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

A late 19th century fashion spawned several artificial languages, some of which were very silly. Esperanto became the most famous, but attracted criticism from language planners for several reasons, including the choices made for some of its roots, and the amount of redundant pluralisation and other inflections.

I would say that, for example, Interlingua is achieves the goal of learnability better than Esperanto - rather than being like a Euro-Martian hybrid, it's a kind of shaved version of Latin. Nevertheless, history favoured Zamenhof's creation.

I was wondering, are there any websites that could help me learn Esperanto?

[URL removed by moderator] has a listing of various helpfull links; including national esperant movements across the world and free online courses. There's plenty of info out there.

I should have remembered that the moderators would remove any URLs thanks anyway.

Red Dwarf also incorporates Esperanto in many of their shows. In the first series the deck numbers are written in both english and esperanto. Nievlo (I belive) is 9.

"Ese rano in mio bideo." This is the only Esperanto I know aside from the number 9, it means "There is a frog in my bidet."- a little off color but hey, I learnt it from watching Red Dwarf so what do you expect?

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Sorry to be Mr Know-it-all, but I am an Esperanto-speaker after all! In actual fact, "nivelo" means level - the Esperanto word for the number nine is "nau^" ("u^" means a "u" with the lower half of a circle as an accent - I can't show it here!). If you have the videos of the first two series of Red Dwarf, you may notice that the word "Nivelo" appears underneath "Level", no matter what colour or number it is!

By the way, the full phrase from Red Dwarf: "Bonvolu alsendi la pordiston, lau^s^ajne estas rano en mia bideo." ("s^" = "s" with circumflex ^). This means, as you probably know, "Please send the porter, as there seems to be a frog in my bidet." Quite why you'd want to say it ... I don't know!

Anyway, glad you've spotted the language - it has appeared in a couple more programmes as well, although I can't remember them off the top of my head - dodgy memory, I'm afraid!

Bondeziroj,

Mikeo.

If you want to find Esperanto sites, just type 'Esperanto' into a search engine like Google, and see what comes up.