WORKERS' ESPERANTIST ASSOCIATION:
People in Ireland have set up a new left libertarian esperanto website for people in Ireland interested in learning Esperanto and to provide labour news in both English and Esperanto. The website provides access to an online tutorial course in Esperanto. The language of Esperanto was first constructed by Dr. Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof in the late 1870s and the 1880s. The name derives from the pen name of Zamenhof ie Doctoro Esperanto when he published the Unua Libro in 1887. The name means "one who hopes". There is a monument to Zamenoff in Odessa, Ukraine, where he once lived, and many streets are named after him in Israel. The number of speakers of this constructed language grew, mainly in Europe and east Asia. In 1905 the first world congress of Esperanto was held in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France. Since then annual congresses have been held every year except for during the two world wars. Attempts have been made to popularize Esperanto over the decades. After the 1911 Chinese Revolution there was talk of replacing Chinese by Esperanto, but the idea never developed roots. The American Radio Relay League adopted Esperanto as its official language in 1924, hoping that it would become the language of amateur radio, but once more the idea withered.
The vocabulary of Esperanto is mostly from the Romance languages with a smaller input from Germanic and Slavic languages. The phonemic content is basically Slavic. Word order is flexible, though basically subject-object-verb and adjective-noun. There are five vowels, the same five as Spanish and Swahili and six diphthongs. There is a simple method of constructing Esperanto nouns, with prefixes, roots and suffixes. The construction is modifier first then root.
The various parts of speech each have their own suffixes; common nouns end in "o", adjectives end in "a" and derived adverbs end in "e". There are six tense and mood suffixes for verbs. Plural nouns end in "oj", pronounced "oy" as in "joy". Direct objects end in "on". Plural direct objects end in "ojy" like the "oin" in "coin". Adjectives agree with the noun. Their endings are "aj", as in "eye", direct object "an" and plural direct object "ajn", like "fine".
There are three tenses, present ending is "as", future ending in "os" and past ending in "is". The three moods are infinitive mood, ending in "i", conditional mood ending in "us" and jussive mood ending in "u". The verbs are not inflected as to person or number.
Zamenhof published the first Esperanto dictionary, Lingva Internacia, in 1887. The 900 roots presented there could be expanded to tens of thousands of words by prefixes, suffixes and compounding. Esperanto, however, is a growing language, and many new words are added each year by its speakers.
The number of present day speakers of Esperanto is unknown. It may be as high as 2 million. outside of China, Hungary and Bulgaria few schools teach Esperanto in their curricula. The language has long been favoured by left wing people such as socialists, anarchists and humanists, and the German esperantists were, in fact, imprisoned in the concentration camps under Hitler.
For more on Esperanto see
Esperanto.Org -International
Universal Esperanto Association -International
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