I don’t know why, but I’m channeling Attenborough at least once a month lately; It’s my own romantic period. Imagine his voice when reading this post and see if it makes more sense. I almost guarantee it.
Rachel Sussman has photographed the oldest living organisms that we know of, and the pictures are available here. The pictures themselves are unassuming, and even though one might be disappointed with the blandness of some of the flora, perhaps there’s a lesson to be learned there; To not judge a book by its cover, or something equally profound and boring. [Via Wakaba, who just got back to Japan]
While working in London I tried to occupy my time thinking up websites and community projects. One of those ideas that never took off was Tree of the Month, a website where I imagined that people would document a particular tree that they had a relationship to. While researching the subject I stumbled upon a book by Thomas Pakenham called Meetings with Remarkable Trees
By the way, seeing as the domain for Tree of the Month is still available, does anyone know of an arborist who’d be interested in working on this? The idea needs to be fleshed out, but still. Trees, dude.
In the same vein of “the universe is wicked, yo!” NASA and MTU has been publishing Astronomical Picture of the Day since 1995, and if you read space fare (Like Peter Hamilton
While on the topic of future: Why not learn Esperanto instead of farting into your chair? Or are you happy to make do with Europanto, the hodgepodge language that all Europeans speak whenever we’re talking to someone we don’t understand? Willen you vielleicht desert haben efter food oder vamos to playa direct?
Although meant as a pisstake on Esperanto, the idea of a common language that you grow aggressively by using what little you know of your listeners vocabulary is interesting. It’s easily dismissed as nonsense, and much of it reads like gibberish, but instead of looking at every language that you need as a discreet set of rules, you take a modular approach and just use words in whatever syntax you think is appropriate. Adaptive tourist linguistics.
Closer to home, there’s plenty to be fascinated by. WTF Nature! is a Livejournal dedicated to crazy stuff that surround us. Again, reading science fiction or fantasy you grow accustomed to descriptions of strange creatures and places, but if you take a detached look at your surroundings you might cultivate some wonder at how bizarre yet together our planet is. Why don’t you nip outside and ponder a bush or fondle a beetroot, hmm? Let that inner hippie out and feel as one with the cosmos for a bit. It’ll do you good.
You have suggested learning Esperanto. I recommend it too. I’ve made use of Esperanto on my travels for many years. Take a look at http://www.esperanto.net
Looking over the webstats, I take it you’re either a very enthusiastic speaker of Esperanto, or a rather clever bot. Feel free to share the stories of your use of Esperanto, or point us in a direction where we could read about them.
Over the years I think I’ve attempted to learn Esperanto three four times, but the stumbling block has always been the lack of everyday use. Lojban might be a language that I’d actually have use of if there only were more users, it being more computer geek oriented.
Bill is definitely a living, breathing Esperanto speaker. Like Bill, I recommend Esperanto, having also used it during travels (not nearly as much as Bill, he being a much more accomplished traveller than I). As for local use, there is an Esperanto association in Gothenburg, and if that doesn’t suit you, start up your own! That’s what I did at work. You wanted a story, so here goes:
At one point in time, I created an internal email alias at work with a very Esperanto-sounding name with the hopes of drawing fellow Esperanto speakers out of the woodwork. It kind of worked – I got a couple of people to subscribe to it who showed interest in Esperanto, but not enough to actually try learning it. Then, a colleague interested in languages (I work in software localization, so that kind of goes with the territory :-)) found out I speak Esperanto, and went ahead and learned it over a period of a couple of months. From then on until the end of his work contract, we spoke only in Esperanto at work, about everything from work to personal life. When his contract ended, we kept in touch by having lunch in Esperanto once a week. Not that long after that, my email alias snagged a couple of people who actually do speak Esperanto, whom I invited to our Esperanto lunch. One of them invited another Esperanto-speaking colleague he knew, and voilà, the rest is history. Well, actually, the group cooled off during the summer months (vacation et al.), so I need to kick-start it again. But you get the picture.
These anecdotes about learning and using Esperanto might also be of interest to you (hopefully more than my anecdote was :-)).
Depending on how long ago you tried to learn Esperanto, you might not be aware of how Esperanto has flourished on the Web in recent years. In particular, Lernu.net has emerged as a good resource site, with, among other things, free self-study online courses (click on Courses; Ana Pana comes recommended as a beginner’s course, and Gerda Malaperis is a good follow-up course), a dictionary and a grammar. Another good beginner’s course is Kurso de Esperanto, a free downloadable multimedia course.
