1132: J.R.R. Tolkein's Opinion on Esperanto Jan 14, 2018

J.R.R. Tolkien did not only create the Lord of the Rings series, but he also created nearly a dozen languages for his books, all based off of natural languages like Finnish, and Old English which he studied and taught professionally, and also less famously basing Dwarvish on Hebrew and other Semitic languages. Nevertheless, he did not hold as high of an opinion on constructed languages as that evidence might suggest, saying "Esperanto and other constructed languages were "dead", far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends". His argument here is that because there is no group of people who do or have spoken the language, there is no culture tied to it; no word is more or less significant, and the only phrases and idioms would have to be artificially invented, etc. Even with Hebrew, which is the only language successfully revived on a large scale, not only was the language already tied to a culture, but the creation of Modern Hebrew relied a significant amount on loan-words and new words in order to adapt to the culture found in the world today, as opposed to when it died a very long time ago. There will be more on why Esperanto failed as a global language, this time due to politics, tomorrow.

As a side-note, in the quote Tolkien uses 'dead' comparatively, which is rare (some have argued semantically impossible) given that, like other words such as 'pregnant' where someone either is or is not, it cannot really be described in degrees.

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