Klingon -- more users than Esperanto?
Martha H Adams
Klingon users now than Esperanto users. This surprised me, for I am
fairly well in touch with (fannish) reality and I don't recall hearing
anything of that. Is this fact an urban-legend kind of thing? Yet
today's world features a lot of implausible things: Klingon seems to be
a seriously functional language now, and maybe this happened very
quietly and it's *true.* ??
Cheers -- Martha Adams
Erich Schneider
Urban legend, I think. You might get an inflated idea of how many
Klingon users there are if you think that there's a bona fide Klingon
user behind every copy of _The Klingon Dictionary_ and related
materials sold. I seriously doubt this. Esperanto, on the other hand,
has a body of serious original literature (Klingon really only has
the KLI's translation projects), use in scholarly journals, use at
international conferences, and even native speakers (children of
enthusiastic Esperantists).
See http://www.webcom.com/~donh/conlang2.html, written by an
Esperantist, which has a section on Klingon which, as far as I can
tell, is objective and factual. I used to participate on the Internet
Klingon-language mailing list tlhIngan-Hol, so I have some experience
with the Klingon side of things. It was a common occurrence back then
for people to try and petition (via proxies) Marc Okrand, Klingon's
creator, to invent new words or grammatical constructs because it was
very difficult to express some common things using the ones available.
That leads me to doubt positive comments about Klingon's popularity
relative to Esperanto.
--
Erich Schneider er...@caltech.edu Caltech Information Technology Services
Doug Dawson
: An acquaintance recently commented that he had heard there were more
: Klingon users now than Esperanto users. This surprised me, for I am
: fairly well in touch with (fannish) reality and I don't recall hearing
: anything of that. Is this fact an urban-legend kind of thing? Yet
: today's world features a lot of implausible things: Klingon seems to be
: a seriously functional language now, and maybe this happened very
: quietly and it's *true.* ??
: Cheers -- Martha Adams
Here's a specific probably-urban-legend about it (which _was_ presented
to me as happening to a friend of a friend): Man goes to Japan, but doesn't
speak a word of Japanese. He ends up in an extremely small, backwoods town
where no one speaks his language. He sees a child or young adult wearing a
KLI shirt and manages to at least establish a working understanding.
th...@my-deja.com
Erich Schneider <er...@caltech.edu> wrote:
> Urban legend, I think.
I agree. My e-friend George (who may yet respond to this thread) has
been chasing down claims (on usenet) that more people speak Klingon than
Esperanto, and not a single person who made that claim was able to
provide even a questionable reference. It was always something which
they just "heard somewhere." (George, feel free to correct me or add
details as relevant). He also has been in touch with many "people who
should know" (some of whom you mentioned) and it seems pretty clear that
the oposite is true - by many orders of magnitude.
> Esperanto [...] even [has] native speakers (children of
> enthusiastic Esperantists).
I guess I could be described as an enthusiastic Esperantist. I speak
Esperanto to my son (one month old) because I believe that
multilingualism is beneficial, and I don't want him to be left out when
we visit with other Esperanto speakers.
> See http://www.webcom.com/~donh/conlang2.html, written by an
> Esperantist, which has a section on Klingon which, as far as I can
> tell, is objective and factual. I used to participate on the Internet
> Klingon-language mailing list tlhIngan-Hol, so I have some experience
> with the Klingon side of things. It was a common occurrence back then
> for people to try and petition (via proxies) Marc Okrand, Klingon's
> creator, to invent new words or grammatical constructs because it was
> very difficult to express some common things using the ones available.
> That leads me to doubt positive comments about Klingon's popularity
> relative to Esperanto.
This is very interesting. Can I quote you on this?
Thomas L. Rochestro
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
rsn...@postoffice.swbell.net
Erich Schneider wrote:
> m...@world.std.com (Martha H Adams) writes:
>
> > An acquaintance recently commented that he had heard there were more
> > Klingon users now than Esperanto users. This surprised me, for I am
> > fairly well in touch with (fannish) reality and I don't recall hearing
> > anything of that. Is this fact an urban-legend kind of thing? Yet
> > today's world features a lot of implausible things: Klingon seems to be
> > a seriously functional language now, and maybe this happened very
> > quietly and it's *true.* ??
>
> Urban legend, I think. You might get an inflated idea of how many
> Klingon users there are if you think that there's a bona fide Klingon
> user behind every copy of _The Klingon Dictionary_ and related
> materials sold. I seriously doubt this.
'The number of Esperanto speakers is estimated at more than 100,000.'
> Esperanto, on the other hand,
> has a body of serious original literature (Klingon really only has
> the KLI's translation projects), use in scholarly journals, use at
> international conferences,
<snip>
'There is an annual World Esperanto Congress, and more than 100 periodicals are
published in the language. More than 30,000 books have been published in
Esperanto.'
Both quotes above are taken from
http://search.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/1/0,5716,33601+1,00.html
Nathan Raye
KLOTSZ ZASPIAAHK
>> An acquaintance recently commented that he had heard there were more
>> Klingon users now than Esperanto users. This surprised me, for I am
>> fairly well in touch with (fannish) reality and I don't recall hearing
>> anything of that. Is this fact an urban-legend kind of thing? Yet
>> today's world features a lot of implausible things: Klingon seems to be
>> a seriously functional language now, and maybe this happened very
>> quietly and it's *true.* ??
>
>Urban legend, I think. You might get an inflated idea of how many
>Klingon users there are if you think that there's a bona fide Klingon
>user behind every copy of _The Klingon Dictionary_ and related
>materials sold. I seriously doubt this. Esperanto, on the other hand,
>has a body of serious original literature (Klingon really only has
>the KLI's translation projects), use in scholarly journals, use at
>international conferences, and even native speakers (children of
>enthusiastic Esperantists).
Hmmm...I wonder how it compares with speakers of Volapük. Or Kobaian.
;-{)>
MIKE (a.k.a. "Progbear")
make GEORYN disappear to reply
"It is not an obscenity to be free. It is a divine right." --Annette Peacock
N.P.:nothing
th...@my-deja.com
prog...@aol.comGEORYN (KLOTSZ ZASPIAAHK) wrote:
> Hmmm...I wonder how it compares with speakers
> of Volapük. Or Kobaian. ;-{)>
Be carefule what you write with a bearded smiley. Someone might take
you seriously and respond...
Just as the number of fluent Klingon speakers can sit down to dinner
together (perhaps at a fairly large table), the number of fluent Kobaian
speakers could likely dance together on the head of a pin. If you're
feeling liberal, you might estimate that the number of fluent speakers
(NB: *fluent* speakers) might be enough to form a rock band.
As for Volapük, it does still have a small following. My guess is that
it consists mostly of Esperantists who learned it out of curiosity. I
bet there are enough to sit together at dinner, but I haven't been able
(in the last few minutes of thinking about it) to come up with a "person
who should know" to ask.
pricer...@my-deja.com
> See http://www.webcom.com/~donh/conlang2.html, written by an
> Esperantist, which has a section on Klingon which, as far as I can
> tell, is objective and factual.
Thanks for pointing me back to Don's conlang chapter. I see he now has
a pointer, in a footnote, to Gavin Edwards's update of his WIRED article
on conlangs, with more current information on D'Armand Speers project o
raise his son bilingually in Klingon and English.
As Thomas mentions elsewhere in this thread, I've made ahobby of trying
to track down some background to this UL... so far without success.
Aside from publishers figures on Marc Okrand's books, we have
orgnaizational memberships. The world membership of the KLI is of the
same order as that of ELNA, the Esperanto organization for the US
alone... and as far as I can tell the majority of Esperanto-speakers
do NOT live in the USA, so that's at least one strong indication that
the UL is wrong. But since it's unlikely aprroaching probability 0
that anyone's ever going to do a serious census of either group,
we'll probably never know for sure. (Sid Culbert came up with 1.6
million speakers of Esperanto at Level 3 of the language proficiency
scale the US State Dept uses, plus or minus 250,000, but his methodology
has been roundly criticized in some Esperanto circles).
I see no reason to be very skeptical about the anecdote about the
encounter in Japan, mentioned elsewhere in this thread. I've run into
the story before... and pointed out that I've personally had at least 3
such random encounters with Esperanto speakers, one in Prague, one on a
ferry in Puget Sound, and one on a charter fishing vessel here in
southeast Alaska. Seems to me all it proves is that there's at least
one Klingon speaker in Japan, and at least four Esperanto-speakers
worldwide, which isn't surprising. It certainly proves nothing about
the relative numbers of speakers!
A somewhat more interesting question is: why is the "more Klingon
speakers than Esperanto speakers" myth getting spread? This is a
question that can be asked about any UL (or about UL's in general). I
have some tentative ideas (about the emotional payoff), but I'll reserve
those until I see if anyone else has any good ideas I haven't thought
of.
George
pricer...@my-deja.com
th...@my-deja.com wrote:
> As for Volapük, it does still have a small following. My guess is
that
> it consists mostly of Esperantists who learned it out of curiosity. I
> bet there are enough to sit together at dinner, but I haven't been
able
> (in the last few minutes of thinking about it) to come up with a
"person
> who should know" to ask.
Try Sebastian Hartwig
(<http://amor.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h0444wow/vp/volagram.html>) or Ken
Caviness (<http://ns.southern.edu/~caviness/Volapuk/>).
BTW, one of my favorite bits of trivia: in Danish "volapyk" means
"gibberish" or "gobbledegook", but the vast majority of Danes have no
idea where the word came from.
George "Kiom da volapukistoj necesas por sxangxi ampolon?" Partlow
KLOTSZ ZASPIAAHK
>Just as the number of fluent Klingon speakers can sit down to dinner
>together (perhaps at a fairly large table), the number of fluent Kobaian
>speakers could likely dance together on the head of a pin. If you're
>feeling liberal, you might estimate that the number of fluent speakers
>(NB: *fluent* speakers) might be enough to form a rock band.
As I suspected. I wonder where that guy who wrote the "Rolling Stone
Encyclopedia Of Rock" got the idea that there were fanatical Magma followers
that could "speak Kobaïan fluently". As I'm acquainted with (probably) most of
the *really* fanatical Magma fans, and only a few of them even have a vague
inkling as to what Christian Vander & Co. are actually singing about. It's not
really a proper language, anyway, when you get right down to it.
>As for Volapük, it does still have a small following. My guess is that
>it consists mostly of Esperantists who learned it out of curiosity. I
>bet there are enough to sit together at dinner, but I haven't been able
>(in the last few minutes of thinking about it) to come up with a "person
>who should know" to ask.
I must admit a passing curiosity. One of my local libraries actually has
an English-Volapük dictionary! When I first saw it, I'd never heard of Volapük,
and had no clue as to what it was. It took me a while to realize that it was an
Esperanto-substitute. Apparently, the thinking was that Esperanto had too much
of an Indo-European bias, and this would be a language that would have no such
bias, and everyone would have an equal amount of difficulty to learn. Or
something.
MIKE (a.k.a. "Progbear")
make GEORYN disappear to reply
"Parece cosa de maligno. Los pianos no estallan por casualidad." --Gabriel
Garcia Marquez
N.P.:"Silver Arms"- W a l l e n s t e i n / C o s m i c C e n t u r y
Don HARLOW
skribis:
>m...@world.std.com (Martha H Adams) writes:
>
>> An acquaintance recently commented that he had heard there were more
>> Klingon users now than Esperanto users. This surprised me, for I am
>> fairly well in touch with (fannish) reality and I don't recall hearing
>> anything of that. Is this fact an urban-legend kind of thing? Yet
>> today's world features a lot of implausible things: Klingon seems to be
>> a seriously functional language now, and maybe this happened very
>> quietly and it's *true.* ??
>
>Urban legend, I think. You might get an inflated idea of how many
>Klingon users there are if you think that there's a bona fide Klingon
>user behind every copy of _The Klingon Dictionary_ and related
>materials sold. I seriously doubt this. Esperanto, on the other hand,
>has a body of serious original literature (Klingon really only has
>the KLI's translation projects), use in scholarly journals, use at
>international conferences, and even native speakers (children of
>enthusiastic Esperantists).
>
Actually, probably 1/3 to 1/2 of native speakers of Esperanto are the
children of couples who speak primarily Esperanto at home because it's
their only common language, or at least the one common language that
they both speak with equal facility. I've known several of this type.
As far as literature is concerned, yesterday I picked up -- off the
shelf -- a recent collection of twelve Chinese fairy tales (ninth book
in a series) in Esperanto, two plays by the Chinese dramatist Cao Yu
in Esperanto translation, and the Esperanto translations of six short
stories by Mark Twain (including the "Jumping Frog") to add to a
collection that fills up much of my bedroom and hallway. For the
Klingon equivalent, check out http://www.kli.org (the Klingon Language
Institute); last time I looked, they were still promising a second
Shakespeare play to add to ... the first, and the Bible translation
process was still going on much as in 1994 (many, perhaps most, of
Shakespeare's plays are available in Esperanto -- one, "Hamlet", in
two different translations -- and a complete Bible has been on the
market for the greater, though perhaps not better, part of this
century). (*)
>See http://www.webcom.com/~donh/conlang2.html, written by an
>Esperantist, which has a section on Klingon which, as far as I can
>tell, is objective and factual.
Kindly stated, Eric, but I do have to admit that I was holding my
tongue firmly in my cheek as I wrote that section (I was also
watching, simultaneously, the Deep Space 9 episode "Looking for
Par'mach in All the Wrong Places", with its rather delightful sample
of Klingon opera, as I wrote it). So I don't know about the
"objective". But I feel fairly confident about the "factual".
