One of the ideas behind Esperanto was supposed to be the abandonment of irregularities, especially the duality between sounds and glyphs. Esperanto was supposed to be a perfectly phonetic language.
As it turns out, no language can stay perfectly phonetic and in popular use at the same time. I think this is because as the language is used, we tend to optimize it, and the optimizations are not based on structure, because that’s not how our brains work. Think about the optimizations as a kind of cache — caches are not structured, they are simply a way to throw some hardware into a problem.
Which brings me to an important question. Can mankind use a single language? Not the way English is used now — English is more of a code than a language — a default option that everyone seems to agree on, due to its prevalence in the world, both geographically, but also culturally (the most impactful culture “producers” have been and are now English-speaking empires).
I think there is something about language and distance — just like you can only naturally interact with about one hundred and fifty people, you can only share culture with people closest to you. Despite globalization, the French have been, are, and will always be very different than the Chinese. Language will reflect that culture (why? Does it have to do with differing natural circumstances in the early history of the nations?) and so it will diverge if the cultures are divergent. It’s clear even on a smaller scale, with various dialects being distinctly different, not just in sounds, but often in syntax and semantics.
However, it may be possible to devise a kind of basis, a fundamental set of principles that everyone agrees on and can communicates basic thoughts with, but then uses the local language on top of that to express more complex thoughts. Something, I think, that Latin was to European languages a long time ago.
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Esperanto was supposed to be a perfectly phonetic language… As it turns out, no language can stay perfectly phonetic and in popular use at the same time.
Esperanto actually comes pretty darn close to being perfectly phonetic and in common use. I believe the reason is fourfold:
* Esperanto’s phonetics are relatively simple (within the grasp of most speakers).
* Its phonetics are defined a priori (nothing left to float in the breeze).
* Almost all Esperanto speakers use it as a second language (speakers tend to accept rather than define the phonetics).
* Esperanto is used primarily internationally (has a stabilizing and simplifying effect).
Esperanto speakers, as second-language users, of course have accents, with somewhat more variation in a couple of the phonemes than in the others. But the correspondence between grapheme and phoneme comes pretty close to 1:1.