Thursday, May 31, 2012

Ora Auroro

Today during my daily blog reading (it is called avoiding the hard work of writing), I read about how the Google Translate app for Android was being upgraded to provide support for esperanto. As if Klingon wasn't enourgh for strange language support. (For the record, I actually know a couple of people who do speak Klingon...but I know no one who speaks esperanto.)

And yes, the question "Do people actually write in esperanto?" popped into my head.

For those people who do not understand why this post is being written here and not on my science fiction blog, just remember that a decade or two ago, there was an esoteric Order who attempted to convince its members to learn esperanto. (Should esperanto be capitalized? I don't know.) In theory, it is a wonderful idea. Adepts need an universal language to be able to communicate across international lines.

Based on my own blog stats, I presume that the universal language consists of zeros and ones, and involves the use of Google Translate or Babelfish. And so it goes.

Yes, I own a esperanto/English dictionary. But beyond looking up "Golden Dawn" in it, and using it for brief sentences and phrases for my science fiction writing, the dictionary sees no use. And yes, "Ora Auroro" (spelled with the funny U with the bowl on top) is how one would say Golden Dawn in esperanto. Enourgh said, right?

2 comments:

Bashmu the Oracle said...

It's rather interesting to hear that there is/was a call for the use of Esperanto (a language that I have been studying) amongst the G.D. adepti.

The only thing of the sort that I had ever heard of previously was from CROMAAT (a lesson series from A.M.O.R.C.) where Ido (another international auxiliary language; derived from Esperanto) was being presented as "an international language for rosaecrucians" back in 1918.

Brian Barker said...

Esperanto is in fact more widespread than people imagine.

Esperanto is now in the top 100 languages, out of 6,800 worldwide. It is the 22nd most used language in Wikipedia, ahead of Danish and Arabic. It is a language choice of, Skype, Firefox, Ubuntu and Facebook and Google translate recently added to its prestigious list of 64 languages.

Native Esperanto speakers, (people who have used the language from birth), include World Chess Champion Susan Polger, Ulrich Brandenberg the new German Ambassador to and Nobel Laureate Daniel Bovet. Financier George Soros learnt Esperanto as a child.

Esperanto is a living language - see http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8837438938991452670

Their online course http://www.lernu.net has 125 000 hits per day and Esperanto Wikipedia enjoys 400 000 hits per month. That can't be bad :)