Wednesday, December 4, 2019

More Esperanto - Exodus

(There)appeared in Egypt a new king
Aperis en Egiptujo nova reĝo,
ap-PER-ees en eg-eep-OO-yo NO-va REJ-o

who didn't know Joseph
kiu ne konis Jozefon.
KEE-oo ne KON-ees yo-ZEF-on

and he said to his people
Kaj li diris al sia popolo:
keye lee DEE-rees al SI-a po-POL-o

behold(see) the people of the children-of-Israel are more numerous
Jen la popolo de la Izraelidoj estas pli multenombra
yen la po-POL-o de la eez-ra-el-EED-oy EST-as pli mul-te-NOM-bra

and more strong than us;
kaj pli forta ol ni;
keye plee FORT-a ol nee.

we must use, then, shrewdness against it,
ni uzu do ruzon kontraŭ ĝi,
no OOZ-u ROOZ-on KON-trau ji

so that it not multiply
por ke ĝi ne multiĝu,
por ke jee ne mool-TEE-ju

I decided to go to Exodus because it's more topical in the racist, anti-immigrant Trump era and the story of the Hebrews enslavement and liberation is the heart of the entire Jewish-Christian-Islamic monotheistic tradition.  I suspect the vocabulary is also more generally useful.  Here is a link to the entire Bible in Esperanto, the First Testament is all translated by L.L. Zamenhof, so the Esperanto can be taken as authoritative, the Second Testament was translated by a group of Scholars in London in the 1920s and has been evaluated as accurate.

I'll keep posting the link to the Zabreb Method material, to Gerda Malaperis and Lasu Min Paroli Plu with associated material.   Claude Piron wrote a follow up book for those two,  Ili Kaptis Elzan! which is available for free.  Piron was one of the most significant figures in Esperanto because he championed the full use of one of the most ingenious features of the language which makes learning and using it so much easier than a "natural" language, you are allowed to make words by putting together word roots and grammatical affixes, the rule being that it has to make sense, you can make a word root a noun, a verb, an adjective or adverb as needed.  It really works very well and when someone comes up with a really clever one it makes you smile instead of cringe.   That word-building feature makes it possible to enormously expand a very tiny vocabulary, something which anyone who has ever tried to learn a second language will realize is an enormous time saving.  It is something which Zamenhof noted he built into the language with that intention.  Piron has written a large number of texts, from beginner to a series of entertaining crime novels* to scholarly works using a small vocabulary used to its full. 

And there is a movie of Gerda, the pronunciation is excellent in the way that it wasn't in Incubus - though I'll say, I think the young William Shatner made a very good effort.

*  Including one with a rather pornographic title and content which I won't give just now.  Most of those are available for free at the late Claude Piron's website.

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