First of all

Before I start in, I suppose I should introduce myself and this Blog.



I'm Douglas Dmitri Ralph (that's pronounced "Rafe" as in Ralph Fiennes or Ralph Vaughn Williams, by the way. No, it's not what my parents had in mind, but I like it better and it's the cheapest way to change your name: just pronounce it differently) Mosier (sorry about that tangent I just went on!) and I'm an Esperantist.



You just went "Henh?", didn't you? Heh heh..........



OK. An Esperantist is a person who speaks (preferably) or otherwise supports the idea and use of Esperanto.



If you're the average American you just went "henh?" again, right? (do'h!....sorry: I'm being snarky)



For those of you who didn't click the link above, Esperanto is, in short, a language. But not your "normal" run-of-the-mill language. It was specifically constructed (during a period of about 10 years culminating in its publication in July {probably the 27th} of 1887) ostensibly for the purpose of being the world-wide international language. Ok, we did fall short of that goal, but we do have a world-wide community of Esperantists who use it every day. It's main claim to fame is that it's pretty streamlined as to morphology. For example, there are a grand total of 6 different verb endings that cover the same ground as 58 different endings in Spanish (and 58 is the conservative opinion! Some would say 76 endings) and that's just the so-called "simple tenses" (ones which consist of just one word); for the compound tenses (think: "I have spoken")you would use 6 more endings in Esperanto totalling 12 for the entire system of verb morphology (Spanish adds just two more, totalling 60/78.....still a bargain). Oh, wait....did I mention the irregular verbs? Ya know; the ones that don't follow the basic rules? There's a lot of those (not nearly so many as in English, but still...) and to make it even more fun, you can't tell just by looking at the verb which ones are regular and which ones aren't. You just have to know which is which. (Did I mention Esperanto has a completely regular set of morphology rules? No irregular verbs....nope, not even the bane of every foreign language learner's existance: to be!)



Esperanto has one method of making plurals as opposed to Spanish's three methods, complete with rules to tell you which method to use when......and then there are the exceptions (again not nearly as many as English, but compared to none in Esperanto, well.........).



OK, by now you're probably asking yourself "Why the heck is he harping on Spanish?? It's a wonderful language!" and you're right, it is a wonderful language. It's just that Spanish is the language I speak best after English (yes, even better than Esperanto, but I'm working on evening the scoreboard), and it's usually considered the easiest foreign language for native English speakers to learn. So if Spanish is easy to learn (so to speak), Esperanto must be a piece of cake, right? Well, it's not quite that simple, but Spanish does have a much more complex morphology than Esperanto (remember those 60 as opposed to 12 verb endings?)



Hmmm......talk about tangents............If you want a brief introduction to Esperanto just go here.


OK, this blog is going to chronicle the rest of my journey through "Esperantujo" (pronounced something like "ehs-peh-ron-TOO-yo"; trill the "r"). I say "the rest of my journey" because it started back in the middle 1970s when I saw the entry for "Esperanto" while I was reading the Encyclopedia Americana (yeah, I'm one of those), and I was fascinated. It was the summer after 8th grade and I'd just bought a Spanish dictionary in preparation for starting Spanish class the next fall, and I had found out about those 60 verb endings. Ugh. Then the "Esperanto" article and I thought "Oh, how cool!!" and after much arduous searching (remember this was in the day before home computers and Amazon.com!) finally found a textbook (amusingly titled "Esperanto in Fifty Lessons" {but the book actually does come through}) and an Esperanto-English dictionary (I still have the dictionary....it's pretty dilapidated! I'm trying to find another copy).



I did what I could for 6 years. In September 1981, I joined the Air Force and due to the job I had, international contacts (especially ones "behind the iron curtain" {where most of the [to me, anyway] really interesting people lived}) were out of the question (hmmm...Penpal with courtmartial or no penpal and an uneventful stint in the military?) so I had to drop Esperanto for the time being. By the time I got out of the Air Force (6 1/2 years later) my interest in Esperanto had gone dormant. I don't remember exactly how it got fired back up, but it obviously did. I've now got quite a few volumes of literature (some originally in Esperanto and others translated from other languages), magazine issues, and an entire internet community to delve into!

I've bored you enough for one day, so I'll let you go for now.

dimo (Pronounced "DEE-moh......a Ukranian diminutive form of Dmitri. Remind me to tell the story sometime if you're interested).
Gĝ