Esperato lovers speak out
Although the title does not do justice to the actual situation in today's world, I wish to congratulate you for David Newnham's article ("World reluctant to embrace Esperanto," July 18, page 9). As a speaker (and lover) of Esperanto since my teens, I've appreciated its rare accuracy.
However, he's mistaken when he says that "Esperanto is probably the only language to have no irregular verbs." How could you, in Taipei, print such a sentence? Chinese has no irregular verbs either. It consists, just as Esperanto, of completely invariable blocks that combine without restriction.
Esperanto's Eurocentricity is less marked than Newnham suggests. While the roots on which the vocabulary is based are European, they combine according to patterns you find in Asian languages. In both Chinese and Esperanto, you derive "first" from "one" and "my" from "I," something alien to European tongues.
Or consider words like "foreigner" or "autonomous." The Chinese who learns English has to memorize them as new, separate entities. In Esperanto, eksterlandano, "foreigner," consists of the same three elements as its Chinese equivalent waiguoren: ekster, "outside," land, "country" and ano, "a human being (belonging to...)."
Similarly, memstara, "autonomous", is an exact transposition of the Chinese zili (stara "who stands" = li
I've noticed also that my experience -- I was more fluent in Esperanto after 10 months than in English after 10 years -- is shared by many people all over the world. For many decades, Esperanto used to be derided in the press. The trend appears to be changing. More and more honest articles are being published. But Newnham's stands out for its wealth of accurate information.
Claude Piron
Switzerland
The reason why Esperanto is not widely known in England and Wales (and probably the rest of the world) is that professional language teachers regard it as a menace to their jobs, or beneath their dignity because it is not complicated, or think that Esperanto teachers are heretics. It has long been suppressed in UK schools, and hardly anyone emerges from the system with knowledge of it.
The British Esperanto Association struggled for many years to have it examinable for the Certificate of Secondary Education, and finally for the General Certificate in Secondary Education (GCSE). The Northern Examining Association successfully marketed the GCSE in Esperanto, but in 1989 the Modern Languages Working Group, consisting of the leaders of professional language teachers, omitted to mention Esperanto when it recommended a list of languages (19 of them, from Arabic to Urdu) to the then minister of education, for inclusion in the emergent National Curriculum.
Since 1990, when the National Curriculum came into force, it has therefore been illegal to teach Esperanto as a first foreign language in schools in England and Wales, and this caused it to be ignored by schools in the rest of the UK.
As a second foreign language it may be taught, but timetabling for that purpose is so difficult that it would be true to say that millions of UK adults by now are unaware of the only successful means of speaking or writing to non-English-speakers on a basis of equality. The GCSE in Esperanto was withdrawn in 1995 because of a lack of candidates.
David Curtis
England
Elbridge Colby, America’s Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, is the most influential voice on defense strategy in the Second Trump Administration. For insight into his thinking, one could do no better than read his thoughts on the defense of Taiwan which he gathered in a book he wrote in 2021. The Strategy of Denial, is his contemplation of China’s rising hegemony in Asia and on how to deter China from invading Taiwan. Allowing China to absorb Taiwan, he wrote, would open the entire Indo-Pacific region to Chinese preeminence and result in a power transition that would place America’s prosperity
A few weeks ago in Kaohsiung, tech mogul turned political pundit Robert Tsao (曹興誠) joined Western Washington University professor Chen Shih-fen (陳時奮) for a public forum in support of Taiwan’s recall campaign. Kaohsiung, already the most Taiwanese independence-minded city in Taiwan, was not in need of a recall. So Chen took a different approach: He made the case that unification with China would be too expensive to work. The argument was unusual. Most of the time, we hear that Taiwan should remain free out of respect for democracy and self-determination, but cost? That is not part of the usual script, and
All 24 Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers and suspended Hsinchu Mayor Ann Kao (高虹安), formerly of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), survived recall elections against them on Saturday, in a massive loss to the unprecedented mass recall movement, as well as to the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) that backed it. The outcome has surprised many, as most analysts expected that at least a few legislators would be ousted. Over the past few months, dedicated and passionate civic groups gathered more than 1 million signatures to recall KMT lawmakers, an extraordinary achievement that many believed would be enough to remove at
Behind the gloating, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) must be letting out a big sigh of relief. Its powerful party machine saved the day, but it took that much effort just to survive a challenge mounted by a humble group of active citizens, and in areas where the KMT is historically strong. On the other hand, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) must now realize how toxic a brand it has become to many voters. The campaigners’ amateurism is what made them feel valid and authentic, but when the DPP belatedly inserted itself into the campaign, it did more harm than good. The
RSS