Another Google Doodle can be spotted on the search engines’ homepage today, celebrating the 150th birthday of L. L. Zamenhof. He invented a constructed language named Esperanto. He hoped the language will be used for international communication, though ho country ever adopted it.
There are over 2 million Esperanto speakers and almost 1,000 native speakers. Also around 100,000 people use it every day.
There aren’t many websites who adopt this language either, but Google is one of them, fortunately for its speakers.
Unfortunately, it seems like there are a lot of people upset with Google because they didn’t pick a U.S. Bill of Rights logo. The U.S. Bill of Rights went into effect exactly 218 years ago.
The L. L. Zamenhof Google Logo
Esperanto is SO useful.
Who is mad? I had no idea that it was bill of rights day, when I e-mailed google asking for them to Use december 15 Dr Zamenhof’s birhday for the promotion of esperanto. Particularly because it his 150th birthday party.
kiu estas kolera? mi ne scias gi esas “bill of rights” tago, tiam mi retopo?to por okazi 15 decembro , por la multi vidu, ?ar 150 jaro okazoj.
Good luck to Esperanto
Many people do not realise that Esperanto is now a living language!
You can see this at http://www.lernu.net
Hey Brian, I am having a hard time understanding you.
oh wait, why is that? is that because Esperanto is a FAILED language that no one uses as a lingua Franca?
more people speak Tok Pisin from Niugini (New Guinea) than speak Esperanto.
what a useless language!
Thats clearly indicated that true cause of the google scope has been steared towords very very few individuals points of view. Personally I can attest to that even many hard-core yiddish or zoinist like my grandma dispise Espranto. And many orthodox I came across considered him anti-zionist & trader to the cause; G?d only knows what his true intention was. By the as my cousing Sheldon who is DA, stated Bill of Rights have been abolished the day Patriot act was passed.
Well, Joe… Zamenhof’s “true intention” is fully accomplished: the project is no longer a project but a living language, already since some 120 years ago. The contacts are between individuals, not nations or representatives. No interpreters needed. The language gathers people around the world, makes the travels in foreign countries very easy and even more interesting and it carries an implicit “linguistic handshake” as someone said – we do not leave our mother tongues behind in favor of the other’s language, but we meet everybody at the same level. That makes a huge difference. If you ever learned a foreign language, you know what that means.
I don’t understand your “trader to the cause”… Is there any special meaning of “trader” (not found any in Merriam -Webster) or perhaps did you mean “traitor”? I would not be very upset in any case.
If regional meanings and English phonetics are some times a pain for you, native speakers, what could we say about us, foreigners which don’t live in a English-speaking country?…
Well, Esperanto has nothing to do with any jewish movement, so maybe you shouldn’t ask them. And I wonder how a language can be ‘failed’ if I use it daily to communicate with people all over the world. Isn’t the goal of language communication?
Very interesting to know that, Joe.
… while many Palestinian despise Esperanto because Z was a Jew.
I guess they all despise the theory of relativity because Einstein was an anti-Zionist Jew?
Jesus! What does it have to do with the language of Peace?
Remu?
Esperanto and the Jewish Connection
As a speaker of Esperanto, Yiddish and Hebrew I declare my love for all three languages. Hundreds of Israeli Esperanto speakers proudly use both Hebrew and Esperanto. The fact that Zamenhof was Jewish, that his brothers and children were killed in the Holocaust will remain an integral part of Esperanto history. I proudly inform (at the UN, where I volunteer) anybody who wishes to forget this sad period of mankind.