Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Google Celebrates 150th Birthday of Zamenhof

You may notice that today Google has a little Esperanto flag. This is in celebration of the 150th birthday of L. L. Zamenhof, the creator of the language. Esperanto is a fascinating little language, and works as diverse as The Lord of the Rings and The Origin of Species have been translated into it. It was the first foreign language that I managed to get a good reading knowledge of, and still the only one that I can read without a dictionary by my side. Many people give up learning languages because they don't see themselves getting to the stage of doing something interesting, like reading a novel in it. My success in reading Esperanto led me to develop my reading knowledge of French and German and my interest in more obscure languages such as Jersey and Sorbian. Not to mention Volapuk!

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