>I used to participate on the Internet
>Klingon-language mailing list tlhIngan-Hol, so I have some experience
>with the Klingon side of things. It was a common occurrence back then
>for people to try and petition (via proxies) Marc Okrand, Klingon's
>creator, to invent new words or grammatical constructs because it was
>very difficult to express some common things using the ones available.
>That leads me to doubt positive comments about Klingon's popularity
>relative to Esperanto.
>
The same web-page mentioned above has, I believe, links to a couple of
"Wired" articles by Gavin Edwards in which he discusses the popularity
(real or imagined) of Klingon, and in the second he describes how and
why an attempt to raise a child speaking Klingon (which he first
discussed in the first article) came a cropper. A good example of what
you describe in the second sentence above.
One other interesting phenomenon about Klingon: many (perhaps most) of
the leading Klingonists also speak Esperanto. One or two I've met
personally and spoken with in Esperanto over the years; several
others, I've had communication with; others have played, at various
times, significant roles in various Esperanto organizations. There
does seem to be some sort of positive correlation there...
As far as numbers are concerned: when last I looked, the main Klingon
work, Okrand's "Dictionary", had sold a quarter of a million copies
(that was several years ago, and the number may have increased;
though, also, it was after the period -- around 1994 -- when Klingon
was getting the most publicity, so it may not have increased that
much). According to the World Almanac and Book of Facts (2000
edition), there are two million speakers of Esperanto, a number which
may be overestimated or underestimated but -- from my own experience
-- is at least in the ballpark. You can do your own arithmetic from
this.
---
(*) Perhaps someday someone will translate Tolkien's "Lord of the
Rings" into Klingon (see e.g. Tolkien, J.R.R., "La Mastro de l'
Ringoj", translated into Esperanto by William Auld, Ekaterinburg:
Sezonoj, 1995-1997, available from e.g. ELNA Libroservo,
el...@esperanto-usa.org, or -- if you have plastic money -- the on-line
bookshop of the Flandra Esperanto-Ligo at
http://www.esperanto.be/retbutiko, and search under Tolkien; the total
price of the set there is about 65 Euros).
Don HARLOW
http://www.webcom.com/~donh/don/don.html
Por la Festa Sezono:
Vana V., Kiel Ni Mortigadis Leporon por la Antaıkristnaska Vespermanøo
http://www.best.com/~donh/Esperanto/Literaturo/Noveloj/mortigadis_leporon.html
O. Henry, La Donaco de la Magoj
http://www.best.com/~donh/Esperanto/Literaturo/Noveloj/magi.html
Ok tradiciaj Kristnaskaj Kanzonoj
http://www.best.com/~donh/Esperanto/Literaturo/Poezio/kristnaskaj_kanzonoj.html
Tomaş Pumpr, Letero al Malgrandaj Amikinoj
http://www.best.com/~donh/Esperanto/Literaturo/Revuoj/nlr/nlr12/amikinoj.html
Jan Neruda, Kristnaska Romanco
http://www.best.com/~donh/Esperanto/Literaturo/Revuoj/nlr/nlr12/romanco.html
Hans Christian Andersen, Knabineto kun alumetoj
http://www.uni-leipzig.de/esperanto/texte/bibl/fabeloj_andersen/alumetoj.html
Don HARLOW
skribis:
>th...@my-deja.com wrote:
>
>>As for Volapük, it does still have a small following. My guess is that
>>it consists mostly of Esperantists who learned it out of curiosity. I
>>bet there are enough to sit together at dinner, but I haven't been able
>>(in the last few minutes of thinking about it) to come up with a "person
>>who should know" to ask.
>
There are apparently a few semi-enthusiastic Volapu"kists left in the
world; but the few I've encountered who can actually speak it do also
speak Esperanto.
> I must admit a passing curiosity. One of my local libraries actually has
>an English-Volapük dictionary! When I first saw it, I'd never heard of Volapük,
>and had no clue as to what it was. It took me a while to realize that it was an
>Esperanto-substitute. Apparently, the thinking was that Esperanto had too much
>of an Indo-European bias, and this would be a language that would have no such
>bias, and everyone would have an equal amount of difficulty to learn. Or
>something.
>
"Or something." Schleyer published Volapu"k in 1880, if I remember
correctly, and Zamenhof published Esperanto in 1887. Esperanto's
earliest successes were built on the remains of the disintegrating
Volapu"k movement. (This is, of course, a perhaps simplistic
description of the situation, but the temporal priorities are
correct.)
Don HARLOW
http://www.webcom.com/~donh/don/don.html
Por la Festa Sezono:
Vana V., Kiel Ni Mortigadis Leporon por la Antaýkristnaska Vespermanøo
http://www.best.com/~donh/Esperanto/Literaturo/Noveloj/mortigadis_leporon.html
O. Henry, La Donaco de la Magoj
http://www.best.com/~donh/Esperanto/Literaturo/Noveloj/magi.html
Ok tradiciaj Kristnaskaj Kanzonoj
http://www.best.com/~donh/Esperanto/Literaturo/Poezio/kristnaskaj_kanzonoj.html
Tomaþ Pumpr, Letero al Malgrandaj Amikinoj
Anton Sherwood
: I must admit a passing curiosity. One of my local libraries actually has
: an English-Volapük dictionary! When I first saw it, I'd never heard of
: Volapük, and had no clue as to what it was. It took me a while to realize
: that it was an Esperanto-substitute. Apparently, the thinking was that
: Esperanto had too much of an Indo-European bias, and this would be a
: language that would have no such bias, and everyone would have an equal
: amount of difficulty to learn. Or something.
There are languages constructed on that theory, but Volap*k is not
one of them; it's older than Esperanto, as Don Harlow points out,
and its vocabulary is all European (though distorted).
The most famous "neutral" language(s) is Loglan/Lojban, whose roots
are chosen to maximize the weighted average of similarity (number
of phonemes in common) to the equivalent word in six or eight major
languages (Chinese, English, Spanish etc).
Truly equal difficulty would be best approached by random generation
of the roots. Loglan/Lojban does a good job with the grammar, though,
which is (by design) unlike any other.
--
Anton Sherwood *\\* +1 415 267 0685 *\\* http://www.jps.net/antons/
If the list of newsgroups is long, I may limit followups to one or
two that I read. If you respond, please add your favorite group.
Matt Ruff / Lisa Gold
>
> An acquaintance recently commented that he had heard there were more
> Klingon users now than Esperanto users.
Given the high fatality rates among Klingon-speakers as compared to
Esperantists, I tend to doubt it.
-- M. Ruff
Mark A Mandel
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
References: <Fn5wn...@world.std.com> <3864CC...@worldnet.att.net>
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
Distribution:
Matt Ruff / Lisa Gold (Storyt...@worldnet.att.net) wrote:
As a fluent speaker of Esperanto for 35 years and a fairly skilled
Klingonist for about 6, I have thought about this claim and formed the
following opinion.
The number of Esperanto-speakers is estimated from a whole lot of factors,
including wild-ass guesses but also club memberships, subscriptions, con
attendance, and petition signatures. The number of Klingon-speakers is
almost certainly based on the number of copies sold of _The Klingon
Dictionary_ and nothing else... unless it's been inflated by adding sales
of other _The Klingon Way_, _Klingon for the Galactic Traveler_, and the
Klingon language tapes, almost all of which (we may safely assume) are to
people who already have the Dictionary.
Esperanto is designed to be easy to learn, and is in fact so; especially
for speakers of Romance and Germanic languages, but also for others
(Serbo-Croatian -- this datum is from before the death of Tito and the
breakup of Yugoslavia -- as well as Turkish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean,
and other non-Indo-European languages). Klingon is designed to be
different from all Terran languages and difficult in some basic aspects of
grammar and sound, although the morphology is very simple in ways where it
would have been a pain to design difficulties. As a result, Esperanto is
likely to be learned more readily, used, and retained in memory than
Klingon.
Klingon is attractive almost exclusively to fen. Esperanto attracts people
of many kinds, from all, hmm, esthetic and lifestyle varieties.
Klingon is available only to English-speakers, unless we count the
perfectly Godawful bungle of a German translation of the dictionary.
Esperanto is available in well over 100 languages.
Almost all that's available to read in Klingon is about ST, Klingon
fandom, or Klingon itself. Esperanto literature comprises tens of
thousands of volumes on just about any subject imaginable.
People travel and speak Esperanto, using it as their only means of
communication with their hosts. People GET AND STAY MARRIED with only
Esperanto as common language. Klingon? <DuHbe'>/neeble/impossible!
Klingon has been around for maybe 10 years, Esperanto for over 100. So
Esperanto has been accumulating speakers for a couple generations -- and
losing them, to death as well as dropout -- but that cumulative gain ("Ecx
guto post guto...") is likely to far outstrip Klingon's faddish burst.
Looking at it all together: no bleepin' way!
(I started composing this followup before seeing the replies that have
already been made to the claim. But I don't think the effort is wasted.)
-- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and
Philological Busybody
a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel
tlhIngan veQbeq marqem la'Hom -- Heghbej ghIHmoHwI'pu'!
Subcommander Marke'm, Klingon Sanitation Corps --
Death to Litterbugs!
http://world.std.com/~mam/
--
If you're reading this in a newsgroup: to reply by mail,
remove the obvious spam-blocker from my edress.
hrj...@socrates.berkeley.edu
: Esperanto is designed to be easy to learn, and is in fact so; especially
: for speakers of Romance and Germanic languages, but also for others
: (Serbo-Croatian -- this datum is from before the death of Tito and the
: breakup of Yugoslavia -- as well as Turkish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean,
: and other non-Indo-European languages). Klingon is designed to be
: different from all Terran languages and difficult in some basic aspects of
: grammar and sound, although the morphology is very simple in ways where it
: would have been a pain to design difficulties. As a result, Esperanto is
: likely to be learned more readily, used, and retained in memory than
: Klingon.
I'd question that "designed to be different from all Terran languages"
part. My understanding is that Okrand's Klingon language bears a number
of startling parallels to the Native American language he wrote his
dissertation on here in the UCB linguistics department. (I don't have
firsthand knowledge about this, as the departmental copy of his
dissertation has been missing for a number of years now, but this
observation has been made by several faculty members who are familiar with
his work.) Mind you, many Native American languages have features that
seem awfully "alien" to people who aren't used to dealing with them.
--
*********************************************************
Heather Rose Jones hrj...@socrates.berkeley.edu
**********************************************************
Mark A Mandel
: Mark A Mandel <mam-DIE-S...@world.std.com> wrote:
[...]
: I'd question that "designed to be different from all Terran languages"
: part. My understanding is that Okrand's Klingon language bears a number
: of startling parallels to the Native American language he wrote his
: dissertation on here in the UCB linguistics department. (I don't have
: firsthand knowledge about this, as the departmental copy of his
: dissertation has been missing for a number of years now, but this
: observation has been made by several faculty members who are familiar with
: his work.) Mind you, many Native American languages have features that
: seem awfully "alien" to people who aren't used to dealing with them.
Yes, I should have been clearer. Okrand took many features from Terran
languages and combined them. The strict ordering of suffix types is one of
these features that I think is from some of the American languages he
studied. He has said that whenever someone commented on his
work-in-progress that it reminded them of Language X, he would
deliberately modify it away from Language X. Klingon is different from all
Terran languages in *somewhat* the way a fantastic creature that combined
reptilian, avian, mammalian, and arthropod traits would be different from
all Terran animals.
Klingon also includes a number of dissonances and violations of apparent
(at least statistical) human-language universals. I'm thinking of the
highly asymmetrical distribution of phonemes across different points of
articulation; the ability to use a sentence as an object but not as a
subject (I *think* that violates an implicational universal, but I'm not
sure); and the basic Object-Verb-Subject word order, which is the rarest
of all the six permutations and is found in a literal handful (<10, I
think) of the several thousand human languages that have been examined.
-- Mark A. Mandel
Don HARLOW
(Mark A Mandel) skribis:
>Klingon is available only to English-speakers, unless we count the
>perfectly Godawful bungle of a German translation of the dictionary.
>Esperanto is available in well over 100 languages.
>
Is that true? I vaguely remember reading two or three years ago, in
the "Laste aperis..." column in UEA's "Esperanto", that an
introduction to Klingon had appeared in _Esperanto_... Of course (if
my memory is at all correct), it was published in Germany, and so
might be based on the dictionary you mention.
Don HARLOW
http://www.webcom.com/~donh/don/don.html
Novaj verkantoj, novaj verkajxoj:
El Gvatemalo: Miguel Angel Asturias, La legendo de Tatuana
http://www.best.com/~donh/Esperanto/Literaturo/Noveloj/tatuana.html
El Ukrainio: Lena Poţivana, Donaco de Dio
http://www.best.com/~donh/Esperanto/Literaturo/Noveloj/donaco.html
Michael Urban
Martha H Adams <m...@world.std.com> wrote:
>An acquaintance recently commented that he had heard there were more
>fairly well in touch with (fannish) reality and I don't recall hearing
>anything of that. Is this fact an urban-legend kind of thing? Yet
>today's world features a lot of implausible things: Klingon seems to be
>a seriously functional language now, and maybe this happened very
>quietly and it's *true.* ??
>
Urban legend, as others have pointed out. I seem to recall it being
mentioned in some newspaper article or another, but it is indeed
devilishly hard to track down. I have observed that while most
"mundane" people imagine that there are hordes of Trek fans who are out
there speaking Klingon at Star Trek conventions, the people who are
actively "doing" Klingon turn out to be the "usual suspects" in the
constructed language hobby -- Esperantists in some cases, or (as in the
case of Dr. Schoen of the Klingon Language Institute) former Elvish
enthusiasts, and so on.
I imagine that there are quite a few Trek fans who, armed with
Okrand's book, can and do puzzle out how to construct a few
straightforward compounds and sentences, but to classify them as
"speakers" is rather generous. And if the same criterion were used,
the number of Esperanto speakers might run to several million.
