Mike Jones's blog

More fractionalization of English, and our funny bone

From, “Advice for Yankees Moving South”:

“Don't be worried that you don't understand anyone. They don't understand you either.”

Here’s the link:

http://www.c4vct.com/kym/humor/yms.htm

(16.Feb.2012, Taiyuan, China)

Nova slogano por Esperanto

The linguistic corridor is sometimes dark and slippery. Esperanto provides you with a handrail in traversing it.

(16.Feb.2012, Taiyuan, China)

“It’ll never fly, Orville!”

Here’s an exchange regarding Esperanto on the “English Language and Usage” Q & A website, where the cretin dissing Esperanto got hoist by his own petards:

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/57358/idiom-about-tackling-sm...

Preseraro en la nova Wells-vortaro

En la nova Wells-vortaro, por la anglalingva vorto “compote” estas donita “komposto”, sed estu “kompoto”.

Further Esperanto support for ESL

I recently had a conversation with an ESL colleague about words in English that have a double form: Germanic and French (apparently a legacy of the Norman Conquest). I decided to compile a list. It came to fifteen (15) items. I titled it “GF Double-Sourced English Vocabulary”, and included the following explanation:

“GF Double-Sourced English Vocabulary consists, by definition, of pairs of synonyms, or near-synonyms, one of which is of Germanic origin, and the other of French (technically: Latin) origin.”

I have uploaded this document, which is in Microsoft Word 2007, to my “gallery” in Ipernity, and announced it there in a blog post there. Here is the link to the blog post there:

http://www.ipernity.com/blog/101198/374316

I put the vocabulary into a table, and I think I can simply dump the whole document, table and all right here. Let’s try:

GF Double-Sourced English Vocabulary
(In the Public Domain. No rights reserved.)

Yet another slogan for Esperanto: outreach

Esperanto is the most impressive outreach program ever devised.

Further fractionalization of English

There is an item, now of long standing, of further fractionalization of English which, so far as I am aware, no one has yet related directly to the language barrier, and the increased difficulty of the task of learning English, namely, the fact that grammar checkers are notoriously wrong, and so are seriously misleading to any learner of English who depends on the grammar checker to, uh, check grammar. Someday grammar checkers will no doubt make the grade (pun intended), but it’s hard to say when. As the saying goes, prediction is risky business, especially when it concerns the future. For example, top scientists in the early 50’s said to the government, “Shower us with money, and we’ll give you controlled hydrogen fusion in two or three years.” The government did so (Project Sherwood), but we STILL don’t have it. (Having it would be an awesome thing. It would mean electricity “too cheap to meter”!)

Yet another slogan for Esperanto

When it comes to keeping in touch, nothing can touch Esperanto.

(15.Jan.2012, Taiyuan China)

English alone would not be sufficient

For years now I have pointed out that English alone would not be sufficient for the world, regardless of the status or even (non-)existence of Esperanto. Here is what I said herein about that:

Short Intro to General Topology

I have uploaded to my Ipernity account a document (in MS Word 2007 format) titled “A Short Intro to General Topology”. (I will be scanning the document into PDF format soon, and uploading that version as well.) The document is 19 pages in length. It is in English, but includes a note in Esperanto for the librarian. Here is the note:

Por la bibliotekisto:
Ĉi tiu verko estas en la angla, pri La Ĝenerala Topologio, parto de la Matematiko.
titolo: Mallonga Enko al La Ĝenerala Topologio
(En la Publika Regno. Neniuj rajtoj rezervitaj.)