Harry Potter and the Muggle Linguist. Part III

I'm sure most of you can't imagine why in the world anyone would want to translate something into a made-up language. Esperanto and similar artificial languages have the goal of leveling international problems by doing away with a major block toward mutual understanding, namely language differences, without favoring an existing language. I never put a lot of faith in that philosophy, because same language does not equal same culture nor mutual respect, and no matter how easy the inventors and supporters claim the artificial language is to learn, they still take some learning. Unfortunately, many people resist learning with a fiery passion. Having a language like Esperanto that is heavily Latin biased does very little to help a native speaker of Russian, Thai, Finnish, or Japanese learn the language. ( Read more... )