[shadowofneptune]

Esperanto was intended as a sort of diplomatic language. It's got flaws, definitely. The sounds and spelling are very much from the creator's native Polish, a lot of important terms are rather obscure («Usono,» from "Usonia" is the word for the United States). That said, it is in the end relatively easy to learn, and it is easy to express the ideas of diplomacy, science, and civil society.

China and Japan used to have a lot of Esperantists before WWII, for that reason.

https://www.loc.gov/item/2021670575/

> After World War I, the League of Nations considered adopting Esperanto as a working language and recommending that it be taught in schools, but proposals along these lines were vetoed by France.

It may be Eurocentric, but it's hell of a lot easier for diplomats to learn than English or French!

[senloke]

An actual Esperanto speaker here. I need to correct this. It was never intended to be a "diplomatic" language, as such a language only spoken by diplomats between their kind. So the language of a small elite, which does not want to deal with the average man on the street. That sounds like a story which was said about the predecessor of Esperanto: Volapük.

Esperanto was at some point in time the "workers latin", because the less educated worker could learn it as a means to talk with people from other nations. That ended with pushing English or other "more practical languages" in schools to this day.

Esperanto still is a working living language with a working worldwide community.

[bmacho]

Zamenhof stated multiple times that he wanted to create an universal second language, as opposed to an universal first language. I don't think this distinction makes much sense, had any effect on any design decision, but probably it was important for the marketing of the language. In this sense it was indeed intended to be a "diplomatic" language, so that diplomats can use a single language. (As well as international organizations, merchants, tourists etc.)

[shadowofneptune]

Frankly, this is why despite my admiration for Esperanto, I do not engage in it.

Posts like these are the 'no fun allowed' of constructed languages, and it pops up most often with Esperantists. Like a diplomat, you refuse to let people use words carelessly, or loosely.

Toki Pona is in itself a reaction to that. It's an exploration in wordplay, puns, and local culture.

EDIT: You also left like... a wall of text explaining why Esperanto is far superior to Toki Pona? That isn't fun to read or talk about. If the idea is to replace English as a language of the world, we don't have to bring the stern attitude of an English teacher along with it.

The sister post got my intent well.

[int_19h]

Slight correction: Zamenhof's native languages (so far as we can tell), in a sense of what he spoke at home, were Yiddish and Russian, although he certainly learned Polish at a very young age due to place of residence. Not that it makes much difference in this case - the quirks of Esperanto phonology, such all those affricates and consonant clusters are familiar to speakers of pretty much any Slavic language. Esperanto orthography, on the other hand, appears to be inspired more by Czech than Polish - "v" rather than "w", diacritics over digraphs etc.