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Archive for January, 2010

WoW? Oh, wow. Posted by on Jan 31, 2010

Have you ever played the game World of Warcraft? If not, you might be one of the few who hasn’t! (I count myself among your number, though). Like any social game that attracts a worldwide audience, World of Warcraft has speakers of all languages who play the game. Apparently, it has a decently-sized Esperanto community…

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Linguistic Relativity and Esperanto Posted by on Jan 29, 2010

Have you ever heard of the philosophical concept of linguistic relativity? If not, there’s the possibility that you’ve already thought about it yourself! Come to think of it, according to the theory, you’ve been thinking about it your whole life, probably without realizing it. According to the theory, the thoughts you are capable of thinking…

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Lojban Posted by on Jan 27, 2010

What is Lojban? A friend of mine introduced me to it as another “competitor” of Esperanto – another logical, planned language designed to surmount language barriers. It seems as though Lojban has a more scientific feel to it than Esperanto does. Where Esperanto emerged from L.L. Zamenhof’s attempts to promote cultural awareness, Lojban was invented…

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Discussions in the Comedy Community Posted by on Jan 11, 2010

Yes, Esperanto has been the target of many a joke. For all its praiseworthy qualities, it has a lot that can be mocked. (In the English-speaking world, for example, the verb for “to fare” has a suspicious phonetic resemblence to a wholly unrelated verb…) There’s also an “article” about Esperanto in a certain “dramatic encyclopedia”…

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Denominations of Time Posted by on Jan 5, 2010

Esperanto has always enjoyed a remarkably intuitive number system. We use root words for the cardinal numbers 0-9, and then there are various prefixes to denote larger and larger multiples. So, where languages like Spanish have words like cuarenta for 40 [N.B. – Thank you for catching me in yet another moment of stupidity, Toraku!]…

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