esperanto flag, symbolism

http://flagspot.net/flags/qy-eo.html

Origin and symbolism of the flag

The Esperanto flag: green 2:3, white 1:1 canton with 0,35 radius green 5 pointed regular star pointing upwards centered on it.
António Martins, 04 Jun 1999

Esperanto organizations and individual esperantists use this flag as a general symbol of their language; variants defaced with organization names and slogans, written on the bottom half of the flag, are usual. Some organizations, especially those whose logo or emblem is based on the green star, put it on the canton of an otherwise unmodified esperanto flag (see particular variants).
António Martins, 14 May 2004

According to [rod97], both a star and the green color were associated to Esperanto quite early, following a call for it from B. G. Jonson, a Swedish Esperantist. Louis de Beaufront (who later become adept of Ido) proposed and initiated the usage of publishing books written in Esperanto with their covers green and with a star on it. The idea caught on and soon the green color and the star symbol were all over in Esperanto written books and periodicals. However nothing was fixed for the exact design of the star neither for its color — it was often golden, on the green background.

In 1893, were used the first lapel pins with a green star on a white background, by C. Rjabinis and P. Deullin, in a design used until today. The meaning of this symbol was, as usual, coined a posteriori — said to stand for the hope (green) of the five continents untited (5-pointed star) in common understanding and peace (white color)…

António Martins, 04 Jun 1999

The pentagon and the five-pointed stars were supposed to symbolize the five continents and the 'five races' of mankind. In a bow on top and at the bottom the flag got the names in English and French for the League of Nations.
Jarig Bakker, 10 October 1999

D: perhaps looking at the League of Nations flag will help.

Five continents, five RACES. I think we moderns squirm a bit at the mention of race.

Still, the League flag at least is not so demonstrably northern-hemisphere-centric as the UN flag.

I have pondered what a flag for a language I (knock on wood) will make might look like.

Any map will inevitably imply some sort of geographical superiority for one region.

But an abstract shape typically looks a bit like some ancient geometric occult symbol.

First of all, there are technically SEVEN continents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heptagram
D: Yup, an occult reference to alchemy exists.

I did like the olive wreath of the UN symbol though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_United_Nations
The blue color that appears in the background of the insignia was chosen to be "the opposite of red, the war color". The original color the group chose in 1945 was a gray blue that differs from the current United Nations flag.
The olive branches are a symbol for peace, and the world map represents all the people of the world.

http://www.greek-thesaurus.gr/Olympia-ancient-greek-olympic-games-champions.html

The olive crown was a constant reminder that much was expected of its recipient. He was a symbol of the highest moral values of the time in which he lived, and it was incumbent on him to speak and act in the finest traditions of aidos.

D: more "arete" (excellence, sans accent) than peace, originally.


The earlier version had the globe 90 degrees turned eastward compared with the present flag. According to press statements, the change was made to move North America away from the centre of the emblem.<sup>[6]

D: LOL! Does that mean in 2035, when the Chinese economy is TWICE the size of the USA economy, we hafta put China dead centre? [=</sup>

I just read Brin's "Uplift War". Thoughts on vocabulary.

D: normally I look up any words in a dictionary as I read.
It doesn't happen often, since I have a pretty extensive vocabulary.
... I think I have repetitive-stress injury from reading Brin's book.

Sadly, there was no rhyme or reason to which characters were using the obscure words.
I was willing to accept it about the advanced space alien.
Not for the militia chimp, though.
Brin cannot write dialogue. Behind every character I can always see Brin peering out.
I cannot recall the TV show, but some writer had all his characters using "whom" properly- it shattered my suspension of disbelief.

Brin got me thinking, though. There were many words that my compact dictionary of ONLY 60,000 words lacked. To my way of thinking, it means Brin could not write at a level appropriate for his audience.
But how many words does a typical person know?


http://www.balancedreading.com/vocabulary.html
Nagy and Anderson (1984) estimated that an average high school senior knows 45,000 words, but other researchers have estimated that the number is much closer to 17,000 words (D'Anna, Zechmeister, & Hall, 1991) or 5,000 words (Hirsh & Nation, 1992). Surely these dramatically different estimates depend upon the three questions described above, namely, what does it mean to "know" a word, what counts as a "word," and who counts as "average?"

D: perhaps as important as having a large lexicon is knowing when NOT to use it.
In factory work, I have confused co-workers with such words as fallacy, necromancy, celibate and so on.

D: I want to write some sci-fi this year. Reading Hugo and Nebula award winners is research into this. I was looking at my Webster's Compact Dictionary.
It contains just under 400 pages of words to know.
That would require a year of reading 1 page per day, which is hardly an onerous burden!
I don't want to be able to use the truly fancy words, for fear of accidentally using them when inappropriate. I would like to, however, be able to express nuance more effectively.
I need to be able to summon the right word as an author where as a reader I need only recognize it.

