Isn Esperanto “too European”?
Joseph Voros: The argument seems to always come down to the difference between agglutination and separate roots. Or “Eastern” and “Western” style languages, broadly speaking (I know it’s an over-simplification). Some people think every concept needs its own root, others are happy to begin with some basic set and modify. Two incompatible systems of thinking. I consider Esperanto to be a good compromise between “Western” root-based thinking and “Eastern” agglutinative thinking (again, very roughly speaking). Having a Hungarian background, I delight in the simple elegance of Esperanto word-building. [Unlike just about every other language in Europe, Hungarian is not Indo-European; it comes from a completely different language family. Thus, it is as unrelated to Esperanto as English is to Arabic, for example. — Ed.] I think there is something for everyone in Esperanto, no matter what your linguistic background, and that this is one major reason why it is the most successful of the auxilia
