Whos the most Walkerian here

There am I crouched low wearing clothes that blend in with the background.

And in the background you will see Mr Jacobs standing up like a sore thumb.

And who caught the near 2 lbs roach?

Two guesses.


)

Prof Bumblebee?

Indeed, Graham; it was my subtle adjustments to Ron's rig and advice on feeding that made all the difference, that and finding out the hot pegs in the tackle shop.

Awww- Alright then.

But you must spot the subtle difference in my classic headgear compared with the Chav like boilie plopper worn by Peter.

Even Barney and Graham wear boilie ploppers these days.

Oh, I see Ron, you are refering to the Sensas Oslo Match Team waterproof and windproof designer gear, right?

The 'hat' by the way, if I remember rightly, is one of the Pro Circuit Gold Valley models - limited edition I think

While we are on about it, who caught the first (and the most) Roach?

And who gave you the bloody rig in the first place?
Moi, methinks, not to mention the loan of my spare pole rest?

Cor, some peoples!!!!!

You wait until I renew my passport so I can cross the Thames and visit you'all on the Trent.

Hee Hee Hee!!

I'm worse than Barney.

And old Bumblebee kept hooking carp. Boy was he cheesed off.

Mind you my roach was a brilliant bit of big fish targeting wasn't it?

)

Would someone care to enlighten me as to what "fishy Esperanto" is supposed to mean? I have spoken this non-ethnic language for 55 years now and found it to be i.a. a truly democratic, non-discriminatory means of communication providing equal language rights to all its speakers on a level playing field; an excellent tool for transnational education; an superb introduction for unilinguals to second-language study; an ecologically sound means of assuring minor-language preservation and human emancipation. But "fishy"? Certainly not!! Put down your rods for 10 minutes and inform yourself properly:
http://esperanto.memlink.ca
Gardu vin, au la Granda Ezoko shtelos vian logajhon!
[Watch out, or the Big Pike will steal your bait!]

" . . and inform yourself properly:"

Sadly mankso, the link you provided (to a Canadian web page) doesn't work - so if its okay with you, I'll stick to the 4 languages that I already speak.

As for Esperanto, well, it is about as dead a language as Latin!

Have a nice day ;-)

To Peter:
The Canadian link works just fine for me - try it again!
Or you could try this one in 62 languages:
http://www.esperanto.net
Bizarre to think then that I have been in the middle of 2000 or more "dead" people all talking Esperanto together, and that they actually get together each year at their week-long annual congresses!!
And are the voices of the announcers in the daily Esperanto broadcasts from Radio Polonia and Radio China International, coming from "the other side"? And who have they been speaking to for the past 50 years?
And why does Google today show 53,900,000 hits for Esperanto if it's so "dead", as you claim?
Being British (?), you're probably fluent in French, so here's le rapport Grin about language in the EU (published a few weeks ago):
http://satamikarohm.free.fr/article.php3?id_article=696
One of the solutions proposed is Esperanto.
Ignoti nulla cupido! [that's Latin - Google it!]
Happy fishing - better stick to what you know. ;-)
mankso

Welcome to planet earth Mankso, not sure which planet you are from but welcome anyway.

And whats wrong with good old English anyway?

Mankso,

I am sure that the good Dr. Zamenhof's original ideas were sound, however, in the 118 years since Esperanto was first published (not too sure of the date) there are what, at best 2 million people allegedly speaking Esperanto?

That would rate the language on a par with Estonian, Icelandic and a few others. hardly an overnight or significant success?

One of my main problems with the language is actualyl one of its' prime criteria, and that was to free people from the 'cultures' that surround and indeed are incumbent in their own languages.
This to me is rather sad inasmuch as we (the various nations of the world) are very much a product of our languiage and culture.

Right or wrong, my impression of a world entirely speaking Esperanto would be somewhat like haveing a conversation with Daleks!

Har du en hygellig dag ;-)

At least fishy Esperanto is universal. This unwritten and unspoken language is used by fish to tell anglers where they are. Hence the term "reading the water". Literally billions of fish speak it but few anglers understand it. This is the point of my article so that non conversant anglers can use clever short cuts to get round their lack of fluency.

