2010-05-26 05:02:40.154271+00 by ebradway 5 comments
Heard on NPR today that it's been 100 years since L.L. Zamenhof first and only visit to the US, to speak at the Esperanto-USA Annual Meeting. Also learned that William Shatner starred in the US film,Incubus released in 1966 in Esperanto.
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comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):
#Comment Re: made: 2010-05-26 13:34:31.232721+00 by: meuon
The more I travel and do business around the world, the more I wish there really was a common language. There is, by default: English. It's amazingly common in most parts of the business and engineering world, but you have to be very careful as the connotations of certain worlds and phrases are different from place to place.
Except for the French. It all must be in French. You are a unwashed unworthy uneducated slug if you can't do it all natively in French. Even West African's who are French speakers seem to feel this way. But they are happy when you show them that the system does French, with all the proper characters, with Français at the top of the language selection menu.
#Comment Re: Shatner made: 2010-05-26 16:54:39.032711+00 by: ghasty
I was given a copy of the Shatner film...it was painful in any language
#Comment Re: made: 2010-05-26 18:58:02.536399+00 by: ebradway
I'm trying to find a reference, but I read something about how people with different native languages in multi-national settings, like at the UN, tend to use English for common communication even when there may be another common language between the speakers other.
And I find all of my German friends speak English, even amongst themselves, when there are non-German speakers present. This was frustrating when I was trying to learn German.
#Comment Re: Esperanto made: 2010-05-27 11:02:53.293013+00 by: Brian Barker
Can I add that Esperanto has become a living language :) After a short period of 122 years Esperanto is now in the top 100 languages, out of 6,800 worldwide, according to the CIA World factbook. It is the 22nd most used language in Wikipedia, and a language choice of Google, Skype, Firefox and Facebook. Native Esperanto speakers, (people who have used the language from birth), include financier George Soros, World Chess Champion Susan Polger, Ulrich Brandenberg the new German Ambassador to NATO and Nobel Laureate Daniel Bovet. Your readers may be interested in the following video. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8837438938991452670 A glimpse of the language can be seen at http://www.lernu.net#Comment Re: made: 2010-05-27 18:38:33.047211+00 by: petronius
I've been seeing items recently about Globish a streamlined dialect of English with a vocabulary of about 1500 words. The idea is that this is a living language that developed off of non-native English Speakers talking to each other, and that the Globish idea is just a formalization of an existing trend. But if you go back to 1930 you find Basic English, another streamlined tongue with a basic vocabulary of only 850 words, with only 18 verbs. Then we have Special English, developed by the Voice of America, designed to be heard by novice English speakers. What I am not hearing about is anybody attempting to develope Basic Francais, Basic Deutsch, or Basic Mandarin. Meanwhile, while only 4-5% of the planet's population speaks English at their mother's knee, nearly 25% of the world population speaks some English learned later. Perhaps Dr. Esperanto's (Zamenhof) hope will be attained, but in English.