>>766305Aesthetically I don't like it a lot, there is some beauty (akin to that of Polish or Lithuanian) I have sometimes appreciated but overall is a pretty ugly language, like English, but at least not as ugly as German
As an IAL I think it's okay-ish to somewhat bad, but it was reasonable for it's time. The vocabulary is too western and the word sources are very weird, for example Spanish is very minimal compared to Italian or Latin. Although the roots are not really an issue, and can be a problem if they are too similar to your native language but has slightly different meanings. It's cool that they don't have a gender but that's the bare minimum. What's great about the vocabulary are the affixes, really cool and useful from the time I spent learning it (I am not an esperantist). What's bad is the phonology, too many phonemes… For example I personally struggle differencing /v/ and /b/ in English and Romanian, I can't notice the difference. /h/ and /x/ is another bad pair but luckily ĥ is being replaced either by k or h. I personally don't have problem with the affricatives but it can be an unncessary challange for some people, one affricative (/ts/~/tʃ/) would be more than enough. The phonotactics are a bit too much too, why kn-? I remember there were more syllabes like that but I can't remember which. The syllabe is too dense anyways, it should've been (C(L))V(C)
The grammar is okay too, maybe the participles are a bit hard at first but I don't think they are that hard. The accusative is very unnecessary tho. If you are going to have a case why not have more?
And as a project I am sad it didn't succeed, apparently it was very popular at the time. I remember reading Niebla from Unamuno and there was an esperantist anarchist uncle, it's always funny to find reference to esperanto in old media. I still need to learn more about its history tho, specially its history in China
I don't think Esperanto has any current possibility nowadays at succeeding, and if some day an IAL indeed becomes successful I hope it fixes Esperanto's mistakes