Stupid Trivia

I have a guilty pleasure of a movie: Incubus. It was released in 1965, starred William Shatner and filmed by a lot of Outer Limits crew. What makes it stands out is that was performed entirely in Esperanto. What's weirder: it's the second movie made in the Susan-B-Anthony-dollar of languages. In 1964, Angoroj, came out: scooping this lost Shatner epic by a whole year.

The irony: more people speak Klingon than Esperanto. Kapla!

What could be worse?



There's your answer all the way from the 1978 Sci-Fi Awards.

Comments

Tonyo said…
> "more people speak Klingon than Esperanto"

That is simply not true. It's just another urban (or Internet) legend.

Look at:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.08/es.languages.html

An article about the relationship between cinema and Esperanto (in Spanish): http://personal.telefonica.terra.es/web/tdb/cine.htm

If you are interested in knowing the facts about Esperanto, you may look at http://www.esperanto.net
10/08/2006 08:50:00 AM
Shawn DeWolfe said…
Native speakers of Klingon and Esperanto amount to a statistical fluke.
Klingon-- like contemporary Korean-- was invented by a linguist. Esperanto was invented by a Polish othamologist. Klingon was invented to prop up a pop-culture franchise. Esperanto was invented from a stew of languages and grammar. Both have a loose foundation in reality: Klingon is linguistically consistent and spoken languages are not consistent. Esperanto is a forced mish mash of tongues. Lingual stew is how English came about: people kept showing up in Britain, taking plunder and leaving lingo. Then English was further altered through contact and imperialism in Asia (pyjamas, shanghaiing, etc.). But sitting down with a pen-and-paper and drawing up a language is a guarantee of failure. This is why French is a language in decline (because of strict admission of what is French); but Mandarin and Spanish are exploding. Both have large population bases behind them, but they also admit foreign words where convienent and remain relevant through adaptation.
As for the popularity of languages: language experiments like Klingon, Esperanto and Tolkien Elvish are not accurately charted. While I have hard time believing there are more than 2 million Klingon speakers worldwide, I also have a hard time believing there are 2 million Esperanto speakers.
10/08/2006 02:48:00 PM
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