Thank you for sharing this, Ingrid. I will check the Esperanto posts out and will read with interest, especially about the German town with bilingual German and Esperanto signage.

Saluton, salaton, Salamon kaj Shalomon, kara Sarah.

Adenoid Hynkel and Benzino Napaloni were much chagrined at Chaplin’s signage in Esperanto in “The Great Dictator”. If you check out wicked Wiki’s final link to that 1940 classic black comedy, titled, ‘The original trailer for the film’ the said signage shows up several times. On a more serious note, Hitler and Stalin and Tojo, but not Mussolini to his credit (perhaps because Zamenhof based Esperanto on the euphony of Italian) had hundreds of esperantists incarcerated and put to death in their notorious concentration camps. HO MIA DIO.

All Googleable: More recently William Shatner in “INCUBUS” actually monologues in Esperanto. It also appears up front in RED DWARF and in the background of The Jetsons and in The Simpsons. Frasier’s Roz Doyle was apparently fluent in Esperanto (episode ‘Voyage of the damned’), and West Wing’s President Bartlett was ‘accused’ of wanting students to learn ‘esoteric’ subjects that included Esperanto. Heaps more!

Amike via. (Paulo, ne la Apostolo.)

No, I didn’t. I don’t think he spoke Esperanto, but he nevertheless knew what it is. In Sieber, which is just beside Herzberg there is a hotel where the owners are Esperanto speakers and they do get guests from all over the world because of it. I had lunch there a few times and it was nice to be able to order in Esperanto. In Herzberg there are restaurants with Esperanto speaking owners, but nevertheless most people in Herzberg don’t speak Esperanto.

Nearly nothing can be perfectly fair. It is true that Esperanto is a bit easier for people who speak a Latin based language, but it is still much easier than English for other people like Chinese or Japanese speakers. Esperanto could have taken one word from each of the 5000 languages or so that exist, but then it would be hard for everyone or even take words that are not similar to any language, that would make it fair, but not easy. At the moment even if not perfectly fair it would be so much fairer than using English. By the way in the Netherlands all public phones had the signage in 4 languages: Dutch, English, French and Esperanto. But now we don’t use public phones any more.

Airports are interesting spaces in that they are constructed as more global than national. This can have exclusive consequences for minority speakers, as in this example from Inner Mongolia.

About signage I just had a message from an Esperanto speaking friend from Finland and he sent me a photo showing that they updated the signage in Helsinki airport. Now it is in English in very big letters and underneath in much smaller letters in Finnish and Swedish. It is nice that the signage is not just in Finnish, but shouldn’t the font in Finnish be at least the same size as the one in English? Helsinki is in Finland after all.

That’s so cool. Herzberg is definitely on my bucket list … btw, did you try Esperanto on the taxi driver?

I visited Herzberg a few years ago and I took a taxi from the station. I still remember talking with the taxi driver (I can speak German) and he asked where I come from and I said from Australia. And I remember the taxi driver being surprised and he asked why on Earth is an Australian interested in visiting such a small place. I said because there is an Esperanto event taking place and he answered I should have known that it is because of Esperanto!

Thanks, Sarah! We have a little collection of Esperanto-related posts here. You might be particularly interested in this one about Herzberg am Harz, a German town where signage is bilingual in German and Esperanto.
Here’s an example:

Congratulations, Paul! Would love to see your speech – maybe a write up for Language on the Move? 🙂