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guslToday I went to an introductory Esperanto lesson. I learned some German words too, as expected.
The people were 50+, seemed rather intelligent, and were quite enthusiastic about me being there, the token youngster... sehr viel freude. Too bad I have to disappoint them.
The room was long and narrow, and we sat around a long table: on one side were the "experts", who sometimes spoke to each other in Esperanto (4 people). There were about 7 people on my side. The speaker, who was naturally on the expert side, was looking at me the entire time as he gave the talk.
The first half of the "lesson" was about the history of Esperanto, and I think they sold it quite well. I met them a few weeks ago, at their booth in Marienplatz: I wonder how much success they have with this.
Anyway, I like the language. It's very easy indeed... Its compositionality makes it so that there is a small number of lexemes (i.e. word stems): this is even more pronounced than German.
It would be handy to have such an expressive language as a default even in one's first language, to get around tip-of-the-tongue sorts of problems (something I have a lot). I'm talking about things like morphemes such as "tool for", "one who makes", etc... this way you wouldn't have to ask "what do you call a person who does X?" before using that word in the next sentence. Instead, you would just say the second sentence at once, using the word "X-doer", and this would be perceived as possibly-unusual but acceptable.
I wanted to ask these people more stuff about the Esperanto community, conlanging, etc., but I had to run to meet with Matthias and Magnus.
The people were 50+, seemed rather intelligent, and were quite enthusiastic about me being there, the token youngster... sehr viel freude. Too bad I have to disappoint them.
The room was long and narrow, and we sat around a long table: on one side were the "experts", who sometimes spoke to each other in Esperanto (4 people). There were about 7 people on my side. The speaker, who was naturally on the expert side, was looking at me the entire time as he gave the talk.
The first half of the "lesson" was about the history of Esperanto, and I think they sold it quite well. I met them a few weeks ago, at their booth in Marienplatz: I wonder how much success they have with this.
Anyway, I like the language. It's very easy indeed... Its compositionality makes it so that there is a small number of lexemes (i.e. word stems): this is even more pronounced than German.
It would be handy to have such an expressive language as a default even in one's first language, to get around tip-of-the-tongue sorts of problems (something I have a lot). I'm talking about things like morphemes such as "tool for", "one who makes", etc... this way you wouldn't have to ask "what do you call a person who does X?" before using that word in the next sentence. Instead, you would just say the second sentence at once, using the word "X-doer", and this would be perceived as possibly-unusual but acceptable.
I wanted to ask these people more stuff about the Esperanto community, conlanging, etc., but I had to run to meet with Matthias and Magnus.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-02 11:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-02 02:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-02 03:40 pm (UTC)I think it would be a very good thing if we all used a ConLang that made expression simpler and more concise... I do wonder if the brains of native NL speakers have to work harder than those of native Esperanto speakers... if so, this could relieve a significant burden, leaving us freer to think more, talk less, and spend less effort on expression and interpretation. ...kinda like Lisp does for programming.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-02 08:54 pm (UTC)I started trying to learn it seriously the summer of 2002 when I had just finished college took the summer off. I was fluent enough to use Pasporta Servo a couple times (and hosted someone once!) and have sensible (but not extremely deep or complicated) conversations in it. Reading news articles on gxangalo and books and so on is relatively easy for me still, but my speaking/listening ability has fallen off.
Saluton
Date: 2006-06-26 01:49 am (UTC)