Day twenty-one
Question -- How about the Esperanto to be a universal language?
Answer -- I already showed that English is far from a true universal language after over 400 years of economical and political domination. The only chance for English to become a true universal language is by PreBabel-lizing itself. And, this is also the case for Esperanto.
I am not an Esperanto speaker. As a great linguist, I am able to notice some genetic defects of the Esperanto.
1. It is a phonetic language. For human, the phonetic memory is tremendously weaker than the visual memory. Furthermore, the human tongue is just a piece of muscle, and its flexibility is limited. After that muscle memory is set with a certain language, it is very difficult to acquire the second set of muscle movements which is, often, required for speaking a second language. Thus, for a phonetic language, if it is not a mother tongue, it can be acquired only after tremendous amount investment of memory energy.
2. The "... learning two instead of one issue" is a fatal blow to any language which attempts to become a universal language if it cannot get around this issue. This is not an issue for PreBabel, as the PB (target language) is simply a constructed dialect of that target language. The different part between the dialect and the target language is not a burden but is a help, as memory anchors for learning the target language. Esperanto could be a dialect of Slavic language family but is very much foreign to the Big Five.
3. The "lacking of speaking group issue" is another fatal blow. With one to two million speakers, Esperanto has, indeed, done some wonders, but no cigar. That number practically means nothing, not even a peanut. Yet, the entire speaker of a target language are the speakers of PreBabel (target language).
I am sensing that Esperanto is trying to domesticate some speakers who speaks aboriginal languages. Superficially, this looks to be a good strategy, but it is not. There is a big reason that they stayed as aboriginal. They cannot be brought out to the bigger world from their trap of aboriginality easily. Even if they can be domesticate with Esperanto, they carry very little importance in the world stage.
There is a saying, "Failure is the mother of success." It means that after a failure we learned a lesson of which pathway is a dead-end, and we try a new path. After enough new paths are tried, one will eventually turn out to be the highway to success. By walking on a failure-path million times will not turn it into a highway of success. Those kinds of failure will never become the mother of success.
This is my opinion alone, "that the only chance that Esperanto can become a universal language is by PreBabellizing itself asap."
Signature --
PreBabel is the true universal language, it is available at
http://www.prebabel.info