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I'm still waiting for a sequel to Shatner's early masterpiece "Incubus."

"Mysteria... profunde... amor!"

Hey.. You can't knock a language William Shatner used on Slashdot, can you?

Buy it!</plug>

And if you want to hear Esperanto, there's a short .ra clip on the site. In all seriousness, it was a decent movie. Looked good, too--cinematography by Oscar-winner (American Beauty, Road to Perdition) Conrad Hall. And yes, they all learned their dialog phoenetically.

According to the official website of Incubus (Shatner's 1965 Esperanto masterpiece) :

Co-star Ann Atmar committed suicide in 1965 shortly after appearing in Incubus.

Not that this should in any way be taken as a commentary on Mr. Shatner's thespian abilities, but when your co-stars feel compelled to off themselves before the movie is even released...

Nah, Shatner couldn't have been that bad. Or... could... he...?

Of course it can! All we have to do is convince everyone to learn it in addition to whatever languages they already speak. People will learn it in droves! Everyone will quickly become proficient, damn the effort! All so that we can easily speak to our electronic devices and save those poor natural language parsing software developers from needless effort. Forget all those neural-networks and whatnot. Let's do it the hard way, like men!

They'll even make movies in Silbo, because everyone will be fluent and will want to completely immerse themselves!

Remember Incubis?, William Shatner's foray into Esperanto language film? No? Me neither.

Mr. Shatner,

I recently went to a screening of your cult classic film, "Incubus". The most amazing thing about this movie was that all the dialog was spoken in Esperanto! Did you actually learn Esperanto for the role? Or were you simply reading off of cue cards?

You're the only actor I heard of who ever did an Esperanto movie (The Incubus). How was that experience? Don't you think that Esperanto has been greatly underutilized in film today?

Absolutely. However, there's a lot of visceral inertia (I can say that in public, can't I?) to overcome before most people will consider learning any other language. It's tied up pretty deeply in their personal and cultural identity. Witness the vitriolic attack by the (clearly under-informed) AC who replied to you first.

Personally, I think it's just fear. Fear by people who are used to being very competent at what they do, of being put in a situation where they aren't the Alpha for a while. I lucked out, picked up Esperanto in high school because I found it very geeky and I was a stone geek. All the other kids laughed, which was nothing new. I'm very glad I spent the amazingly short time to learn the basics; now I'm reading translated literature (some of it from Chinese!) at a fairly advanced level, with ease.

As for the attacker, sigh ... I don't have the energy to form a proper rebuttal. I guess I'd note that Esperanto is the single biggest success story in the constructed-language world, the longest-lived, and its speakers have increased in numbers pretty steadily since the beginning. But don't take my word for it (and if geeks are reading this, they won't), see for yourself. Those links were good; here are some others:

• La Multlingva Inform-Centro ... bet you find your native tongue represented!
  
• Esperantic Studies Foundation ... some formalism for a change
  
• An examination of some of that "visceral inertia"
  
• For you Canadians
  
• And the Britons
  
• Aussies, too
  
• The misleadingly-named Esperanto League for North America, which really means "The USA" here
  
• And finally, for fun, just when you thought Shatner had done it all ...
  

Iru. Jenu. Lernu. Ghuu.

Yeah; I have a copy of it. He still... pauses... And his pronunciation is execrable. Then again, so is that of most of the other actors. And he plays a character that reminds me of so many Star Trek episodes! His character is a war-hero, saintly and pure of soul... falls in love oh-so-quickly, and ready to turn worlds over for his newfound love... This isn't sounding right. Just that somehow some of the situations seem awfully familiar from his later work.

It's at http://www.incubusthefilm.com/.

Hell, if William Shatner advocated it, its gotta be cool, right? right? kidding...