Esperanto is the world's most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. It was invented in the late 1870s and early 1880s by L.L. Zamenhof, a Jewish ophthalmologist living in modern-day Poland. The language has somewhere between 100,000 and 2 million speakers, with about 1,000 native speakers -- the most famous being George Soros.
Esperanto is not an official language of any country, but the short-lived man-made island of Rose Island declared it as such in 1968.
The language's purpose was to foster peace and international understanding, and has been described by Penn Jillette as the idealist's language.
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I hope you’ll let me provide some testimony as to the value of Esperanto. I have used it on my travels for many years, and it has enriched my time spent in countries whose languages I do not know. I have made occasional unplanned meetings with Esperanto-speakers, but I usually make contact using a network of local representatives provided by the Universala Esperanto-Asocio, based in Rotterdam. I’ve also made use of Pasporta Servo, a service providing free accommodation to Esperanto-speakers.
If you learn Indonesian, you are lost and illiterate in Japan. Japanese is of no use to you when travelling in Germany, and so on. Life is simply to short to learn all the languages of the earth.
Esperanto does not belong to any country or ethnic group: it is a neutral, international language.
Esperanto has a very regular structure. Words are often made from many other roots, and in this way the number of words which one must memorise is made much smaller. The language is perfectly regular, and the rules of pronunciation are very simple, so that everyone knows how to pronounce a written word and vice-versa. All this make of the language relatively easy to learn and use.
There are plenty of web resources, but a good place to start is www.esperanto.net
Espwranto is for practical people, and not just idealists, as Bill points out.
It's unfortunate however that only a few people know that Esperanto has become a living language.
During a short period of 121 years Esperanto is now in the top 100 languages, out of 6,800 worldwide, according to the CIA World factbook. It is the 17th most used language in Wikipedia, and in use by Skype, Firefox and Facebook.
Native Esperanto speakers,(people who have used the language from birth), include George Soros, World Chess Champion Susan Polger, Ulrich Brandenberg the new German Ambassador to NATO and Nobel Laureate Daniel Bovet. According to the CIA Factbook the language is within the top 100 languages, out of all languages, worldwide.
Confirmation of this can be seen at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8837438938991452670 A glimpse of the language can be seen at http://www.lernu.net
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