| |
DL4IAX > ESPERANT 03.10.03 11:54l 51 Lines 2665 Bytes #999 (999) @ WW
BID : H9JDTRDB0SIF
Read: GUEST
Subj: RE^4:Interlingua or any others still in use
Path: DB0AAB<DB0PV<DB0ZKA<DB0GPP<DB0LX<DB0CZ<DB0GV<DB0SIF
Sent: 030130/1659z @:DB0SIF.#HES.DEU.EU [GIESSEN JO40IO] DP6.00 $:H9JDTRDB0SIF
From: DL4IAX @ DB0SIF.#HES.DEU.EU (Axel)
To: ESPERANT @ WW
Reference-BID: 2244_G0TEZ
Hello Ian and readers!
Please note that I did not suggest german to be EU's only official
language; in fact, this is (unofficially) english. I only wanted to make
clear that I'm not against english because it is not my native language
(since I would vote against german, too), but because the choice of any
native language is a preference for the corresponding mothers-tonguers
and a discrimination against all others. Of course this is not the fault
of the language itself.
Concerning your figures about language sizes I think they are wrong. The
biggest one is mandarin chinese with about 900 million speakers, and
english is closely followed by spanish, not by french. German is not a
world language, and therefore it surely is placed below number 10 in the
world, but it is number 1 or 2 in Europe. It would be worth searching
for statistics; perhaps the World Watch Institute or the CIA has them on
their web-pages.
Nobody knows about the number of esperanto speakers because they are not
registered (how many soccer fans are there in the world?). There is no
need to rationalise esperanto, since it has been constructed from the
beginning to be easy to learn for everybody, including little children
and elderly people. It's grammar is minimal, but complete. It has not a
single exception from any rule and no irregularities, which is the main
difficulty when learning any language. The word formation is strongly
systematic, the official dictionary (PIV) has more than 100,000 words.
There are no limits, absolutely anything is precisely expressible. I
can't imagine anything that is too complicated or should be simplified.
If you have internet access, just look at the free esperanto course at
http://www.cursodeesperanto.br/en/index.html
(available in about 30 languages) to get a closer idea, without having
to learn it or buy anything. Since esperanto is 100 % phonetical, it is
possible to learn it only written without speaking it in a real course.
Sorry, I can't say much about Interlingua, Volapük, Volksprak, Lojban,
Ido or the others, because I didn't study them. This would be the job
of those who use them, but it seems that there are none, which is no
surprise for me. Doing a Google search (btw: Google offers esperanto for
the messages) you will hardly find anything about them. When searching
for esperanto related pages or books you will find a huge amount of
stuff of any kind, including world literature and poesy.
In any case: thank you for having started this interesting discussion.
73 de Axel, DL4IAX @ DB0SIF.#HES.DEU.EU [de eo en fr]
Read previous mail | Read next mail
| |
