World population: getting on for seven billion.
Number of Esperanto speakers: (optimistically) two million.
Conclusion: Esperanto is a language that is particularly useful for international communication about 0.03% of the time.
After a whole century of use, that's impressive.
You completely misunderstood that statement. It did not imply that you could speak with
everyone in Esperanto -- just that it was really, really useful when you wanted to speak to people internationally. And it
is. Especially since these 1-2 million people are scattered all around the world. What does this mean? This means you can go to a Chinese town, find someone who speaks Esperanto, and converse with them
as fluently and naturally as two native speakers of a national language might. And they'll show you around and tell you about their own culture. What's remarkable is that this holds in countries internationally, in countries from Lithuania to Brazil. I mean, did you have a look at the map I posted? And Esperanto is still growing.
World population: getting on for seven billion.
Number of Esperanto speakers: (optimistically) two million.
Conclusion: Esperanto is a language that is particularly useful for international communication about 0.03% of the time.
After a whole century of use, that's impressive.
That's a very misleading calculation, and you know it. Ideally you would want to calculate the percentage of Esperanto speakers from the set of all people who could have but chose not to learn Esperanto, to gauge whether its growth is "impressive" or not (I mean, seriously, you're including poor African kids in that estimate). Second, take the Chinese language, for example. Learning it allows you to converse with a fifth of the world population. But because the speakers are concentrated in one geographical spot, you won't be able to do much with it internationally.
Third, unlike Interlingua, Esperanto wasn't designed with immediate comprehension in mind. Obviously you wouldn't be able to speak to
everyone in the whole wide world if you learned Esperanto. It was designed as a language that could in the future become a universal second language, be it by a UN resolution or otherwise. Change takes time. To stop plowing along just because change is slow is the height of pessimistic indolence.
Sorry, but that's tragic. If you want to take things from Latin, malnova would mean "bad new", not "old".
Ya habibi, ya osmanthus, Esperanto is
not Latin. If you consider it "tragic" that it diverges from Latin, then... I don't know, Esperanto is not for you, I guess. Try
Latino sine flexione.
Also, knowing such words depends on having a grounding in certain other languages. For someone who was raised to speak (for instance) Thai, or other tonal languages like Chinese, learning Esperanto would not be as easy as learning another hypothetical language that was designed to provide international communication for speakers of Asian languages. IOW, Esperanto is very clearly designed by and for Europeans.
Sure, it wouldn't be as easy, but it would be a hell of a lot easier than learning English. And in fact, China is one of the largest Esperanto hubs in the world (if not the largest), showing that this clearly isn't an impediment to learning the language. Also, you overestimate how easy it would be for Europeans -- the grammar is closer to Chinese and Turkish than to Romance languages.
And of course, keep in mind that the "ESPERANTO IS NOT EUROPEAN ENOUGH!!!!11!one!!1!" argument is one of the primary raisons d'être of such constructed languages as, among others, Ido and Interlingua.
Why lucky?
I like Romance languages. I consider myself lucky because I've had the opportunity to study one. I think anyone who learns any other language is "lucky".
Also, here's something you might want to have a look at, Oz:
http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/reactions.htm
Topic: Esperanto!