From: "dr. Eduard Werner (Edward Wornar)" <edi <at> SERBSKI-INSTITUT <dot> DE>
Date: 23 mar 2000
Subject: Re: Beginners Book in Esperanto

Dnja Wed, 22 Mar 2000 sæe pisali:
> >Cxu la tutan libron estas en esperanto? Mi estas esperantiston kaj volas
> >lerni la vortojn de japana sxako. Cxu kiu havas la vortarojn?
> >Rikard
> 
> Esperanto is an international or universal language intended to be used by
> people from various linguistic backgrounds, as a method of communications.
> There have been hundreds of attempts, since the 17th century, to create an
> artificial language that would encompass the majority of the Worlds
> languages.  Esperanto is one of those attempts at such a language.  Dr.
> Ludwig Zamenhoff (a physician and linguist) of Poland presented it to the
> public in 1887, as a small text booklet.  It is made up of individual root
> words from Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, and Germanic languages, which have
> various prefixes and suffixes added, so as to simplify the words.  It has
> been shown that Esperanto can be learned in 10 - 20 percent of the time
> required to learn most any other national language.  It was estimated in
> 1991, by Sidney S. Culbert, University of Washington, that over 2 million
> people were speaking the Esperanto language.

Well, it's hard to tell since no one ever counted. It took me about two weeks
to pick it up, and I know that other people were even faster than me ...
There's lots of translated and original literature, and even s.th. on shogi ;-)

Best

Edi
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