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Friday, December 13, 2024

Sunday 15 Dec Zamenhof Day, honouring the creator of easy made up international language Esperanto


 Esperanto flag.

Zamenhof lived in a city in what is now Poland, where four different language groups resided, creating communication problems. They did not have a common intermediary language (such as Greek, Hebrew, German, French, English with added words from local languages) and all the languages had different structures. So he created a simple language with no exceptions. Past, present, future, singular, plural, sixteen straightforward rules. 

The language is in use today, mainly by countries which have a language which few or no other coutnries speak.  In Hunagary you can take Esperanto as a school course and do the school leaving exam.

If you learn it, you can meet other speakers at clubs such as the one in Reading, England, or their annual conference. Throughout the year if you are a speaker, or plan to be, you can link with others who speak esperanto as a second language, or the few entusiasts who speak it as a first language, They have a homestay system. You can offer your home to another speaker to stay for three days and practise speaking Esperanto, and take up offers from others to do the same. 

I bought an Esperanto dictonary and did an Esperanto course, but never took it further. Esperanto is the most widely spoken of two or three made up languages, one developed to update Esperanto. Another, which is my favourite, instead of making up words following the standard unchangeable rules, takes the most widely used international words and phrases.  To give you an example, if the word computer with the plural computers was deemed to be most widely known, this would be used in Interlingo. However, the Esperanto plural oj would be used in Esperanto. 

Also Esperanto is a Romance language base language. Asians have their own sets of attempts to create common languages. 

Meanwhile, I am running an online languages group two Sundays a month, in my time, currently winter in UK, turn on zoom at 2.30 for a 3 pm start. The second and fourth Sundays each month. I give a talk on lanugages. Start with everybody introdcuing themselves with hello and/or welcome in their language and ending the meeting with goodbye in their language.


wiki explains

Esperanto (/ˌɛspəˈrɑːnt//-ænt/)[7][8] is the world's most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Created by L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, it is intended to be a universal second language for international communication, or "the international language" (la Lingvo Internacia). Zamenhof first described the language in Dr. Esperanto's International Language (Esperanto: Unua Libro), which he published under the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto. Early adopters of the language liked the name Esperanto and soon used it to describe his language. The word esperanto translates into English as "one who hopes".[9] 

Esperanto Travel


Esperanto Speakers meeting in Norfolk, England



For the traveller, you can visit a museum about Zamenhof and Esperanto in Poland. In Vienna, Austria, you can visit a museum with a section devoted to articifical languages including Esperanto.

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