Can Esperanto save local culture?

Hey Q. Thanks for getting this going! I have a bunch to contribute. I'll get a few threads going here in a bit.

As far as this thread goes, though, you won't find disagreement here. One of the cool thinks that came out of the Esperanto movement was the SAT. It's was/is a revolutionary group that's been around for a long time that only uses Esperanto. I don't know too much about it, because I'm not fluent enough yet to read all their stuff. However, one important thing they put forward was the idea of a-nationalism. They felt this was better than internationalism, as internationalism presupposes the existence of nations. A-nationalism is perhaps the exact opposite of nationalism and truly represents everyone coming together regardless of physical location.

Anyway, this group is an exciting development, for me, anyway, as it will give me much more motivation to continue my studies. I've got a bunch of information to put up for input and discussion, so I'll get crackin'!

Esperanto is the best alternative, in my view. There are difficulties in creating a truly inclusive language, as Asian languages are based on an entirely different alphabet. Still, in Esperanto, you have similarities to the Germanic and Romantic language families, as well as English. This is fairly inclusive. Plus, as a second language for everyone, it does not overshadow the native language of the speaker, or seek to replace it as national languages often do.

As to Esperanto "never coming close," I would argue that it's history is parallel to that of revolutionary struggle. I'm trying to keep my terminology inclusive here, as this group is to get interest in Esperanto among the revolutionary left. I would say, though, that it is often the case in revolutionary politics that ideas are thought of as good but unrealistic, "utopian," etc. There are many times revolutionary struggle has "come close" and other times revolutions have happened and then collapsed afterward. We are still far from the world we wish to see. I don't think that's a blow against revolutionary politics, and I don't think that Esperanto's small (though still active and growing) speaking population is a sign of its "unrealistic" goal.

I don't know if there are any numbers, but historically, many more people spoke Esperanto than they do now. Also, Esperanto came close to being adopted as an official language of the UN (let's not get side-tracked about the pros and cons of the UN, I'm not arguing for or against, just stating as part of the history of Esperanto), and today, the group that oversees Esperanto still has an advisory status to the UN. And there were at least a few places where adopting Esperanto was at least considered.

Yes, Esperanto is easy to learn, and yes, it is rather fun. It can even help you form a basis for learning other languages more quickly.

Sender: I'll reply to your other post as well. I was waiting to see if others might want to jump in. What does everyone else think?

Another quick thought: One of the cool things about Esperanto is that people can retain the sentence structure they're familiar with in their native language and still be understood by all other Esperanto speakers. In this way, it is similar to Asian languages, I believe. For instance:

La hundo amas la katon. = The dog loves the cat.
La katon amas la hundo. = The dog loves the cat.

In Esperanto, we denote the direct object of the sentence (in this case, "kato" or "cat") with an -n, creating katon. Now we can place "katon" anywhere in the sentence without changing the meaning. This allows people from all languages to learn Esperanto more easily.