How I Made My Mark On Europe
Inspired by our current European season on BBC Radio Scotland, I jumped off the train at Inverness and dashed, eventually, to the polling station to register my vote in today's election. There is something awe-inspiring about the thought of millions of people across the continent doing the same thing at the same time. I suspect, however, that the polling stations in some other countries are a little more sophisticted than the draughty school halls and community centres we have come to expect in Scotland. The Italians are bound to have a coffee bar in theirs.
My polling station, for some reason, was not within walking distance at the nearest Primary school. Instead - because of family logistics - I had to load daughter and dog into the car at nine o'clock tonight and vote in a place called Green Drive...which obviously gives an advantage to one particular party.
So let me tell you how I voted. No, I don't intend to let you know which party I voted for, but to give you an insight into my thought process as I stood in that wooden booth holding the pen on a string.
Naturally I considered the wider European issues such as, er, the demise of Esperanto. Then I thought about that whole moat-cleaning and bath-plug scandal in Westminster. Then I thought about which politicians had sent me the rudest letters in the past year.
Then I looked at the logos of each party on the ballot paper and decided which was the cutest. Then I rememembered that my daughter and dog were waiting for me in the car and I made my mark.
What a huge ballot paper. Luckily there were origami experts on hand to instruct us on how to fold it in such a way that it would fit in the ballot box.
Note to counters: mine is the one that looks like a flying swan.
© MMIX~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~45~RS~)
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Demise of Esperanto? I think not!
I agree however that it's unfortunate that only a few people know that Esperanto has become a living language.
After a short period of 121 years Esperanto is now in the top 100 languages, out of 6,800 worldwide, according to the CIA factbook. It is the 17th most used language in Wikipedia, and in use by Skype, Firefox and Facebook.
Native Esperanto speakers,(people who have used the language from birth), include George Soros, World Chess Champion Susan Polger, Ulrich Brandenberg the new German Ambassador to NATO and Nobel Laureate Daniel Bovet.
Further arguments can be seen at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_YHALnLV9XU Professor Piron was a translator with the United Nations in Geneva.
A glimpse of Esperanto can be seen at http://www.lernu.net
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If only Alois Schicklgruber hadn't married cousin Klara...
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#1
Personally I have never really seen the point of Esperanto other than as a very interesting academic exercise (I have a firm interest in languages - especially the germanic/norse/scots etc. Indeed, what's wrong with Italian and Spanish? If you want a regularised and Latin-based language, why not start with those? Dutch, for example, has gone through several 'regularising' exercises whereby things like odd spelling exceptions and grammatical anomalies are 'corrected'.
However, I DID catch a movie once with William Shatner all done in Esperanto - I very much enjoyed it and in fact hardly needed to look at the subtitles, having some knowledge of the modern Latin languages! The movie was called Incubus - info here:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059311
Highly recommended!
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Interesting to see how my throwaway mention of Espernato has prompted a little debate. Obviously a subject we should include in the Europe Season.
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