Someone was talking about it on the radio today that it was the language all our young people should be learning!
2007-02-17 01:42:33 · 5 answers · asked by Norah B 4 in Society & Culture ➔ Languages
Norah, Esperanto is an artificial language. If memory serves me, it was a Russian doctor who invented Esperanto in the late Eighteen hundreds or very early Nineteen hundreds hoping to bring the world together by giving us a common language. It was an excellent idea but it never caught on. If all the world's governments had agreed to teach Esperanto as a requirement in public school then maybe all of us would speak Esperanto. As is, only a few learned the language out of curiosity or in hopes that one day it would become universal.
I still have an Esperanto/English phrase book in my library and now and then I read through it. I am sorry it never took off. There seems to be a resurrected trend toward learning Esperanto by young people. One European band even released a song entirely in Esperanto. So maybe one day it will catch on.
H
2007-02-17 02:10:03 · answer #1 · answered by H 7 · 1⤊ 1⤋
Esperanto is the most widely spoken constructed international language.
It was invented and developed by Ludvic Lazarus Zamenhof, a Jewish-Polish linguistic, in the mid 19th century.
Esperanto is considered a very easy language to learn, as the vision of Zamenhof was that Esperanto will some day be the second language of all the people around the world, and that we will communicate with each other in Esperanto.
There are about 1000 native speakers of Esperanto, and 100,000 to 2 million speakers to whom it is a second tongue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto
2007-02-17 10:25:17 · answer #2 · answered by yotg 6 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Esperanto has been around for a long time - my father was a talented linguist and he learned it out of interest, even though it really has no practical application - when he was learning it, all the information packs were about how this could become a truly international language with simple grammar and vocabulary and could unite the world. My father died in 1982 and I have heard practically nothing about Esperanto since.
2007-02-17 09:53:08 · answer #3 · answered by f0xymoron 6 · 2⤊ 1⤋
I had an aunt who took lessons in the 1930's and forever after was boring people to hell!!
2007-02-17 09:53:38 · answer #4 · answered by Duffer 6 · 0⤊ 1⤋
No I dont, I have never seen lessons advertised for it either!
2007-02-17 09:51:14 · answer #5 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 1⤋