First of all, did you know that George Soros is a native speaker of Esperanto?  Posting this as my status message on Facebook resulted in a whole discussion of the term ‘native speaker’ and if one could be a native speaker (or whatever your preferred term) of a made up language.  That’s all very interesting – but seriously!  A native speaker! of Esperanto! and also a very influential billionaire!  These things can’t be unrelated.

One of my lifetime ambitions is to learn Esperanto.  I don’t think there’s a rational explanation for this – I just get really excited – not even excited, GIDDY – at the thought of it.  Today I picked up Universala Esperanto Metodo De Doktoro Benson, which is this fabulous book from 1932 with pronunciation guides, an illustrated dictionary, and short stories that I assume I’ll be able to read once I learn according to the good doctor’s metodo.  If you want to see something really amazing, I’d recommend clicking on this link, which will take you to a PDF version of the first 20 or so pages of the text.

I excitedly asked Shane last night if we could raise our children to be native Esperanto speakers.  His immediate response was, “No, that’d be terrible.”  I figure it’s worked out OK for George Soros, though.