Of course, you can always fall back on the argument that Esperanto's basic structure and grammar have not 'evolved' in the past 100 years. But then neither have those of English. What do you want? They work just fine as they are.

On the other hand, I've run into far too many cases of people who, in a very, very short period of self-study (usually months, sometimes weeks, rarely -- but not never -- days) have taught themselves to read and write Esperanto better than any language that they learned in school for a period of years, and who -- this latter is an experience I shared -- found that the first time they were actually exposed to spoken Esperanto they had no trouble in understanding it, nor in participating in conversation. Why do you think so many people who speak Esperanto are so enthusiastic about it? Because they think it's going to save the world? See below.

Why should Esperanto be easier to learn? First, because the grammar has been cleansed of irregularities. The student of English, for instance, is faced with at least two totally irregular verbs and around three hundred "strong" or "radical-changing" verbs, each of which has three components that have to be learned separately; the student of Esperanto has to learn one simple paradigm, six endings, applicable to all verbs. The student of English has to learn the irregular plural endings of a large number of nouns (and, consequently, has to pay attention to every noun so that he will know whether or not it uses one of these unusual endings); the student of Esperanto has to learn one plural ending for all nouns. Etc.

Second, because Esperanto has a productive system of word-formation. Once you have memorized a relatively small vocabulary (eleven grammatical endings, nine pronouns, a dozen numerals, a correlative system consisting of fourteen parts, about forty affixes, a hundred or so particles, and maybe three hundred word roots) you can leverage this yourself into all the vocabulary you need to carry on a conversation in the language, or read most of the material written in the language with about 90% comprehension. The rest you can pick up as you need it.

Third, Esperanto doesn't force you to learn contexts as well as words. When do you use the root 'profund''? Anytime you're talking about depth, whether physical or metaphorical. When do you use 'deep' in English, and when 'profound'? Hint: you'd never use the latter in discussing a physical situation; but in metaphorical situations, the two may be used (mostly) interchangeably. In Esperanto, a root has a meaning, and may be used metaphorically as well; but nowhere is there any rule to say, "You may not use this particular root here, because you have to use this other root with the same meaning under these conditions."

I cite my best friend: She studied English for nine years (high school and university) in her home country. She studied Esperanto for one semester in her last year of university. At the end of that semester she felt more competent and confident reading and writing in Esperanto than she did in English. (My friend's native language, for the record, is Shanghainese, not one of the European tongues; and she did not learn Esperanto out of a hobbyist's interest, or to save the world, but because the authorities in her university ordered her to do so, against her own wishes. Not that she regrets it!)

I read books from all over the world in Esperanto, subscribe to magazines from all over the world in Esperanto (and get some that I never subscribed to -- my public thanks to the Yokohama Esperanto-Rondo for their excellent window on Japanese life, _Novaj^oj Tamtamas_), have friends all over the world through Esperanto, and have a much better idea of what goes on in the world than I would ever learn through my English-language newspapers, magazines, or news services. You may not consider this very useful. If not, then I can't argue the point, because your definition of 'useful' differs too much from my own.

One other indication of the usefulness or uselessness of Esperanto can be given by the experience of Radio Polonia, whose Esperanto broadcasts for three decades brought in a level of listener response exceeded only by that of their German-language broadcasts -- and higher than that of English. This is why, when Radio Polonia had to cut services back for financial reasons after the fall of Communism, they merely reduced those for Esperanto, while those for some "languages of wider dissemination" -- Spanish comes immediately to mind -- were terminated completely.

Esperanto has not been rejected by the UN or the EU. It hasn't even been considered.

(The case of UNESCO is somewhat extraordinary. Despite formal protests from the US State Department, UNESCO considered a resolution favorable to Esperanto at its 1954 General Conference in Montevideo -- and firmly rejected it. But the method of rejection was so irregular [and, thanks to the local Esperantists in Uruguay, made so public] that the local press forced UNESCO to take a second look before the closing of the conference -- and this time the same resolution was adopted. A second favorable resolution was passed some 30 years later, at Sofia, Bulgaria -- by some weird coincidence, at the first General Conference after the United States and Great Britain [read: Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher] picked up their marbles and went home.)

Around puberty, Zamenhof entered high school (gymnasium) on the language track, where he had the privilege of studying both Latin and Classic Greek. I don't know how many weeks into the courses he was before he decided that inventing his own language would probably be more realistic.