Mike
Tom Hardy
<848i1q$l9o$1...@nntp2.atl.mindspring.net>:
>In article <Fn5wn...@world.std.com>,
>Martha H Adams <m...@world.std.com> wrote:
>>An acquaintance recently commented that he had heard there were more
>>Klingon users now than Esperanto users.
<snip>
>Urban legend, as others have pointed out. I seem to recall it being
>mentioned in some newspaper article or another, but it is indeed
>devilishly hard to track down.
I've spotted a Deja reference going back to 1995 based on a search
for "klingon esperanto" and "author: eddore". Why eddore? Because
I vaguely recall Gharlane of Eddore doing some sort of "informal
poll". It was a joke.
<snip>
> And if the same criterion were used,
>the number of Esperanto speakers might run to several million.
I saw an eight million figure about 30 years ago. Is Esperanto
usage declining?
--
Tom Hardy <*>
rth...@email.msn.com
robert...@blake.pvt.k12.mn.us
pricer...@my-deja.com
Tom Hardy <rth...@email.msn.com> wrote:
> Quoth Michael Urban of rec.arts.sf.written, in
> <848i1q$l9o$1...@nntp2.atl.mindspring.net>:
> >the number of Esperanto speakers might run to several million.
>
> I saw an eight million figure about 30 years ago. Is Esperanto
> usage declining?
The short answer to your question is, of course, "Who knows?"
There's no real way to tell. I've certainly never been able to find any
backup for the "eight million" figure _at all_, and I never believed it
(insofar as I ever thought about it much!) . As Mike Urban implies,
much depends on how you define "speaks". Dr. S. Culbert defines it as
"Level 3 on the U. S. State Department scale of language proficiency",
and based on that estimates 1.6 million, give or take a few ten
thousands.* That gets rounded up to "two million" in the WORLD Almanac
(which prints only even millions in its table of langauges with a millin
or more speakers). However Culbert's methodology has been criticized by
a number of Esperantists, notably Simon Payne and Jouko Lindstedt (they
think his number is too high). Culbert thinks the number has stayed
more or less stable throughout the 90's. I think so too. My guess is
that, although the number of speakers has always been under a million,
the number of people currently learning the language is more than
compensating for speakers lost through death. But no one knows for
sure, nor is likely to.
George
*Here is the definition of "Level 3", taken from
<http://www.rano.demon.co.uk/nombro.html>, where you can find more on
the topic, some in English, some in Esperanto:
| Interagency Language Roundtable, level 3 (Professional Proficiency)
|
| Pronunciation: Sometimes foreign but always intelligible
|
| Grammar: Good control of most basic syntactic patterns;
| always conveys meaning accurately in reasonable
| complex sentences
|
| Vocabulary: Adequate for participation in all general
conversation
| and for professional discussions in a special field
|
| Fluency: Rarely hesitant; always able to sustain
conversation
| through circumlocution
|
| Comprehension: Understands most of what is said to him; can
follow
| speeches, clear radio broadcasts, and most
| conversations between native speakers, but not in
| great detail.
Don HARLOW
skribis:
>Quoth Michael Urban of rec.arts.sf.written, in
><848i1q$l9o$1...@nntp2.atl.mindspring.net>:
>
>> And if the same criterion were used,
>>the number of Esperanto speakers might run to several million.
>
>I saw an eight million figure about 30 years ago. Is Esperanto
>usage declining?
>
Nah. I think the eight million figure was quoted by Mario Pei in one
of his books; where he got it from, I don't know, but it was certainly
B.S. at the time.
There are only two figures on the number of Esperanto speakers that
can be _in any way_ justified (after all, nobody has ever done a
census, and I'm not sure one could be done). In the late twenties,
Johannes Dietterle in Germany did a global survey and came up with a
figure of (I think) 128,000 speakers of Esperanto at the time. More
recently, Prof. Sidney Culbert of the University of Washington came up
with a figure of one million for his table of languages spoken by one
million or more people in the World Almanac and Book of Facts, based
on on-the-ground research in several parts of the world; after a visit
to China in 1986, he kicked that up to two million (meaning, he said
at the time, >1.5 million). Culbert claims that this figure refers to
speakers of the language at State Dept. Level 3 or better.
Elsewhere in this thread, George Partlow mentions that even some
Esperantists have questioned Culbert's methodology. Actually, I've
never encountered a criticism of his _methodology_ -- few people are
at all familiar with it, as far as I can tell. But even quite a number
of Esperanto speakers, like most non-speakers of Esperanto, question
his _results_, largely on the grounds that "That can't _possibly_ be
true!!!" (*) Based on my own experiences (and based on those George
quotes, as well), (**) I suspect his figure is, in fact, at least
ballpark correct, as I think I said elsewhere. Most people just don't
bother to do the math.
---
(*) The Almanac's chief editor took the unprecedented step of removing
Culbert's figure for the number of Esperanto speakers from the table
in the 1994 edition, apparently based on just such complaints, though
nobody seems to have questioned Culbert's figures for other languages,
despite the fact that the one for English looks remarkably low to
those who've been exposed to e.g. "The Story of English". The figure
for Esperanto was restored in the 1997 edition, apparently after the
staff had satisfied themselves that it was justified.
(**) George mentions that he himself has had random encounters with at
least three Esperanto speakers. This may seem like a small number, but
think about the number of general random encounters you would have to
have to encounter three Esperanto speakers out of two million in a
world whose population is _six billion_, and I think you'll find that
the figures are not out of line. And I can testify that George is not
unique.
J. Moreno
> (**) George mentions that he himself has had random encounters with at
> least three Esperanto speakers. This may seem like a small number, but
> think about the number of general random encounters you would have to
> have to encounter three Esperanto speakers out of two million in a
> world whose population is _six billion_, and I think you'll find that
> the figures are not out of line. And I can testify that George is not
> unique.
But it's not quite as random as the sheer numbers imply either -- you
can reasonably suppose that people that learn Esperanto share some
common interest (learning languages if nothing else), and so you'd be
more likely to bump into them than with someone with no common interest.
Think of it as bumping into SF fans (although of course there are
probably more than 2 million of us).
> Don HARLOW
> http://www.webcom.com/~donh/don/don.html
>
> Novaj verkantoj, novaj verkajxoj:
> El Gvatemalo: Miguel Angel Asturias, La legendo de Tatuana
> http://www.best.com/~donh/Esperanto/Literaturo/Noveloj/tatuana.html
> El Ukrainio: Lena Poţivana, Donaco de Dio
> http://www.best.com/~donh/Esperanto/Literaturo/Noveloj/donaco.html
Sigs should be preceded by a sigdash, a line consisting of two dashes
followed by a single space, "-- ", particularly when they are so long.
--
John Moreno
Don HARLOW
skribis:
>Don HARLOW <d...@donh.vip.best.com> wrote:
>
>> (**) George mentions that he himself has had random encounters with at
>> least three Esperanto speakers. This may seem like a small number, but
>> think about the number of general random encounters you would have to
>> have to encounter three Esperanto speakers out of two million in a
>> world whose population is _six billion_, and I think you'll find that
>> the figures are not out of line. And I can testify that George is not
>> unique.
>
>But it's not quite as random as the sheer numbers imply either -- you
>can reasonably suppose that people that learn Esperanto share some
>common interest (learning languages if nothing else), and so you'd be
>more likely to bump into them than with someone with no common interest.
>
>Think of it as bumping into SF fans (although of course there are
>probably more than 2 million of us).
>
Oh, there's no problem in _encountering_ Esperanto speakers if you
want to. I've sat in a room with more than 2000 of them at once. But
George and I were both (I think) talking about random on-the-street
encounters with people we'd never met before who turned out to speak
Esperanto -- this not even taking into account the fact that we might
well have met ten times as many Esperanto speakers and never known it,
just as you can meet SF fans and not know that they are without a long
conversation. (*) In this sort of case, community of interest is
pretty much irrelevant to the statistical process.
---
(*) Probably the most absurd example I can think of with respect to
this is the time my wife and I were showing my parents around London
one Friday afternoon, and in the evening, before we took the train
home, we stopped in at a watering hole where the local Esperantists
hung out after their weekly get-together, just to say "saluton", and
my father, to my surprise, addressed the president of the World
Esperanto Association, who happened to be there, in Esperanto. Turned
out he'd learned the language from one of those old radio-experimenter
magazines back in the late twenties, and had never bothered to mention
the fact to me...
th...@my-deja.com
d...@donh.vip.best.com wrote:
> Oh, there's no problem in _encountering_ Esperanto speakers if you
> want to. I've sat in a room with more than 2000 of them at once. But
> George and I were both (I think) talking about random on-the-street
> encounters with people we'd never met before who turned out to speak
> Esperanto
Hey, maybe I was in that same room. :-)
FWIW, I've been speaking Esperanto for about 2.5 years, and I've already
had 2.5 chance encounters with Esperantists "on the street" (again, not
counting the many *planned* meetings.) Maybe these don't count as
totally chance (see below) but one almost-chance encounter a year is
much higher than I ever expected.
One was someone I'd met before and saw in a sandwich shop 100 miles from
my home, and 400 miles away from where I met him. The second was known
to someone I was with in Amsterdam. The "half" one was on an airplane.
Someone saw my green star and asked me whether I speak Esperanto. He'd
had a colleague in Japan who had offered to teach him Esperanto.
Thomas L. Rochestro
pricer...@my-deja.com
pl...@newsreaders.com (J. Moreno) wrote:
> But it's not quite as random as the sheer numbers imply either -- you
> can reasonably suppose that people that learn Esperanto share some
> common interest (learning languages if nothing else), and so you'd be
> more likely to bump into them than with someone with no common
interest.
That's true, but doesn't speak to my "random encounters". In one case I
was walking down a street in Prague's New Town, having just crossed the
Charles Bridge... and a Belgian Esperanto-speaker happened to be walking
in the opposite direction on the same street. In another my wife and I
were returning from a Co-Counseling workshop on Orcas Island in the San
Juans, and pulled on to the Washington State ferry behind the car of an
Esperantist. In the third, my son and I were returing from a
whale-watching kayak trip in Icy Strait near Glacier Bay, and the wife
of the charter-boat skipper who was picking up our group turned out to
speak Esperanto. The key here is simply that in each case either I or
the other person had a green star (symbol of Esperanto) or some piece of
clothing with something in Esperanto written on it. Otherwise there
would have been no way to know that we both spoke Esperanto. It may
well be that I've met other Esperanto-speakers randomly, and simply
never found out that they spoke Esperanto. And I _have_ met
Esperantists because we shared some common interest (for example
language, as you mention), but I wasn't counting those encounters as
"random". If you say that I met the Belgian in Prague because we
"shared a common interest in Czechoslovakia" or "shared an interest in
travel", and that therefore that meeting wasn't a "random encounter",
then ISTM you're going way beyond common usage... in such fashion that
_no_ meeting between two humans could _ever_ be called "chance"! ;-)
Incidentally, I found out a couple years ago that one of my cousins
knows some Esperanto. She is 57, I'm 52. Somehow the topic had never
come up... by chance or otherwise! ;-)
George
J. Moreno
Well, I'd think that they'd more likely be able to /afford/ to travel,
which would improve their odds of bumping into each other.
Still -- you and others are explicitly advertising your interest in
Esperanto, it's not to surprising (at least to me) that it works to the
extent of bring other speakers of it to your attention when they
wouldn't otherwise.
Driving down the road (when I'm not reading) I may see thousands of
vehicles in a single day -- when something like this grabs my attention
when I see it, I wouldn't go so far as to say it was "unlikely". You
are in the same general area and the other person is advertising for
your attention, which works.
Take for instance the Washington State ferry example above -- the two of
you could have been the only speakers within a hundred miles, you've
probably seen a million cars without a sticker. The fact that you see
one with, indicates they are out there, but doesn't really speak to the
popularity.
--
John Moreno
pricer...@my-deja.com
pl...@newsreaders.com (J. Moreno) wrote:
> Take for instance the Washington State ferry example above -- the two
of
> you could have been the only speakers within a hundred miles, you've
> probably seen a million cars without a sticker. The fact that you see
> one with, indicates they are out there, but doesn't really speak to
the
> popularity.
I'm still not sure I follow you. Let's take a really obvious
"advertisement": my last name. Wouldn't you say that my chances to
having an "encounter" with someone with the same last name as mine are
roughly related to how many of us there are?
And in any case, I wouldn't say that Esperanto is exactly "popular"! At
least, that's not the word that immediately springs to mind... ;-)
Kai Henningsen
> Here's a specific probably-urban-legend about it (which _was_ presented
> to me as happening to a friend of a friend): Man goes to Japan, but doesn't
The FOAF bit is just about the most obvious hint of being an UL, of
course.
Kai
--
http://www.westfalen.de/private/khms/
"... by God I *KNOW* what this network is for, and you can't have it."
- Russ Allbery (r...@stanford.edu)
J. Moreno
> pl...@newsreaders.com (J. Moreno) wrote:
>
> > Take for instance the Washington State ferry example above -- the two of
> > you could have been the only speakers within a hundred miles, you've
> > probably seen a million cars without a sticker. The fact that you see
> > one with, indicates they are out there, but doesn't really speak to the
> > popularity.
>
> I'm still not sure I follow you. Let's take a really obvious
> "advertisement": my last name. Wouldn't you say that my chances to
> having an "encounter" with someone with the same last name as mine are
> roughly related to how many of us there are?
Sure -- roughly, but it also depends upon what you are doing.
For instance "John Smith"; fairly popular names but I don't know if I've
run into anybody with the combination. OTOH, if my name was "John
Smith" and I went around wearing a T shirt that said "Yes, my name IS
John Smith", my chances of bumping into another JS would be better than
if I went around with one that said "Yes, my name IS John Doe".
