China the Beautiful

[chinapage]

Esperanto speakers gathering in Beijing


By Qin Jize (China Daily)
Updated: 2004-07-26 08:34


The curtain rose Sunday on another gala for Esperanto speakers around the world. The 89th Universal Esperanto Congress opened Sunday in Beijing.

This is the second time China has hosted the largest and most important Esperanto gathering, with more than 2,000 participants from 52 countries and regions.

Esperanto was invented by Polish L L Zamenhof in 1887. It is an artificial language based on European roots. It was originally intended as a main mode of communication for people around the world.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-07/26/content_351555.htm

[Aolung]

BTW, Zamenhof thought of Esperanto to be a means of communication among the Jewish people all around the world: something between Yiddish (maybe not accepted by Jews beyond German-Slavic area) and Hebrew (too difficult to learn for common people).

Here's some discussion on this topic on my lojban board:

http://www.lojban.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=Zamenhof&highlight=zamenhof%20hebrew

The article on the relationship between Hebrew and Esperanto discussed there can be read at my site (since no longer available on its original - Israelian - page):

http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de/HEBREW.RXML

Alfred