I took three years of Latin in high school, and have good reason to suppose that few American contemporaries of mine were as adept at wrangling the language as I was. At the end of three years I could, with the aid of the Cassell's I won in a contest, plow my way through -- though not enjoy very much -- Vergil and Cicero. I can safely say that, had Selma Lagerlof's Gosta Berling's Saga and Ivan Vazov's Under the Yoke been translated into Latin rather than Esperanto, I would never have devoted hours to reading those two multi-hundred-page classics the year after I got out of high school. Let's face it -- the number of grown people who are going to learn Latin as an auxiliary language well enough to use it in free-flowing conversation, or even for light reading, is at least as miniscule as the number of grown people who are going to learn any other ethnic language to the same level.

If you're referring to one of the names under which the "Latino Sine Flexione" of the Italian mathematician Peano was known -- this is a different kettle of fish. This is Latin as she should have been, shorn of all those complicated declensions, conjugations, and incomprehensible ablative constructions, but -- at least in terms of its vocabulary -- remaining essentially Latin! I don't know whether anybody, or how many, ever spoke this language, but, if you are interested, it would certainly be a better candidate for revival than Gode's Interlingua, Hogben's Interglossa (nowadays resurrected as Glosa), or any of a thousand other stillborn language projects. Some of you university types in Europe should be able to find examples -- I seem to remember reading that one volume in Peano's collected works was written entirely in the language.

Very likely, though, you could get all Esperantists to agree that if everybody in the world learned Esperanto, everybody in the world would be able to speak Esperanto. But as to whether this was desirable or not -- you wouldn't find any agreement on that...

You can even find a few sample technical dictionaries available, for free, on the net. Check out Pilger's dictionaries of names of mammals and of insects (in Linnaean order), or any of at least three dictionaries of computer terminology, at ftp.stack.urc.tue.nl:/pub/esperanto -- of the latter, if you have TeX and a laser printer, I recommend the latest version of Pokrovskij's book (1700+ definitions, with English and other equivalents, illustrated).

(Example: In 1986 I got a copy of Albert Goodheir's Esperanto translation of Europides' _The Trojan Women_. After reading it I decided to do a review comparing it with an English translation. So I pulled Edward P. Coleridge's off my shelf and opened it. It was unreadable, and the review never got written. As far as I could tell, the major difference was not in the language of translation but in the fact that Goodheir was translating something about which he cared deeply, while Coleridge appeared to be doing a translation exercise. Goodheir's translation showed what Esperanto is capable of; as anybody experienced in English will agree, Coleridge's only showed what Coleridge was capable of.)

Fernando de Diego once sneered that fifty percent of Esperanto translations were lousy translations of useless works, twenty percent were lousy translations of good literature, twenty percent were good translations of useless literature, and only ten percent consisted of good translations of good literature. American science fiction readers will instantly recognize this as an independent rediscovery of Theodore Sturgeon's famous Law -- "Ninety percent of science fiction is crud, but then ninety percent of everything is crud!" -- from which Esperanto literature, like everything else, is not immune.

... and finally ...

1. Esperanto doesn't belong to anybody -- and hence it belongs to everybody who wants to use it. Unless a couple of other heavyweights were to decide, at the same time as the EU, to make Esperanto their official language (and I don't see that happening!), the EU would, in effect, become the new owner of Esperanto; so, farewell, our vaunted cultural and political neutrality.

2. And, once the EU had decided "in principle" to adopt Esperanto, who's to guarantee that a couple of Eurocrats, munching at a McDonald's in Brussels, would not decide to "repair" the language. A century of use has shown that "repairs" (they are commonly called "reforms") are generally the products of people who read through Teach Yourself Esperanto once, decide that because Zamenhof didn't do it in the same way the French do he was dead wrong, and set out to fix up the language. In other words, most proposed reforms of Esperanto are definitely not for the better. Mostly they end up in the garbage can ("dustbin", if you prefer) of history. The EU would have the clout to ensure that, good or bad, this would not happen.

I think that the adoption of Esperanto by the EU would be a step toward resolving a multitude of problems that plague the organization -- including the serious one of making it more democratic. But I don't think that it would do Esperanto any good, and so I'm not terribly enthusiastic about the idea. And I know that there are other Esperantists -- including many in the EU itself -- who agree with me.