Why do people think Esperanto is linguistically neutral?

Question

Almost all of the roots are from European languages, the phonology is European, the morphology is European, and syntax is European. Someone who knows Chinese would have a much harder time with Esperanto than they would with a Sino-Tibetan based language.

Answer 1

You are right that the vocabulary of Esperanto is comprised primarily of roots from western languages. The neutrality of Esperanto refers to the fact that it is not the language of any particular nation or political entity.

It may surprise you to know this, but Esperanto has quite a following in China. The Esperanto magazine El Popola Cxinio (Out of People's China) became a premier publication amoung Esperanto enthusiasts.

Even though the roots for the words are western, the simplicity of the grammar is still there. Also, the absence of exceptions to rules, and the reduced vocabulary learning load based on the agglutinative feature of affixes, and the ease of pronunciation are all available to Chinese learners as well.

Answer 2

Esperanto is "linguistically neutral" in the sense that no one speaks it as a native or national language. I think that is what is generally meant by the expression.

You are not alone in arguing that Esperanto is based on European roots and therefore discriminates, to some degree, against speakers of non-Indo-Euopran languages in the world. However, this arguement has some weaknesses when you really think about it. .

First of all , most foreigners do remarkably well in learning English , an Indo-European language, even people from China and sub-Saharan Africa.

Secondly, lots of non-whites in the world speak other Indo-European languages like French, Spanish and Portuguese with no problem.

Thirdly, Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese are all highly intelligent peoples who have not found learning Western languages to be a major obstacle. They learn our languages better than we in the West learn theirs.

Fourthly, while Esperanto is based on European languages it has a relatively simple sound system, a neccessity for any international language. Someone who speaks a Bantu or Polynesian language would especially love this.

It also has basically an agglutinating type of grammar e.g. kuragxa (courageous), kuragxulo (brave man), malkuragxulo (coward), malkuragxuleto (little coward), fikuragxulo (stinking coward) etc. that speakers of languages like Turkish, Mongolian, Korean and Japanese or Quechua and Swahili would not find all that foreign.

Finally, Esperanto as it exists today still needs to be further simplified and reformed. Some of its choice of vocabulary is questionable too like birdo for "bird," lifto for "elevator" and boato for "boat." However, once these problems are overcome, some sort of Esperanto-like language might be acceptable as an international language everywhere on the globe.

Answer 3

I just came back from the International Esperanto convention which took place in Japan. More than 1,000 of the attendees were from Asian countries.
I made friends with many Japanese and Chinese people and we discussed this topic.
Invariably, they agreed that, given a choice they would prefer to learn Esperanto over English, even though most of the roots are European.
The fact that some of them knew some English or some Spanish,certainly made learning Esperanto even easier for them.
One Japanese lady, Humiko, said that she love the fact that Esperanto uses particles and endings to indicate parts of speech and word function, just like Japanese language does.
We jokingly proposed that the root "dank" should be replaced with "arigat" when thanking someone.
Koran Arigaton! =)

Answer 4

well yeah of coures. its a neutral euro language. lol