvankam multaj jaroj antaux, homo malpli abstraktis.

se vi ne komprenas, povas peti Heather traduki por vi.

As it happens, I have Slovio as my ‘first language’. By that I mean that my parents spoke only Slovio to me from birth until just before I started school at the age of three and a half. As their friends were primarily Slovio speakers, this was the language I heard in our home, read in my children’s books and sang in my nursery rhymes.
Frankly, as such, I don’t bother getting too involved in rebutting the various arguments against use of the language. I use Slovio on a daily basis with a wide variety of friends and colleagues around the world, on a personal and business basis.

As you can see, we are still in the field of “my personal experience is…”. I could assert the same about Indo-European, or anyone could say the same about his “language” – see e.g. the Slovio “testimonials“, how a lot of people argue about the great advantages they had when learning (and using!) Slovio… Do you believe them? WHY NOT? Are they not personal experiences, as reliable as yours?!

Indeed, if your “first and only language” is (really) Esperanto, then maybe your ability to comprehend and use abstract theories is already affected. That’s what happens when parents play with Star Trek or The Lord Of The Rings to educate their children. The same happens when parents play with ‘alternative’ medicines instead of correctly vaccinating their children, or when they teach them only creationism: if he/she dies from a preventable influenzavirus, or becomes a violent extremist, then it’s not your fault as parents; but if he/she just lives and isn’t violent, and continues the family tradition, then you’ve done it well. That’s called denying the antecedent: “I taught my children Esperanto; it didn’t go wrong; so it was right“. A rather simple, but very useful, logical fallacy.

@Remush:

What is exactly your measure of infinity? More than you can grasp in your lifetime?

I used the word “infinity” not as a measure for individual knowledge, but as a philosophical measure for our (speaking hominids’) almost infinite possibilities of reasoning – it refers to this post about the need for a complex language to be able to use a complex reasoning. It is indeed a matter studied in psychology of language, whether language helps reasoning or the other way round, but it is more or less clear both language and developing mind influence each other. Would you consequently rely, for the education of your children and the world’s next generation, on a “language” (i.e. a mix of Romance words and some selected grammatical rules) invented in two days of work, 120 years ago, by someone completely unrelated to linguistics or psychology, who in fact called himself “Dr. Esperanto”, showing that his only aim was “the hope to unite the world”, and not to bring anything valuable to improve communication from a scientific or academic point of view? Then you have faith on Him and His work, and nothing can change that.

Esperanto gives people more time to read literature in their own culture

You can note that for the future. Remember that in each “Universal Congress” you Esperantists have to bring new promotional “advantages” of learning and using Esperanto, proof of them is not required. Just your “personal experience” for newer, more difficult to contrast propaganda; something like “Esperanto gives people more time to read literature in their own culture“, whatever that could actually mean

Read anything in Spanish lately? How much time are you actually spending on great world literature?

Did I told you about logical fallacy already? What do you think about the argumentum ad hominem? Maybe you should read less “great world literature” (i.e. fantasy and inventions), and concentrate on real world knowledge, so that you don’t repeat the same mistakes again and again? The problem of not knowing something is that you cannot feel ashamed of not knowing it: you prefer to read fiction books, so you decide it’s a shame not to have read those very books you’ve read, while philosophy or science aren’t that important for you…

Anyway, thanks for giving me an opportunity to practice my English. Now that I have absolutely no use for it – other than participating to such blogs – I would soon forget everything. Unfortunately, my elocution deteriorated a lot these last years.

Are you kidding me? But Esperanto and Esperantism are perfect! Your English must be perfect, thanks to your Esperanto, it’s tautological! Bring that to the next Master of the Universe Congress, too: “If you learn Esperanto, you will not forget English, even if you don’t use it! That’s my personal experience”

BTW I think you Esperantists should register the trademark “that’s my personal experience” ™, before the other conlangers begin to exploit the same argument. But hurry up, because – as I said – the Slovio creator already noticed it…

What is exactly your measure of infinity?
More than you can grasp in your lifetime?
With Esperanto, you’ll need several reincarnations, and rely on charity to feed you while reading.

Read anything in Spanish lately?

Esperanto gives people more time to read literature in their own culture. What about that?

How much time are you actually spending on great world literature?
…
Honestly?

Anyway, thanks for giving me an opportunity to practice my English. Now that I have absolutely no use for it – other than participating to such blogs – I would soon forget everything. Unfortunately, my elocution deteriorated a lot these last years.

Now allow me to go back to my reading of “Faraon” de Bolesław Prus (with the help of an excellent translation of Kabe, alias Kazimierz Bein – another one you never heard of in your horizon of infinity)

Frankly, as such, I don’t bother getting too involved in rebutting the various arguments against use of the language. I use Esperanto on a daily basis with a wide variety of friends and colleagues around the world, on a personal and business basis.