One more thing, Mr. Brin. "Brumous" is not a word. "Brumal" would be.
Plus a word used for accolades serves double duty for eulogy. It didn't quite feel right.
Picking just the right word by definition is important.
Picking the word that fits in a sequence just right is even harder.
Big and large, in theory, mean the same thing.
But "big man" and " large man" each carry their own subtle implications.
The more an author wanders away from a core vocabulary, the more likely they are to mislead the reader in an attempt to impress.

Aside: Esperanto originally claimed it only needed c. 1000 word roots, but now has c. 10,000.
I'd really like to make modular Magnetic Poetry for it at the next Congress.

http://ethnomed.org/cultures/chinese/chin_lang.html
(CHINESE)
A large dictionary usually contains 40,000 characters.² One must be able to recognize 2,000 to 3,000 characters to read a newspaper.

D: this resembles Ogden's Basic English.

http://ogden.basic-english.org/
If one were to take the 25,000 word Oxford Pocket English Dictionary and take away the redundancies of our rich language and eliminate the words that can be made by putting together simpler words, we find that 90% of the concepts in that dictionary can be achieved with 850 words.

D: I find some of these claims misleading. Any use of multiple word lexemes (MWLs) is more confusing than necessary. Learning more core words is preferable to generating meaning from a sequence of words that cannot be isolated to find the meaning.
For example, consider "put away", "put forth" and "put up (with)". Put is no help at all!
In fact, consider Ygyde's observation that
"The English language is not the best international auxiliary language because it is too ambiguous and too difficult to learn. For example, there are 56 meanings of the verb set, 11 meanings of the adjective set, and 47 meanings of the noun set, not counting subtle variations of these meanings. "
D: Let us assume that making chunked but manageable subsets of meaning with a new word for each is practical. That would leave about 11 words filling the void for the verb set.

I had toyed with the idea of using a tri-pitch system to capture 3 common meanings for Basic English words. I later incorporated pitch into VERSE instead to change other aspects.
http://www.geocities.com/dinosnider666/VERy_Simple_English
D: this will be be incorporated into a tale of submarine future sea nomads I'm working on.

the future of english. funny, then seriously

http://www.anvari.org/fun/Language_and_English/Language_Trends_of_the_Future.html

These consonants will not be entirely forgotten; they will migrate to
Czechoslovakia, which will by that time have no use for vowels.

In 200 years, the English vocabulary will be the union of all other
vocabularies, but the spelling will be original.

Similarly, the Japanese alphabet will be the union of all other
alphabets in the world.

The Cyrillic alphabet will eventually be the same as the Latin alphabet,
only backwards. A mirror will suffice for translating Russian into
Polish.

Finally, in 200 years, entire books in Germany will be one word. Plus a
verb at the end, of course.

D: ROTFL!

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19726491.300-how-global-success-is-changing-english-forever.html
Historical trends are a useful guide to the future. One common prediction is that Modern English is following the same path as classical Latin - a global language belonging to a powerful empire which evolved gradually, broke apart and was eventually buried by its progeny. According to language historians, as early as AD 300 the Latin of the masses had a vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar largely distinct from the elite's classical Latin. Over the next 500 years this "vulgar" Latin split into increasingly distinct regional dialects, and by AD 800 it had evolved into a family of mutually unintelligible languages - the forerunners of today's Italian, Spanish, French and other Romance languages.

http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/futurese.html

red, white, blue > *read, *wed, *blu

Early American /rEd wait blu/

Middle American /'read wajd blu/

Classical American /'rEad wajd bly/

Late American /'rEad wEd bly/

Pronounced: ['rE@d wEd bly"], i.e. "REH-ud wed blü"

D: 2100,2200, 3000 AD.

homophones and such

http://www.bifroest.demon.co.uk/misc/homophones-list.html

1. accessary, accessory
2. ad, add
3. ail, ale
4. air, heir
5. aisle, I'll, isle
6. all, awl
7. allowed, aloud
8. alms, arms
9. altar, alter
10. arc, ark

D: and then there are triplets, even quadruplets. awe, oar, or,
oreaye, eye, I
bel, bell, belle
bight, bite, byte
braise, brays, braze
buy, by, bye
caw, core, corps
censer, censor, sensor
cite, sight, site
cue, kyu, queue
doe, doh, dough
ewe, yew, you
(Reminds me of a variant of song lyric :hey you get off of my cloud! Hey, McCloud, get off of my ewe! <:)
flew, flu, flue
for, fore, four
haw, hoar, whore
heal, heel, he'll
holey, holy, wholly
meat, meet, mete
miner, minor, mynah

221. pair, pare, pear
222. palate, palette, pallet
223. paten, patten, pattern
224. pause, paws, pores, pours
225. peak, peek, peke, pique

praise, prays, preys

221. rain, reign, rein
222. raise, rays, raze

right, rite, wright, write
roo, roux, rue
saw, soar, sore

331. sear, seer, sere
332. seas, sees, seize
333. sew, so, sow

331. taught, taut, tort
332. te, tea, tee

there, their, they're

331. to, too, two
332. toad, toed, towed

vain, vane, vein
wail, wale, whale
ware, wear, where

331. way, weigh, whey
332. we, wee, whee

weal, we'll, wheel
yaw, yore, your, you're

Wow...

great articulation animations

http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/about.html

D: I couldn't get Firefox to work.
Try Explorer, and make sure you click on the Quicktime plug-in.

