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Some debate occurs over whether Esperanto is the ideal solution for an international auxiliary language. Esperanto has had numerous criticisms, especially from the auxiliary language community.
Sexism in Esperanto grammar
Esperanto is accused of being inherently sexist. Esperanto uses the suffix -in to express the female version of a concept, similarly to German. This produces a gender inequality because the generic form is the same as the male form (e.g. doktoro = "a doctor" or "a male doctor"), but different from the female form (doktorino). A male form, virdoktoro, from viro = "man", can be constructed, but is rarely used in practice.
Likewise for pronouns: as in English, li ("he") may be generic, whereas ŝi ("she") is always female. To some, this aspect of the language makes the implication that masculinity is some kind of default, and femininity is an exception. Additionally, the female forms in -ino look like diminutives, and some use this to argue that Esperanto makes the presumably sexist grammatical argument to equate "feminine" with "small".
Others reject the view that it is sexist, and instead use the term "gender-specific". They argue that this detail makes Esperanto a more precise language than some others. To solve the "ŝi-li" (she-he) problem when there is a possible confusion, some use "ŝ/li" instead of "li". Other use "tiu" (that one), another solution that comes from the standard grammar. Furthermore, much of the language was taken from already existing languages, and since many languages use grammatical gender to decline both nouns and adjectives, Esperanto also inherited this trait.
See the Esperanto section of non-sexist language for more details.
Neutrality
Esperanto is accused of being insufficiently neutral, as it is based almost exclusively on European source languages. This refers in particular to the vocabulary, but also applies to the orthography and the grammar, which retains many features of European languages, although the forms are more regularized.
Although the vocabulary uses the same roots as European source languages, Esperanto's regularized grammatical forms give it some degree of uniqueness. Also, Esperanto has a large set of affixes, which makes parts of its grammar more similar to some Asian languages than to Indo-European languages. Some Esperanto speakers and linguists also say that this makes the language more flexible and expressive. Also, Esperanto changes dramatically the orthography of many cognates borrowed from European languages, and once can argue that these changes show that Esperanto is at least not intentionally Euro-centric. However, this aspect of Esperanto is also used as a criticism (see next section).
Its shared vocabulary can expedite learning for those who have already studied a European language (even if they can't speak it). Compared to a language with completely unique words, there is no increased difficulty for those who do not speak a European language.
However, critics still charge the language is too Euro-centric, and that it detracts from the neutrality which many, including Zamenhof, recognised as being essential to a world language.
See La Espero, fifth stanza.
Spelling of cognates
Esperanto words are more changed in orthography and endings from their etymological cognates than in some auxiliary languages. This makes some Esperanto words less recognisable without study to those already familiar with the cognates. For example: English quarter, Italian quarto, Interlingua quarto, Esperanto kvarono; also English/French pollution, Interlingua pollution, Esperanto poluado (Esperanto polucio is a false friend meaning "involuntary ejaculation").
This criticism, which seemingly stands opposed to the previous criticism, principally suggests that a language which lacks the neutrality to be a world language, such as Esperanto or Interlingua, could nonetheless function as a regional common language; for this purpose, recognisable cognates offer an advantage. (Recognisable cognates would also be an advantage in a world language, provided that they were drawn from a much larger spread of source languages.)
However, the orthographic changes were made to keep the spelling system of Esperanto internally consistent and regular, and maintaining spellings from cognates would have resulted in an irregular spelling system. The tradeoff between internal and external spelling consistency was made in favor of internal consistency.
To illustrate, compare English with Esperanto:
{| !English!!Esperanto |- |two||du |- |twenty||dudek |- |one half||duono |- |one twentieth|| dudekono |- |four|| kvar |- |forty|| kvardek |- |a quarter|| kvarono |- |one fortieth|| kvardekono |}
Esperanto is often presented as easy to learn, and this is true, but only compared to learning natural languages. The student expectation is that learning Esperanto does not require any effort. Indeed, to learn the grammar (fundamento) takes a maximum of one hour, the basic vocabulary: 2 hours (for English-speaking people), the pronunciation and spelling: half an hour.
In theory, the student has now a vocabulary equivalent to 7000 words in English because he can build new words combining the 1000 roots he knows. Speaking requires skills that are not really identified and taught. Many are disappointed when they realize they are incapable of easily overcoming the last hurdle, and give up too soon, blaming the language as being ill-formed, or simply feeling stupid. Although Esperanto removes some hurdles to learning by being systematic, learning any new language requires lots of practice and memorization.
Indeed, this criticism also comes from within the Esperanto community. Notably, the author Julio Baghy critiqued mediocre Esperantists in his ironic poem "Estas mi Esperantisto" (I am an Esperantist). Also, author Kazimierz Bein, while attending a conference at which it was generally agreed that everyone should learn Esperanto, remarked that the first who ought to learn it were the Esperantists themselves.
Esperanto is a good tool to identify the real difficulties in speaking a foreign language; those difficulties would apply to any language.
Difficulty in achieving fluency in Esperanto
Some key persons within the Esperanto movement have lamented how few learners of the language progress to a high level of fluency.Character set difficulties
Esperanto contains six letters not used for writing many languages. The missing letters cause some difficulty in using Esperanto on a computer, as they are not available in most character sets. This problem can be remedied through the use of the Unicode character set. Zamenhof recommended the use of the digraphs "ch","gh", "hh", "jh", "sh" and "u". Esperantists have also developed a system of using the letter "x" to signify these special characters; this system is called the X-System. The overall impact of this problem is decreasing as support for Unicode becomes widespread.Other planned languages
Some of the other planned languages that have emerged in the twentieth century have attempted to address criticisms of Esperanto. Yet despite the flaws exposed by criticism, no other constructed language has approached the number of Esperanto speakers or has an extensive body of literature like Esperanto. Some of these other languages are quite different from Esperanto, while other languages, like Ido, are based on Esperanto, and enjoyed a period of popularity in the early 1900s. More recent spinoffs from Esperanto include the modified form Riismo which seeks to eliminate sexual inequality from the language. Other alternative languages include Idiom Neutral, Occidental, Novial, and Interlingua; some languages not originally intended as international auxiliary languages are also sometimes suggested, such as Lojban. Because Esperanto is the most well-known of constructed languages, many who have been interested were unaware of these other languages, but the Internet offers information about these languages as well.
