On 15/09/09 17:32, Patrick Gen-Paul wrote: > > Raúl Núñez de Arenas Coronado wrote: > >>> hmm.. esperantista? >> >> Trying to ;) > > Interesting in this day and age, with the English language having become > the de facto "lingua franca". :-) [...]
English is a terribly difficult language, spoken one way and written another, fraught with idiotisms of all kinds, morphological irregularities, etc. It is one of the few languages that I speak fluently, but it isn't my mother language and it takes me constant practice to keep it up; and even so, I would never feel on the level arguing some difficult point with someone from Cambridge (England) or Cambridge (Massachusetts). Ever tried to understand a Japanese speaking English? The few times it has happened to me, I had all the trouble in the world making sense of what was being said. Esperanto doesn't suffer from all these problems: its spelling is phonetic, its grammar suffers no exceptions, and its system of affixes and of word-composition allows saying the same things with a much smaller "dictionary memory" effort. In addition, its phonology (similar to that of Italian, but with the stress always on the penultimate syllable, except of course for monosyllables) makes it a language easy to pronounce, and even though the Japanese have a hard time distinguishing the l and r sounds from each other, I usually have no trouble at all making sense of what they say when they speak Esperanto. And of course, since the few native speakers of Esperanto aren't the bearers of the language norm, the fact that it isn't my mother language is no handicap at all. Best regards, Tony. -- "I'd love to go out with you, but I'm doing door-to-door collecting for static cling." --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message from the "vim_use" maillist. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
