Day Forty-Six - Ĉu vi parolas Esperanton?

I will admit - I am greatly enjoying learning about all of these non-official holidays and then coming up with things to do on them. This is a rare back-to-back celebration for today is Zamenhof Day. And who is Zamenhof? Well, he is the fellow who created the language of Esperanto.

What can be said about Esperanto? It was supposed to be an international language [like love only more nerdy, but maybe not quite as nerdy as Klingon] and it's been wildly unsuccessful [at most it is spoken by 2 million people - 0.03 of the global population, although only 10,000 of these speakers are fluent]. It was denounced and reviled by Hitler, Stalin and Senator Joseph McCarthy so I guess that Esperantists are doing something right. However, Esperanto is criticised for being too difficult to learn, too European, not European enough, sexist, without culture, too large in vocabulary and too artificial in construct.

I decided to give it a go anyways and tonight I learned some useful phrases in Esperanto. It sounds like a bizarre mix of Spanish and German [I don't speak either]. With maybe like a side of Elvish? Anyway, I've been shouting @ Joseph "unu bieron, mi petas" for over 20 minutes now and I still don't have a cold, frosty one, so this is hardly a universal language. I think if I tackle Klingon next that will really get his attention.