Esperanto, the language, not the kebab shop.

I’ve started refreshing my French in preparation for my trip to Mali. 

Bonjour, ou et l’hopital, com bein un beir? Avez vous un mosquito net pour moi?

My French teacher would be turning in his grave if he heard me butcher his native tongue – except he’s not dead, yet – plus I’m pretty sure he was from Ballyduff, and not La Rochelle as he claimed.

Language has never been a strong point for me. I was subjected to Latin, Spanish and French at school and where other students picked them up with ease, rolling their Rs with sexy European verve, I was completely lost.

Which brings me to why I’m writing this post.

I was challenged today, by my bored work-mates to write a blog post in under an hour, on a topic of their choosing. “Sure, mon ahead big lads” I said, “I could blog about anything, you name it, I’ll blog it.” I added, in an annoying way I do.

“Ok, how about Esperanto”, suggested one of the more mop-topped workers. “And not the kebab shop.”

He knew my humour too well.

So here it is, my blog post on Esperanto, the global language of peace and reconciliation…

A cursory glance at Wikipedia offers some vaguely interesting facts about something I was never remotely fussed about.

These are as follows:

• Esperanto has between 100,000 and 2 million speakers in about 115 countries, and approximately one thousand native speakers.
• Who the hell is a native speaker of this ridiculous language I hear you cry. Well, it becomes ‘native’ when adopted by kids born into an Esperanto family and not, as I hoped, spoken by a group of posh Swedish hippies living on a Kibbutz in Strabane. Nearly 2000 poor wee sods have Esperanto as their first language.
• Klingon and Elvish are considered faster growing languages than Esperanto.
• The Bible has been translated into Esperanto, and if you ever feel the need, you can use Google to search in it as well.
• To ask for a beer you say: Unu bieron, mi petas.
• In the 1994 film Street Fighter, Esperanto is the native language of the fictional country of Shadaloo.
• The Irish political party Éirígí has recently adopted the green star as its emblem partly in support of Esperanto as an international language instead of English.

It seems to be a mix of badly spelt french, german and spanish. And although it seems to be having a bit of a renaissance in Cardiff (or Karidiff) I can’t imagine it ever being anything more than a hobby language, like Irish, Ulster Scots and machine code.

So there you go, a rushed half arsed blog post about a topic I knew nothing about, badly written within an hour – whats new eh?

In return, I asked two of my colleagues to write about whatever they wanted and I’d post it up here – they picked football… how original…

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