anyone remember / speak Esperanto?

does anyone remember Esperanto? The international "business" language that was supposed to revolutionize global business and break down language barriers, but didnt work because CEOs of global corporations were too lazy to learn it?

more importantly, can anyone out there speak it?

just wondering.....

I remember, but I don't think that was it's intended use.

what0- stupid0- idea0...

aristocles likes to speak/learn Esperanto.

I recently watched Incubus, a long lost movie with all of the dialog in Esperanto and starring William Shatner!

Great article in an early issue of McSweeney's on Esperanto. No. 5 or 6, I think.

I've heard that too.

I so hope that's true.

oh that would make me weep with joy.

Esperanto was most definitely not intended as a business language. The idea was to end wars and such. There weren;t really many global corporations around when it was invented, either.

I wager that the number of people that speak Elvish will surpass Klingon soon.

There was a an auther I read way back...think his name was Harry Harrison...thought that in the future, everyone would speak Esperanto. And being like ten, I was convinced that the sci-fi author was telling the truth. So I tried to get someone to teach me, but as luck would have it, there's nobody in southern Ontario who would.

So I forgot the language existed until this thread showed up. Strange days.

Sounds like XML

(though it's more like CEOs of corporations are too lazy/impatient to learn how to use it properly. Oh, and Microsoft can be headsmackingly obtuse, in case you didn't know)

SCREW INTERLINGUA!

Lojban holds the promise of an invented spoken language that would be easier for computers to understand.

I read a language book by Anthony Burgess where he was critiquing Esperanto. I think he was okay with it, but he pointed out some obvious mistakes...

...such as, most languages have a word for "school" that looks like "school"-- escuela, skol, etc etc...but Esperanto used some totally dissimilar word for it.

You know a language isn't very well-known if you have to go around asking people if they've even heard of it...

Yeah, on the Lojban page, they list where it is spoken: the annual Lojban conference (~20 attendees) and one guy teaches a class.

According to esperanto.org its used by millions of people to solve international crisis.

-Sean in LA

I think Fark had an article saying that more people speak Klingon than Esperanto, as well as way more people speaking Klingon than Cherokee, which is pretty obvious to me now.

Esperanto's not that useful to me for anything because it's not a native human tongue. It's sad to see really obscure languages with interesting features dying while some of the most boring languages out there persist. Of course, even these languages will be gone eventually.

for reasons unknown to me, Esperanto was (is?) dead popular in the ex Eastern Bloc (like: Poland, Soviet, E.Germany, Bulgaria etc)

wow... thanks for all the info... forgive my ignorance on thinking it was invented for business, but that's what I was originally told... excuse me while I go and slap someone upside the head...

It was intended to be a language THE WHOLE WORLD was going to speak, so we'd all be on the same page for once. But the guy who invented it forgot that even if he did get the whole world speaking it, lingual drift would ensure that it would end up breaking into different languages in different regions anyhow.

william shatner can