Tuesday, June 26, 2012

The Linguist’s Calendar: June 26

June 26

1992: Corsica’s parliament adopts a motion giving official status to the local language. This decision is not approved by the French government.






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EXTRA for today, more from Limits of Language:

Linguistic Naming Practices 

The biggest object ever named for a language is most probably a continent—Latin America (or rather a continent and a half, since it includes not only South, but also Central America). Indeed, it is not unlikely that Latin is also the language for which the largest number of objects has been named. That certainly does not mean that it does not have its competitors. One of the more striking is Esperanto.

Röllinger (1997), updated by Ka­min­ski & Bore (2002) lists more than 1 200 objects of various kinds in 59 countries named either after Esperanto, or its crea­tor Ludwig Zamenhof. The list includes about 700 streets, 140 mo­nu­ments, 50 buil­dings, 27 bus stops, 22 parks, 16 restaurants, 14 schools, 10 hospitals, 5 foun­tains, 6 hotels, 4 ships, 3 libraries, 2 islands, 2 shopping malls and 2 camping grounds, a brook, a mountain and a town (Esperantopolis, in Brazil).

 
A tulip was named Esperanto in 1968, and it was later joined by a similarly named clematis. A species of lichen is known as Zamenhofia, while a beetle has been baptized Gergithus esperanto. The Berhardt Progressive Furniture Collection of New Zealand markets a chair named Esperanto.
 

Esperanto has even made its presence known in outer space—in the late 1930s, Finnish astronomer Yrjö Väisälä named two asteroids Esperanto and Zamenhof. The language itself soon followed, as the spacecraft Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 included disks with Esperanto recordings, for the benefit of any interested aliens.


2 comments:

  1. Thank you for this unexpected posting. I'm sure you know that Esperanto is celebrating its 125th anniversary this year. That's quite an achievement for what started as the idea of just one man. It has survived wars and strikes and economic crises, and continues to attract young learners.

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  2. Thankyou for such an interesting article! Esperanto is certainly not something only historical. During a short period of 125 years Esperanto is now in the top 100 languages, out of 6,800 worldwide. It is the 22nd most used language in Wikipedia, ahead of Danish and Arabic. It is a language choice of Google, Skype, Firefox, Ubuntu and Facebook.

    Native Esperanto speakers, (people who have used the language from birth), include World Chess Champion Susan Polger, Ulrich Brandenberg the new German Ambassador to and Nobel Laureate Daniel Bovet.

    Financier George Soros learnt Esperanto as a child. Google Translate has recently added Esperanto as its 64th language.

    Esperanto is a living language - see http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8837438938991452670

    Their new online course http://www.lernu.net has 125 000 hits per day and Esperanto Wikipedia enjoys 400 000 hits per day. That can't be bad :)

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