I'm still snickering about a website I visit daily.
Eureka Alert.
Of course, the site name has no spaces.
eurekalert.
Now say it.

"You REEK alert!"
[=

common world phonemes

http://www.eskimo.com/~ram/segmental_phonemes.png

D: very nice summary chart of common world phonemes.
I saved the screen with Printscreen. It saved to bmp format.
I then opened it up and resaved as a jpeg in Paint.
A bit of work...

Looking for common phonemes in this chart, I am reminded of an old song lyric from "Garden Party". It goes "you can't please everyone, so you've got to please yourself".
http://bahai-library.com/books/lango/lang36.html#a

D: this is tricky. There is some art as well as science involved. Some sounds are subdivided into subsounds, but may be palatable to many as a more general sound, particularly R-derived ones.

"UPSID was a phonological inventory of 317 languages published in 1984 by researchers at the University of California. Examination of the selected tongues, each one representative of a different recognised language family grouping, showed the following 20 to be the commonest consonant phonemes:"

D: this UPSID study is the typical starting point for a second-language aux-lang.
If one excludes all deal breakers, i.e. any phoneme at least one major language lacks, there are not many left at all.
Take Japanese, for example. They do not distinguish between L and R. And so on.
Sounds that English-speakers assume are common may not be. Any TH derived sound, for example.
A quick comparison to Esperanto shows how bad it is by this measure.

Aside: I still get posts from the Esp-o facebook group. They want it taught in schools. WHY?!?

English has 43 (ish) phonemes, which is a lot, but Esp-o is not far behind with 34!

http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/#b

Japanese:	/ m b p w n d t r z s j g k h /
Hawaiian:	/ m p w n l k h ? /
Rotokas:	/ p B t * k g /

D: the unfortunate thing about the 'arts' is that nobody ever decisively wins a point.
The loser can claim the points are spurious or adequately answered.
The Esperantists are still insisting they've adequately responded to any and all criticisms.

Universal Esperanto Congresses take place each year in a different nation.

2009

Białystok

Poland

Then Cuba in 2010- closer maybe.
MONTREAL, QUEBEC--(Marketwire - July 7, 2008) - Between July 11 and July 18, 2008, the Quebec University in Montreal (UQAM) will host the 7th Esperanto Congress of the Americas (TAKE7

D: I can only imagine the sorts this attracts! I somehow imagine lots of UNIX programmers, aged and with beards, LOL!

Back to LangX - it initially proposes 20 consonants and 5 vowels.
I have seen schemes that stick to AUI for vowels to make them almost truly universal.
I can only assume it would be remarkably verbose or far too general.

D: my news year's resolution is to complete my alphabet.
This will involve
1) taking my HIOX basis
2) xeroxing a blank of the character dozens of times
3) studying one good university website with little animated movies of articulation
4) showing these on the standard pictogram, slightly stylized
5) converting them to somewhat more abstract or at least obscure pictogram
D: they should be obvious once the code or key to read it is indicated.
I was reading about Etruscan and realized a problem with a phonetic or phonemic alphabet. It requires centralized received pronunciation or else every area with their own dialect will spell it differently. Until the advent of large-scale government structures and mass media, phonetic alphabets were a can of worms with more problems than they were worth.

etymology of word apparently doesn't help

I was reading the Toronto Star a week ago.
The author described a young man with an "illusive" smile.
Apparently this was quite fetching.
I suspect the author meant "elusive".
Illusive is clearly related to illusion in its origin.
Elusive, to elude.

Folks that learn language primarily by sound and not sight will make these errors in English.

I think I busted some other major newspaper for confusing "elicit" with "illicit". This is even less forgivable. Elicit is a verb and illicit is an adjective. A simple understanding of word order should have prevented this. BBC online this week had "it's" and "its" confused.

I have advice to aspiring journalists. Visit some web sites. Google a few terms such as "common mistakes English".
----
D: Punctuation humor.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/08/20/1092972728267.html
The exclamation mark is "... a screamer, a gasper, a startler or (sorry) a dog's cock".
Poor writers are prone to using triple exclamation marks for effect. !!!
Any good editor would never accomodate 3 of these. ... ... [=