French expat Cyril Vergnaud lives in Pingtung and speaks French, Chinese, Hoklo (more commonly known as Taiwanese) and English. He also speaks Esperanto.
Tomorrow, Vergnaud and students of Esperanto from Pingtung Community College will hold the Esperanto Festival (屏北社大世界語學員), an annual event that is open to the public. There will be a NT$100 door charge to cover drinks, snacks and a gift bag for everyone who attends, he said.
Esperanto is a language devised to enable communication among the world’s different language speakers. Vergnaud told the Taipei Times by e-mail that he became interested in learning the language purely by chance.
Photo courtesy of Pingtung Esperanto Festival
“I first met two Esperantists who live and work in Pingtung,” he said. “One guy, Reza Kheir-khah, is from Iran and a woman New Zealand, Simone Roberts, is also in our group here. While I had never studied Esperanto before, I soon learned from Reza and Simone that it’s easy to learn. So I decided to give it a shot. One thing led to another and we’ve got this annual festival.”
“What I discovered was more than just a language,” he said. “I became a member of a very interesting international community. I fell in love with the philosophy of Esperanto, as much as I did with the language,” he said.
Last year around 80 people attended the festival, Vergnaud said, many of whom were expats living in southern Taiwan and other countries such as Canada, Thailand, Spain and Japan, among other nations.
“In Taiwan, most Esperantists are Taiwanese,” he said. “But because we use this language a lot to travel, foreign travelers often visit us here in Pingtung.”
The breakwater stretches out to sea from the sprawling Kaohsiung port in southern Taiwan. Normally, it’s crowded with massive tankers ferrying liquefied natural gas from Qatar to be stored in the bulbous white tanks that dot the shoreline. These are not normal times, though, and not a single shipment from Qatar has docked at the Yongan terminal since early March after the Strait of Hormuz was shuttered. The suspension has provided a realistic preview of a potential Chinese blockade, a move that would throttle an economy anchored by the world’s most advanced and power-hungry semiconductor industry. It is a stark reminder of
May 11 to May 17 Traversing the southern slopes of the Yushan Range in 1931, Japanese naturalist Tadao Kano knew he was approaching the last swath of Taiwan still beyond colonial control. The “vast, unknown territory,” protected by the “fierce” Bunun headman Dahu Ali, was “filled with an utterly endless jungle that choked the mountains and valleys,” Kano wrote. He noted how the group had “refused to submit to the measures of our authorities and entrenched themselves deep in these mountains … living a free existence spent chasing deer in the morning and seeking serow in the evening,” even describing them as
As a different column was being written, the big news dropped that Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) announced that negotiations within his caucus, with legislative speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT, party Chair Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chair Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) had produced a compromise special military budget proposal. On Thursday morning, prior to meeting with Cheng over a lunch of beef noodles, Lu reiterated her support for a budget of NT$800 or NT$900 billion — but refused to comment after the meeting. Right after Fu’s
What government project has expropriated the most land in Taiwan? According to local media reports, it is the Taoyuan Aerotropolis, eating 2,500 hectares of land in its first phase, with more to come. Forty thousand people are expected to be displaced by the project. Naturally that enormous land grab is generating powerful pushback. Last week Chen Chien-ho (陳健和), a local resident of Jhuwei Borough (竹圍) in Taoyuan City’s Dayuan District (大園) filed a petition for constitutional review of the project after losing his case at the Taipei Administrative Court. The Administrative Court found in favor of nine other local landowners, but
RSS