So proper Esperanto is not "fishy".

As you will see from my qualifications it is vital to understand that a diploma in speading bovine manure equates to a "b*llsh*tter". As ever with tongue in cheek, the Prof.

Thanks to all for the various comments re Esperanto.
To Graham who wrote:
>And whats wrong with good old English anyway?
Nothing - if you happen to have been born in an English-speaking area. Trouble is that excludes about 94% of the world's population who are not so blessed. Fine - if your idea of international co-operation is to sit on your linguistic duff, while everyone else slaves away for years. The EU today opened a special site promoting multi-lingualism:
http://europa.eu.int/languages/
Is this likely to persuade a single UK English-speaker to learn any other language? I am still in the dark as to how a knowledge of Maltese might be of use in, say, Denmark.

To Peter who wrote:
>That would rate the language on a par with Estonian, Icelandic
Are you then now claiming that Estonian & Icelandic are also "dead"? Or that Esperanto is in fact not "dead", as you originally asserted?
and
>one of its' prime criteria, and that was to free people from the 'cultures' that surround and indeed are incumbent in their own languages.
Tack s?a mycket, men ...
That is simply total cow-poo. Where did you pick up that idea? The basic aim is (not "was") universal bilingualism with Esperanto as a common, second language, NOT "one language for the world". The latter is what English is now trying to achieve through global neo-colonialism, making others economically, and hence linguistically, dependent. Please quote me something from the one-page Prague Manifesto:
http://www.esperanto.se/dok/praguemanifesto.html that proves your assertion!
By the way, Esperanto was initiated in 1887, since when it has grown and developed.

To Prof. David:
Thanks for the "fishy" clarification.

And also by the way, I've just checked in the public site statistics, and there have been two successful UK visits to that Canadian Esperanto website today:
http://esperanto.memlink.ca
(one of which was probably not by Peter!)

Eagerly awaiting some more pearls!
mankso

I was not proposing that either Icelandic or Estonian were 'dead' languages.
The proposition was simply to put the alleged number of Esperanto speakers into context against a norm that most people could recognise.

If you prefer, then in simple figures, the 2 million you mention would be approximately 0,000308439% of the total population of the world (as estimated by the USA Dept of Census as of Dec-05)

The criteria argument came from discussion with a collegue who actually administers an Esperanto on-line association group.

In a career spanning over 33 years I have lived and worked in 14 diffrent Countries on all but one Continent.
Wherever I have worked the Project Language has been Engilish, with one exception being a project in Scandinavia where Norwegian was the day-to-day language. As to your point regarding if a knowledge og Maltese is useful in Denmark, I doubt that very much. However, when I have been either working, or fishing, in Denmark I have never had a problem using either English or Norwegian, as the Danes speak/understand both equally (along with Swedish as well)

I did actually manage ot get hte page open for the Esperanto link that you so thoughtfully provided.

For those regular members of FM who have not been so lucky as to read it, here is a sample of what these peole think of 'us' English speakers:

"Speakers of western majority languages (or "languages of wider currency") are especially privileged, those of eastern majority languages less so, while native-speakers of English (although forming only about 8%, and declining, of the world's population) are uniquely advantaged in that they are rarely obliged, or need, to know a second language to perform their jobs, carry out everyday tasks, or graduate from high school or even university. Many of this latter group are barely aware of any language problem, or believe that the burden of communication and language-learning should be assumed by others (frequently those in developing nations). This often brings charges of monolingual myopia, arrogance, linguistic neo-colonialism and even cultural imperialism from speakers of other groups"

So there you have it fellow anglers - apparently we are:
Linguistically Short-sighted, Arrogant, neo-Colonialists who believe we have a cultural imperialism associated with our language.

Over to you guys - what do you think of that?

I think anyone who went anywhere in this world (except Manko's house) and insisted on speaking esperanto would have a very hard job finding a translator. Like all minorities, they have a very inflated opinion on their importance and rather than join the majority they insist that the majority join them, hence they remain a minority.

Now about these fish..........

Glad this has been "HIJACKED" onto a good subject - ie: useless languages.

