Ted Alper's blog

Belecon taksas ne la orelo, sed la koro.

Is Elvish more beautiful than Esperanto? The question came up in a discussion with a friend of a friend on Facebook -- and my response is given as the title of this post (adaptita de la Zamenhofa proverbaro). I'll note that the f-of-a-f was unable to defend her preference for Elvish in Elvish, which ought to count for something. But it left me wondering:

Is Esperanto beautiful? I know it's a standard question, both among Esperantists and, for some reason, among people who know nothing about Esperanto, but I still haven't worked out my own thoughts on it.

I don't even know how to judge such a thing. I've certainly heard and read some very lovely sentences in Esperanto, but many of them were translations of presumably very lovely sentences in other languages. And I've certainly heard some clunky Esperanto sentences (most of them coming from my own mouth).

Harry Harrison, esperantisto, verkisto, forpasis

http://www.harryharrison.com/

http://on.io9.com/67H4sd

Eĉ sen la fina venko esperantistoj jam unuigas la mondon

kio malgraŭ ĉiuj malakordoj kaj miskomprenoj povas kuniĝi por la pligranda celo moki nin.

just noticed an article on trio's Stanford Esperanto class from earlier this week

http://www.stanforddaily.com/2012/05/14/1066219/

Esperanto Problem on this year's North American Computational Linguistics Invitational Round

Since my son graduated high school, I'm not following NACLO quite so closely this year [though I still know some participants] -- but I did perk up when I saw that the invitational round started off with an Esperanto question! I think this was meant to be an easy start, it's only 5 points, and they expected most people to get it without much trouble.

Still, they normally shy away from languages any participants are likely to know to avoid giving an advantage [i.e., you'll see questions on Inupiaq or Udihe , but not Japanese, unless it's some very obscure aspect of the language.

a word I stumbled over last night

not an important post at all, but if I can't tell you, whom can I tell?

I was reading Naŭ jaroj en la infero last night and tripped over the word "neobeo". It took me well over a minute to puzzle it out. In retrospect, the meaning is obvious
(it's "disobediance"), but something about the x-eo-y-eo just made it look strange on the page and I wasn't parsing it.

Have you ever had that happen to you?

Wikipedia is down today for a political statement -- but not the Esperanto version!

I always enjoy playing with Esperanto, but it is particularly sweet on those occasions when I find it useful in my life.

I am sympathetic to the point of the wikipedia protest, and I hope I'm not some sort of scab for using vikipedio -- but, boy it's nice to have!

http://eo.wikipedia.org/

Nothing like a pile of papers to grade to make me think of Esperanto limericks

Ne volas mi esti pedanto
rilate de lingvuza vanto
sed estas "tangento"
sinuskvociento;
Alie plitaŭgas "tanĝanto."

Stanford SPLASH! -- maybe a bit too late for the fall

Stanford Splash is a twice-a-year weekend of short (1 to 4 hour) classes for students in grades 7-12 taught by anyone with a passion to teach something to middle school or high schoolers.

Off to a slow start

4 lines in three weeks! (and those on the first weekend). To be fair, I knew that April was not going to be a month with much free time, May should be a little better. Also, I ordered that booklet of DB Gregor's from the UEA catalog soon after Lee Miller mentioned it, and it still hasn't come. I'm really quite curious to see it.