> [1] http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/

I have read large parts of this rant, and I started off thinking "wow, he's really ripping into Esperanto, there will be nothing useful left afterwards!". Then I started thinking about it; on the high level his arguments are weak. E.g. the overall theme of his rant seems to boil down to "If Esperanto has flaws, it can't be good", and on the low level, his arguments are weak, he gets right down to "A flaw in Esperanto is that the 1905 published book on it contained a typo". That's someone with a real axe to grind.

I'm not linguist enough to follow very closely, but pages and pages of this are essentially. "Here's what Esperanto did. It's bad because it's not what I'd have done". Look:

The actual forms of these inflections (‐os? ‐inta?) are unconvincing. Worst of all is ‐u, the imperative. Most languages, for obvious reasons, arrange it so that commands can be given via the most basic verbal “stem” available, not a special, uniquely inflected form!

Well I disagree, I like that basic stems and imperatives are clearly different. Now what?

B3: I wouldn't have chosen those sounds.

F1: It uses words people knew!!!!!

F2: I wouldn't have chosen those words!

F3: It's plausible that a hypothetical language could do better.

G2: He wasn't even a real linguist!

G5: I don't like how this looks, therefore it's bad.

M1: Unsurprisingly, Esperanto's phrase structure rules and so on turn out to be hardly distinguishable from the ones Zamenhof grew up with – they're pretty good simple ones, but it's sheer blind luck… - Really? You can't even give him the benefit of the doubt? He spent ten years working on this and the only way he did something you like was blind luck?

On and on, sour grapes and "hypothetically it could be done differently and more to my taste" by the author.

Yes there are some valid criticisms in there, the way "Three twelfths, 32nds and Thirty halves" are written the same, numerically.

But then we come back to... what's the point of the article? "If there are problems it must be completely useless?" or "If I can find no problems then everyone would speak it?" or "it's possible to design a language that nobody would find any flaws with?".

Anyway, let me not whinge forever, since I'm not a fluent Esperantist or a linguist. See instead Claude Piron's response to that deconstruction: http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/why.htm (He being a UN translator working on translating English, Russian, Chinese and Spanish into French, and was fluent in Esperanto).

There are very few people who have taken up Esperanto who can communicate well with it even after much effort. That's especially true for people of the majority of the world's native language backgrounds.

and his http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/comments.htm which contains

Languages such as Esperanto are no easier for non-Europeans to learn than French or English.

When I observed communication in Esperanto in Eastern Asia, especially among Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Koreans, I made it a point to ask people how much time they had devoted to acquiring the language. [..] Most of these Asians with a rather crippled English had devoted some 2000 hours to learning it; those who used Esperanto had studied it for less than 200 hours. Yet, their level was much superior whatever the criterion (fluency, lack of misunderstandings, spontaneity, nuances, humor, etc.). Obviously, your conclusion is based on erroneous data. (See my research report "Esperanto: l'image et la realite'", Cours et Études de Linguistique contrastive et appliquée No 66, Paris: Institut de Linguistique appliquée et de didactique des langues, University of Paris-8, 1987, and my book Le defi des langues, Paris: L'Harmattan, 1994, e.g. pp. 243-254; a review of this book can be found in Language in Society, 26 (1), 143-147, 1997).

Also, ref. Bjarne Stroustrup's quote 'There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses'.