[Membroj] When Enough Is Enuf

[Ralph Dumain]

When Enough Is Enuf: The earnest, oddball effort to reform English spelling.
OCTOBER 30, 2008
By CULLEN MURPHY
Wall Street Journal
Bookshelf
review of:
Righting the Mother Tongue
By David Wolman
(Collins, 211 pages, $24.95)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122533218527282911.html

Prefaces a review on the history of English spelling reform with some 
digs against Esperanto:

"A friend of mine once set out to learn Esperanto, the presumptive 
world language whose adoption, it was often claimed, would usher in a 
new age of understanding and harmony. He mastered the rudiments and 
then set off for a week of immersion at the World Esperanto Congress, 
in Beijing. I'm pretty sure that he never intended to make a full 
leap of commitment -- it was more a linguistic version of adventure 
camp -- but for a few months his greetings consisted of a cheery 
Bonan matenon ("Good morning") or Kiel fartas aferoj? ("How are 
things going?"). He also learned to say Mi bezonas tradukiston ("I 
need an interpreter"), perhaps the most useless phrase in Esperanto.

"The notion that by reforming the way people employ language you can 
reform almost everything else is a durable canard that has survived a 
thousand years of contrary evidence."

And so, to bed.
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