wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

Esperanto does not have grammatical gender--all nouns end in -o, all adjectives end in -a, and there is only one form of each article or preposition.

Some Esperanto words have inherent gender (patro = father, becoming patrino = mother with the addition of the -in- "femininity" affix) but there are modern reforms that adjust this to make the default form gender neutral and add another (optional) affix to denote masculinity (e.g. patro = parent, patruno = father). There are also separate pronouns for "he" and "she" ("li" and "sxi") but some today use a more recently invented gender-neutral pronoun, such as "gi".

wife and i began speaking vietnamese in front of our first child when she was 2,3,4, and we wished to exclude her from the dialogue. (We grew up in usa and have no connection to vietnam other than we lived there long enough to pick up some of the language).

needless to say, our first daughter now knows vietnamese.

My mother (now 74) and her sister would speak alfalfa language at the dinner table so their parents wouldn't understand what they were discussing. She never felt compelled to teach it to any of her five sons.

If Esperanto was supposed to be universal, why did it adopt the frivolous and wildly inconsistent concept of grammatical gender?

Agree with previous commenter: Tolkien's languages were subject of much scholarly investigation

My husband speaks, Elvish, Logban and some Klingon...he is a computer guy and THAT is an invented language...so he's into it.

supporters of anglish want all the french and latin out of english!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglish

We as waiters certainly "invent" a language. We do this to alert one another to a "special" diner or someone who might or might not tip as well.

I learned a bit of Elvish in college (tragically I've forgotten it all). Tolkien started Lord of the Rings pretty much as a setting for the languages he had invented.

My college (SUNY Albany) started offering a course in Klingon language while I was there (offered credit, but less than a regular class), two otherwise respectable linguists taught it.

Don't say QI'yaH! The FCC will not approve.

What constitutes a language? It seems that the last century has many invented _technical_ languages, from circuit diagrams to C++ to IKEA instructions.

How does this relate to languages such as Swahili and Indonesian that were created for trade purposes by colonizers

Though I had heard of it before I first learned about Esperanto while studying early 20th century anarchist movements in Japan, China, and Korea. Apparently these anarchists published many of their newspapers in Esperanto.

Esperanto is 19th Century.

Re: Sotomayor's education --- didn't she go to Catholic Schools before going to Princeton? Not a NYC public school graduate ---

What about interlingua? I could read it right away.