If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!En bona fojntrogo anstataux litet’
Ripozis la dolcxa Jesua kapet’:
La steloj rigardis al nuba vual’
Al eta Jesuo dormanta en stal’.
        In a good manger instead of a bed
        Slept the gentle Jesus’ small head
        The stars looked towards the cloudy veil
        To tiny Jesus […]

The Acad

A nice call this week from Radio 4. Actually, it was a follow-up to a voicemail and an email, neither of which I’d had time to reply to, so I feel quite grateful and honoured that they should try for a third time.
Anyhow, after my last slot on Word of Mouth, they’ve asked me to […]

The one thing I’m finding difficult about Esperanto isn’t the vocabulary, or the wonderfully logical and flat-form verbs and tenses. It’s not the adjectives and adverbs, or the comparative clauses that revolve around combinations of kiel and tiel. It’s the direct object.
That’s something we have in English, too, but it’s not something you ever think […]

It’s always good to read around a subject, rather than just dive in, blinker-style, and ignore the periphery. So, I picked up a copy of The Life of Zamenhof at abebooks.
It’s a slim book - 123 pages in total - and couched in slightly outdated terms. Originally written in Esperanto by Edmond Privat, it was […]

There’s a good piece over at Progressive U arguing against Esperanto and the general ideal of a universal language that we could all speak without wearing a linguistic badge of national identification.
The EU uses both English and French as its official working languages, while the UN includes both of them as well as Chinese, Arabic, […]

It’s not easy getting hold of Esperanto books. High street book stores don’t stock them, so you’re usually left to pick them up second hand, most often online. As such, you rarely get to try before you buy, but my small library is slowly building up.
I’ve just got hold of a copy of Step by […]

An interesting story in the Yorkshire Post, about the National Conference taking place in Scarborough:
JUST like Latin, Esperanto is the supposedly dead language that won’t lie down. Hitler and Stalin tried to ban it. The internet helped to save it. Now it could be on the way to a school near you…
Esperanto was developed in […]

You can find some weird and wonderful things on eBay. Hunting for anything Esperanto, hoping to turn up some old course books, I found someone selling an all-audio course on CD. It’s a single CD of just four 10-minute sessions, the first three of which are sounds of the sea. The description went on:
The final […]

Lunch with Vinnie today, where she outlined how the BBC’s disability site, Ouch, conducted a survey to see how offended disabled and non-disabled people felt about a range of words used to describe people with a disability.
The usual range of spastic, cripple, mong and window-licker came up from both camps, but the one thing it […]