> And in any case, I wouldn't say that Esperanto is exactly "popular"! At
> least, that's not the word that immediately springs to mind... ;-)
Just a manner of speaking.
--
John Moreno
pricer...@my-deja.com
mam-DIE-S...@world.std.com (Mark A Mandel) wrote:
> Yes, I should have been clearer. Okrand took many features from Terran
> languages and combined them. The strict ordering of suffix types is
one of
> these features that I think is from some of the American languages he
> studied.
Not to change the subject too drastically, but do either of you know
just _which_ language or languages he did his dissertation on? And can
either of you tell me the origin of the term "Penutian" (which I
discovered while trying to answer Question 1 myself via google.com; I
see Tsimpshian and Chinook are part of this group along with severl
oregon and California languages, which interests me since we
Tsimpshian-speakers here in town, along with Haida and Tlingit).
George
(And Question 3: Are there _lots_ of people who are linguists _and_
filkers, or is this just one of those random events J. Moreno doesn't
believe happen?)
DillyTaunt
>Urban legend, as others have pointed out. I seem to recall it being
>mentioned in some newspaper article or another, but it is indeed
>devilishly hard to track down.
Oh dear, you all are going to force me to untruth at you. I seem to recall
that Martin Gardner did an article for "Skeptical Inquirer" about so-called
universal languages. He mentioned
Esperanto and Klingon, and mentioned in passing that Klingon (that year) had
more students than
NAVAJO!
I can easily imagine somebody mentally conflating Navajo <-> Esperanto;
students <-> speakers
and repeating "Klingon
has more speakers than Esperanto"
If repeated to others who also were
dimly aware of Gardner's article, it would soon take on a life of its own.
BUT.. (standard disclaimer) I can't
remember back how far the article
was, so I may be the one doing the
misremembering and conflating...
DillyTaunt
teach Esperanto to a four year old who enjoys "Pig Latin" and like
speech games?
I think that it would be a good introduction to the structure of
languages without the irregularities
of -- say-- actual Latin. While it
would provide some of the same
vocabulary benefits of teaching
a child Latin. OTOH... maybe it
would be better to teach Spanish...
Don HARLOW
There's a lot of information, all of it favorable, on using Esperanto
as a propaedeutic (introductory) language, but most of it applies to
older children (teenagers) in a relatively structured
language-teaching environment, which is not totally appropriate for
four-year-olds. While there is a fair amount of reading material
available for smaller children (e-mail me for some sources, if
interested), there's very little good teaching material for that age,
so you'd pretty much be on your own (advantage to this: it's an easy
language for the parent to stay just ahead of the child and still
teach it effectively). All other things being equal, though, it might
be better, if possible, with a child of four to get her/him into some
more complicated language, since he/she is at an age when such
languages are easier to pick up by osmosis rather than structured
teaching. Possible disadvantage: are you in any position to help your
four year old learn some more complicated language? (I do not suggest
Klingon...)
Don HARLOW
http://www.webcom.com/~donh/don/don.html
Novaj verkantoj, novaj verkaźoj:
Don HARLOW
By a strange coincidence, I happen to have a copy of Gardner's
"Klingon and Other Artificial Languages" (Skeptical Inquirer,
July/August 1995, pp 3-5 + 55) right by my computer; it was sent to
me, some time back, by (by another strange coincidence!) an occasional
poster to this newsgroup (Pierre Jelenc: pardonu, ke mi neniam danke
respondis al vi pro tiu artikolo; mi kaptu la okazon fari tion nun,
kaj publike!). There are two paragraphs and a footnote on Klingon, its
life and times, but I see no reference to Navajo there at all.
It's actually a rather superficial article, showing little more than
superficial research. I'll put the misprint of the title of William
Orr's translation of Carroll's "Humpty Dumpty" ("Homito Omleto",
according to Gardner; should be "Hometo Omleto") down to a typo. But
Gardner also quotes as fact the popular misconception that the
Esperanto movement peaked in the 1920s (when it had on the order of
100,000 or 200,000 speakers, as I mentioned here in another posting)
while at the same time mentioning a figure of two million speakers for
today; readers here can do the requisite math themselves, I think. His
reference to the failure of anyone to show up at a 1991 Modern
Language Association seminar on Esperanto conveniently overlooks the
fact (which Gardner may not have known) that the MLA, in its infinite
wisdom, scheduled the seminar for 8:00 A.M. on a Sunday morning in the
middle of a howling blizzard (they may not have anticipated the
blizzard); I attended a similar seminar a couple of years earlier,
along with a couple of dozen other people (it was on a weekday
evening; the weather was at worst moderate). His comments on the
"ugliness" of another artificial language, Volapu"k (whose supporting
movement he refers to, not totally dispassionately, as a "cult"), are
quite out of place. And he apparently does not know the difference
between Peano's Latino Sine Flexione and Gode's Interlingua.
All in all, I would have expected better.
However, I myself seem to have heard the "> Navajo" story, too --
someplace...
th...@my-deja.com
dilly...@aol.com (DillyTaunt) wrote:
> I seem to recall that Martin Gardner did an article
> for "Skeptical Inquirer" about so-called universal languages.
> He mentioned Esperanto and Klingon, and mentioned in passing
> that Klingon (that year) had more students than NAVAJO!
Interesting.
BTW, there was an article in "the onion" about this.
http://www.theonion.com/onion3526/klingon_navajo.html
This article started a long discussion in sci.lang where the concensus
is that you should read the article for a laugh, but not take it
seriously. (A deja search on "klingon navajo" will pull up a number of
notes from that thread.)
Of course, I will point out that you said "students" of the languages,
and the Onion article says "speakers" and "fluent speakers."
Thomas L. Rochestro
Kai Henningsen
> <pricer...@my-deja.com> wrote:
>
> > pl...@newsreaders.com (J. Moreno) wrote:
> >
> > > Take for instance the Washington State ferry example above -- the two of
> > > you could have been the only speakers within a hundred miles, you've
> > > probably seen a million cars without a sticker. The fact that you see
> > > one with, indicates they are out there, but doesn't really speak to the
> > > popularity.
> >
> > I'm still not sure I follow you. Let's take a really obvious
> > "advertisement": my last name. Wouldn't you say that my chances to
> > having an "encounter" with someone with the same last name as mine are
> > roughly related to how many of us there are?
>
> Sure -- roughly, but it also depends upon what you are doing.
>
> For instance "John Smith"; fairly popular names but I don't know if I've
> run into anybody with the combination. OTOH, if my name was "John
> Smith" and I went around wearing a T shirt that said "Yes, my name IS
> John Smith", my chances of bumping into another JS would be better than
> if I went around with one that said "Yes, my name IS John Doe".
Well, when John Smith walks around the US with a t-shirt advertizing his
name, he's going to meet many more people with the same name than where I
going to run around Germany with a t-shirt advertizing my name. (I know of
one such person, at least a generation older than myself, and living in
Copenhagen/Denmark. I never met him. In this city here (pop. around 1/3
million), there currently seem to be two families with this last name, and
I know nothing about the other.)
Surely you won't dispute that?
So, therefore, one _can_ make assumptions about the distribution based on
such encounters.
pricer...@my-deja.com
d...@donh.vip.best.com wrote:
> However, I myself seem to have heard the "> Navajo" story, too --
> someplace...
It was in an article in the satirical zine "The Onion" within the last
year.
Search Deja for "The Onion" + "Navajo" + "Klingon and you should be able
to find a thread about it easily. I disremember which ng...
George
Don HARLOW
>In article <1e3hoxk.giqaas1ukucayN%pl...@newsreaders.com>,
> pl...@newsreaders.com (J. Moreno) wrote:
>
>> But it's not quite as random as the sheer numbers imply either -- you
>> can reasonably suppose that people that learn Esperanto share some
>> common interest (learning languages if nothing else), and so you'd be
>> more likely to bump into them than with someone with no common
>interest.
>
>It may
>well be that I've met other Esperanto-speakers randomly, and simply
>never found out that they spoke Esperanto.
This does happen, but is rather hard to document. Fortunately I can
(and have, before) quoted a case that happened to me:
About a decade ago, my then small daughter and I were hiking from
Pantoll on Mt. Tamalpais down to Stinson Beach (a small touristy place
on highway 1 a few miles north of the Golden Gate). At the beach
there, we met my wife, and left her setting up a picnic table for us
while my daughter went down to surfside to play. I sat down on a
convenient bench to keep an eye on her and read the latest issue of
"El Popola C^inio". At the other end of the bench a group of four
German teenagers were arguing over a map (I assumed they were German
because they were arguing in German). I thought of trying them out
with "Saluton!" (Esperanto for "Hi, there!"), but thought "better" of
it, and after a while they went on their way, still arguing.
A bit later, my daughter returned and we went back over the dunes to
where the picnic area was. When we got there, my wife said: "Do you
know what just happened to me? A group of German kids coming back from
the beach saw the Esperanto bumper-sticker on our car and came over to
me and asked, in Esperanto, how to get to Fort Ross (old Russian fort
70-80 miles north of San Francisco) and whether they could get there
today and still get back to the city before dark."
>Incidentally, I found out a couple years ago that one of my cousins
>knows some Esperanto. She is 57, I'm 52. Somehow the topic had never
>come up... by chance or otherwise! ;-)
>
See my earlier posted story about my father.
Pete McCutchen
(Mark A Mandel) wrote:
>Klingon also includes a number of dissonances and violations of apparent
>(at least statistical) human-language universals. I'm thinking of the
>highly asymmetrical distribution of phonemes across different points of
>articulation; the ability to use a sentence as an object but not as a
>subject (I *think* that violates an implicational universal, but I'm not
>sure); and the basic Object-Verb-Subject word order, which is the rarest
>of all the six permutations and is found in a literal handful (<10, I
>think) of the several thousand human languages that have been examined.
OK, I'm a bit out of my depth here, having a background in
linguistics basically limited to reading a few popular books such as
_The Language Instinct_, but . . . if true, does that mean that a
child could not learn Klingon grammar "naturally," by osmosis, as
young children learn fluent English, French, Russian, and Chinese all
the time?
--
Pete McCutchen
Pete McCutchen
>One was someone I'd met before and saw in a sandwich shop 100 miles from
>my home, and 400 miles away from where I met him. The second was known
>to someone I was with in Amsterdam. The "half" one was on an airplane.
>Someone saw my green star and asked me whether I speak Esperanto. He'd
>had a colleague in Japan who had offered to teach him Esperanto.
Your "green star"? Is this some sort of badge worn by Esperantists?
If Esperantists routinely wear identifying badges, then it
dramatically increases the likelihood of your being aware of these
chance encounters when they occur, which is about 90% of the battle.
Not also that many of these encounters involving travel do involve at
least a bit of sample bias -- not quite so much as one would encounter
at a linguists' convention, say, but some. I would imagine that
Esperanto is learned by people who are 1) more highly educated, 2)
relatively affluent, and 3) interested in the ways of the world at
large. Such persons are more likely to be present in airports and
other locations frequented by travelers. Ergo, an encounter with a
fellow Esperanto-speaker on an airplane is not quite a random event.
--
Pete McCutchen
Pete McCutchen
>That's true, but doesn't speak to my "random encounters". In one case I
>was walking down a street in Prague's New Town, having just crossed the
>Charles Bridge... and a Belgian Esperanto-speaker happened to be walking
>in the opposite direction on the same street. In another my wife and I
>were returning from a Co-Counseling workshop on Orcas Island in the San
>Juans, and pulled on to the Washington State ferry behind the car of an
>Esperantist. In the third, my son and I were returing from a
>whale-watching kayak trip in Icy Strait near Glacier Bay, and the wife
>of the charter-boat skipper who was picking up our group turned out to
>speak Esperanto. The key here is simply that in each case either I or
>the other person had a green star (symbol of Esperanto) or some piece of
>clothing with something in Esperanto written on it. Otherwise there
>would have been no way to know that we both spoke Esperanto.
But these "random" encounters don't tell you anything about the
relative prevalence of Esperanto-speaking versus other
characteristics, unless the holders of those other characteristics
also wear identifying badges.
To use a related example, most Trekkies don't wear Spock-ears around
on the streets (I said most!). If they did, I suspect you'd be able
to report thousands of chance encounters with Trekkies. Esperanto may
well have two million speakers -- or whatever you said the figure was
-- but I honestly don't think the fact that Esperantists have random
encounters with one another means all that much when the Esperantists
are going around with green stars on their lapels.
--
Pete McCutchen
Pete McCutchen
>In article <1e3izmb.1u5s45yz1ser3N%pl...@newsreaders.com>,
> pl...@newsreaders.com (J. Moreno) wrote:
>
>> Take for instance the Washington State ferry example above -- the two
>of
>> you could have been the only speakers within a hundred miles, you've
>> probably seen a million cars without a sticker. The fact that you see
>> one with, indicates they are out there, but doesn't really speak to
>the
>> popularity.
>
>I'm still not sure I follow you. Let's take a really obvious
>"advertisement": my last name. Wouldn't you say that my chances to
>having an "encounter" with someone with the same last name as mine are
>roughly related to how many of us there are?
If everybody whose last name was "Zednik" went about with a "Z"
tattooed on his or her forehead, would you conclude that "Zednick" was
a more common name than Smith because you encountered more Zednicks
than Smiths while traveling?
The answer, of course, is that you didn't -- you met Smiths all the
time without even realizing it. The tatoos merely increased the
likelihood that you would be aware of a Zednick that you happened to
encounter. The wearing of identifying badges dramatically increases
the chances that an encounter will be recognized. I should think this
would be obvious. Indeed, I would think that this would be part of
the point of wearing the identifying badge in the first place.
