Esperanto

 "C'est abus de dire que nous avons une langue naturelle; les langues sont par institution arbitraires et conventions des peuples." (It's misuse to say that we have a natural language; languages are by institution arbitrary and conventions of peoples.)

François Rabelais

There are a million tangents I could go on on Wikipedia. Actually there are over 3.5 million in English. Every once in a while I'll read a French page too.

Tonight I'm going to see Cyrano de Bergerac, so I was reading it (in English) on Project Gutenberg. That is a good website too. I got kind of distracted and started at looking at books they had in Latin (I'm learning Latin right now). Then I looked at the books they had in Esperanto (La Aventuroj de Alicio en Mirlando ...)

I proceeded to read the Wikipedia page about Esperanto. I always thought it was kind of a joke. The only thing I thought of when someone said Esperanto was that William Shatner made a film in Esperanto.

Here are some interesting facts from the article:

''Esperanto is the 26th language.^[3]Worldwide, there are 6,912 recognized languages.''
''There is evidence that learning Esperanto may provide a superior foundation for learning languages in general, and some primary schools teach it as preparation for learning other foreign languages''
''The first World Congress of Esperanto was organized in France in 1905.''
'' Esperantists were killed during the Holocaust''


I think the ideals of the creation of Esperanto are pretty beautiful. The creator, Lazarus Zamenhof, wanted to create a ''an easy-to-learn and politically neutral language that would foster peace and international understanding between people with different regional and/or national languages''.


All in all, a very interesting article. A very interesting concept. I actually say an Esperanto club meeting poster on campus here a few months back. I think I would quite like to learn Esperanto. I'll probably wait until I'm back in Canada though so I can focus on learning French right now.