That's what people who have never tried to learn Esperanto usually say.
-Esperanto is simple, yet not simplistic. Somehow, it has managed to develop a culture of its own, with authors and poets publishing original works in this language.
-Most Esperantists are realists. They don't expect this conlang to achieve world recognition, they don't even wish to, even though it was the intended specific purpose when L. Zamenhof created it. English as word language is here to stay. Nowadays, many Esperantists are attached to their unique underground subculture. They wouldn't like it to become mainstream.
-Esperanto's big advantage is its propedeutic value. A study conducted by the University of Paderborn in Germany has revealed that kids who learn Esperanto at an early age have less trouble learning a second foreign language.
Because its flexible syntax allows many different combinations, depending on which part of the sentence you want to emphasize, teaching kids how a sentence is constructed, how to think intuitively in a "foreign" way.
And it turns out that countless Esperanto-speakers are enthusiastic polyglots.
-I find Esperanto very appealing, but this is just my personal opinion. It combines a vocabulary mostly derived from Latin and Romance languages with a southern Slavic phonology, giving it a pronounced Adriatic vibe. At first sight, it could be an extinct Romance language formerly spoken in Fiume or in the Republic of Ragusa, a kind of Dalmatian, so to say.
A reconstructed Indo-European language as
lingua franca would be absurd.
-It would be as fake and artificial as Esperanto, to begin with. That project of reconstructed language exists but is only hypothesis-led. No linguist can know with certainty how that extinct language really looked and sounded like.
-This resurrected language would have to adapt itself to the modern world. Tons of new vocabulary would have to be created in order for that language to be functional. It would be a huge waste of time. Especially if you consider that Esperanto, as a fully functional auxiliary language, is in step with the 21st Century and our digital era.
-Last but not least, a reconstructed IE language would be hard as Hell. It would never catch on, way too repelling, nobody would want to learn it. Whereas Esperanto is purposely simple.
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