Mi fartas bone ĉar mi havas anason
Oil on panel
6 x 6 inch
I like languages. In the Netherlands we learn French, English and German at school and I always thought that those are subjects which would actually be useful later in life. When I graduated from Minerva, the Dutch Art College, my father said I could name something as a reward and I asked for a language course in Spanish.
There’s another language I have always been fascinated with and it has been my wish since many years to learn it, but I never got around actually doing it. This language is Esperanto. The internet came to the rescue: there are several sites to help you learn Esperanto, Duolingo gives one a nice grounding in many languages, and is also an app for your phone, and Lernu! is a site for Esperanto.
Esperanto started off in the 1880’s as a constructed language, it means ”hope”. The inventor of Esperanto is dr Zamenhoff. The idea was that Esperanto should be an easy, flexible international auxiliary language for everybody, thereby promoting peace and understanding.
And he was somewhat successful, Esperanto is (comparatively) easy, and flexible and many Esperanto speakers have friends all over the globe. (All dictators and authoritarian regimes hate it)
Esperanto also seems to program your mind for learning languages, if a child learns Esperanto first, it will learn every other language faster afterwards.
Mi skribas this on my komputelo with my hundo at my feet.
I bet you got the gist of that sentence! The word komputelo is an interesting example of how Esperanto evolves like any other language but I will spare you the utter nerdiness of expanding on that.
And grammar….
Don’t we all hate grammar? Especially all those bloody exceptions. No language has grammar without exceptions.
Except Esperanto.
Esperanto’s grammar is perfect and beautiful in it’s mathematical perfection.
I have never felt like this about any other language.
So: ”Mi fartas bone ĉar mi havas anason”
”I am doing well because I have a duck”
Obviously.
There’s a few of these gems in the Duolingo lessons… I am sure some of them will pop up in a drawing or painting from time to time. ”Kiu estas ĉi tiu virino, kiu dormas ĉi tie?” comes to mind, it definitely deserves a drawing. Just wait for it!
