🚀 go-pugleaf

>Can someone please explain what Esperanto is?  I've never heard of it
>until just this week.  If it's as widespread as I gather it is from the
>recent posting about it, I might give learning it a shot.  But not right

Esperanto ("hope") is an artificial language, developed early in the
20th century by a man named Zamenhof.  His theory was that there is need
for a language which can be spoken internationally -- not necessarily in
daily life, but at the level of diplomacy, world trade and so on -- and
that national pride prevents any existing language from filling this role.

So he developed Esperanto, which is based on word roots and natural
grammar of (mostly) the major European languages.  Spoken, it sounds
much like Italian.  Because the words are largely from existing languages
(and languages which already have a lot in common) Esperanto is quite
easy to learn -- though I have to admit I haven't really learnt it!
A few of its nouns:

  patro        father (Latin pater, English paternal)
  patrino      mother ('in' makes a masculine noun feminine)
  hundo        dog (German hund, English hound)
  stelo        star (Latin stella, English stellar)
  steloj       stars (j, pronounced like English y, makes a noun plural)

All nouns end in o; all adjectives end in a.  La verda stelo, the green
star, is the symbol of Esperanto.

All verbs end in s -- I believe it's as for present tense, os for past
tense, is for future tense, but I may have those turned around.

And so on.  No irregularities, no silent letters.

There are some magazines published in Esperanto, and the organizations
which promote it claim that several hundred thousand people speak the
language.  I suspect that they do so mostly when they travel to meet
other Esperantists.

There are other artificial spoken languages, by the way, including
Interlingua (something like Esperanto, I believe -- years ago I used
to subscribe to some scientific journal which for some reason published
abstracts of all its articles in Interlingua) and Babm (a bizarre
construct produced by a Japanese enthusiast).

  CAR