Balderdash… Complete nonsense.
No disrespect to Tolkein. :-)
But Esperanto is in fact a living language. And as a living language, it has it’s own culture, a culture with its own flavour, that evolved quite naturally and inevitably as it was taken up and used — as a real language — over the last century or so. There are third and fourth generation Esperantists, and even native speakers (usually because the parents are from different countries, don’t speak each others native language(s), and maybe even live in yet another country where a third language prevails).
As for making a difference in the world, Esperanto has done its share. Esperanto saw significant use during and after WWI and WWII in keeping families separated by the hostilities in touch, and in finding and reuniting them after the hostilities were over. Esperanto played a role in the Spanish Civil War (at least, it did on the anti-Franco side). Esperanto has even provided opportunities to escape across the Iron Curtain (most famously exploited by George Soros, who took advantage of officially sanctioned participation in the 1947 World Congress (in Switzerland, that year) to simply not return home).
Today, Esperanto is a “working language” in several UN Organizations (eg. WHO, UNESCO). The Pasporta Servo organization, founded in the mid-1960's, is still running a (strictly non-commercial) “Air B&B” or “couch-surfing” service for Esperanto-speaking travellers.
Esperanto’s “creator” (today, he’s as likely to be referred to as the language’s “initiator” was under no illusion that any single person could create a full-fledged, expressive, flexible, adaptable language, single-handedly — he noted this reality quite explicitly, from the very beginning, and called upon the Esperanto community to participate in the process. He formally renounced any claim of personal control over Esperanto’s future development, on the grounds that a true, living language belongs to the community that speaks it, and that this community inevitably shapes it. (Esperanto could well be considered the world’s first Open Source project.)
Nor was Zamenhof under any impression that Esperanto could be a static, rigid, mechanical “thing” (or that this was desirable). He was striving to create more than some sort of clumsy Pidgin, suited chiefly for commerce and perhaps sciences — his goal was a true language, with all of the resources and expressiveness required for writing (good) poetry and engaging at a high level in all the Arts and Humanities, as well. Zamenhof (and his collaborators) created not just rules and principles, but cultural mechanisms, and even institutions (eg. the Academy), with the clear understanding that change was inevitable — what such change needed, in an easily-learned bridge language based on a basic underlying simplicity and consistency, was some sort of official guidance from qualified individuals, to protect those principles (underlying simplicity and consistency) from hasty and/or inconsistent developments. (And amazingly, these seem to mostly work)
Consequently, Esperanto has in fact evolved quite noticeably over the decades — just as any other living language does. I’m not qualified to give you a full lecture on the developments over the years — and anyhow, this screed has rambled on quite long enough…
… So let me instead, point you to an article written some years ago, with concrete, illustrative examples, on that very topic, by someone much better qualified: a francophone Swiss, who worked for a decade as a professional translator at the United Nations and the World Health Organization, translating between French, English, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese… (Five of the six official languages at the UN at the time)
Claude Piron: Evolution Is Proof of Life
Esperanto is a living language, and it functions as a living language, today, in real life. It is used, by ordinary people, as a language, not as just an academic or artistic project. And as a living language it inevitably has it’s own, distinct own culture, and it necessarily evolves along with the times and its own speech community . And all this, in the end, is precisely why it’s still a living language today, well over a century down the road, rather than one of the (literally) thousands of failed, mostly forgotten attempts that preceded and followed it.
Tolkien had to invent his own fantasy “cultures” to support his fantasy languages. That’s fine. They’re interesting languages, and fun to play with. But to argue that those linguistic fantasies have not only had more real effect on the world — but moreover that Tolkien’s fantasy languages are somehow “closer to how languages actually work in the real world” — than a language that’s actually used around the world, is itself fantasy. And I must argue in turn that it’s a fantasy based on fundamental misapprehensions about what Esperanto actually is, and about how Esperanto actually functions, in the real world.