I used to sell software that aided translations to/from French, German, Spanish, and to Chinese (Guoyo or Mandarin as most call it) and from Russian (although mostly technical as it was for the CIA - Oops, not to mention that!)

During that time I never met another translator who spoke Esperanto.

I have also worked in four other countries in Europe, France, Spain, Nederlands and Belgium (althoughthey share almost the same language Dutch/Flemmish) and again, I never met anyone that could speak Esperanto.

This convinced me that despite my trying to learn it once - it was a complete and utter waste of time.

I too looked on that site and see that 1100 people in this country can speak and translate it. BOY! That's 0.0000196 of the population.

Less (in this country) than what speaks Punjabi, Hindi, Gujarati, Cantonese, ... other Euro languages ... Ukranian, Greek, Polish, Turkish, Latin, etc. etc... There's even more people over here that speak Korean than Esperanto - and I have to deal with them (Hyundai Shipping).

In south Wales, Welsh is now the third most popular language with English being second after Japanese. (joke there)

There's more people who can sign (BSL) for the deaf and more again that can read Braille. Even more again can understand Morse (although personally I prefer Midsomer Murders).

Esperanto was never a challenger. It's a dying language if ever it was one at all.

Re highjacking: I do realise that this is supposed to be a forum on fishing, and since I know nothing about that (although I did once catch a mackerel [scomber trachurus?] as a teenager), I have refrained from comment. Re comments from the gallery: One wonders why those with scant factual knowledge of Esperanto don't do likewise! ;-) The Swiss psychotherapist Piron wrote in 1995 about such psychological reactions to Esperanto in:
http://esperantic.org/ced/psyres.htm

Peter's statistics are probably correct, and looked at from that angle I willingly admit that Esperanto might be judged a "failure" (whatever that means) compared to other languages. But obviously that is an unfair comparison of apples with oranges etc. and fails to take into account some important facts, viz.
- Esperanto [Eo] has rarely had the backing of any state, with all the state apparatus, economic weight, ready-made population, military/commercial might etc.
- Eo was begun by one man in 1887, has been supported mainly by individuals, and now has organized national associations in 62 countries and individual members in twice as many countries, and most larger urban centres (exc. mainly in islamic areas, apart from Iran)
- Eo almost made it into the League of Nations but was sabotaged by the French, intent on promoting another language. Guess which one!
- many speakers of Eo suffered persecution and death under both Stalin and Hitler, who both perceived the language as a threat
- the metric system was introduced in France in 1795 still is not used world-wide. Is this then a failure?
[To keep it short, see this if interested in more facts:
http://www.uea.org/info/angle/an_ghisdatigo.html ]
Viewed in this light, Esperanto appears rather as a remarkable success story.

It looks as if books such as Robert Phillipson's "English-only Europe?" and "Linguistic Imperialism" haven't hit the bookstores in the UK yet! Most Esperanto-speakers are interested in promoting general language awareness and in issues such as those to be addressed at the World Social Forum 2006: "Another Language is Possible: Linguistic Democracy, Cultural Diversity, and Linguistic Human Rights"; the realism of the 'pie-in-the-sky' EU education policy of "mother tongue + two languages" for all pupils; Eo as a realistic and rational improvement on the EU's 20+ languages approach, etc. None of this can be properly discussed without adequate prior factual information.

Esperanto is just as useful as you like to make it. Even some British language teachers see this:
http://www.springboard2languages.org/home.htm
I have not knowlingly met any speakers of Mongolian, but that doesn't lead me to deny its existence or usefulness. Nor do I conclude from the (right peculiar!) interest in fishing that all Britishers are poverty-stricken and starving and forced to fish in order to survive.

By the way, to Woody bach: I'm not familiar with "Flemmish". Is that related to Flemish at all?

Pardon the rant! Happy fishing!
mankso

There are probably more people that can speak Klingon than Esperanto ....

The metric system not used world wide!!

I can assure you that in the language of engineering, the metric system took over from Imperial many years ago.

In my own industry the metric system rules, that I can assure you.

...and to think, I missed all this faffing about in Baitbox.