The Big Smoke

Esperanto people piss me off. They act like they're saving the world and evolving into some kind of new and better forum of humanity and I'm damned sick of it.

Once upon a time I took a few Linguistics classes, and on one of the finals, there were a bunch of questions about motherfucking Esperanto. Now, is a language that's completely artificial really a valid scientific example of a human language? Like, could I get my biology degree by analyzing a picture some kid drew of a dog?

Every time you meet, or read anything by, an Esperanto freak, it's inevitably trying to get you to join their batty pseudo-religion, and I'm getting fucking sick of hearing about that made-up fantasy language, so, in an attempt to get Esperanto speakers to leave me the fuck alone, I've decided to write a counterpoint to this Why We Should Learn Esperanto page I stumbled.

1) The first practical reason which I want to mention is to enjoy yourself. By means of Esperanto you can meet and become acquainted with many good-hearted, interesting, educated, clever, talented persons. You can travel to various countries throughout the world.

Say I decide to visit, to pick a random example, Taiwan. Wouldn't it be smarter of me, if I wanted to not get lost, and to communicate with the locals, to, you know, learn fucking Mandarin or Taiwanese? Do you think learning a language that few if any people speak at all is really going to be useful travelling? I mean I suppose I could find some Esperanto club, but when you're travelling, you're probably going to have to ask for directions.

According to the article, this is but one of the many situations in which a strong command of Esperanto will come in useful.

Aside from that, what's really going to get me in touch with Taiwan's culture? Esperanto in my freaky decorationless, white-walled Esperanto shrine, or Chinese on the streets of Taipei?

2) The second practical reason is to have like-minded friends (some of whom you have not even previously met) who will greet you and welcome you anywhere in the world.

Fair enough, but:

If you want to gain money, study English; but if you want to have friends, learn Esperanto.

Shut the fuck up you bastard. That's true of any language, even if you just stay home. Seriously, my first language is Portuguese, and anytime I hear someone speaking it here in Canada, it's an instant friendship. If you think the members of your insane fake language cult are the only people who experience that, try living far from home and hearing your native language.

If I wanted to learn a language just to make friends, I'd learn Cantonese or Mandarin or Hindi or Korean or Turkish or any large language really. You can find speakers all over the world, and they appreciate like hell when a foreigner puts the effort into learning their tongue.

Besides, when you learn Hindi, you can talk about something other than the Hindi language. What's the only thing Esperanto speakers ever talk about?

3) The third practical reason for learning Esperanto, especially for children in English-speaking and Asian lands, is that Esperanto provides a good way of beginning the study of a language other than your native tongue. Various experiments show that pupils learn the rule-guided language Esperanto more rapidly than European national languages such as English and French.

They must have been teaching it to some pretty retarded children, then. If you actually have to spend the effort of learning a brand new vocabulary, and get absolutely nothing as a result, you shouldn't be proud of yourself, you should be pissed off.

I'd never force my kid to learn Esperanto. I don't want my child's introduction to the world to be some Sysiphean nightmare.

4) Let me turn now to the second kind of reason for studying Esperanto, namely, to expand your mind in order to have a better understanding of the world. As Canadian Esperantist Dr. Stevens Norvell of Nova Scotia rightly notes, Esperanto is "a window to the world." When you are able to read and hear Esperanto, you can use it to become informed about other countries, other cultures, and other viewpoints through books, newspapers, magazines, sound-tapes, videotapes, radio and television broadcasts, web-sites, and web-messages. You can acquire information from a neutral point of view about what is happening throughout the whole world.

Fuck off, you cunt. You want a window to the world, look at the language you're typing in: Half the books in the world currently are published in English. More books have been translated into English than any other language, along with a substantial body of shit written in English itself.

95% of the books published in Esperanto are translated, and most of those are from English. Beside, art is rooted in the cultures it comes from. Can a great novel really work in a language without any cultural context? Of course not.

And neutral? I've never met a more fanatical zealot than the average Esperanto speaker. Do you think I can reasonably expect neutrality from someone who violently dedicates themselves to a linguistic game of 'Let's Pretend'? Ha, Esperanto speakers make Ben Laden look like an emotionless machine.

But as an example of media available in Esperanto, here's a clip from William Shatner's low budget Esperanto film, "Incubus":

The only other Esperanto movie ever made was destroyed by it's director, because it just sucked so bad. I think that should be a wonderful example of the brave new worlds you're opening yourself up to by learning Esperanto.

Last but most retarded:

5) The third kind of reason to learn Esperanto is for me personally the most important. It is the moral reason, and it has two sides. First, you can have a relationship with other persons throughout the world on the basis of equality and justice because you are using the world-wide neutral language Esperanto instead of your own national language. You will not require others to use your language, and they will not require you to use their language. Consequently there exists a feeling of equality and justice between you and others. The second aspect of the moral kind of reason for learning Esperanto is the fact that, as an Esperantist, you are helping to create an evolving harmonious global community. Through Esperanto you become part of an important historical movement which promotes a sense of solidarity among all humans. Esperanto is not only a language. We Esperantists constitute a totally new kind of universal community based on the use of our global language. We together are now moving beyond the inter-nationalism of the twentieth century to the globalism of the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, at the same time we are helping to conserve the many national languages in the various parts of the world, thus preserving linguistic diversity.

So what this fuckhead is trying to say is that he's actually saving the world by starting a kooky little cult and calling it a nationality.

Get a load of this, shit-for-brains: Esperanto is a mishmash of Western European languages. As far as I can tell, 100% of the vocabulary is drawn from German, French, Italian or Spanish. As a native speaker of Portuguese, I can already make out a good 75% of Esperanto just by guessing. Do you think a native speaker of Swahili or Japanese or Hindi would be able to learn the language with the same ease? Of course fucking not. What you've done is made for yourself a big, ugly White's Only club and now you violently impose yourselves upon us like the saviours of humanity.

Interestingly enough, a brief search on the web will show you that the majority of Esperanto sites out there are aimed at indoctrinating children. Yeah, that's not fucked up.

Is anyone honestly stupid enough to believe that learning a fake language with no culture and no real history going to help you universalize humanity or some shit? Hell, if you really want to contribute to multicultural diversity, instead of cutting yourself off from the rest of the world, and starting a cult which you euphemistically and psychotically refer to as a cult, why not learn a real language, and translate a great book? Are you doing more of a service to spreading tolerance and cultural understanding by cutting yourself off from the world and spitting on every culture in existence, or by increasing appreciation in your own nation for that of others?

You Esperanto shits are no better than Scientologists or Heaven's Gate or any of those other blatant psychopaths, and you're more aggressive missionaries than Jehova's Witnesses. Get the fuck off my planet.