Re:Esperanto as an Asian language
by madcaptenor on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @09:29AM
(#14847539)
From John Cowan's list of "Essentialist Explanations", credited to Kapitano Eglefino (http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan/essential.html#Esperanto):
"Esperanto is essentially English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Latin, and Greek, invented by someone who speaks English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Latin, Greek...and Polish."
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Which is actually quite a farce. Esperanto is largely a language that's vaguely Slavic in grammar and strongly Polish in phonology, with vocabulary largely derived from Slavic, Romance, and Germanic languages. In other words, Esperanto is a "world language" that comes from a time where "world" meant "Europe", and it largely assumes that Indo-European language peculiarities are fairly universal in languages (they're not).