By about 2 million people in about 100 countries according to the best info available.
It is a language invented about 120 years ago for the purpose of making communication
between people of different native toungues easy and fair. It is not native to any
place. It is everybody's language and the only invented language to enjoy the kind of
success it has had (such as it is).
Admittedly, it isn't as popular in the US as it is in other countries, for the
same reasons a lot of good ideas aren't popular here. Americans are under the
impression that everybody speaks English (or at least should). The French like to
think the same thing, and block exceptance of Esperanto at every turn where it may
decrease the use of French as "The" international language.
In this way, the French and Americans remind me of MS trying to protect MS
.DOC format as a 'standard'. Esperanto is sort of the XML of the language world.
If you are at all interested, I would suggest looking at
http://www.esperanto-usa.org and http://www.esperanto.net.
I think I first heard of Esperanto 10 years ago when my family used to host
exchange students. One of the families we met through that used to open their home to
people traveling from all over the world. They had people from Japan, Brazil, Russia,
and all over Europe stay with them and see Chicago. None of these people spoke
English; they did all of their communicating in Esperanto. I started thinking about
it again when Larry Price said something about it in passing one day and I have
finally gotten around to learning it.
So far I'm having a good time, but I'm having a hard time finding the literature in
book stores. Luckily the Esperanto League for North American sells just about
everything on their web site.
I found the letters in the Esperanto alphabet that are not in the English alphabet in
the Latin-1 Suppliment Unicode chart at http://www.unicode.org/charts/
--TimH
On Sat, 7 Dec 2002 20:46:06 -0800
Cory Petkovsek <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Tim, would you enlighten us as to where in the world esperanto is
> spoken? (other than eugene).
>
> Cory
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