Your professor’s suggestions sound very practical to me. Still, it’s no surprise that they were not well-received… as I have said on many occasions, Esperanto has more in common with a cult than it does with a language.

In short, I agree with almost all of them.   The one that I most strongly agree with is the point about correlatives.  Easy to learn, nearly impossible to differentiate.  I’ve tried to share my love of Eo with English speaking friends, and this is always the “speedbump” we run into.  New speakers – and even veteran speakers — can hardly tell the difference between “kie” and “kia.”  

My college linguistics professor at the Univ of Wisconsin went to an Eo congress in the 1990s and suggested some slight “tweaks” – all of which made great sense.  (E.g. swap “kie” for “kive”,  the “v” coming from “dove” in Italian I believe . . .and perhaps partially inspired by the Ido “ube”, who knows… But all derivatives stay the same as if it were still “kie”. . .)   He nearly got his head ripped off. 

- Esperanto natives number ~1000 (not a few dozen)
- The statistic about Esperanto speakers speaking on average 2 foreign languages besides Esperanto comes from the book of sociological studies in Esperantio, “La Rondo Familia” which you can get here: http://omploader.org/vNWQ3dQ/Eo%20-%20Nikola%20Ra%C5%A1i%C4%87%20-%20La%20Rondo%20Familia-%20Sociologiaj%20esploroj%20en%20Esperantio.pdf

Secondly, it can never be an international language as it relies too heavily on slavik and romance langauges, from what I’ve seen. What’s the point some one arabic or chinese learning this? It will be just too difficult.

Thirdly, it should be made as simple as possible, not have those digraphs on them.

I think this video will make you laugh :) http://farbskatol.net/dotclear/index.php?2008/12/17/120-kiel-varbi-por-esperanto#co

good luck for italian.

I am used to read critics about Esperanto … by people that spent hours searching for what they believe are negative traits of Esperanto.
Had they spent 15 – 20 of those hours in learning Esperanto, now they would be happy Esperanto users and would never again think about any of those imagined problems of the language.

If you learn Chinese you have to deal with countless homophones and the subtleties of the tones which are very difficult to discern for foreigners. If I enter the Chinese word “ji shi” im my dictionary using pinyin, I get 13 hits and they can mean anything from “in time” to “technical expert”.

People have to deal with way more tonal ambiguities in other languages than in Esperanto. The way we perceive and differentiate sounds is very subjective and depends on our mother tongue as well.