>Interesia!
>
>It's been around for nearly a hundred years and is used (according to one source) by 3 million people world-wide. Surprised I haven't heard more about it. The word Experanto seems somewhat familiar to me for some reason.
>
>You truly are a fountain of knowledge Hilmar...

Thanks.

>
>Renoir

Some additional facts, which I consider interesting:

There have been at least 50-100 other attempts to create "artificial languages", but none has been as successful as Esperanto.

Bahá'u'lláh, the founder of the Bahá'í Faith (www.bahai.org) suggested several steps to unite the human race. One of them is to either select, or invent, an international auxiliary language, to be taught in all schools all over the world. Thus, if you come to a foreign city, you will feel as if you were home. (Note: I am a member of the Bahá'í Faith.)

My Esperanto teacher (no, I myself don't know Esperanto well) said that Modern Hebrew is an artificial language, based of Ancient Hebrew.

The same teacher also said that Esperanto can be learned in 1/5 of the time it takes to learn the average European language. This doesn't surprise me, given the large amount of irregularities and "special cases" in a typical "natural" language.

A Bolivian computer expert considers created a translation program that uses Aymara (a native language used in Bolivia) as a "meta-language" - a language to describe language, I assume. For translating from English to Spanish, translations are done to Aymara first. Seems to have been quite successful, too (but I don't trust any automatic translation). Due to the structure of Aymara, he claims that Aymara must have been developed a long time ago, as an artificial language.

Hilmar.

Difference in opinions hath cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether whistling be a vice or a virtue; whether it be better to kiss a post, or throw it into the fire... (from Gulliver's Travels)