Photographic evidence:

I’m the guy on the edge looking like an aging hippy hanging out with a bunch of college kids.

It looks like enough of us will be in town over the summer to make it worth having meetings. If you’re interested in Esperanto and live in or near Champaign-Urbana, join us!

Esperanto has been important to me for twenty years. I’ve traveled overseas with it. I’ve met bunches of cool people, read fascinating books and magazines, and listened to great music.  Most important, I’ve done it on equal terms with the writers, performers, guests, hosts, and other people that I’ve met.  Instead of one of us speaking our native language, we’re both speaking a second language–but one that’s easy to learn.  Easy enough to learn that you don’t need to have any special talent with languages to learn it.

Happy Esperanto Day!

There have been Esperanto-language publications that focused on science fiction (in particular, the Sfero series published by Grupo Nifo), but none of those seem to be active at the moment. (This is not as sad as it might seem, though, because the Esperanto-language literary magazines are not averse to publishing science fiction or fantasy. In particular, a recent issue of Beletra Almanako focused on speculative fiction.)

I told Gareth what I knew about sf in Esperanto, but also reached out to the Esperanto community, asking if anyone knew translators or publishers who would be interested in doing something with Gareth’s work. Pretty promptly, I heard back from Brazilian publisher Luciana F Campos whose publishing house Lusíadas was interested in publishing Gareth’s work.

I’ve heard from Gareth that the publications are now out.  Esperanto translations of two of his stories can be found in I Antologio Luzidoj (link to pdf) as well as Portuguese translations in I Antologia Lusíadas (link to pdf).

Helping make another Esperanto connection in the world is really its own reward, but as a bonus I also got this cool link to Douglas Smith’s Foreign Market List, an annotated list of  publications that buy foreign-language reprint rights to English-language stories.

With that in mind, I’ve been going ahead and scheduling a chunk of walk/photograph time between my two morning writing sessions. Today, though, I was meeting some friends for lunch, so I postponed the walk until late morning, then did my walking and photography in the neighborhood of the restaurant.

Thursdays are my most social day–I have lunch with one group of friends (a couple of them former coworkers) and then before dinner meet with my local Esperanto group. With all that, plus the fact that I spent a chunk of the afternoon working on a short talk that I delivered to the Esperanto group, meant that my fiction word count was just 500 words. But they’re words I’m happy with.

About Esperanto

• Esperanto.net General information about Esperanto.
• Universala Esperanto-Asocio The big international Esperanto organization.
• Esperanto Access An excellent introduction to Esperanto for non-Esperantists.

National organizations in English-speaking countries

• Esperanto USA
• Esperanto Association of Britain
• Australian Esperanto Association
• New Zealand Esperanto Association
• Kanada Esperanto-Asocio
• Quebec Esperanto Society

Learning Esperanto

• Learnu.net is the place to start.
• Project Gutenberg Esperanto texts includes a number of Esperanto text books, some works by Zamenhof, and some other public-domain stuff in or on Esperanto.

Local to East-Central Illinois

• East-Central Illinois Esperanto Club / Esperanto-Klubo de Orient-Centra Ilinojo
• To keep up to date on Esperanto activity in and around Champaign County in Illinois, join the Esperanto_Champaign mailing list.

My English-language writing that features Esperanto

• Frugal travel with Esperanto an article for Wise Bread about Pasporta Servo.
• Cheap international payments with Esperanto another article for Wise Bread that discusses “hawala” and compares it to the international payment account that every member of UEA gets.

There are several komencantoj, but also three or four of us who speak Esperanto adequately, so we’re trying to do a mix of things at the meetings.  We’ve been reading Gerda Malaperis, which is something that even beginners can do. We also started watching Mazi, which is fun. We’ve decided to all read a couple of articles from the Esperanto Wikipedia and show up ready to discuss them. We’re hoping that narrowing the topic of conversation down to a specific article will make it easier for people who’s working vocabulary is still really small–they can look up a few domain-specific words before the meeting (even make notes to refer to, if necessary).

I’ve already noticed improvements in my own Esperanto, after just three meetings–it’s amazing how fast you can pick up fluency if you’ll just practice.

Here’s the folks who were at the last meeting:

Our new local Esperanto group: Jack Hutchens, Omar Ali, Phoebe, Darcy Ross, Matt, Meryl Garrison.

My brother, Steve, is once again organizing Esperanto-Tago, a day for everyone with a blog to post about language problems from their own perspective, bilingually–in their own language and in Esperanto.

Two years ago, all kinds of people posted on all kinds of topics–immigrants, children of immigrants, people whose native language has a small number of speakers, people whose languages are not supported by the culture where they live.  Everybody has some language problems, if only wanting to connect with people with whom they don’t share a common language.

At the Esperanto-Tago page there’s support of various kinds, including support for hooking non-Esperanto-speakers up with volunteers willing to translate their post into Esperanto.

If you’ve got a blog, think about the language problems that you face, and consider writing a post for Esperanto-Tago.

At his urging, I took the quiz, which showed me as “sofia.” The flash dohicky the provided to show it on the blog, though, messed up my page, so I took it down.