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Interesting -- thanks. Did you learn Esperanto before English or after? (I'd guess a second foreign language is easier to pick up than a first, unless the first is learned in childhood and the second not.) Is your native language more like English or more like Esperanto or roughly the same in each case?
It's certainly true that Esperanto is much more regular than English. (My impression is that English is unusually irregular even among natural languages, but I'm not sure how true that is.)
Of course, if you say "see-able" in English then everyone will understand you. The only trouble is that you won't be speaking English like a native speaker. That's not really a question one can raise about Esperanto, since there are no native Esperanto speakers. (Well ... allegedly there are ~1000 "native speakers", which I think means "people brought up bilingually in Esperanto and some other language", but that doesn't constitute an actual linguistic community.)
This isn't just a quibble; my point is that if Esperanto became an actually widely used language, I bet it would start acquiring irregularities that one would have to know in order to speak it "like a native". You'd still be able to say "see-able" and everyone would know what you meant, just as you already can in English, but you'd need to know "visible" to sound truly fluent. (Of course I don't mean that this specific example would turn out to be an irregularity. But I bet there'd be some.)
Mind you, what I say about irregularities is sheer guesswork: it just seems like the sort of thing one should expect. I wonder whether there's any research on this sort of thing? (E.g., when pidgins turn into creoles, do they become more or less irregular?)
Languages I speak, in chronological order of starting to learn, are: Slovak, Hungarian, English, Russian, Esperanto. (Of these, Hungarian and Russian remain on the level of "I am able to read a text slowly, but I need to use a dictionary, and my vocabulary is so limited I can't speak fluently, and my grammar is horrible, but if you give me time to find the right words in the dictionary, I will be able to communicate the meaning.") So you could argue that more languages make learning another langu... (read more)