--
Pete McCutchen
J. Moreno
> pl...@newsreaders.com (J. Moreno) wrote:
>
> > <pricer...@my-deja.com> wrote:
> >
> > > pl...@newsreaders.com (J. Moreno) wrote:
> > >
> > > > Take for instance the Washington State ferry example above -- the
> > > > two of you could have been the only speakers within a hundred miles,
> > > > you've probably seen a million cars without a sticker. The fact
> > > > that you see one with, indicates they are out there, but doesn't
> > > > really speak to the popularity.
> > >
> > > I'm still not sure I follow you. Let's take a really obvious
> > > "advertisement": my last name. Wouldn't you say that my chances to
> > > having an "encounter" with someone with the same last name as mine are
> > > roughly related to how many of us there are?
> >
> > Sure -- roughly, but it also depends upon what you are doing.
> >
> > For instance "John Smith"; fairly popular names but I don't know if I've
> > run into anybody with the combination. OTOH, if my name was "John
> > Smith" and I went around wearing a T shirt that said "Yes, my name IS
> > John Smith", my chances of bumping into another JS would be better than
> > if I went around with one that said "Yes, my name IS John Doe".
>
> Well, when John Smith walks around the US with a t-shirt advertizing his
> name, he's going to meet many more people with the same name than where I
> going to run around Germany with a t-shirt advertizing my name.
-snip-
> Surely you won't dispute that?
Certainly not, just...
> So, therefore, one _can_ make assumptions about the distribution based on
> such encounters.
...that when trying to figure out the distribution, you do need to take
into account whether or not there is advertising involved (which I know
I didn't do a good job of explaining above)
--
John Moreno
Don HARLOW
<p.mcc...@worldnet.att.net> skribis:
>To use a related example, most Trekkies don't wear Spock-ears around
>on the streets (I said most!). If they did, I suspect you'd be able
>to report thousands of chance encounters with Trekkies. Esperanto may
>well have two million speakers -- or whatever you said the figure was
>-- but I honestly don't think the fact that Esperantists have random
>encounters with one another means all that much when the Esperantists
>are going around with green stars on their lapels.
>
Some do, some don't. Actually, the green star on the lapel seems to be
a dying emblem, at least outside of Esperanto conferences, where
they're hardly needed in any case (I never wear mine in public --
probably because my dress code these days doesn't often seem to
involve lapels...).
Pete McCutchen
wrote:
>>-- but I honestly don't think the fact that Esperantists have random
>>encounters with one another means all that much when the Esperantists
>>are going around with green stars on their lapels.
>>
>Some do, some don't. Actually, the green star on the lapel seems to be
>a dying emblem, at least outside of Esperanto conferences, where
>they're hardly needed in any case (I never wear mine in public --
>probably because my dress code these days doesn't often seem to
>involve lapels...).
Perhaps not, but by your own account, you have an Esperanto bumper
sticker on your car, and you read Esperanto publications in public.
--
Pete McCutchen
Don HARLOW
<p.mcc...@worldnet.att.net> skribis:
>On Wed, 29 Dec 1999 19:46:11 GMT, d...@donh.vip.best.com (Don HARLOW)
Yep, but I don't wear the car on my lapel when I'm walking among
people, and the Esperanto publications usually don't have the word
"Esperanto" on them (any more than "Time" has the word "English" in
big letters on the cover. As to how much attention the latter draw,
see my other posting about the Esperanto-speaking German kids sitting
on the same bench with me who apparently didn't even notice what I was
reading...
(The car does draw a response from time to time -- like the surfer
dude who yelled "Saluton!" at me as he drove past at sixty mph on a
downtown SF street...)
pricer...@my-deja.com
Pete McCutchen <p.mcc...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> But these "random" encounters don't tell you anything about the
> relative prevalence of Esperanto-speaking versus other
> characteristics, unless the holders of those other characteristics
> also wear identifying badges.
>
> To use a related example, most Trekkies don't wear Spock-ears around
> on the streets (I said most!). If they did, I suspect you'd be able
> to report thousands of chance encounters with Trekkies. Esperanto may
> well have two million speakers -- or whatever you said the figure was
> -- but I honestly don't think the fact that Esperantists have random
> encounters with one another means all that much when the Esperantists
> are going around with green stars on their lapels.
You're making at least one unwarranted assumption: that "Esperantists
are going around with green stars in their lapels". Some are,
sometimes; but I have no reason to thing that they are any more likely
to do that than Klingon enthusiasts are likely to be, say, wearing a
t-shirt with a picture of Worf or an inscription in Klingon on it. In
fact, the Belgian I met in Prague came up and spoke to me specifically
to ask me, in Esperanto, whether I spoke Esperanto, then added
apologetically, "Foje homoj portas vestajxojn kun surskirbajxoj en
lingvoj, kiujn ili ne parolas!" (sometimes people were clothing with
inscriptions in languages they don't speak). He had a point: I happen
to own a tie with a photo of Spock on it, but I'm hardly what most
people would consider a "Trekkie". The t-shirt I was wearing said
nothing about Esperanto, but had the famous photo of Earth from 23,000
miles out, taken on the last Apollo flight, with "C^iuj Unu Popolo" (All
One People) written on it. I don't wear it often. I've certainly met a
few of the stereotypical variety of Esperantist festooned with green
stars, green hat, etc. ... but only at gatherings which are the
equivalent of a WorldCon or a Trekki convention, where I'd _expect_ to
find Trekkies with Vulcan ears and Tricorders, at least on some days!
that's not what I'm talking about. And I'm also not counting the
"identifiable Esperantists" who don't actually speak Esperanto...
I agree that my anecdotes say very little about the relative numbers of
speakers of the languages, but I suspect they say _something_. They
interest me simply because I've encountered in print statements on the
order of "Of course your chances of meeting someone on the street who
speaks Esperanto are zero". Mostly they're just amusing. The really
useful contacts I've had haven't been accidental, anymore than looking
up a AAA-approved auto-repair place in a phonebook would be, or finding
the one person in a village who spoke something in addition to thai
(which I don't speak at all) would be.
Pete McCutchen
wrote:
>>Perhaps not, but by your own account, you have an Esperanto bumper
>>sticker on your car, and you read Esperanto publications in public.
>>
>Yep, but I don't wear the car on my lapel when I'm walking among
>people, and the Esperanto publications usually don't have the word
>"Esperanto" on them (any more than "Time" has the word "English" in
>big letters on the cover. As to how much attention the latter draw,
If you were wandering about in Mongolia, and you saw a fellow reading
Time magazine, would you not say something to him?
>see my other posting about the Esperanto-speaking German kids sitting
>on the same bench with me who apparently didn't even notice what I was
>reading...
Which is why it was good that you had two identifying markers, rather
than just one!
>
>(The car does draw a response from time to time -- like the surfer
>dude who yelled "Saluton!" at me as he drove past at sixty mph on a
>downtown SF street...)
What does "Saluton!" mean, anyway? It strikes me as a rather
Nazi-esque form of greeting. No offense.
--
Pete McCutchen
pricer...@my-deja.com
Pete McCutchen <p.mcc...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> OK, I'm a bit out of my depth here, having a background in
> linguistics basically limited to reading a few popular books such as
> _The Language Instinct_, but . . . if true, does that mean that a
> child could not learn Klingon grammar "naturally," by osmosis, as
> young children learn fluent English, French, Russian, and Chinese all
> the time?
From what little I know of D'Armand Speers's attempt to raise his son
bilingual in English and Klingon, the answer is No. What caused them to
drop it was not any inherent "unnaturalness" in the grammar, but simply
the lack of already existing terminology for everyday things (and
possibly other factors, such as not enough contact with other
Klingon-speakers). But I need to stress that I know very little. A
mutual acquaintance offered to put me in contact with Speers, but I
decided they're entitled to their privacy.
Don HARLOW
<p.mcc...@worldnet.att.net> skribis:
>On Wed, 29 Dec 1999 20:57:45 GMT, d...@donh.vip.best.com (Don HARLOW)
>wrote:
>
>>>Perhaps not, but by your own account, you have an Esperanto bumper
>>>sticker on your car, and you read Esperanto publications in public.
>>>
>>Yep, but I don't wear the car on my lapel when I'm walking among
>>people, and the Esperanto publications usually don't have the word
>>"Esperanto" on them (any more than "Time" has the word "English" in
>>big letters on the cover. As to how much attention the latter draw,
>
>If you were wandering about in Mongolia, and you saw a fellow reading
>Time magazine, would you not say something to him?
>
Why should I? I wouldn't go to Mongolia to talk to people who read
"Time" magazine; I can do that in California.
>>(The car does draw a response from time to time -- like the surfer
>>dude who yelled "Saluton!" at me as he drove past at sixty mph on a
>>downtown SF street...)
>
>What does "Saluton!" mean, anyway? It strikes me as a rather
>Nazi-esque form of greeting. No offense.
>
Etymologically, it means "health!" In practice, it means "Hi!". It
never had anything to do with Nazis (who, I suspect, used some
non-Latin-based greeting among themselves).
Does this mean that this thread is now at an end?
pricer...@my-deja.com
Pete McCutchen <p.mcc...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> If everybody whose last name was "Zednik" went about with a "Z"
> tattooed on his or her forehead, would you conclude that "Zednick" was
> a more common name than Smith because you encountered more Zednicks
> than Smiths while traveling?
>
> The answer, of course, is that you didn't -- you met Smiths all the
> time without even realizing it. The tatoos merely increased the
> likelihood that you would be aware of a Zednick that you happened to
> encounter. The wearing of identifying badges dramatically increases
> the chances that an encounter will be recognized. I should think this
> would be obvious. Indeed, I would think that this would be part of
> the point of wearing the identifying badge in the first place.
I still don't get it. I _don't_ have my name tatooed on my head,
anymore than I have the word "Esperanto" tatooed on my head. I _do_
have my name on luggage tags, on my passport, etc, and I am required to
give my name in various circumstances, such as checking into hotels. So
do people named Smith. Thus the chance that someone will happen to find
out my name is more or less the same, _whatever_ his or her name may
happen to be. You appear to be _assuming_ that speaking Esperanto is
somehow more like having one's name "tatooed on the forehead" than like
having one's name on an airplane ticket.
J. Moreno
No, he's pointing out that some people walk around with little buttons
that proclaim "I speak Esperanto" and put stickers on their car that do
the same thing.
Let me give an example straight out of this thread -- its been suggested
that more people speak Esperanto than speak Navajo, but regardless of
whether that is true or not, you are more likely to RECOGNIZE that
someone speaks Esperanto than that you speak Navajo; people that speak
Navajo don't walk around with badges saying that speak it.
And he's right -- the point of the badges/stickers is to let other
speakers of the language know that /you/ speak it.
--
John Moreno
pricer...@my-deja.com
dilly...@aol.com (DillyTaunt) wrote:
> What would you all think of trying to
> teach Esperanto to a four year old who enjoys "Pig Latin" and like
> speech games?
>
> I think that it would be a good introduction to the structure of
> languages without the irregularities
> of -- say-- actual Latin. While it
> would provide some of the same
> vocabulary benefits of teaching
> a child Latin. OTOH... maybe it
> would be better to teach Spanish...
Depends very much on the situation... and do you really mean "teaching",
or do you mean "put in a situation where he/she can acquire"? Do you
have a family friend fluent in either language? Do you know either one
yourself? The "word-building" features of Esperanto probably _would be_
fun for kids... but it would be nice to avoid saddling him/her with
something like my early experience of my parents teaching me to read
Quebec roadsigns out loud, when neither one spoke any
French (my mother's first language was [a kind of] German)! GAmes and
songs and such are the ticket... wiht someone who can pronounce things
properply, and knows how to have fun with a kid.
Personally I think I might pick Mandarin if I could start over again.
George (at the "4 grandkids and counting" stage)
DillyTaunt
Pete McCutchen
>> To use a related example, most Trekkies don't wear Spock-ears around
>> on the streets (I said most!). If they did, I suspect you'd be able
>> to report thousands of chance encounters with Trekkies. Esperanto may
>> well have two million speakers -- or whatever you said the figure was
>> -- but I honestly don't think the fact that Esperantists have random
>> encounters with one another means all that much when the Esperantists
>> are going around with green stars on their lapels.
>
>You're making at least one unwarranted assumption: that "Esperantists
>are going around with green stars in their lapels". Some are,
>sometimes; but I have no reason to thing that they are any more likely
Hey, I didn't even know about the green stars before yesterday. You
were the one who mentioned them.
>to do that than Klingon enthusiasts are likely to be, say, wearing a
>t-shirt with a picture of Worf or an inscription in Klingon on it. In
Oh, I agree. Klingon speakers may well be likely to wear identifying
badges -- if they're not attired in full regalia, brow ridges and all,
that is.
>fact, the Belgian I met in Prague came up and spoke to me specifically
>to ask me, in Esperanto, whether I spoke Esperanto, then added
>apologetically, "Foje homoj portas vestajxojn kun surskirbajxoj en
>lingvoj, kiujn ili ne parolas!" (sometimes people were clothing with
>inscriptions in languages they don't speak). He had a point: I happen
>to own a tie with a photo of Spock on it, but I'm hardly what most
>people would consider a "Trekkie". The t-shirt I was wearing said
Are you sure? "Most people" consider _me_ a Trekkie because I've 1)
seen every episode of TOS and TNG; 2) own more than one episode on
videotape; and 3) own at least some Trek memorabilia. But as Star
Trek aficionados go, I'm a dilettante. I can't even say "Success!" in
Klingon.
