Esperanto was a marvelous idea, and deserved to take off once the United Nations got under way, and yet it is practically dead nowadays. Maybe that is because nobody loves it as his own, and I'm sure few people, even among Esperanto speakers, ever got into the habit of thinking directly in it. Look at the way Shakespeare, the Bible, Churchill, Billy Connolly and a host of other sources creep into our daily words. I don't believe that would happen with Esperanto.

Idiomatic shades of meaning are usually specific to languages. "I'm sure" often means you aren't sure, and "no doubt" can mean there is no doubt, in England, but in Scotland means "I'm not at all sure of that." In Arabic "helas", literally "it is finished", can mean "All is complete", "Don't mention it", or "The situation has deteriorated beyond remedy". Probably that would came into Esperanto if a lot of people used it routinely for a few centuries, but we aren't going to.

I had a friend who worked in Hong Kong in the 1960s, when the level of refugees arriving from the mainland was high. He used to see Chinese taking out notebooks and discussing how to spell words, when they didn't understand each other, because the script spans a number of dialects. Similarity can even be seen in some of the Japanese traditional characters.

There is a marvelous story about Japanese script, because they realised that military signalling in morse was a non-starter with their traditional script. So they produced a new phonetic alphabet, with characters similar in number to our own. But in wartime it promoted laxity in ciphering, for they relied on the fact that a Japanese-speaking British, Inidian or American signaller was unlikely to be within range of their tactical communications. What they didn't realise, when they sent out encrypted groups of Japanese characters, is that with only two or three morse dots and dashes per letter, they were sending random groups of English letters without knowing it. Any signaller could take those down, and relay them to the specialist decryption unit in Ceylon.