Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 2nd May 2008 20:52 UTC, submitted by irbis
One of the biggest problems facing the European Union today is the fact that within its borders, 23 languages are spoken. This means that all the important documents have to be translated by a whole army of translators, which costs the taxpayer more than 1 billion Euros a year - and companies trading within the EU spend millions more. The EU-funded TC-STAR project aims to tackle this issue with technology: a system that eats speech in one language, and outputs that same speech in another.
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Member since:
2008-05-03
Come on, Esperanto is a stupid idea. First of all, it is not "universal", or easy to learn for everyone - it is hugely biased toward latin language speakers. Esperanto is much more difficult to learn if you are an english speaker of a japanese speaker than if you speak, say, italian.
So all this stuff about how it is less culturally biased is a load of tommyrot.
Secondly, 51% of the population of the EU's 27 countries can speak english, right now. This compares to the 0.000000000000001% (or whatever it is) that can speak esperanto the language of latinate nerds.
So from a practical perspective you would have to retrain a huge population of people to speak your made up language all at once. A colossal waste of human time for billions of people. Nothing short of a brutal global totalitarian state could make esperanto a success, or ever could.
So there's no point whinging on about it and how superior it supposedly is. It's pointless and wrong in every way.