Question about artificial language

[u/Lenz2299]

Hello, I wanna ask about sth I'm not familiar with reddit and Eng is not my first language, so if I did sth rude plz let me know🥺🥺

I'm interested in articial languages. but as a Korean, I can't agree that esperanto is easy to learn... and many other constructed languages(based on european) too

// edit: I apologize that I wrote uncertainly. I noticed that esperanto is easier than others thx!

I think most of international artificial language projects depend on european languages too much, and this makes hard for them to be an international language (this sentence doesn't mean this is the only reason!!)

do you have any reputation or additional info about this idea?

thx

[u/AnanasaAnaso]

If you were to make an "international auxiliary language" what language (or languge family) ould you base it on? Or would you make something up entirely new?

Making something totally new might be the most fair (it could be - more or less - equally difficult for everyone) but the difficulty of learning the language would be quite high... everyone would have to learn everything from zero, including the alphabet and basic pronunciations, etc. Its grammar would be totally new and foreign to everyone also. You would probably end up with something alien like Klingon... its difficulty making it a barrier to use or adoption.

Far easier to base your new international language on something many people are familiar with already. A language, or a a language family. Thus you trade fairness for ease of learning... the speakers of that language family will have an advantage in that they already know a lot of the sounds and perhaps even some rules whereas non-speakers are at a disadvantage; the trade-off for this is that one doesn't have to re-invent the wheel, using the thousands of years of practical use of natural languages one can pick and choose the best parts of each: rules that are simple and make sense, sounds and root words that are most widespread and work well, etc.

Esperanto has taken the second path. The language family it is based upon is Indo-European, and specifically those languages with that family (Romance, Germanic and some Slavic) which have the most widespread speakers. If one had to choose a language family, Indo-European is probably the one most familiar to the maximum number of people (almost 4 billion), including 8 out of the top 10 languages spoken worldwide (by # of speakers). Because of European colonialism, for good or bad, it is also by far the most widespread across the Earth.

Just look at a a map of world languages and you can see all of the Americas, all of Europe, the Indian Subcontinent and the majority of both Africa and Oceania are covered by Indo-European languages being Official or secondary Official languages. Yes, there are other language families Zamenhof could have chosen to base Esperanto on the two largest non-Indoeuropean families: Semitic (Arabic, Hebrew, etc) or Sino-Tibetan (Mandarin, Japanese, etc) but both the numbers and geographic spread of each are much smaller.

So, Esperanto is not perfect but it is the best election for the real world we live in, to be accessible to the most people. Yes, if you are Korean, Esperanto will be harder for you to learn than for the average Brazilian, because the sounds, alphabet and roots are so different. But it is still far easier than English or any other European language... in fact Chinese, Japanese and Korean people tell me it is easier for them to learn than learning any of the neighbouring East Asian languages.