Esperanto

[bean fidhleir]

Just out of curiousity, how and why did you learn it? How many other languages do you speak?

Oh, it's just that I stumbled across it one day. I can't quite remember in what context, though. Anyway, I was intrigued and thought Zamenhof had the right idea - create a "langue sans frontieres" that anyone could speak anywhere. So I took out a book (a Teach Yourself, iirc) and got stuck into it. I'd grown up speaking Scots and English, and at that point I'd had a year of French in secondary school, so the idea of learning another language wasn't completely foreign (npi) to me. I bored eveyone around me rigid for a year or two, saying everything in Esperanto and then in English. But by then it had started to penetrate that I was on a hiding to nowhere with the language, being deathly poor and unlikely, I thought, ever to travel, so....

Besides English I'm fluent only in Russian and Standard German, and even they are starting to evaporate from lack of regular speaking use. There are a few others in which I have get-by and/or passive (reading) ability, given a dictionary, but that's all.

(edit: I just realized that it was *50* years ago, not 40 as I originally said.)