Ildar

Language is one of the most vivid examples of spontaneous order arising in society. People have a desire to understand one another, and they use various available means for this purpose; in most cases, this turns out to be the voice, although gestures and facial expressions also retain an important role. The convenience of transmitting information by voice is quite great, and this successful practice becomes embedded in culture, turning into a full-fledged language and gradually being refined: vocabulary tends toward complexity, and syntax toward simplification.

In every sufficiently isolated population of people, its own language develops. You can see this in miniature even in your own family, where there are likely many idioms for internal use that are not used in the outside world. At the same time, as globalization progresses, a reverse trend emerges—toward the unification of language, for now there is a need to understand not only the nearest neighbors but also those with whom contacts occur quite episodically, and there has been no long period of adjustment to develop a communication protocol.

Esperanto is an artificially created language intended precisely to fulfill this task: to facilitate mutual understanding in a global world with minimal common costs for language learning. The fate of Esperanto unfolded roughly as the fate of Bitcoin might have if it had appeared in a world with a gold standard. Yes, Bitcoin is more convenient for transfers than gold, but where is its gold backing? Why are another set of decentralized funds, independent of a trusted intermediary, needed if gold already exists and is actively used? The same goes for Esperanto: yes, one can learn it and become one of hundreds of thousands of speakers, but English is just as widespread worldwide, and it has billions of speakers, for hundreds of millions of whom it is their native language.

So the idea is certainly clever and deserves great respect, but by natural order, people did not follow this idea. However, there is certainly a point in learning Esperanto—some people, for instance, learn Sindarin, and there are surely more speakers of that artificial language in the world than of, say, Vepsian. This means someone needs it.

Of course, forcing humanity to communicate in Esperanto is a solvable task. After all, there are precedents in the world where the Irish artificially recreated their Gaelic and the Jews recreated Hebrew. But the costs for those who would be forced to do so would be very high, and I would prefer that society avoid such a violation of spontaneous orders—there is no need for it, as the natural convergence of languages and the development of machine translation will handle the task much more simply.