La artikolo montras Esperanton ne estas okcidento.

Those who criticize Esperanto for being too Western overlook two important aspects of the question. First, they neglect to proceed to a linguistic analysis of the language, which is the only way to discover how different it is, in depth, from what it seems to be at first sight: their judgment is purely superficial. Second, they ignore the fact that some language is necessary if people with different mother tongues have to communicate. In practice, on what language does one fall back when mutual comprehension is needed and Esperanto is not used? On English! Isn’t this one a Western language? As a matter of fact, it has many more Western features than Esperanto, and is much more difficult to learn and use for the large majority of the inhabitants of our planet. No language could put all peoples on an equal footing. But among all those that exist and are being used, Esperanto comes closest to that ideal. After 2000 hours of English (five hours a week for ten school years), the average Japanese and Chinese are incapable of using it in a really operational way. Their clumsiness, as well as their difficulty in producing the relevant sounds, tend to complicate communication or to make them ridiculous, a risk which is, unfairly, spared the native speaker of English, although he is the one who has made no effort towards mutual understanding. After 220 hours of Esperanto, as an average, Eastern Asians can really communicate in that language, a language which is a foreign language for everybody and in which the risk of sounding strange is thus equally distributed.