Our Canadian members might be interested to hear that today's the Current is featuring a piece on Esperanto.

http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/

That particular episode is at http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2008/200807/20080715..... I think it was interesting, and relatively well-informed because of including interviews with actual Esperanto-speakers. It was unusual that they went to the trouble to find someone to interview who wants to attack Esperanto. I've started a discussion about the more unusual of his arguments (that a common language doesn't help avoid conflicts at all) at http://eo.lernu.net/komunikado/forumo/temo.php?t=2....

Thanks for the link, that was interesting to listen to (and it was cool hearing my friend Boriso in his brief interview).

It is indeed interesting that they went to the trouble of finding an opponent of Esperanto, but not so surprising to me. It isn't the first time I've seen something like that happen; I read another article about TAKE in Montreal, and I found it generally quite insulting (saying things like, occasionally people claim to be raising a kid with Esperanto as their native language, but it isn't true because everyone has to learn the language from books and classes - I have met a number of Esperanto speakers ranging in age from toddler to adult, who beg to differ!)

I think that people feel an instinctive anti-Esperanto reaction. They perhaps feel threatened by it. Whereas, if some "non-threatening" movement has a meeting, you won't hear those kinds of negative comments. A local Star Trek convention, an anime-fest, a comics event - you might hear a few snide comments about all of the nerds gathering, but no one would bother hunting up some university professor to talk about how worthless it is to be interested in those topics.

I have noticed that the general reactions to news stories about Esperanto tend to be more negative in English-speaking countries than in other countries (another recent example being the article at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7505820.stm). I wonder how they found him. Obviously people like Humphrey Tonkin can easily be found by being a university professor and a well-known Esperanto-speaker, but I wonder if people like this guy (Dennis Baron) make it known that their interests and activities include opposing Esperanto. That page actually has a link to his website, with some of his articles. I read a couple of them, and even though they're completely unrelated to Esperanto, one still contains a snide comment about it (http://www.english.uiuc.edu/-people-/faculty/debar...).

I never heard about that Baron guy until the CBC program. There are a couple of virulent anti-Esperanto people around online, but Baron is a university professor, so he is probably seen as more credible than "random guy with website who hates Esperanto".

I know that Noam Chomsky has lots of negative things to say about Esperanto, but probably he is too well-known and not interested in doing an interview on a topic like this.

I submitted a comment yesterday to that BBC magazine article that you cite. Perhaps some other people from this forum are interested in submitting a comment? It would be nice if we could get a few more positives in the mix. My comment hasn't been posted (yet?) but maybe someone else's will show up.