I suspect that Esperanto will not be much more difficult to tackle than any current existing language, or at best a *tiny* bit easier. The greatest difficulty of language is not grammar, or spelling, punctuation, etc. To get an AGI to the point of using _any_ language "naturally" on the level humans use it is the big challenge. It can be ancient Greek or Latin with all its declensions and exceptions; the difficulty lies in the use of language per se.
In case my position isn't clear, I think that any language
will be too difficult to start with and development should
be focused on playing a wide range of simple games instead.
However I have been really struck by the fact that Esperanto
(and no doubt many other artificial languages) can be equal
to a natural language in terms of the role they play and yet
are something like ten times less complex than a real natural
language in terms of language structure.
I'm sure a reasonably powerful AGI would be able to infer the
Esperanto rule for forming the plural of a noun (you add "j"
to the end of the word) but I think it would struggle to work
out how to do it in Italian (it's about six pages of rules in
my Italian grammar book and than doesn't cover all the weird
cases like when a word changes gender conditionally when forming
a plural depending on the context).
Sure, getting a computer to speak Esperanto would still be
*really* hard, but having hundreds of pages of grammar rules
that serve no real purpose other than to add a truck load of
complexity to an already difficult problem just seems absurd.
I guess people continue to do AI with languages like English
because that is what is of practical use and where more money
is likely to be.
Shane
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