Because the last thing Europe needs is another euro-language. It's easier to learn because it's deliberately made simpler - but it is still learning another language, and learning another language to any kind of fluency is still a multi year effort with thousands of things to memorise and practise.
As well as "no one speaks it" (approximately true), no areas speak it, no laws are written in it, no road signs are written in it, no maps, nothing to push anyone to learn it. And where not-using-any-agreed-interlanguage does cost, the costs are hidden or swallowed unquestioningly and the consequences brushed aside:
"An effective malaria control program would cost only $800,000 a year," says a French doctor fighting disease in Laos, "but there is no money to finance the operations. Simply no money. No money to pay the staff, no money to purchase equipment, no money to buy gas. There is simply no money." (5) But when the Twenty-Eighth World Health Assembly decided - against the recommendation of the WHO Secretariat - to add two languages to the four already in use, it accepted to earmark for its language services $5,000,000 a year, "to begin with" (6). It refrained from carrying out a cost/effectiveness analysis that might have determined if its decision would facilitate or complicate matters. As a matter of fact, observation of the functioning of international organizations shows that the addition of new languages entails for them only complications and added costs. True, a few States are put in a better position, since they can use their own language, but this involves no advantage for the organization as a whole, nor for most of the Member States. Yet, all international organizations have undergone the same evolution: they have kept increasing their language budget at the expense of the activities they were meant to perform. To save a child from malnutrition costs only $10 per year. This is the cost of one 7 word sentence in a document translated at the UN, (7)which translates many millions of words a year. - http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/effects.htm
Translation is expensive. In the oligolingual system, every thousand words in an original text cost US$2030 for translation in seven languages (average for UN and WHO), or more than two dollars per word (Allen, Sibahi and Sohm, 1980, table 7). Such a sum seems more realistic than the figure of 36 cents a word given for the European Union (Rollnick, 1991). Apparently, the European Union translates daily 3,150,000 words, so that translation costs there, in the most conservative estimate, US$ 1,134,000 per day (Rollnick, 1991).
The situation is quite different with the two multilingual systems, which rely heavily on translation and interpretation. With simultaneous interpretation, a loss of 10% and a distortion of 2 to 3 % are considered normal. The conditions are such that it is impossible to transmit a speech in another language without gaps and errors while it is being delivered. The interpreter must not only have a good delivery, a perfect mastery of both languages, a quick mind and sharp hearing, he must also be fairly familiar with the subject in order to repeat in the target language everything said in the original using the appropriate technical terminology and without dropping important elements. Such a combination of deep linguistic competence and vast technical knowledge can rarely be found. Hence the large number of inaccurate interpreters noted in UN documents (King, Bryntsev and Sohm, 1977, par. 89 and 94).
Esperanto has certainly caught on. It just hasn't been more successful than English has been, which was always kind of a ridiculous goal anyway.
Many of the reasons people give for learning a language are highly ideological and often propaganda. "no one speaks it" is one of these: it usually just means that one thinks the people who speak it are not important. There is more to a language than network effects; languages tie together families and communities. If you are the kind of person who likes Esperanto and the company of Esperantists (open-minded, internationalist, cosmopolitan) appeals to you, then that is reason enough to speak it.
Languages have carrots and sticks driving people to learn them. But then, languages that have sticks are usually using them to beat the snot out of minority groups in order to assimilate them to the national state. Esperanto has only carrots, such as a rich literature (some translated into English) and plenty of maps.
The primary function of the United Nations is to prevent large-scale interstate wars. Translation is a small price to pay for that, and certainly less costly than trying to force everyone in the world to use and understand a single language. It's really more costly to provide translations than try to open English programs in every country, even in places where children have difficulty getting access to quality instruction even in their native language?
Esperanto has certainly caught on - well it hasn't died out, I'll give it that. And you can probably do more things and more varied things in Esperanto than many niche regional languages, particularly online ( https://www.reddit.com/r/esperante ktp.) . But it hasn't caught on in any official sense, it's learned and used by people who want to learn and use it, not by any big formal groups who think it is the fairest, the cheapest, the most reasonable, the xyz-est option for them, or because they think providing their non-Esperanto related services in Esperanto would be useful to their customers or profitable for their business.
