Esperanto: the universal language celebrates 150 years

by Sean McLachlan on

Ĉu vi parolas Esperanton?

Do you speak Esperanto?

Even if you don’t, you’ve probably heard of the world’s most popular artificial language. Spoken by a dedicated international community, this easy-to-learn language has been pushing for global understanding for a century now.

This month Esperantists, as people who speak Esperanto are called, are celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birth of their founder, Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof.

Zamenhof grew up in a small town in the Russian Empire where the people spoke Belarussian, German, Polish, and Yiddish. He saw all the troubles and misunderstandings this multilingual community had and decided that an international language would be the best way to promote peace. He devised one and published a grammar and dictionary in 1887. The language has no verb declensions, no exceptions to its simple rules, and a uniform way to turn a word from a verb to a noun to an adjective. Called Esperanto (“One who hopes”), it soon grew into a international phenomenon.
Sadly, Esperanto never became a truly universal language. The governments of the world would have had to agree to teach it to their populations, and this would require a degree of cooperation that our fragmented globe is unable to muster. Being a language of international peace and understanding, it’s also received unhealthy attention from various unsavory regimes. Esperantists were killed in the Holocaust and in Stalin’s purges. The fact that Zamenhof was a Jew fed into antisemitic fears of a “one world government”.

But this hasn’t dissuaded Esperantists. They’re an active bunch, with their own version of Wikipedia, their own magazines, their own language academy, even their own flag, sporting the green star, which many Esperantists wear as a lapel pin to identify themselves. For travelers, Esperantists have a network of free accommodation in 92 countries.

It’s unclear just how many people speak Esperanto, but estimates range from 100,000 to two million. I’ve met Esperantists in Bulgaria, Iran, India, and the U.S. Back in the Nineties I and a group of other visionaries scammed some money from the University of Arizona to create our own Esperantogrupo and taught regular classes for three years. Sadly, the group is no more and my knowledge of Esperanto has decayed as I’ve studied German, Arabic, and Spanish.

Perhaps some day I’ll pick it up again. Who knows? As the U.S. slips from superpower status English won’t remain a universal language, and it’s sure not going to be replaced by Chinese (one of the hardest languages in the world to learn) so perhaps Esperanto will get a second chance.

Hotel owner makes Latino employees change their names

by Katie Hammel on

Taos, New Mexico, is home to a large Spanish-speaking population. There are a lot of Latino people living and working in the town. So it follows that many people there have traditionally Latino names. You would think a guy from Texas (another state close to Mexico and home to many Hispanic people) would understand that. But not Larry Whitten.

When Whitten came into town to take over as the manager of a run-down hotel, he told his Latino staff that they needed to change their names to more Anglicized versions. As CBS News puts it, “No more Martin (Mahr-TEEN). It was plain old Martin. No more Marcos, now it would be Mark.” Of course, the staff and many of the town’s residents were not happy. Nor were they pleased when Whitten fired several Hispanic employees and forbade those remaining from speaking any language but English around him, because he feared they were talking about him in Spanish.

After referring to the locals as “mountain folk” in an interview and then being picketed by fired employees and their families, Whitten later apologized for the “misunderstanding” and said he was not against any culture.

Whitten denied that his actions were racist and said that he asked the staff to change their names for the “satisfaction” of guests who may not be familiar with Spanish names. One fired employee disagreed. “I don’t have to change my name and language or heritage,” he said. “I am professional the way I am.”

Learn a new language – 10 words at a time

by Scott Carmichael on

The joke is that people who speak 2 languages are bilingual, and people who speak one language are American.

Sure, it may not be that bad, but compared to Europe and Asia, the US really does lack bilingual speakers.

There are plenty of ways to pick up a new language, including those expensive courses you see advertised on TV infomercials every night.

Learn10 is a new approach to learning a language – you are presented with blocks of 10 words, and can have them emailed to you each day.

Their site offers a widget with a variety of language tools, including spoken audio and a translator. You can even embed that widget in your own web site.

Your daily list of 10 words can also be accessed through RSS, Twitter and Facebook!

Learn10 offers 24 different languages, including the “popular” ones, and a couple of less popular ones like Welsh and Danish. You probably won’t become a fluent linguist in a new language within a week, but it should provide you with a decent foundation of basic words.

The basic version of Learn10 is free, and includes most of their learn and test features. For $9.95 a month, you can upgrade to the premium version, which comes with a revision tool, a compete feature and a language training screensaver.

This location had absolutely tall!

by Scott Carmichael on

Apologies for the insane article title, it’s one of the results of passing a piece of text through “Blahblahfish“, a fun yet useless re-translator.

The site takes any text you enter, and translates it to one of the 28 languages supported by the translation site, then translates that back to English again.

“This location had absolutely tall” is actually “this site is absolutely fantastic” in English to Croatian and back.

The purpose? None. But it makes for some absolutely hilarious results. The “highest rated” Blahblahfish translation managed to turn “Oh Shit!” into “Human waste of Ohio” when passed through English to Korean and back. Passing “George Bush” through a Latin translator, yields “Agricultural Shrub”.

Of course, if you need a way to justify wasting 10 minutes of your life on creating gobbledygook text, then you could always claim you are doing scientific research on automated translation sites, but the real lesson here is that online translation sites are horrible at doing their job, and that using them for anything serious might be a bad idea.

(Via our friends at Download Squad)

Learn Norwegian in an hour

by Jerry Guo on

Misleading headline? Well, I just came upon a wonderfully detailed post arguing that Norwegian is the easiest language for English-speakers, to learn. This followed up on an equally fresh post from last week in which the poster explained why Persian/Farsi (two languages for which the CIA is desperately looking for translators) happen to be easier to learn than most people think.

Anyways, back to Norwegian. The guy’s basic points are:

  • It’s a Germanic language
  • But with simpler grammar than other Germanic language
  • And a word order that more closely mirrors English

You’ll have to read the original post for the many examples. After an hour of this stuff, you’ll probably feel like you have a rudimentary grasp of Norwegian! Great way to introduce a language.