gazetara komuniko pri la 26-a de septembro

*Teksto de Bill Chapman sendita de li al pluraj ĵurnaloj kaj de mi al la
londonaj ĵurnaloj.*
*Amike, Renato*

*Esperanto movement backs the European Day of Languages*


It’s nearly time to celebrate the European Day of Languages, a day which
has taken place every year since 2001 on 26 September, as an initiative of
the Council of Europe.


The Esperanto Association feels that learning any language is worth doing,
although life is simply too short to learn them all.


Esperanto started life with one speaker. Its inventor, Ludovic Lazarus
Zamenhof (1859–1917), was born in the multilingual city of Bialystok, in
Russian-controlled Poland, where Jews, Poles, Germans, and Russians lived
in ethnic enclaves and mutual hostility. From his teenage years the Jewish
Zamenhof dreamed of inventing a new language that would bridge ethnic and
national differences — not by replacing native languages, but by becoming a
universally shared common language for people around the world to use with
each other if they were from different linguistic backgrounds. Esperanto
was the result, designed specifically to be simple to learn yet fully
expressive.


On 26 July 1887, Zamenhof unveiled his new language in a thin pamphlet
published in Russian under the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto (“Doctor
Hopeful”), which soon became known as the Unua Libro (First Book).

Alternately embraced and mocked, persecuted and ignored, Esperanto has
stubbornly survived, and today it is spoken by an international community
whose members are estimated to number anywhere from scores of thousands to
two million. Many Esperantists open their homes to Esperanto-speaking
travellers and mingle at international holidays where they share the foods
and cultures of other lands. And a few of them even raise multilingual
children who have Esperanto as one of their native languages, quite often
the consequence of people from different linguistic backgrounds meeting
through Esperanto and subsequently falling in love.


Online, today’s would-be speakers of Esperanto can study for free with the
help of the language-learning app Duolingo, which launched its Esperanto
course for English-speakers two years ago. In that time over one million
people have used it to start learning the language.


Next summer some 2,000 Esperanto speakers from 80 countries will come
together in Lisbon, in what might be seen as the parliament of a dispersed
speaker population.


Learning languages contributes to the understanding of other countries and
their cultures, says Tim Owen of the Esperanto Association of Britain.


Ends


For further information on Esperanto, contact Tim Owen on 0773 741 0480 /
[email protected], or send an email to the Esperanto Association of
Britain at [email protected].




-- 

*~~~*
*Renato Corsetti, 117 Dukes Avenue, London N10 2QD, UK/Britujo tel.
+393286315655, +447399273515 [email protected]
<[email protected]> <[email protected]>*