If everybody woke up tomorrow a fluent Esperanto speaker and started using it as their first language, how quickly would irregularities arise? Because, in natural languages, commonly used verbs such as “be” and “have” are almost always irregular, I imagine because they are used so much that they get streamlined to users’ tastes. Take something like Esperanto’s estas, meaning “is” or “are” or “am”. It seems a bit of a mouthful for such an essential word. I can well imagine people shortening it to, say, “es” pretty quickly, thereby creating Esperanto’s first irregular verb.
I know that there have been a handful of native Esperanto speakers. Have they introduced irregularities?
I’ve heard languages become irregular by adopting things from other languages that work differently. The longer a language is used, the more regular it gets, because people are lazy about remembering to do all the irregular things. But, the more influx there is into a language, the less regular it is.
How widely spoken would Esperanto be? That is, would its speakers typically never interact with people speaking anything else? In that case, it would probably stay perfectly regular.
I’d like to point out that the two explanations for language irregularities that pretty much go to each extreme. “Irregularities arise because common words are modified for ease of pronunciation, ergo over time a word will become more irregular” and “irregularities arise because borrowed words don’t fit our language pattern, over time they will regularize”. In fact, both tendencies are at play in language.
Probably. Esperanto is already somewhat irregular when used in poetry and song lyrics; endings are frequently chopped off for the sake of the rhyme or the rhythm. The grammar is regular to begin with, so they’re easy to reconstruct from context, but it’s still somewhat confusing for a beginning student. Try looking up some of the translations of things like Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky – I happen to like “La Jxargonbesto” best, but there are several.