First of all, I think the pledge that you mention at PledgeBank.com is wildly unrealistic, as I say (in Esperanto) in the comments on the pledge page.

I am of course aware of Zamenhof’s effort to get 10 million people to commit to Esperanto, and you’d be right to point out that there have never been 10 million speakers of Esperanto throughout its 120 years of existence.

I also have to confess that I’ve never actually taken the time to read La Unua Libro, so thanks for the link to an online translation!

However, I certainly retain confidence that Esperanto is far from a lost cause. There is much apathy and resistance to overcome, certainly, and the critical mass that would make Esperanto the “obvious” choice to language learners (the position currently enjoyed by English) is still a long way off.

However, when I see the number of students enrolled at http://www.lernu.net, projects like http://www.Springboard2Languages.org, events like the Nitobe Symposia, and the increasing visibility of the language to young, active people on the internet through Skype, LiveJournal, PledgeBank, and many other places (including of course OpenOffice.org)… well, I like to believe that the idea is still spreading, and gaining adherents faster than they’re dying off or quitting the movement.

Incidentally, I’m not sure of your identity, Alan, but I’d be interested to hear more about you, if you’d like to share. You can obviously write in Esperanto quite compentently, but appear very disillusioned with the whole idea. I’m not so blindly devoted to the movement that I can’t imagine how that might have happened, but I’d be interested to hear your story, either here or by private email.

You are, of course, right. But did you know that in the “First Book”, Zamenhof tried almost exactly the same? He invited readers to fill in and return a coupon saying: “I, the undersigned, promise to learn the international language, proposed by Dr. Esperanto, if it shall be shown that ten million similar promises have been publicly given”. (See: http://www.genekeyes.com/Dr_Esperanto.html)

It is interesting that the idea of collecting any really significant number of pledges to learn Esperanto seems doomed to fail today as it did in the 1880s.

In same book, Dr Zamenhof wrote the following about Volapük:

“But the number of enthusiasts, after having risen to a certain number, will remain stationary, and as the unfeeling and indifferent world will never consent to take any pains in order to speak with the few, this attempt will, like its predecessors, disappear without having achieved any practical victory.”

Ask yourself whether he has not in fact unintentionally described the situation about Esperanto itself. The numbers have risen to “a certain number”. For Esperanto, that number is probably one or two million, which is many more of course than for Volapük, but nonetheless a number at which it has stagnated, and at which the “unfeeling and indifferent world” has little reason to pay notice.

Does Esperanto really look that scary to you?! It’s got a very high proportion of Latin, German and Greek roots, so many of them should look familiar. There are of course the accented consonants, which look a little bizarre to Western Europeans, but the way it all fits together — the grammar — is beautifully simple.

Thanks for passing by anyway.