How Many Readers Speak Esperanto?

lifebouy asks: "I just read a story about a high school that teaches Esperanto. I've noticed the majority of Esperantists I have met are IT professionals, perhaps because it nurtures our need to explore new things. So I was wondering, how many Slashdot readers speak Esperanto? Has anyone else noticed the high rate of IT Esperantists?"

Comments

Esperanto, for what?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm learning mandarin chinese. It's actually quite useful for me - for one I get to access all sorts of new media; and I can talk to so many other people. Why bother learning an artificial language? It's hard enough learning a useful one, and I can't spend any time on the artificials. (I like the asian languages more than european though; they're more interesting to me).

Re:Esperanto, for what?

[LeninZhiv]

Well then, here's some irony for you: the main reason I originally learned Esperanto was to communicate with Chinese people, and become acquainted with Chinese literature. Esperanto is big in China, just check out the Cxina Interreta Informa Centro if you need proof--and there is a great amount of Chinese literature availiable in Esperanto translation. This is better than reading Chinese lit in English or another European language, because in those translations it is a native speaker of the European language who produces the translation, and a lot of interpretation is required to do it (put any two translations of the Tao Te Ching side-by-side to see how divergent they can be!). But Esperanto lit is always translated by a native speaker from his own language into Esperanto, so at least the interpretation that goes into the translation comes from the same cultural context as the work itself.

But the biggest argument is, learning to read a literary work in Esperanto takes as little as a month, whereas if you're going to be reading Laux Sxe's "Kamelo Sxangxi" (to name a Chinese novel I've read in Esperanto) in Mandarin Chinese, and you're a native English speaker, you're going to be studying for years, not weeks. --Not that there's anything wrong with that, but that's a key thing about Esperanto, it's easy, so there's no reason you can't learn it AND Mandarin Chinese, even if you put 95% of your effort into the latter.

Esperanto is now my primary language

[amuzulo]

I'm a full-time volunteer for the World Esperanto Youth Organization in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. As of July 2002, I've been speaking Esperanto as my primary language travelling for six months through Brazil and Europe and then volunteering here starting in January 2003. I'm also a board member of Esperanto@Internet which has done projects like lernu! which is one of the best free language teaching environments online as well as the founder of the Wikipedia in Esperanto which has over 8,000 encyclopedia articles after two years of work by an international team from over 25 countries and is now the 9th largest language in the project.

As for a high-rate of IT Esperanto speakers, I think a lot of it comes from the fact that we aren't put off by the word artificial because we're familiar with fields of study like artificial intelligence. Also, people working in IT are more likely to like the idea of a "logical language" even though Esperanto isn't really logically per se since no living language can ever be completely logical. Esperanto was initiated out of the need for a just international language and started just like an Open Source Project. So, another reason that many Esperanto speakers are techies is simply because we tend to use the Internet more than other people.

The single most useful language for cheap travel

[UnuMondo]

I learned Esperanto in 1996 and it has proven very useful. I travelled through Europe several times, staying at no cost at the homes of Esperantists, and finally moved there for good by first working for an Esperanto youth organisation in Holland. It's been a ticket to lower-cost travel, a genuinely international social life, and ironically more effective learning of national languages.

For those who would say that learning English or Mandarin is more important because there are more speakers, the traveller to, for example, Chile can't just call up any English speaker there and request free lodging and hospitality. With Esperanto, however, that's pretty common. In spite of the smaller number of speakers, Esperanto is much more useful for travel.

However, Esperanto is pretty useless if you spend all your time in the US. A lot of American Esperantists, though, end up leaving the US like I did after they learn the language because it's a ticket to a much more diverse and interesting world.