So, I was relieved (if a bit surprised) to find that a competition was held on swearing words and expressions in Esperanto with prizes for top three places and that there were enough candidates offered to need the judges. It took 6 months, but the candidates and the winners are now available. No translation into any other language was provided, but most of the words and expressions are recognizable by anybody who can read Roman alphabet.

This is of course nowhere close to the Russian language, which has a whole shadow language of swearing, but it is probably sufficient for now.

I used to talk about Pasporta Servo, ability to listen to other countries’ radio and global community. Now I just go straight for the big guns.

I ask them whether they ever tried learning another language. Usually the answer is yes and usually the language was never learned well. Then I tell them about the studies showing that learning Esperanto as a first foreign language gave enough ‘language learning’ meta-knowledge that it allowed to learn the next language faster and more thoroughly. This usually gets their attention!

I don’t think I have convinced anyone to learn Esperanto yet, but my arguments are getting better every time. Maybe I should make a badge Learn two languages for the price of one. Ask me how. That might get some attention.

More information about these benefits is also available at Springboard to Languages website.

Today’s collection had a comment that gave me a double take. It went like this:

–strange junk–
Kiel
vi fartas?
–spam links–
G^is revido

Which is obviously esperanto for ‘How are you’ and ‘See you later’ (though I prefer x notation myself in Gxis revido).

So, what happened there? I can see three options:

1. Esperanto speaking spammer who decided to switch the ‘hello’ text upon seeing an Esperanto category in my blog
2. Automatic software that looked for all blogs that mentioned Esperanto with hopes that the ‘less frequent’ language will not trigger spam filters
3. Some sort of automatic spam algorithm picking out greetings based on the content of the blog; if that’s the case, the fact that somebody bothered adding Esperanto to their list is - in a perverse way - a cause to celebrate

I don’t think I will ever find out what happened, unless the original spammer comes back and comments on this post with the answer. Still, it is a food for thought.

Bill’s position is that any format that is not already accepted (specifically not html) is a lock-in and a disadvantage, whether that format is an open standard (like OpenReader) or a proprietary one (like Sony’s BBeB). He advocates using web browsers as ebook readers.

David’s point (and he invokes me in there) is that HTML format is not sufficient for all e-books, mostly due to the layout and browser changes issues. So, if HTML is not sufficient, we have to chose a new format. Thefore, it is better if the format is an open standard that can be implemented and maintained by multiple parties.

I am with David here and mostly for the reasons he pointed out. For my interests (language learning e-books), HTML is not a good enough format. Sure, I could hack HTML into submission for some of my goals, but it will require so much javascript, that it will not work in anything but a full-blown browser. I invite Bill to replicate the functionality of the Pocket e-Sword. so that it works well in IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari. Maybe that’s why Pepper Pad is integrating FBRReader despite already having a built in Firefox web browser.

So, where does Esperanto comes into it? Well, here is Bill’s quote (emphasis is mine):

Trying to standardize on a common “ebook format”, be it some IDPF creation, some OASIS masterpiece, or even the so-called OpenReader, would only be an attempt to force them all to publish in Esperanto, instead of their house languages. They still wouldn’t have customers.

Publishing in Esperanto does not bring customers? Really! I wonder where Bill gets that data. I don’t know how many (human) languages he speak, but the only reasonable way I could interpret that statement was as “publishing English material in Esperanto would not bring any more English customers”. That could be a a point, where he would be mostly correct. Of course, the market for Esperanto is not English, it is global.

As an example, I want to take the book/movie Night Watch by my favourite author Sergey Lukyanenko. The book started in Russian, was made into the Russian movie with english subtitles, impacted American market and finally was translated (quite well) into English. What about Chinese or Egyptians? Would they be interested in this book? Maybe, but there is no easy way to find out because translation or even subtitling is very expensive.

Except that there is a way. Night Watch has just been translated into Esperanto (announcement in russian). There is even an excerpt available (unfortunately in PDF). Now, the book is accessible to people in China, Egypt or Germany, as long as they can read Esperanto. And if there is enough interest from those people, the book can be translated into their native languages as well to reach to the rest of the audience. The push model of finding the markets suddenly becomes a pull model of market finding you. This is not a new idea, it is already used by newspapers and even Vatican. It is called establishing a beachhead, I believe.
And that’s exactly the strength of open standards. They can expand the audience beyond original planned targets and bring new markets to your solution, adapting the solution to the market needs in the process.

Closed standards control the markets they know about, open standards create new, unplanned markets. I am currently in the market segment, Sony does not want to think about. Do I wait another 5 years for Sony to catch up or do I look for open standard and open source alternatives? There should be no need to guess.

The rest of us can handle this problem by not thinking about the connection in too many details. Fortunately English, Russian and probably other languages help us by disassociating the name of the animal with the name of the meat that comes from it.

Esperanto does no such thing. Due to its suffix system, any animal meat has to use the suffix -aĵ. Worse yet, the meat that comes from the baby animal (like calf - a baby cow) has to also have suffix -id. Makes it easy to remember the words, but much harder to see the connection.

Let’s see this in the table for one animal:

Makes it a bit harder to swallow, doesn’t it?

The video finishes with a pointer to www.lernu.net , an Esperanto learning website that I strongly recommend myself. I am currently using it as my primary learning method.
In fact, Lernu! is a better website from language-learning point of view than I have seen for other languages (e.g., French). Part of that is because many of the Esperanto resources are free (dictionaries, reading materials, etc), while resources for other languages are commercialised to the point that one site cannot even afford to integrate them together. And I am not even talking about distributed volunteer mentors that are happy to help in whatever is your first language.

With Esperanto, the core idea is so great and compelling that many people seem to have difficulties to turn their eyes to identifying more immediate opportunities. This seem to be slowly changing in the last several years with absolutely amazing projects such as lernu.net and RadioArkivo.

Still, it was great to find a free online book(Esperanto: A Language for the Global Village by Sylvan Zaft) that adds in a lot of rational reasoning into the heady original concepts. The Cost-Benefit chapter is particularly interesting, but others are just as good.

I guess on the scale of Esperantists, I would be more close (but not fully aligned) with the Raumists.

Tags: esperanto Language learning

Now, I have just discovered that there is an internet petition to United Nations to recognize Esperanto as the international language. Already, more than 4500 people signed.

It would be interesting to see how far it will get and what will come out of it, even if just as an indication of how many people are actively looking out for Esperanto issues.

I have voted, because I think that in some cases Esperanto is a much better option to teach than English. Or at least as an option before English/French/etc.

For example, if a piecekeeping missing is established in an area where natives don’t speak English/French/Spanish/etc. and the local language is difficult as well, teaching Esperanto for communication purposes would be much faster and more effective than trying to teach English or even fight for the limited number of interpreters available. At the moment, I believe these situations are treated as effectively unresolvable and the high costs and slow process caused are taken as granted. Esperanto might be just the right outside-the-square solution for this.

Tags: esperanto, languages