Today is Esperanto Day – here’s why I learned it
Perfect occasion to ask something that I didn&#x27;t know who to ask: does anyone here knows if it has ever been tried to &quot;simplify&quot; the visual aspect of Esperanto, by getting rid of all accents? (ĉ, ĝ, ŭ, etc.)<p>I&#x27;m a French speaker and I know some Spanish, so I should be used to accents and maybe biased towards the idea of having them as part of a language, but on the contrary, I love that English has none:<p>- Accents make a language look more complex at first glance, and therefore less appealing to beginners (my opinion).<p>- They make it harder to learn and type in the language on a keyboard, even a virtual one. In my case, choosing a language for a keyboard is a big deal.. French one so that accents are easy to type, or English so that code is easy to type? (I chose the latter).<p>I&#x27;m gonna risk a comparison here: it&#x27;s a bit like programming languages syntax, you can build an app with either Objective-C or Swift, but I suspect many beginners would find Swift&#x27;s syntax a bit less intimidating. Similarly, someone looking at Esperanto might be immediately put off by seeing that they will have to learn to type ĉ, ĝ, ŭ, etc.<p>I would love to see someone refactor Esperanto&#x27;s syntax to remove its accent while still keeping its capabilities.<p>1. Is that even technically possible, or would that imply making words too complex or adding new letters?<p>2. Has this idea ever been debated, could I read about it anywhere? (on a public forum&#x2F;wiki maybe?)<p>Thanks!<p>----------------------------<p>Edit: Thank you for your answers! So Esperanto has indeed been changed, and each &quot;constructed language derived from Esperanto&quot; is called an Esperantido.<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Reformed_Esperanto" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Reformed_Esperanto</a>
(this version has been created by Zamenhof himself and removing the accents is part of the proposal.<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ido_language" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ido_language</a><p>Would love to see a new crowdsourced and open-source reform on Github, in 2019!