Another thing you might not be aware of that could be of use to you if you travel is the Pasporta Servo, a worldwide hosting network whose sole cost of admission is the ability to reach your prospective host’s domicile and the ability to speak Esperanto.
I’m impressed by how quickly you guys found the post. Woopra reports four searches containing “Esperanto” within a few hours of the post; something that usually only happens if I write about salacious topics. Awesome.
I remember reading about the Pasporta Servo last time around I tried learning the language, and it seems a swell idea. Have you actually used it though? The idea seems to hinge upon a commonality — which is a good thing — but which might have been superseded by online groups and couchsurfing.
The political ideas behind universal languages are interesting though, so maybe it’s worth another try. If there’s an active Esperanto subtitle community for movies, it might facilitate the whole learning bit a bit. The average age of Esperanto speakers and users can hardly be going down, can it? Are there Nintendo DS games using the language?
Thank Google blog search :-) for its speed.
To answer your questions as best I can (which isn’t saying much), I’m hardly the seasoned traveler that Bill is, and have used the Pasporta Servo only once; I’m hoping Bill can chime in. My single experience was very positive, though, and I got to meet the local Esperanto club and got a guided tour of the city I (near Munich, Germany). There are a few Esperanto movies out there, but I’m not sure about subtitled moves; I’m more a consumer of stuff I can read and live interaction. I don’t have proof to offer, but my impression is that, especially in recent years, the average age of Esperanto speakers is dropping, judging from the Esperanto blogs I see and the apparent age of new Esperantists I read about on the Web in hotspots of growth, currently the Far East and Brazil and parts of Africa. I am not a consumer of electronic games, so I can’t answer specifically about Nintento DS games, although I know that some titles of computer games have been translated into Esperanto (I just read about one the other day).
There’s a lot of youth activity with Esperanto, and the Internet plays an important part in this. There’s a lot of enthusiasm, too. I brought up my own children using both English and Esperanto.
However, the organised Esperanto movement itself is in difficulties. In the UK the average age of the members must be somewhere around 80. The whole thing is in melt-down, and the under-seventies are in denial about it. They think it has something to do with the closing down of Bingo clubs, as one of the sheeple put it at the last AGM.
The reality is that the organisation was taken over by a group headed by public school toffs, rather as the Labour Party was. I was their Walter Wolfgang.
The international movement, however, is still going strong. Esperanto is well-worth learning and using, but I would not now say that to anyone without putting a health warning on the packet.
I think that the Esperanto idea, if not the language, is needed now as much as any time in the past. People need to be able to communicate on equal terms across barriers. What is happening in the Esperanto movement is not unique. The undermining of democracy is not a reason for giving it up.
Hey man!
I have very little experience with Esperanto, but I have done a lot of research on it. I am learning really, really slowly do to time constraints. There are plenty of places to get more than daily exposure to it. My Esperanto Links page has a veritable plethora of sites from video, audio, email lists, and text to sate your appetite with Lernu.net seeming to be the Esperanto hub of the Internet.
http://www.ArionsHome.com/esperanto
Give her a try again, because I am sure that she misses ya! =)
Ian, how very neat to bring kids up bilingual with Esperanto. Do they actively use it in some way? And what’s the “health warning” about?
Some years ago I read on Slashdot about the guy who brought his kid up bilingual English / Klingon. As I recall the kid understood both languages perfectly but refused to use Klingon, and it was suggested that this was because the no-one else used the language.
I know actually that some native speakers fell in love with each other :P. And if I remember correctly, Ian not only has native Esperanto-speaking children, but is even married himself with a native.
Thanks for your interesting post. Europanto is an interesting idea indeed, although meant as a joke, and I have no difficulties understanding it as I speak most of the source language used in most phrases.
Yes, my kids do use Esperanto, and they have friends all over the place and enjoy it.
The health warning is about the organised Esperanto movement. I would encourage people to go into it to support the furthering of Esperanto, provided that they understand that any progressive movement is likely to meet opposition, and that that opposition can come from within as well as from outside. That has been the history of the Esperanto movement for a century.
In the UK the situation is similar to that of the Labour Party, as described by Clare Short in her book ‘An Honorable Deception?’. It was taken over by a group headed by public school toffs, who did not seem to be sympathetic with the traditional objectives of the organisation, but seemed intent only on gaining the credence for themselves.
