Professor Esther Schor of the Department of English at Princeton University discusses her new book “Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language,” which tells the story of one of the most ambitious social experiments in modern history.
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This season of the Tel Aviv Review is made possible by The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, which promotes humanistic, democratic, and liberal values in the social discourse in Israel.[/infobox]
Very informative, on the mark and delivered in the mellifluous tones of a mid-Atlantic newsreader’s voice so to speak. We Australians are often derided for emasculating the language of Shakespeare but I was just wondering which ‘horrible American accent’ Esther had in mind. I’m not so sure that it’s easy to distinguish the mother tongue of fluent Esperantists by the way we give voice to the Zamenhof language. I recall an enjoyable game in a very international Esperanto milieu in which the task, difficult as it turned out, was to work out from where each speaker hailed
LOL
Paul (Adelaide)
Neil Blonstein Very interesting. Tre interesa. I was active in the Israeli Esperanto movement for over a decade (returning in 2000 for the World Esperanto Conference and in 2013 for the All Asia Conference) and recently volunteered 8 years in the Esperanto office fostering relations with the UN. I’d add that while in Israel I befriended one family in Bethlehem involved in Esperanto. I’ve renewed relations on the internet. In the 1980’s I flew from Tel Aviv to Cairo and met a few Egyptian Esperanto speakers and the family of Tadros Megali, mentioned in the broadcast. Tadros spent most of his later years in Germany, where I met his son in the 1980’s. Nachum.