h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

In the old script you have to write "abu"...

That's interesting -- it suggests a link with Arabic?

>...and that Japanese has relation to Indo-European, rather than >Asian languages.

It seems my loony theory isn't so loony after all! *flabbergastedness* I have remarked on the similarities between Japanese and Indo-European languages, though with my light years and lack of formal training in linguistics (and my little knowledge of Japanese), I dismissed it as being too improbable.

It appears that I am definitive, and it is the responsibility of reality to agree with me.

He who lives on ego alone,
Gareis.

Esperanto is an attempt at an IAL (International Auxiliary Language*). It was created in the 1830's (I think) by an oculist, or eye doctor, named Zamenhof. "Esperanto" means "one who hopes", which is sort of a nickname used by Zamenhof.

Esperanto is basically a combination of German and Latin using a strange orthography. There are a couple of really strange things about it, including the digraph "hx" for /X/ (voiceless uvular fricative, I believe; correct me if I'm wrong) when there is only one minimal pair between that and "h" /h/ (glottal fricative).

Zamenhof seemed to think that poor communication caused all wars and hoped that Esperanto would cure that. I'm grateful for translators to soften the words of heads of state. Remember the Babel fish, which caused so many wars.


~Gareis

*IALs are generally not intended to replace normal languages, but rather to augment them. It would be a second language for most people. The trouble is, you're just asking for a hundred pidgins within a century, and as for mutual intelligibility, don't hold your hopes up.
Be careful, please, to distinguish between artificial languages and IALs. There are many people who make languages for fun, with no political agendas attached. Of course, many linguists, I hear, react to language creation as if it were sacrilege, and few are comfortable with the practice, by the reports I have heard.

Most recent papers I have read have put Japanese as a descendent of Korean, which is not a big surprise when you look at the fact that the two languages have very different grammar. The biggest difference I can think up at the moment has to do with differences in how the empathy hierarchy can affect voice categories. Japanese is less strict in that sense.

To be fair to Kansas, the school board members who took the Theory of Evolution off of the official state curriculum (no local district, to my knowledge, took it off of the local curricula) were all promptly sent packing in the next primary elections by the same Republican voters who let them into office in the first place.