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What’s with this “Wren” thing?
The oldest extant version of the fable
we
are presenting here appeared in 1913 in the first volume of a two-volume anthology
of Low
Saxon folktales (Plattdeutsche
Volksmärchen “Low German Folktales”)
collected by Wilhelm Wisser (1843–1935). Read
more ...
Ludovic
Lazarus (Ludwik Lejzer,
Ludwik
Łazarz) Zamenhof
(1859–1917), the inventor of
Esperanto
Language information: Esperanto is an artificial language with no native speakers, though some parents
have claimed that they have raised their children with it as
their first language. Esperanto (a name based upon the word for “hope”) is
one of the oldest constructed
languages and is probably the best known one. It
was
created
in 1887 by Ludwik Zamenhof, a Polish dentist. Esperanto is primarily
based on better-known Germanic and Romance languages. Its morphology has been
streamlined and thus facilitates learning.
Some organizations with visions
of global unity (such as some communist and socialist parties and also many followers of the Bahá’í faith) advocate Esperanto as the neutral global auxiliary language. However,
critics
regard Esperanto as being fundamentally too much European-based to be neutral.
Despite this, Esperanto has been enjoying a fair degree of success worldwide,
not only in Europe and in European-dominated societies elsewhere.
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