>nothing about Esperanto, but had the famous photo of Earth from 23,000
>miles out, taken on the last Apollo flight, with "C^iuj Unu Popolo" (All
>One People) written on it. I don't wear it often. I've certainly met a
>few of the stereotypical variety of Esperantist festooned with green
>stars, green hat, etc. ... but only at gatherings which are the
>equivalent of a WorldCon or a Trekki convention, where I'd _expect_ to
>find Trekkies with Vulcan ears and Tricorders, at least on some days!
Was it you or Don who mentioned wearing your green star on an
airplane?
>that's not what I'm talking about. And I'm also not counting the
>"identifiable Esperantists" who don't actually speak Esperanto...
>
>
>I agree that my anecdotes say very little about the relative numbers of
>speakers of the languages, but I suspect they say _something_. They
Then I suspect we agree.
My point was simply one about the purity of the sample; I certainly
don't mean to make it seem bigger than it is.
>interest me simply because I've encountered in print statements on the
>order of "Of course your chances of meeting someone on the street who
>speaks Esperanto are zero". Mostly they're just amusing. The really
Of course that's wrong.
--
Pete McCutchen
Pete McCutchen
>I still don't get it. I _don't_ have my name tatooed on my head,
>anymore than I have the word "Esperanto" tatooed on my head. I _do_
>have my name on luggage tags, on my passport, etc, and I am required to
>give my name in various circumstances, such as checking into hotels. So
>do people named Smith. Thus the chance that someone will happen to find
>out my name is more or less the same, _whatever_ his or her name may
>happen to be. You appear to be _assuming_ that speaking Esperanto is
>somehow more like having one's name "tatooed on the forehead" than like
>having one's name on an airplane ticket.
Hey, you were the one who told me about the green stars.
--
Pete McCutchen
th...@my-deja.com
Pete McCutchen <p.mcc...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> Was it you or Don who mentioned wearing your green star on an
> airplane?
Neither. It was I. I've got it on now. I'd say I wear it about 90% of
the time in public.
> My point was simply one about the purity of the sample; I certainly
> don't mean to make it seem bigger than it is.
And you made that point about 6 times yesterday. Rather than replying
to all six notes, I'll just reply once. :-)
I think you misunderstand the reason these examples were brought up.
IIRC (I'm not going to read through the thread again) - it was George
who brought up the matter - as a way of saying that the "UL" about the
Klingon speaker in Japan is somewhat plausable.
I also agree with George - that if we take your use of the word, then
*no* meetings are ever by chance. Of course, you're more likely to meet
an american (or any traveling foreigner) at the Brussels train station
than at a cafe in a belgian small town accessable only by car or bus,
but the fact that you do see some there - reading the timetable and
stepping on your toes saying "excuse me" in English - does show that
travelling americans exist in some kind of significant numbers.
BTW, I don't think it was you, but someone commenting in this thread
seems to think that someone claims that the fact that George, Don, and I
have had chance or pseudo-chance encounters with Esperantists is
supposed to mean that more people speak Esperanto than some other
language. If I'm not mistaken, neither George, Don, nor myself have
said any such thing.
Thomas L. Rochestro
th...@my-deja.com
pl...@newsreaders.com (J. Moreno) wrote:
> Let me give an example straight out of this thread -- its been
> suggested that more people speak Esperanto than speak Navajo,
Actually, the suggestion (which I don't accept) was that more people
speak KLINGON than Navajo. (Or was there a note I missed?)
th...@my-deja.com
Pete McCutchen <p.mcc...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> If everybody whose last name was "Zednik" went about with a "Z"
> tattooed on his or her forehead, would you conclude that "Zednick" was
> a more common name than Smith because you encountered more Zednicks
> than Smiths while traveling?
Oh, it *was* you. (See my other note.) :-)
I don't think anybody suggested that Esperanto was more common than
anything simply based on these encounters. I think we all basically
agree on the logic of what you're saying, but you have apparently
misunderstood the claims being made by George, Don, myself, and/or
others.
Michael Urban
>In article <5olk6s0b624k1hded...@4ax.com>,
>
>You're making at least one unwarranted assumption: that "Esperantists
>are going around with green stars in their lapels". Some are,
>sometimes; but I have no reason to thing that they are any more likely
>t-shirt with a picture of Worf or an inscription in Klingon on it.
As a matter of fact, I routinely wear a "Gold's Gym" T-shirt with
a picture of a Klingon bodybuilder and all the lettering in Klingon
when I'm at the local (Gold's) gym. It is quite a conversation piece, but
in three years or so, I have had exactly _one_ person who identified
the joke without my having to give big hints; others guess that the
mysterious language is Hebrew (for whatever that might imply) and
never notice the headbumps on the guy in the picture holding the
barbell.
At science fiction conventions, I can wear the shirt and everyone knows
it's Klingon, but they often don't know what it says.
It would be an interesting experiment to have a green-and-white
"Gold's Gym" shirt made up in Esperanto, perhaps with a green star,
and see how many people at the gym identify it (let alone speak Esperanto).
All this tells me more about gym members as a group than it tells me
about Klingon speakers or Esperanto or T-shirt readers.
Don HARLOW
>In article <u5rl6s08607opvrfe...@4ax.com>,
> Pete McCutchen <p.mcc...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>
>> My point was simply one about the purity of the sample; I certainly
>> don't mean to make it seem bigger than it is.
>
>I also agree with George - that if we take your use of the word, then
>*no* meetings are ever by chance.
Of course, if you're a Jungian, this is true pretty much by
definition...
>BTW, I don't think it was you, but someone commenting in this thread
>seems to think that someone claims that the fact that George, Don, and I
>have had chance or pseudo-chance encounters with Esperantists is
>supposed to mean that more people speak Esperanto than some other
>language. If I'm not mistaken, neither George, Don, nor myself have
>said any such thing.
>
I think that my own argument was that my own experiences in
encountering other Esperanto speakers would *roughly* support a
certain published figure for the number of such speakers. (I've
created models using other types of data as well, and come up with
figures ranging from a quarter million to forty million speakers; the
published figure falls fairly near, perhaps a bit below, the
geometrical mean of this range...)
Kai Henningsen
> ...that when trying to figure out the distribution, you do need to take
> into account whether or not there is advertising involved (which I know
> I didn't do a good job of explaining above)
With or without advertizing, it should give a lower bound. How low that
bound is, OTOH, depends on the advertizing factor.
Kai
--
http://www.westfalen.de/private/khms/
"... by God I *KNOW* what this network is for, and you can't have it."
- Russ Allbery (r...@stanford.edu)
pricer...@my-deja.com
> No, he's pointing out that some people walk around with little buttons
> that proclaim "I speak Esperanto" and put stickers on their car that
do
> the same thing.
He doesn't have to point that out; I was the one which brought up 3
examples which show this (well, actually, someone else, perhaps Don,
mentioned that I had mentioned these encounters before, so I chimed in
to provide the details).
>
> Let me give an example straight out of this thread -- its been
suggested
> that more people speak Esperanto than speak Navajo, but regardless of
> whether that is true or not, you are more likely to RECOGNIZE that
> someone speaks Esperanto than that you speak Navajo; people that speak
> Navajo don't walk around with badges saying that speak it.
No. Please go back and read the first post in the thread, from Martha.
The question was whether there were more speakers of _Klingon_ than
speakers of _Esperanto_. I think you're right about Navajo (although the
majority of people who speak Navajo are Dine, who _look_ Navajo, at
least to someone who can tell the difference between them and a Hopi or
a Zuni or a Chicano 'mano from Santa Fe, and I wouldn't be surprised if
a comparable % of the anglos who speak some of the language wear
something identifiably Navajo as the % of Esperanto-speakers who wear a
green star or whatever... although as I recall, the first one who leaps
into my mind, Barre Tolken, doesn't!), but ISTM that Klingon-speakers
are as likely to wear something that identifies them as such (or, anyway
_suggests some connection_, which is all you can infer from the
Esperanto-regalia mentioned in my examples), as are Esperantists. Maybe
more so; my instinct is that Klingonists tend more toward the
trekkie-in-full-uniform types than toward the Ralph Harrys or Ivo
Lapennas or Humphrey Tonkin types. But this is all pretty speculative.
Other than Mark Mandel (whom I've known since our college days at St.
John's in the 60s), I don't know any Klingonist very well, and get my
info from the mass media; knowing what they usually do to even the
simplest facts about esperanto, I don't have a lot of confidence in my
impressions. The other Klingonists, whom I know from e-mail, are
professional linguists like Mark (who has a PhD from UCB... just like
Marc Okrand!). That's not true of most of the Esperantists I know (yes,
I know Mark falls in _both_ categories!).
An interesting question, though: do Lojban-enthusiasts fit this pattern,
too? Lojbob, are you out there?
> And he's right -- the point of the badges/stickers is to let other
> speakers of the language know that /you/ speak it.
No, actually that's only sometimes the point. Mostly, when I wear them,
it's so someone who _doesn't_ speak the language will ask "What's
that?". Or because I like what the t-shirt says or looks like (in that
case, I had just come from a weeklong Esperanto-speaking gathering in
Vienna, where it was as natural to be wearing a t-shirt with an
inscription in Esperanto as it would be natural to wear one with an
inscription in French in Trois Riveres... if you were a Montrealer
trying to get across a slogan to other Quebecoix). I suspect that's true
for a lot of other people, too. It's in our interest that more people
learn it... since this will increase its usefulness to us (eventually),
if only by increasing the market for books and music so that more stuff
will get published (forget "one language for the world"; that's
unlikely to happen in my lifetime, or even in my grandchildren's
lifetimes, if ever!); those people who might decide to learn it are not
likely to, if they never hear that it exists, or if what they _do_ hear
about it is just UL's, whether of the the "8 million people speak it!
Anyone can learn it in half an hour!" variety or the "No one speaks
Esperanto any more/Only commie peaceniks speak Esperanto" variety.
_That's_ the point of the advertising. If I want to find Esperantists,
I'll ask, or contact an UEA-delegito, or thumb through my copy of the
Pasporta Servo Membrolisto (see
<http://home.wxs.nl/~lide/paspserv.htm>), or something like that.
How true this is for (1) Other North American Esperantists (2)
Esperantists in general, the great majority of whom don't live in North
America, I'm not at all sure. Perhaps Don or Thomas or Mark can
comment. At any rate, I don't think it's at all obvious that either you
or Pete should be quite as convinced that you can immediately understand
what the point of Esperanto-speakers doing something is, as you appear
to be (Ack, what a convoluted sentence!).
What I _do_ think is clear, is that the idea of "random encounter" or
"chance meeting" is not nearly as clear as I was implying it was. Never
have really felt comfotable with the idea of chance (I remember getting
a note on my final in the Finite Math class I took from Wm. Sleznick at
Dartmouth Summer School, relating to the only bits I got wrong on the
exam, dropping me from an A to anA-: "Stay away from crap games,
Partlow!"... the Kemeny textbook had used a lot of examples from
shooting craps in its Probability section, and some fo them were on the
final). If human beings have the power of choice , can anything that
happens to them be entirely random?
George
Mark A Mandel
: As a matter of fact, I routinely wear a "Gold's Gym" T-shirt with
: a picture of a Klingon bodybuilder and all the lettering in Klingon
: when I'm at the local (Gold's) gym. It is quite a conversation piece, but
: in three years or so, I have had exactly _one_ person who identified
: the joke without my having to give big hints; others guess that the
: mysterious language is Hebrew (for whatever that might imply)
Probably a perceived similarity between pIqaD (Klingon lettering) and
standard square Hebrew print characters, maybe in that both have lots of
strokes that are much thicker than Roman letter strokes typically are.
-- Mark A. Mandel
--
If you're reading this in a newsgroup: to reply by mail,
remove the obvious spam-blocker from my edress.
Katie Schwarz
>In article <1e3l9zm.1rgq7ojgcnbl7N%pl...@newsreaders.com>,
> pl...@newsreaders.com (J. Moreno) wrote:
>
>> Let me give an example straight out of this thread -- its been
>> suggested that more people speak Esperanto than speak Navajo,
That's probably true: as discussed earlier in the thread, Esperanto
has at least one or two million competent speakers, while Navajo is
around 150,000.
>Actually, the suggestion (which I don't accept) was that more people
>speak KLINGON than Navajo. (Or was there a note I missed?)
The original suggestion was the one in the subject line. :-)
"More people speak Klingon than Navajo" was a story in The Onion a
while ago, and is of course false.
--
Katie Schwarz
"There's no need to look for a Chimera, or a cat with three legs."
-- Jorge Luis Borges, "Death and the Compass"
th...@my-deja.com
k...@socrates.berkeley.edu (Katie Schwarz) wrote:
> >Actually, the suggestion (which I don't accept) was that more people
> >speak KLINGON than Navajo. (Or was there a note I missed?)
>
> The original suggestion was the one in the subject line. :-)
Yes, of course. We both were talking about a secondary suggestion.
> "More people speak Klingon than Navajo" was a story in The Onion a
> while ago, and is of course false.
Yes, I know. See my notes earlier in this thread.
Thomas L. Rochestro
Anton Sherwood
: (**) George mentions that he himself has had random encounters with
: at least three Esperanto speakers. This may seem like a small number,
: but think about the number of general random encounters you would have
: to have to encounter three Esperanto speakers out of two million in a
: world whose population is _six billion_, and I think you'll find that
: the figures are not out of line. And I can testify that George is not
: unique.
Well, encounters aren't all that random. I've found Esperantists by
chance at The Other Change of Hobbit and at Spectator bookstore --
places where one might, a priori, expect an enhanced probability
of such meetings.
--
Anton Sherwood *\\* +1 415 267 0685 *\\* http://www.jps.net/antons/
If the list of newsgroups is long, I may limit followups to one or
two that I read. If you respond, please add your favorite group.