Since I had set up the infrastructure for press and public relations in the nineteen seventies for the British Esperanto Association, I naturally became concerned when I saw these structures being dismantled throughout the nineties on the basis of a financial crisis. In 2005 I researched this in some depth, and to my astonishment found that whilst the members were being told that the association’s capital was being eaten up, the figures told a completely different story.
Those running the association responded with abuse. That is not how genuine Esperantists behave. Further research revealed what appears to have been a dodgy property deal with Stoke-on-Trent County Council. Most members are still in disbelief, and it has been difficult even for their own former solicitor to get past the censorship in their publications.
This sort of thing can happen in any organisation. The key to handling it is not to brush the thing under the carpet, but to talk openly about it. That is what Esperanto is supposed to be about. But it has now become a thought crime to be critical of the committee. The president has serious questions to answer, but remains doggedly silent.
We need a new Esperanto movement. For those who wish merely to use Esperanto for holidays and social events, then it’s a great thing to be involved in. But for those who wish also to promote the idea of world peace and understanding, then they will be likely to come across the same sorts of interventions that may occur in any other progressive organisation.
I think it says something for the resilience of Esperanto that it has survived for over a hundred years. The Esperantists themselves need to look at parallel cases outside the Esperanto movement in order to come to terms with what is happening within. I think in the case of Esperanto it may have something to do with pushing English as the language of a militaristic New World Order.
Ah, politicking gets the best of people, I guess. But it would seem that if the “holidays and social events” esperantists are using it despite bickering within the more ideological groups of speakers, their method might be more viable for actually bridging gaps and what have you.
Exactly.
But I think it’s not just internal politicking. I think there’s been influence from outside the Esperanto movement in undermining Esperanto. We know that MI5 brought down the Communist Party by infiltrating it and causing eternal quarreling, and that they did something similar to the Socialist Workers Party. The 9/11 truth movement was specifically not set up as a national membership association because it would be infiltrated and dismantled if they did. That was made explicit by a former MI5 officer at the first meeting I ever attended, in December 2006. He told me later that they did have a file on Esperanto.
It’s all done by ‘Very Persuasive People’ who apply their charm to getting good people into orgies of quarreling.
We now know that it is UK government policy to make the world want to use English. The signs have been there for a long time. This isn’t just happening by itself. It seems to be linked in to a militaristic New World Order. If you’re creating an empire, language is one of the main considerations. You would achieve that partly by undermining the opposition.
I undertook a research project in 2005 to investigate the collapse of the Esperanto movement in the UK. Very soon I was uncovering stuff that I had not previously thought possible. There was a history of undermining key people, and keeping the membership in the dark as to what was really going on. Someone described the association as practically a Secret Society, just the opposite of what you would expect. I found all sorts of stuff, including a dodgy property deal.
Key people in the Esperanto movement in the UK have links with the British Council.
Most Esperantists want to brush all this sort of stuff under the carpet, because it’s bad for the image. I think it’s best to acknowledge what is going on, and to acknowledge that such things can happen in any organisation which may be campaigning for social reform. Otherwise we simply lose our democracy.
There must be something about Esperanto for it to have survived for so long, when the Esperantists themselves have been so blissfully unaware of what is going on behind the scenes.
So, that is the health warning. Esperanto is a great thing to be involved in. But if you are in the UK and try to organise a public meeting, or set up some promotional activity, don’t be surprised when you find one or two very charming nutters in your committee and in the end nothing ever changes.
Esperanto? Bona ideo!
[Who knew that too many comments would bork the layout. Back to the drawing table, I guess]
Ian, I don’t understand on what premise the Esperanto movement ever would be worth undermining from a governments point of view. As with any “alternative” movement, I don’t doubt that there’s interest and occasional monitoring from governmental organisations — vegans, anarchists, hackers, peace groups, they all have had moles at one time or another — but to go from that to suggesting that Esperanto is at odds with the UK is too big a leap of thought for me to make.
By all means, the British Council might have vested interests in keeping English as lingua franca because of their interest in keeping sales of books and teaching material, but this would be such a petty ambition that it wouldn’t seem reason enough. (As an aside, the first hit on “British Council Esperanto” is “ British Council warns against monolingualism” which of course is only one data point, but still)
So, your innuendo aside, I just don’t understand what the reasoning behind the outlined scenario would be. Dodgy real estate deals do not a conspiracy make…