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It's less than ten but more than one, but it's not nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, or two.

(With apologies to Jorge Luis Borges http://www.christopherculver.com/en/translations/ornithologicum.php)

Oh, I've indeed got some impressions about Esperanto.

Tell me how you typeset the Latin transliterations of the Devanagari vocalic R

That doesn't require a combining character either, it's a single Unicode point, U+1E5B Latin Small Letter R With Dot Below. It can be entered directly in UTF-8. See my guide LaTeX for Classical Philologists and Indo-Europeanists .

As a student interested in the whole variety of Indo-European languages and their scripts, I do multilingual typesetting with LaTeX with little hassle. Any modern LaTeX distribution allows input in UTF-8, so the sky is the limit. See my guide LaTeX for Classical Philologists and IEists .

Many publishing houses produce all their output with LaTeX, so saying it's useful just for math doesn't reflect its actual usage.

Your anti-Esperanto rant seems far more crackpot-ish than anything I've read by Piron. E.g. you claim "Loyalty to Esperanto is meant to override curiosity about other cultures", which flies in the face of theory and practice, since the primary goal of Esperanto is to permit people from different cultures to communicate more easily. Esperantists whom I know certainly seem interested in other cultures, and typically enjoy talking about their cultural differences and similarities with Esperantists from other places.

You assert that you can have no "true contact" (whatever that means) with a foreign country unless you learn the language of the country. You blithely ignore that people simply cannot learn dozens of languages. Last year I visited Finland, Lithuania, Poland, and Hungary; should I have learned all 4 languages in the few months I had before my trip? That is madness. I had various valuable experiences connected with the local cultures, making use of English and Esperanto. I learned Lithuanian folk dancing using no verbal language at all! It is absurd and presumptious to compare my experiences (as your rant does) to the experience of visiting a foreign country and only eating at McDonald's or other chain restaurants.

Your assertions that Esperanto is just as hard as English for Asians fly in the face of what I've read and been directly told by by Asians who've studied both, as well as common sense (Esperanto's spelling, pronunciation, and grammar are simpler than English's, even if they are more accessible for Europeans than Asians, and to ignore that is disingenuous. Yes, L/R confusion is a problem for Asians in both Esperanto and English - but English has many additional problems for Asians which Esperanto does not have.)

Your assertions that people are only permitted to speak Esperanto at Esperanto gatherings are also false in my experience. At the UK in Peking, I spoke English with quite a few Chinese people who had only started to study Esperanto a few weeks before the event and had been studying English for years in school. And at other events I have similarly seen people speaking various languages. Of course part of the purpose of an Esperanto event is to speak Esperanto (duh), so it shouldn't be a sinister surprise that Esperanto is encouraged. At the US go congress one is permitted to play other games, but of course people tend to play go. At Esperanto events I've attended, other languages are used too, informally as well as part of the formal program, as you surely know.

You also grossly misrepresent Esperantio as some sort of monolithic cult that plots to convert everyone. In my experience it is far more like any other interest - the participants will happily help an interested new person learn, they will sometimes publicize the language or its events to raise visibility, etc - the same as go players, stamp collectors, or anything else. You don't even mention (since it doesn't fit your conspiracy scenario) that there are Esperantists who explicitly don't want Esperanto to spread widely, preferring the smaller feel of the existing culture. And in my experience most Esperantists don't really have strong feelings about it and don't seriously believe that everyone in the world is going to be speaking Esperanto - they simply use and enjoy the language.

Anyway, this is the sort of thread that can become an endless timesink, so I'll leave it at that.

Wha I am certain of is this: when I'm in charge, we'll have none of this 'multiple language' crap. Everyone will speak Esperanto [wikipedia.org], or else.

At least you are honest about it. I was active for ten years in the Esperanto movement, even volunteering for a year in the central office of World Esperanto Association. Ultimately I left because I was sick of Esperantists paying lip service to ideas of language rights and language diversity--hey, it gets funding, right?--while at the same time preventing the use of any other language among Esperantists. I was constantly scolded for wanting to learn the native languages of my peers, being told that Esperanto should be the only language in international communication, and my interest in other languages just set it back. I decided to leave and dedicate my time to learning national languages, so I did so and wrote an essay about my experiences. Sadly, I lost most of my friends, because they would rather not talk to me at all than talk to me in a different language than Esperanto.

Whatever its advantages as a last resort for two people who can't learn anything else, Esperanto has a cult-like movement that is simply dangerous to get into. I myself stopped having anything to do with Esperanto after ten years of hearing from people that Esperanto should be the only language permitted in international communication, and that my being interested in the native languages of my peers made me a traitor to the movement, much of which is hoping for a "final victory" of Esperanto over national languages.

Like Esperanto, for example. Its syntax is completely regular.

No, that is downright false. Esperanto, although more consistent than many national languages because it was created by one man from nothing, has its fair share of irregularities in syntax. These are generally due to its biased European origin, just see how much trouble Asians have with the language (and if you were at the World Congress in Beijing last year, you'd see it is a lot). I believe Bertil Wennergren's Plena manlibro de Esperanto-gramatiko (PMEG) covers some of these.

Just as important, the language is also effective for ordinary human communication.

No, it isn't. I tried hard to believe that too, but even after a decade I found that Esperanto simply doesn't provide the authentic communication that national languages do. Now I have left Esperanto and speak only national languages when I travel, and I feel that I can communicate much more freely and authentically than when I used some made-up language all the time.

I was active in the Esperanto movement for ten years, spending all my free time going to Esperanto congresses all over the world and even working for a year in the central office of World Esperanto Association. In the end, I found that the movement is really only concerned with getting people to speak only Esperanto in all international contexts, and puts pressure on people not to show any curiosity about the native languages of one's peers. The pleading for "language diversity" that UEA and other international Esperanto organisations do is a bait-and-switch. The movement in general is somewhat of a cult, and people would do best to stay away from it. I wrote a short essay about my experiences that might interest some here.