[ruby-talk:11476] Re: Esperanto (was: trial balloon: Ruby desktop?)

In article <01022401271901.27168@starcrusher>,
W. Kent Starr <[e-mail]> wrote:
>There was also Basic English, essentially a simplified and reduced English 
>vocabulary, which also did not really catch on, possibly due to the 
>"English-centric" nature or possibly from the fact that it (and for the most 
>part Esperanto and other "universal language" attempts) for the most part 
>addressed vocabulary and not construction, which is an equally significant 
>aspect of language.

I believe Zero Wing was translated into Basic English.

And Esperanto addresses construction foremost.  All verbs, nouns, and
adjectives inflect the same way.  Of course, there are some Europisms
in the language like adjective-noun agreement, inflection for plurals
and the accusative case, and of course the notorious definite article.
Those concepts can be just as tough as trying to remember "one mouse,
two mice."

>Best bet is for someone fluent in Japanese and functional in English to 
>translate the documentation (ditto for other languages) and then native 
>speakers of these other languages can do any polishing necessary.

Whether we like it or not, English has become the unofficial official
language of all sorts of things, including programming.  I like it
because it's convenient to me, but I also regret both that Americans
have another excuse to forget that other languages exist, and that
English is such a difficult language.  A Japanese person learning
English, for example, not only has to learn the Western way of
expressing oneself, but also all this grammatical and orthographic
mess that we've accumulated through successive invasions of England.

Also, Esperanto hasn't made the transition to the Web very well.  Some
pages that are written in the Unicode character set work well, but some
pages insist on using the Latin-3 character set, which doesn't render
properly on most browsers.  One has to hunt down and download a bunch of
Esperanto fonts, and even then some pages seem to almost insist on
displaying the wrong characters.  It makes me secretly wish everyone
would use the X convention, even if it's a little unaesthetic.  And
that still leaves the problem of how to type them.

-- 
Nick Bensema <[e-mail]>      ICQ#2135445 
==== ======= ==============
BOY, THIS IS REALLY EXPENSIVE!