Monday, January 08, 2007

Bonvenon al la Sarkindaĵo de Spaco!

Saluton, Internet trawlers,

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the words in the title and greeting of this blog, don't worry - I haven't gone completely insane. Well, maybe I have. You see, I have decided, in a fit of what could possibly be the beginnings of the teenage equivalent of a mid-life crisis, to teach myself the wonderful language that is Esperanto.

Esperanto, for the uninitiated among you, was developed in the late nineteenth century by "Dr. Esperanto," real name Dr. L.L. Zamenhof (honest). His grand design was for his language to be used as an international language, so those who met each other, whose native languages were different, could converse with one another on an equal footing. The idea never really took off, but ten out of ten for trying, Zammy. According to the fountain of all knowledge that is Wikipedia, there are 1000 native speakers of Esperanto. How any language can acquire 1000 native speakers when it was invented just over a century ago is beyond me. But we all know how reliable Wikipedia is, and you just can't argue with truth.

It remains to be seen how far I'll actually get with learning Esperanto before I give up and convert to Mormonism, which was the other thing I briefly contemplated doing. But I'm currently very impressed with this language, more so than German - since Esperanto does away with all those irritating things like word order, verb endings and gender of nouns that cause me to perform so poorly in written pieces of German. So, here's hoping that I will be able to join the two million who can apparently speak Esperanto. That probably makes it more popular than Swahili. And it definitely makes it more popular than French. I think.

Well, that about does it for this time, largely because I just dropped in to let you know about my latest idiotic scheme. I'll be back soon with an update of a more orthodox nature. Expect a bus-related anecdote sometime soon.

Revoluciulo kaj dulingva kontemplio,

Rugxa Andy

BRIEF TRANSLATIONS

Bonvenon = welcome
al = to
la = the
Sarkindaĵo = waste
de = of
Spaco = space
Saluton = hello
Revoluciulo = revolutionary
kaj = and
dulingva = bilingual
kontemplio = regards
rugxa = red

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