"no one speaks it" is one of these: it usually just means that one thinks the people who speak it are not important. - That's a view I haven't considered before, but I might go with it for regional languages; if you ignore a regional language with few speakers then you are ignoring those people - but even native Esperantists speak another native language as well, and most people speak a native language better than they speak EO. So ignoring it because "nobody speaks it" doesn't close off communication completely from any one person, it just changes the lines of which languages could connect you to different people.
Esperanto has only carrots - an apt analogy, when English has Hollywood films, the hyperstimulus of carrot cake spiced latte, to literature's austere plain carrot. EO might have only carrots, but it doesn't have a killer-app carrot. Say it was the ... language of extreme sports - how many people would want to pick it up then?
It's really more costly to provide translations than try to open English programs in every country, even in places where children have difficulty getting access to quality instruction even in their native language? - I could quote a lot more of Claude Piron's essay which I linked, but the whole thing is quite interesting. He certainly wasn't arguing for forcing everyone to learn English, he was for forcing English native speakers to learn Esperanto (or potentially something similar), as well as everyone else learning it, out of a kind of idealism for fairness and equality and putting everyone on a more level playing field as far as communication goes, as much as for just money saving. (Something I think wouldn't really work).
"To save a child from malnutrition costs only $10 per year."
This reminds me of jokes I've heard where pretty much everything (no mater how absurd) could be made looking better or worse depending on the frame of reference which (as you'd probably guessed) was involving those poor starving children. On a more serious note, the starving children are such an effective demagogic ammunition, aren't they? Almost too convenient to completely eradicate!
Because the last thing Europe needs is another euro-language. It's easier to learn because it's deliberately made simpler - but it is still learning another language, and learning another language to any kind of fluency is still a multi year effort with thousands of things to memorise and practise.
As well as "no one speaks it" (approximately true), no areas speak it, no laws are written in it, no road signs are written in it, no maps, nothing to push anyone to learn it. And where not-using-any-agreed-interlanguage does cost, the costs are hidden or swallowed unquestioningly and the consequences brushed aside:
"An effective malaria control program would cost only $800,000 a year," says a French doctor fighting disease in Laos, "but there is no money to finance the operations. Simply no money. No money to pay the staff, no money to purchase equipment, no money to buy gas. There is simply no money." (5) But when the Twenty-Eighth World Health Assembly decided - against the recommendation of the WHO Secretariat - to add two languages to the four already in use, it accepted to earmark for its language services $5,000,000 a year, "to begin with" (6). It refrained from carrying out a cost/effectiveness analysis that might have determined if its decision would facilitate or complicate matters. As a matter of fact, observation of the functioning of international organizations shows that the addition of new languages entails for them only complications and added costs. True, a few States are put in a better position, since they can use their own language, but this involves no advantage for the organization as a whole, nor for most of the Member States. Yet, all international organizations have undergone the same evolution: they have kept increasing their language budget at the expense of the activities they were meant to perform. To save a child from malnutrition costs only $10 per year. This is the cost of one 7 word sentence in a document translated at the UN, (7)which translates many millions of words a year. - http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/effects.htm
Translation is expensive. In the oligolingual system, every thousand words in an original text cost US$2030 for translation in seven languages (average for UN and WHO), or more than two dollars per word (Allen, Sibahi and Sohm, 1980, table 7). Such a sum seems more realistic than the figure of 36 cents a word given for the European Union (Rollnick, 1991). Apparently, the European Union translates daily 3,150,000 words, so that translation costs there, in the most conservative estimate, US$ 1,134,000 per day (Rollnick, 1991).
The situation is quite different with the two multilingual systems, which rely heavily on translation and interpretation. With simultaneous interpretation, a loss of 10% and a distortion of 2 to 3 % are considered normal. The conditions are such that it is impossible to transmit a speech in another language without gaps and errors while it is being delivered. The interpreter must not only have a good delivery, a perfect mastery of both languages, a quick mind and sharp hearing, he must also be fairly familiar with the subject in order to repeat in the target language everything said in the original using the appropriate technical terminology and without dropping important elements. Such a combination of deep linguistic competence and vast technical knowledge can rarely be found. Hence the large number of inaccurate interpreters noted in UN documents (King, Bryntsev and Sohm, 1977, par. 89 and 94).
- http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/sociolinguistic...