Thursday, December 3, 2009

Busy Time

With the Christmas season here, with me working overtime after I got my job back, and also me wanting to take on other projects like learning an international language invented by a man named Zamenhoff, I fail to write as often as I should, and when I don't, this blog is already controversial enough as it is. It is the kind that makes all the tea-baggers mad, including conservative listeners who listen to the Alan Colmes Show. I am finding out that I am just as fluent in Spanish as I am in English. I write to a Esperanto Yahoo! group in that uncommon language about where I can find an Esperanto-Spanish dictionary. Octavio Paz was a Mexican writer who has passed on. He wrote lots of poetry and wrote short stories in poetry. It would sound better to me if a poem of his was translated into Esperanto directly from Spanish, not English. In Spanish, his poems have rhythm and rhyme. When it is translated into English, the stuff don't rhyme and like Al Gore, it has no rhythm. Fellow bloggers from Babel and Yahoo! can see that when I send them a sample. My Esperanto is at a beginning stage, so if I think of something to put in Esperanto, unless I introduce myself in Esperanto, I draw a blank. This must be how it feels to be a non-English speaking student attending school for the first time in these United States. There's isolation, can read the language but can't understand it and to translate into his native tongue, he draws a blank, then the kids make fun of him and give the tea-bagger style of ridicule he doesn't deserve. Now, Esperanto was inverted to attempt to bridge the gap between different races, nationalities, and language groups. Each group speaks a different language, but do not understand each other and as a result of incomprehension, conflict arises. Esperanto was suppose to be this language all individuals learn that would slowly bridge the gap between these different peoples. This never took on very well and only 2 million people in the whole world speak Esperanto, but it does have a strong presence in the internet and there are Esperanto language web sites and publications.
It was to never, ever replace the native language of any country, but to bring some understanding between different peoples who don't speak each others' language.
Nowadays, it is broken American English that serves as the lingua franca of the world.
But, I can prove to people that in some parts of the world like Latin America, Spanish does pretty well as a lingua franca. English, Spanish, Arabic, French, and Chinese all are languages used by diplomats in the UN, but more of them use English, Spanish is growing in popularity, French is on its way out, Chinese is still spoken predominantly in China and Taiwan in spite of the fact that it is spoken by about 1.5 billion people, and Arabic is growing. But, English as the broken American kind seems to serve as the lingua franca of the world. In spite of that fact, Esperanto is also used as such in various parts of the world, too.

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