"Languages are like towns: they must grow organically and for good reason. Esperanto is like a new town, Telfor or Milton Keynes; it has linguistically speaking, ample walkways, spacious parking, rational traffic flow and all the modern amenities: but there are no historic sides, no great towering landmarks: there is no feeling that mankind has grown and lived and worked here, shaping the architecture according to neccessity, power or worship.

The English language, however, is like York or Chester or Norwich or London - absurd narrow twisting streets that strangers are so lost in, no parking, no velodrome: but there are churches, castles, custom houses, the remnants of old slums, and old palaces. Our past is there. But not just our past, these cities are not museums, they contain the present too: estates, office blocks, contraflow cycle paths. They are living things, towns and languages."

- Stephen Fry, 'Trefusius Is Unwell', Paperweight