Don HARLOW
skribis:
>Don HARLOW <d...@donh.vip.best.com> writes
>: (**) George mentions that he himself has had random encounters with
>: at least three Esperanto speakers. This may seem like a small number,
>: but think about the number of general random encounters you would have
>: to have to encounter three Esperanto speakers out of two million in a
>: world whose population is _six billion_, and I think you'll find that
>: the figures are not out of line. And I can testify that George is not
>: unique.
>
>Well, encounters aren't all that random. I've found Esperantists by
>chance at The Other Change of Hobbit and at Spectator bookstore --
>places where one might, a priori, expect an enhanced probability
>of such meetings.
>
Oh, you always have to take the venue into account -- probably more
important than those little green stars. I'm surprised at the number
of names of people I know to be Esperanto speakers posting on
rec.arts.sf.written -- certainly significantly higher than the 1/3000
that Culbert's two-million figure would suggest. (I would guess, from
having passed through The Other Change of Hobbit a few times, that
your experience there is considerably better than 1/3000, as well.)
Keith Ray
>http://www.webcom.com/~donh/don/don.html
I'm trying to read your webpage, but the modified "Times E" font (which I
found following a link from your page) doesn't seem to be displaying it
with entirely correct characters... For example, a headline near the top
says "Verkita1Ž4oj de Don Harlow. Øuu" -- those last three letters in the
quote are showing as an 'O with a slash through it' and two lower-case
'u's. Are you using a non-latin1 encoding or some other modified font?
Also... I would have a hard time reading a piece of paper that had been
wadded up and poorly-smoothed out, so your web page background, which
duplicates that appearance, is also making it hard for me to read the
text.
Not exactly on-topic, but....
I was interested in Esperanto a long time ago, and modified a copy of Mac
System/Finder/MacWrite/Fonts to include the proper accents and translated
as best I could all of the human interface text. This was in the days that
Mac System/Finder/MacWrite and MacPaint would fit on one 400 K floppy
disk, so there wasn't a huge amount of text to translate. Today it took me
a minute to understand "Legu Min".
C. Keith Ray
--
C. Keith Ray
<http://pw2.netcom.com/~kjray/>
pricer...@my-deja.com
das...@netcom.com (Anton Sherwood) wrote:
> Don HARLOW <d...@donh.vip.best.com> writes
> : (**) George mentions that he himself has had random encounters with
> : at least three Esperanto speakers. This may seem like a small number,
> : but think about the number of general random encounters you would have
> : to have to encounter three Esperanto speakers out of two million in a
> : world whose population is _six billion_, and I think you'll find that
> : the figures are not out of line. And I can testify that George is not
> : unique.
>
> Well, encounters aren't all that random. I've found Esperantists by
> chance at The Other Change of Hobbit and at Spectator bookstore --
> places where one might, a priori, expect an enhanced probability
> of such meetings.
Well, as you will see from the post in this thread where I give some
details on the 3 encounters he's referring to, I was trying to pick just
those meetings which were "random". I don't count, for exzmple, running
into people in the streets of a city where a UK or IJK is going on, for
example, or an MLA meeting or an SFCON. I also don't count, say, the
time a Dominican Esperantist came into my office at the Alaska State
Library because he'd seen a notice about Esperanto lessons on a bulletin
board in the lobby of teh State Library, with my name on it. But a kayak
in the middle of Icy Strait doesn't seem to me to be an "obvious place to
look for Esperantists". Of course if one knows all the circumstacnes of
_any_ encounter, it begins to look less "random". If I'd known that the
Esperantist I met on the Washington State Ferry lived in Eastsound WA on
Orcas Island, then it wouldn't have seemed quite as "unusual" to run into
him on the ferry; but I didn't.
George
Don HARLOW
Ray) skribis:
>>Don HARLOW
>>http://www.webcom.com/~donh/don/don.html
>
>I'm trying to read your webpage, but the modified "Times E" font (which I
>found following a link from your page) doesn't seem to be displaying it
>with entirely correct characters... For example, a headline near the top
>says "Verkita1Ž4oj de Don Harlow. Řuu" -- those last three letters in the
>quote are showing as an 'O with a slash through it' and two lower-case
>'u's. Are you using a non-latin1 encoding or some other modified font?
>
Latin-3. Check out
http://www.esperanto.be/tiparoj.html
Don HARLOW
http://www.webcom.com/~donh/don/don.html
Novaj verkantoj, novaj verkaĽoj:
Anton Sherwood
have I mentioned to you that I speak Esperanto?"
Don HARLOW <d...@donh.vip.best.com> writes
: . . . my wife and I were showing my parents around London
: one Friday afternoon, and in the evening, before we took the train
: home, we stopped in at a watering hole where the local Esperantists
: hung out after their weekly get-together, just to say "saluton",
: and my father, to my surprise, addressed the president of the World
: Esperanto Association, who happened to be there, in Esperanto. Turned
: out he'd learned the language from one of those old radio-experimenter
: magazines back in the late twenties, and had never bothered to mention
: the fact to me...
Anton Sherwood
: >Someone saw my green star and asked me whether I speak Esperanto.
Pete McCutchen <p.mcc...@worldnet.att.net> writes
: Your "green star"? Is this some sort of badge worn by Esperantists?
One of Zamenhof's books, I'm told, had a decorative star on the title
page, which happened to be printed in green ink; thus the green star
became a badge. --I've since heard a somewhat more convincing story,
and forgotten it!
I haven't seen one worn in years, except on the back of an old Valiant.
Anton Sherwood
: >(The car does draw a response from time to time -- like the surfer
: >dude who yelled "Saluton!" at me as he drove past at sixty mph on a
: >downtown SF street...)
Pete McCutchen <p.mcc...@worldnet.att.net> writes
: What does "Saluton!" mean, anyway? It strikes me as a rather
: Nazi-esque form of greeting. No offense.
Probably taken from the French _salut_, an informal greeting;
though French also has the verb _saluer_ `to salute' (in senses
including the military).
Pierre Jelenc
>
> Your "green star"? Is this some sort of badge worn by Esperantists?
It used to be, but it's almost never used anymore. Mine broke about 30
years ago and I never bothered to replace it.
Pierre
--
Pierre Jelenc | Home Office Records http://www.web-ho.com
| www.mp3.com/cucumbers www.mp3.com/pawnshop
The New York City Beer Guide | www.cdbaby.com/buy/rawkinder.htm
http://www.nycbeer.org | www.mp3.com/jeniferjackson
Don HARLOW
skribis:
>I relayed this to my father, who wrote back: "As your father,
>have I mentioned to you that I speak Esperanto?"
>
>Don HARLOW <d...@donh.vip.best.com> writes
>: . . . my wife and I were showing my parents around London
>: one Friday afternoon, and in the evening, before we took the train
>: home, we stopped in at a watering hole where the local Esperantists
>: hung out after their weekly get-together, just to say "saluton",
>: and my father, to my surprise, addressed the president of the World
>: Esperanto Association, who happened to be there, in Esperanto. Turned
>: out he'd learned the language from one of those old radio-experimenter
>: magazines back in the late twenties, and had never bothered to mention
>: the fact to me...
>
Fakte, mi aýdis onidiron, ke li frue menciis tion al vi. Tre, _tre_
frue, ću ne?
Mark A Mandel
: Pete McCutchen <p.mcc...@worldnet.att.net> writes
: : What does "Saluton!" mean, anyway? It strikes me as a rather
: : Nazi-esque form of greeting. No offense.
: Probably taken from the French _salut_, an informal greeting;
: though French also has the verb _saluer_ `to salute' (in senses
: including the military).
Esp. "saluti" = 'to greet' and "saluto" = 'a greeting'. Probably taken by
Zamenhof from the Latin "salus" (root = "salut-", basic meaning
'health'), in its derived meaning 'a wish for one's welfare, a greeting',
and the related Latin "saluto" 'to greet', "salutatio" 'a greeting', with
support of the derived forms in Romance languages.
In Esperanto, the form "saluton!" for 'hi! greetings!' < "saluti" 'to
greet' is exactly parallel to "dankon" 'thank you' < "danki" 'to thank',
and similar to such expressions as "bonan tagon" 'good day'. All of these
are grammatically nouns in the accusative case (direct object), based on
the understood formal structure 'I give/wish you ...'
Just a Wild-Ass Guess (tm) (supported by some dictionary-browsing)
from
-- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and
Philological Busybody
a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel
Anton Sherwood
: >I relayed this to my father, who wrote back: "As your father,
: >have I mentioned to you that I speak Esperanto?"
Don HARLOW <d...@donh.vip.best.com> writes
: Fakte, mi aýdis onidiron, ke li frue menciis tion al vi.
"onidiro", bela vorto!
: Tre, _tre_ frue, ću ne?
Antaw ~34 jaroj almenaw.
Anton Sherwood
me not so much for vocabulary as for an introduction to the notions of
foreign languages (they're not just funny English) and of morphemic
analysis. (Any vocabulary effect is complicated by my study of Latin
a few years later!)
Spanish words may be too much changed from Latin to help significantly
with English vocabulary. (French is more changed, of course,
but English inherited a lot of French forms!)
DillyTaunt <dilly...@aol.com> writes
: What would you all think of trying to teach Esperanto to
: a four year old who enjoys "Pig Latin" and like speech games?
: I think that it would be a good introduction to the structure of
: languages without the irregularities of -- say-- actual Latin.
: While it would provide some of the same vocabulary benefits of
: teaching a child Latin. OTOH... maybe it would be better to
: teach Spanish...
th...@my-deja.com
rc...@panix.com (Pierre Jelenc) wrote:
> > Your "green star"? Is this some sort of badge worn by Esperantists?
>
> It used to be, but it's almost never used anymore. Mine broke about 30
> years ago and I never bothered to replace it.
Used to be? Almost never? One needs only to open an Esperanto catalog,
or visit an Esperanto gathering to dispell this one. I don't know if
it's fair to call it "universal" - but it's used quite a bit more than
"almost never."
Thomas L. Rochestro
Martin Wisse
>: das...@netcom.com (Anton Sherwood) skribis:
>: >I relayed this to my father, who wrote back: "As your father,
>: >have I mentioned to you that I speak Esperanto?"
>
>Don HARLOW <d...@donh.vip.best.com> writes
>: Fakte, mi aýdis onidiron, ke li frue menciis tion al vi.
>
>"onidiro", bela vorto!
>
>: Tre, _tre_ frue, ću ne?
>
>Antaw ~34 jaroj almenaw.
Anybody else tried to ROT-13?
(Maybe I should start learning Esperanto, after I finish learning
French, Real Soon Now.)
Martin Wisse
Pierre Jelenc
>
> Used to be? Almost never? One needs only to open an Esperanto catalog,
> or visit an Esperanto gathering to dispell this one.
At E-o gatherings, yes, but that was not the context. Very few people wear
the green star day in day out among mundanes, far fewer than 40 years ago.
Justin Bacon
A Mandel) writes:
>The number of Esperanto-speakers is estimated from a whole lot of factors,
>including wild-ass guesses but also club memberships, subscriptions, con
>attendance, and petition signatures. The number of Klingon-speakers is
>almost certainly based on the number of copies sold of _The Klingon
>Dictionary_ and nothing else... unless it's been inflated by adding sales
>of other _The Klingon Way_, _Klingon for the Galactic Traveler_, and the
>Klingon language tapes, almost all of which (we may safely assume) are to
>people who already have the Dictionary.
Or you could pull the figures from Klingon Language Camps, or the Klingon
Language Clubs, etc.
(And just to be a semi-troll: I would never waste the time to learn Esperanto.
There are too many languages out there in which great works of art have been
composed which I could subsequently read in the original for me to waste my
time on Esperanto.)
Justin Bacon
tr...@prairie.lake.com
Don HARLOW
>In article <FnB1E...@world.std.com>, mam-DIE-S...@world.std.com (Mark
>A Mandel) writes:
>
>>The number of Esperanto-speakers is estimated from a whole lot of factors,
>>including wild-ass guesses but also club memberships, subscriptions, con
>>attendance, and petition signatures. The number of Klingon-speakers is
>>almost certainly based on the number of copies sold of _The Klingon
>>Dictionary_ and nothing else... unless it's been inflated by adding sales
>>of other _The Klingon Way_, _Klingon for the Galactic Traveler_, and the
>>Klingon language tapes, almost all of which (we may safely assume) are to
>>people who already have the Dictionary.
>
>Or you could pull the figures from Klingon Language Camps, or the Klingon
>Language Clubs, etc.
>
You could, but I think you wouldn't come up with a very large figure.
I was told by the person who put on the Klingon Language Camps (an
Esperantist, by the way) that, at least early on, participants were
outnumbered by media representatives...
>(And just to be a semi-troll: I would never waste the time to learn Esperanto.
>There are too many languages out there in which great works of art have been
>composed which I could subsequently read in the original for me to waste my
>time on Esperanto.)
>
Best of luck. You'll need it. ;<)
Don HARLOW
http://www.webcom.com/~donh/don/don.html
Novaj verkantoj, novaj verkaźoj:
th...@my-deja.com
tria...@aol.com (Justin Bacon) wrote:
> (And just to be a semi-troll: I would never waste the
> time to learn Esperanto. There are too many languages
> out there in which great works of art have been
> composed which I could subsequently read in the
> original for me to waste my time on Esperanto.)
Oh, I never respond to trolls. There are just too many
languages out there (including Esperanto) in which great
works are available for me to waste my time responding
to trolls.
:-)
quorum
people speaking Klingon than Welsh, despite great efforts by the welsh to
preserve their cultural identity. I'm not really surprised though, Star Trek
has certainly had a bigger effect on western culture in the last 30 years
than Wales has, but I would think it would be better to preserve the
languages we already have before English takes over the world.
