| rdfs:comment | - Esperanto is a language constructed by L. L. Zamenhof in 1887 to help foster communication between countries. It was designed to be an easy-to-learn international language. However, the vast majority of the vocabulary is based on Latinate roots, as 1887 was still the age of colonialism, so for non-Europeans it can be pretty hard to learn. Sadly, it didn't work as well as intended, thus spawning occasional mockery in modern media . Even then, it's still a thriving language within its own media, and there are a few people around the world who have grown up with Esperanto as a first language. Some stories set in The Future use Esperanto as if it had become the main language. It's also occasionally used As Long as It Sounds Foreign.
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| abstract | - Esperanto is a language constructed by L. L. Zamenhof in 1887 to help foster communication between countries. It was designed to be an easy-to-learn international language. However, the vast majority of the vocabulary is based on Latinate roots, as 1887 was still the age of colonialism, so for non-Europeans it can be pretty hard to learn. Sadly, it didn't work as well as intended, thus spawning occasional mockery in modern media . Even then, it's still a thriving language within its own media, and there are a few people around the world who have grown up with Esperanto as a first language. Some stories set in The Future use Esperanto as if it had become the main language. It's also occasionally used As Long as It Sounds Foreign. Esperanto is supposed to have the advantage of being more "logical" than national languages. It has only 16 grammatical rules, and it (almost) never deviates from those rules; also, each letter is pronounced one way and one way only. By contrast, English (like most national languages) is full of all kinds of weird spelling and grammar rules that make it much harder to learn than it should be. In addition, Esperanto words are much more easily creatable, using prefixes and suffixes around the root word to handily morph words in any way necessary, thus making sentences more concise and language more literal. (Opinions vary on the subject of how colorful language equivalents have solidly found their way into the language, morphable like any other word.) Written Esperanto presents a bit of a problem in the digital age, since 6 letters of the Esperanto alphabet -- ĉ ĝ ĥ ĵ ŝ and ŭ -- don't appear in the standard ASCII/ANSI character set; many authors choose to simply write the letter without the hat on it and put an x afterward, like so: cx, gx, hx, jx, sx, ux. Some informative sites about Esperanto (in English) are at Wikipedia, Esperanto-USA, and Esperanto.net. Despite its status as the best known artificial language, not everybody agrees with all parts of it, (as you can read here) and thus it has spawned other languages that have tried to correct perceived flaws. These projects are collectively known as Esperantidoj; they include Ido and Novial. For one reason or other, these languages have been even less successful than Esperanto. For those who want to learn it, there is a free E-mail course, a virtually identical postal course (U.S. only, free except for postage costs), and Lernu.net. More options here. Incidentally, "Esperanto" is of course itself an Esperanto word (it means ‘one who hopes’), hence is pronounced "ess-pear-AHN-toe", not "ess-per-rant-o". Examples of Esperanto, the Universal Language include:
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