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Esperanto is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language in the world. Its name derives from Doktoro Esperanto, the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof published the first book detailing Esperanto, the Unua Libro, in 1887. The word esperanto means 'one who hopes' in the language itself. Zamenhof's goal was to create an easy and flexible language that would serve as a universal second language to foster peace and international understanding.
Esperanto has had continuous usage by a community estimated at between 100,000 and 2 million speakers for over a century, and approximately one thousand native speakers. However, no country has adopted the language officially. Today, Esperanto is employed in world travel, correspondence, cultural exchange, conventions, literature, language instruction, television, and radio broadcasting. Also, there is an Esperanto Wikipedia that contains over 109,000 articles as of January 2009.
There is evidence that learning Esperanto may provide a good foundation for learning languages in general. Some state education systems offer basic instruction and elective courses in Esperanto. Esperanto is also the language of instruction in one university, the Akademio Internacia de la Sciencoj in San Marino.
The language Esperanto is often used to access an international culture, including a large body of original as well as translated literature. There are over 25,000 Esperanto books (originals and translations) as well as over a hundred regularly distributed Esperanto magazines. Many Esperanto speakers use the language for free travel throughout the world using the Pasporta Servo. Others like the idea of having pen pals in many countries around the world using services like the Esperanto Pen Pal Service. Every year, Esperanto speakers meet for the World Congress of Esperanto (Universala Kongreso de Esperanto). These attract around 1500-3000 speakers, and the best-attended conferences are regularly those held in Central or Eastern Europe, close to the birthplace of Esperanto (see statistics at World Congress of Esperanto). Find out more...
Numbers (la nombroj)
- nulo meaning: "zero" (0)
- unu meaning: "one" (1)
- du meaning: "two" (2)
- tri meaning: "three" (3)
- kvar meaning: "four" (4)
- kvin meaning: "five" (5)
- ses meaning: "six" (6)
- sep meaning: "seven" (7)
- ok meaning: "eight" (8)
- naŭ meaning: "nine" (9)
- dek meaning: "ten" (10)
In Esperanto, all of the question words begin with the letter "k:" kio = "what," kie = "where", kiam = "when," kial = "why," and so on. Not only does this allow the question words to be immediately recognizable, common suffixes allow demonstrative, indefinite, and negative words to also be clearly apparent. For example, kio shares a suffix with tio = "this/that," io = "something," and nenio = "nothing," which are all related concepts.
- ...that William Shatner (of Star Trek fame) once starred in the feature-length Esperanto-language film Incubus?
- ...that Esperanto superseded another constructed language, Volapük, which is now mostly defunct?
- ...that Esperanto contains six letters found in no other alphabet: ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ and ŭ?
- ...that Esperanto has no q, w, x or y?
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