Hacker News Reader

Comment by nsilvestri | Hacker News Reader

Anecdata, but I've met a whole two other Esperanto speakers (that I know of) in the wild since I began learning it a couple years ago! It's not prominent with the general population, but I do think there are certain types of people whom are more inclined to learn it.

View on HN

There was this Physics instructor whose scripts were in Esperanto - the guy was well liked by the students, however he was an Esperantist

Anecdata: In recent times, to a high degree: programmers. I attended one music festival with a high presence of volunteers from the Esperanto community, and among these people, ~20% were programmers.

The grammar is mostly regular. It seems like the thing a stubborn introvert likes: You can hardly use it anywhere, but it has nice properties. And unlike Lojban, Esperanto is something you can learn to fluency fast on your own on the internet.

Fun fact, George Soros (the banker much targeted by conspiracy theorists) is a native Esperanto speaker, as he was raised to speak the language but his father, who was a well known Esperanto speaker

I didn't know that. Fascinating to hear there actually is a native speaker of it. I was aware from reading the wikipedia article that Esperanto was championed by the Ba'hai and Oomoto religious groups, among others. I had also forgotten that Theosophy promoted it as well. Plenty of different Christian groups tried using it too, even Jack Chick, famous for his maligning of D&D.

I've heard there is around 1000 native speakers in the world.

I've met one such.

His parents met at a conference, and only had Esperanto in common.

I've been at music festivals where I met people who did not speak English, so Esperanto was our best common language.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com