User:Tarnoob

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Pros

Surprisingly Esperanto, although it was a big improvement, made some things worse or more complicated than Volapük:

• Esperanto has a more complicated consonant system:

• it has a distinction of /h/ and /x/, spelled out as h and ĥ; Volapük doesn't have the latter;

• Esperanto also has twice as many sibilants, i.e. the eight consonants /s/, /z/, /∫/, /ʒ/, /ts/, /t∫/, /dz/, /dʒ/. Volapük has only four, because it doesn't matter if they're voiced or not; /s/ means the same as /z/, as in. e.g. Spanish;

• Esperanto has the distinction of /r/ and /l/; the original design of Volapük, in the times of Zamenhof, didn't have it, deliberately to make the language easier for many Asians.

• Esperanto is more difficult to type, print or display. Volapük's diacritics (umlauts) are much more common than Esperanto's hats and arcs, at least in Europe. This higher difficulty is a result of:

• the worse consonant system, i.e. the aforementioned 5–6 extra consonants; combined with the avoidance of digraphs – i.e. each phoneme is written with exactly one letter;

• purely orthographic decisions of Zamenhof. Esperanto could have one odd letter less if the /j/ sound was spelled with y – absent in the Esperanto's alphabet – making it possible to write the /ʒ/ sound with j, precisely as it is in Volapük and other languages, like Catalan, Romanian or Ido – Esperanto's most famous descendant.

Sometimes Esperanto is spelled without diacritics – using digraphs instead – but it makes it look odd at least, and is no advantage over Volapük, which has emergency digraphs as well; far more "natural" than those of Esperanto.

• Esperanto has a worse system of personal pronouns, at least from some perspective:

• Volapük has more of them, 10 in total, making it more precise than Esperanto's 7–8 pronouns. For example, Volapük has a distinction of 2nd person singular and plural (ol–ols), but Esperanto has it only in informal contexts (ci vs vi); Volapük also has a distinction of gender in the 3rd person plural (oms–ofs–ons ), but Esperanto has it only in the 3rd person singular; overall, Volapük's solution is more semantically regular. Some people may find it redundant, more difficult to learn or even limiting, because these distinctions aren't optional. However, some prefer precision;

• Volapük's personal pronouns are more regular also morphologically; they all have final -s added to their singular counterpart. On the other hand, in Esperanto the plural pronouns don't even have any specific, common feature. They also bear no resemblance to their singular counterparts, apart from the general feature of personal pronouns ending with -i; it's mi–ni, ci–vi, li, ŝi, ĝi – ili;

• last but not least: Esperanto's third person is sexist; they is ili, which is very similar to the masculine singular li (meaning he) – no matter what are the genders in the described group. Volapük not only has a separate pronoun for uniformly feminine groups (ofs), but also for mixed groups it uses the neutral pronoun ons.

• Esperanto uses a definite article la, which can be a problem for lots of people; e.g. most Slavs, Finns, the native speakers of Hindi or Urdu, Chinese, Janapese, Swahili and whatnot; Volapük has no articles whatsoever.

• Esperanto has complicated rules for switching between active and passive voice. The rules for Volapük seem to be simpler.

• Esperanto has some convoluted rules of very basic word formation, i.e. switching between parts of speech (like the verb to read and the noun act of reading). It works differently for different root classes; Volapük doesn't share this problem.

These pros of Volapük don't make it win, but it shows that Zamenhof was an amateur who didn't analyse previous work exhaustively and instead, he made some steps back. However, in the context of a comparison, this fact is probably no advantage of Volapük over Esperanto, because Schleyer also made some steps back compared to even earlier auxlangs, like Universalglot or Communicationsprache.