The Null Device
2000/2/27
Mr. Rye also has a most entertaining and thought-provoking treatise on alien languages in fiction and fantasy.
A pretty thorough criticism of Esperanto, from one Justin Rye (whose page has a lot of interesting rants on matters linguistic):
Most people I know despise Esperanto, but largely for daft reasons - "Everyone speaks English nowadays anyway", "It sounds a bit foreign", "It has no cultural identity of its own", etc. I, on the other hand, dislike it for being:
- Just good enough to inspire anti-revisionist fanaticism!
- Just bad enough to strike the general public as risible!
- Easily improvable enough to inspire constant half-baked "reforms" whose inventors argue amongst themselves!
Slashdot has an illuminating interview with Bjarne Stroustrup, architect of C++. (Warning: quite technical)