Quorum
> From: tria...@aol.com (Justin Bacon)
> Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com
> Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
> Date: 03 Jan 2000 23:44:52 GMT
> Subject: Re: Klingon -- more users than Esperanto?
>
> In article <FnB1E...@world.std.com>, mam-DIE-S...@world.std.com (Mark
> A Mandel) writes:
>
>> The number of Esperanto-speakers is estimated from a whole lot of factors,
>> including wild-ass guesses but also club memberships, subscriptions, con
>> attendance, and petition signatures. The number of Klingon-speakers is
>> almost certainly based on the number of copies sold of _The Klingon
>> Dictionary_ and nothing else... unless it's been inflated by adding sales
>> of other _The Klingon Way_, _Klingon for the Galactic Traveler_, and the
>> Klingon language tapes, almost all of which (we may safely assume) are to
>> people who already have the Dictionary.
>
> Or you could pull the figures from Klingon Language Camps, or the Klingon
> Language Clubs, etc.
>
> (And just to be a semi-troll: I would never waste the time to learn Esperanto.
> There are too many languages out there in which great works of art have been
> composed which I could subsequently read in the original for me to waste my
> time on Esperanto.)
>
> Justin Bacon
> tr...@prairie.lake.com
Mark A Mandel
: I'm not sure about Esperanto, but I did here that by 1997, there were more
: people speaking Klingon than Welsh, despite great efforts by the welsh to
: preserve their cultural identity. I'm not really surprised though, Star Trek
: has certainly had a bigger effect on western culture in the last 30 years
: than Wales has, but I would think it would be better to preserve the
: languages we already have before English takes over the world.
To recap a point already made here: While there were surely millions of
purchasers of the Klingon dictionary and related works, VERY FEW of those
actually put in the effort to learn the language to the point of being
able to speak it. And as for fluency...
Anyway, I'd put the number of fluent Klingon speakers in the world at
easily less than 100.
-- Mark A. Mandel, Sr. Linguist, Dragon Systems, Inc.
(speaking for myself)
http://www.naturalspeech.com/
tlhIngan veQbeq marqem la'Hom -- Heghbej ghIHmoHwI'pu'!
Subcommander Marke'm, Klingon Sanitation Corps --
Death to Litterbugs!
http://world.std.com/~mam/
draenog
Mark A Mandel <mam-DIE-S...@world.std.com> wrote:
>quorum (death-...@drg.prestel.co.uk) wrote:
>: I'm not sure about Esperanto, but I did here that by 1997, there were more
>: people speaking Klingon than Welsh, despite great efforts by the welsh to
>: preserve their cultural identity. I'm not really surprised though, Star Trek
Welsh garners quite a few utterly loopy urban legends. I'm not entirely
sure why. Why not Breton, f'rinstance, or Gaelic?
>To recap a point already made here: While there were surely millions of
>purchasers of the Klingon dictionary and related works, VERY FEW of those
>actually put in the effort to learn the language to the point of being
>able to speak it. And as for fluency...
>
>Anyway, I'd put the number of fluent Klingon speakers in the world at
>easily less than 100.
Which Welsh beats *easily*, having roughly 500,000 fluent speakers
*in Wales* [1] at last census, IIRC. And there is reason to believe
that this number will continue to increase too, with the upsurge of
Welsh-medium schools in the southeast (which saw the greatest degree of
language loss during the early part of this century).
Are there Klingon-language radio stations, pop songs, novels, newspapers,
and magazines?
draenog
[1] The U.K. census didn't ask people living in the rest of the U.K.
whether they spoke Welsh, amongst other problems. I'm not sure how many
of those have been corrected in the latest version of the census.
--
to reply by mail, replace nospam with yon dash net
pricer...@my-deja.com
mwi...@ad-astra.demon.nl (Martin Wisse) wrote:
> (Maybe I should start learning Esperanto, after I finish learning
> French, Real Soon Now.)
Hey, why not? Try looking at
<http://www.esperanto.net/info/index_nl.html> (or maybe that should be
<http://www.esperanto.net/info/index_de.html>, if I'm being misled by
your ISP's address).
BTW, how do you "finish" learning a language? Just curious. _I_
certainly haven't finished learning English, my L1, let alone French or
Esperanto or any other language I have any knowledge of. (Actually this
takes us back to the beginning of the thread, in a way, since the key to
such questions is always a prior question: What do you mean by
"speakers" or "users"?)
George
pricer...@my-deja.com
quorum <death-...@drg.prestel.co.uk> wrote:
> I'm not sure about Esperanto, but I did here that by 1997, there were
more
> people speaking Klingon than Welsh, despite great efforts by the welsh
to
> preserve their cultural identity.
Where did you hear _that_ factoid? Since the number of fluent Klingon
speakers is probably numbered in the dozens, the guesses you will find
at <http://users.comlab.ox.ac.uk/geraint.jones/about.welsh/#numbers>
would have to be off by a least two and maybe three orders of magnitude
for that to be true. Neither Welsh nor Irish are in quite _that_ bad
shape. Come to Alaska for a visit and I'll show you some really
endangered languages...
Martin Wisse
>In article <38839c08...@news.demon.nl>,
> mwi...@ad-astra.demon.nl (Martin Wisse) wrote:
>
>> (Maybe I should start learning Esperanto, after I finish learning
>> French, Real Soon Now.)
>
>Hey, why not? Try looking at
><http://www.esperanto.net/info/index_nl.html> (or maybe that should be
><http://www.esperanto.net/info/index_de.html>, if I'm being misled by
>your ISP's address).
The first one is fine, I'm indeed Dutch. Thanks for the link.
>BTW, how do you "finish" learning a language? Just curious. _I_
>certainly haven't finished learning English, my L1, let alone French or
>Esperanto or any other language I have any knowledge of. (Actually this
>takes us back to the beginning of the thread, in a way, since the key to
>such questions is always a prior question: What do you mean by
>"speakers" or "users"?)
Well, in this case it means being able to read French language comics or
novels without having to refer to the dictionairy every second sentence
and being able to both write and talk in French reasonable good.
Martin Wisse
--
Sodom today -- Gomorrah the world
Ken Macleod _The Star Fraction_
Crusty McLardly
>> I'm not sure about Esperanto, but I did here that by 1997, there were
>more
>> people speaking Klingon than Welsh, despite great efforts by the welsh
>to
>> preserve their cultural identity.
>
>Where did you hear _that_ factoid? Since the number of fluent Klingon
>speakers is probably numbered in the dozens, the guesses you will find
>at <http://users.comlab.ox.ac.uk/geraint.jones/about.welsh/#numbers>
>would have to be off by a least two and maybe three orders of magnitude
>for that to be true. Neither Welsh nor Irish are in quite _that_ bad
>shape. Come to Alaska for a visit and I'll show you some really
>endangered languages...
Or, indeed, Cornwall.
MIKE (a.k.a. "Progbear")
make GEORYN disappear to reply
"Parece cosa de maligno. Los pianos no estallan por casualidad." --Gabriel
Garcia Marquez
N.P.:"Ifrån klarhet till klarhet"- Ä n g l a g å r d / H y b r i s
Anton Sherwood
: >: Tre, _tre_ frue, ću ne?
: das...@netcom.com (Anton Sherwood) wrote:
: >Antaw ~34 jaroj almenaw.
Martin Wisse <mwi...@ad-astra.demon.nl> writes
: Anybody else tried to ROT-13?
Hm --
: >: Ger, _ger_ sehr, sh ar?
Yes, much better.
Anton Sherwood
: (And just to be a semi-troll: I would never waste the time to learn
: Esperanto. There are too many languages out there in which great works
: of art have been composed which I could subsequently read in the original
: for me to waste my time on Esperanto.)
Er, come again? Esperanto is a waste of time because you
could, in principle, learn to read the Kalevala or Genji?
Don HARLOW
skribis:
>Justin Bacon <tria...@aol.com> writes
>: (And just to be a semi-troll: I would never waste the time to learn
>: Esperanto. There are too many languages out there in which great works
>: of art have been composed which I could subsequently read in the original
>: for me to waste my time on Esperanto.)
>
>Er, come again? Esperanto is a waste of time because you
>could, in principle, learn to read the Kalevala or Genji?
>
No, no! Because you could, in principle learn to read the Kalevala AND
Genji -- in the original!
Myself, I always preferred Lagerlof's "Gosta Berling" and Vazov's
"Under the Yoke" (with apologies to S.M. Stirling -- but Vazov was
there first, by about a hundred years). But I only got to read them in
translation. (*)
---
(*) Not English translation, however. Though for an English
translation of one chapter of the former -- a chapter that, I believe,
is quite appropriate for this newsgroup -- check out
http://www.webcom.com/~donh/don/stories/Kevenhuller.html. I apologize
in advance for the fact that the rather amateurish translation is not
directly from Swedish, which I don't speak, but from some intermediary
language or other...
-- Don HARLOW
http://www.webcom.com/~donh/don/don.html
Baldaý venos la Printempa Festo! Prepare por ři:
Bovisto kaj teksistino, malnova fabelo pri la kreo de la Arřenta Rivero (Lakta Vojo): http://www.webcom.com/~donh/don/esplit/bovisto.html
Kanto de maljunulo, eble la plej antikva poemo en la mondo: http://www.webcom.com/~donh/don/esplit/maljuna.html
Armand SU poezie rerakontas la fabelon Liang Ţanbo kaj Řu Intaj, kiu inspiris la famekonatan violonkonćerton La Papiliaj Geamantoj: http://www.best.com/~donh/Esperanto/Literaturo/Revuoj/MondaKulturo/Printempo65/butterflies.html
Kaj ne maltrafu la jam 1500-jare malnovan kanton Mulan: http://www.best.com/~donh/Esperanto/Literaturo/Poezio/mulan.html
Joe Slater
>: (And just to be a semi-troll: I would never waste the time to learn
>: Esperanto. There are too many languages out there in which great works
>: of art have been composed which I could subsequently read in the original
>: for me to waste my time on Esperanto.)
das...@netcom.com (Anton Sherwood) wrote:
>Er, come again? Esperanto is a waste of time because you
>could, in principle, learn to read the Kalevala or Genji?
Or the Greek and Latin classics, or _The Romance of the Rose_ or _Don
Quixote_ or Dante.
If you want to read something in translation, surely it's better to
read it in English where you have a choice of translations drawn from
the world's best translators. Translations into Esperanto draw upon a
more restricted pool. As for works *written* in Esperanto, I have
never heard of a chick being impressed by someone quoting _The
Proceedings of the Third Etymological Congress_
jds
Don HARLOW
<joeDEL...@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au> skribis:
>>Justin Bacon <tria...@aol.com> writes
>>: (And just to be a semi-troll: I would never waste the time to learn
>>: Esperanto. There are too many languages out there in which great works
>>: of art have been composed which I could subsequently read in the original
>>: for me to waste my time on Esperanto.)
>
>das...@netcom.com (Anton Sherwood) wrote:
>>Er, come again? Esperanto is a waste of time because you
>>could, in principle, learn to read the Kalevala or Genji?
>
>Or the Greek and Latin classics, or _The Romance of the Rose_ or _Don
>Quixote_ or Dante.
>
>If you want to read something in translation, surely it's better to
>read it in English where you have a choice of translations drawn from
>the world's best translators. Translations into Esperanto draw upon a
>more restricted pool.
Actually not; and qualitatively, it doesn't quite work that way.
(1) With relatively few exceptions, the works you read in translation
into English are translated by native English speakers who don't
always have a good command of the source language; with works
translated into Esperanto, the translator is almost always a native
speaker of the source language, but with a good command of Esperanto.
So you generally get a more faithful translation.
(2) This also means that works selected for translation will be based
upon the translator's knowledge of his own literature; works
translated into English are often the result of criteria selected from
the _target_ culture.
(3) Finally, lots of so-called small cultures either do not have their
works translated into English, or have relatively low distribution of
such works; whereas the equivalent Esperanto translations get
relatively widespread distribution in the Esperanto-reading community.
Frankly, I've gotten a _much_ broader (though certainly not deeper)
exposure to world literature through Esperanto than through English.
(Actually, I got interested in English literature through Esperanto
again, after high school had pretty much driven such interest out of
me...)
>As for works *written* in Esperanto, I have
>never heard of a chick being impressed by someone quoting _The
>Proceedings of the Third Etymological Congress_
>
Well, then, you ought to try some of the sonnets from "La sekretaj
sonetoj" by "Peter Peneter". I often wish I'd had access to that book
when I was in high school. Since it was in an unrecognizable foreign
language, I doubt whether any of my teachers would have known enough
to confiscate it...
What, by the way, is "the Third Etymological Congress"?
Joe Slater
>>As for works *written* in Esperanto, I have
>>never heard of a chick being impressed by someone quoting _The
>>Proceedings of the Third Etymological Congress_
d...@donh.vip.best.com (Don HARLOW) wrote:
>What, by the way, is "the Third Etymological Congress"?
It is something very long and dreary which typifies the sort of matter
that fascinates Esperantists, just as _Notes from the Twenty-Third
Industrialisation Symposium_ is the sort of thing quoted at length by
Marxists.
jds
kl...@infotrans.or.jp
Joe Slater <joeDEL...@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au> wrote:
> Translations into Esperanto draw upon a
> more restricted pool. As for works *written* in Esperanto, I have
> never heard of a chick being impressed by someone quoting _The
> Proceedings of the Third Etymological Congress_
I've never heard of anyone fool enough to try to impress a "chick"
with congress proceedings. Anyway, there's a huge variety of
orginal Esperanto literature.
And if you're interested in impressing the "chick" next door,
then you probably don't need Esperanto. But for those with more
exotic tastes, Esperanto is extremely useful.
> jds
Klivo