Mop Up*

I would guess that maybe 3 or, at most, 5% of the "Brain Trust" (they really do call themselves that) at the Baby Blue  blog might be able to successfully order a cup of coffee to their liking in a second language.  I would bet that if it was a matter of asking directions walking in a foreign city that percentage would plummet.  If it were how many of them could read a book of the complexity of the Kroata Milita Noktlibro by Spomenka Stimec without a translation handy, I'd guess it would be an equally tiny percentage.  I doubt any of them could read a book like La Bona Lingvo or Le défi des Langues - Du gâchis au bon sens by Claude Piron in another language and I doubt the instigator over there has ever read a book of that complexity in English.  

Those are the ones who seem to have been snarking about Esperanto last night.  Esperanto wasn't my second language, it was my fourth, the first two a legacy of prerequisites for a music degree.  Spanish came after that.   I am sure I could order coffee in all of them and could follow directions in at least the first two as well as in Esperanto.  I can read pretty well in all of them if I've got a large dictionary handy,  it was very useful while I was researching the eugenics of Darwinism and in a few other things I've written about here. It would be even more useful if I could find translations from languages I don't read at all in a language I can read about as well as I can read English, of which I'd only say that about Esperanto.  I'm tempted to go into a discussion of the transparency that the agglutinative features of Esperanto render a well done text on a technical subject but this is getting longer than I wanted it to be, already.

* Oh, maybe one last time.  MOP HEADS.  

Update:  I'm not surprised that the dumb bunny, "Tlazolteotil" the "Brain Truster" (they really do call themselves a "Brain Trust") who was so stupid she literally named herself after the goddess that eats shit (shit in, shit out) didn't read what I said before she stupidly said what she did in response to SS.   She's typical of Duncan Black's regulars who never bother to read before they opine.   As we know, everyone has an opinion and, like something else everyone has, it mostly stinks.   I have mentioned the time "Tlaz" reacted to a long thing I posted, saying it proved that I knew nothing about science, giving me the opportunity to point out what I'd posted, word for word, was said by that famous scientific illiterate Richard Feynman, something I posted with a full citation at the end of the passage I posted.   The dumb bitch didn't even read to the end of that comment that was right in front of her.