Pupeno’s web site

Conor O’Brien of the Raglan Clinic and James McMahon of Hassett are the people that own me €1250, the deposit of the apartment I rented for more than a year in 4, Windermere, Gilford Road, Dublin 4, Ireland. That I returned in perfect condition and was accepted as such, more than a month ago.

Now that we got to the point, let me tell you the story. I’ll try not to sidetrack with issues like Conor arriving more than outrageously late when I had to handover the apartment and had very little time (moving to Zürich, where I live now) or that James published the apartment as having dishwasher and cable TV which it didn’t (nor was there hot water as well, or fire alarm, or the two set of keys, etc). Ooops, sidetracked. Or that when I went there with James and my wife to see the apartment, there was a guy taking a shower, in the apartment, that shouted “don’t come” and we had to return the day after. Ooops, sidetracked again.
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I’ve created deb packages with my patches to Esperanto layouts. To use them, in Ubuntu, for they are packages for Ubuntu, just follow the instructions for my PPA and upgrade.Then pick them in the configuration as usual.

My wife, Sandra, has a new show, title “¿Tango?… ¡No!”, and she’s performing tonight. If you are in Buenos Aires, you may consider some music tonight.

I’ve got tired of not being able to easily type in Esperanto in Linux. There are some articles out there explaining it how and the are always convoluted and I’ve never seen one that gets to the point of typing “ŭ”, the always try very hard to get “ĝ”.

There’s an Esperanto layout in Ubuntu and I suppose other X Window Systems as well, but there are two things I don’t like about it. One is having to find out where the keys are, I could re-label them, but then I would only be able to type in Esperanto (which might be educational but not what I want, at least for now). I also don’t like the fact that it is Qwerty, not Dvorak. And even if it was Dvorak, one should make the statistics about Esperanto to make a proper Esperanto Dvorak-style keyboard.

Anyway, I wanted something for the casual Esperanto typist, like me, because compose or dead-keys don’t work good enough (Where’s the “˘” key to make the “ŭ” letter?). So my solution is to have the Esperanto supersigno-letters in the group two of the equivalent non-supersigno-letter. It is not a solution for daily Esperanto typing, as it’d be slower and just not right. But it is a good solution, I hope, for the casual Esperanto typist. I’ve submitted my solution to Ubuntu, it contains a patch that can be used in any Xorg installation. If you like it and would like to have integrated, why don’t you drop a comment, so that the know it’s not a lone crazy guy.

There are other Esperanto related bugs that may be needing some love.

English is like Java, Esperanto is like Python, Lojban is like Lisp.

La angla estas kiel Ĵava, la Esperanto estas kiel Pajton, la Lojban estas kiel Lisp.

la glibau simsa la javas .i pa’arbau simsa la paiton .i la lojban simsa la lisp

Bank of Ireland is the worst bank I ever dealt with, and I’m from Argentina. I’m so happy I’m closing my account there and I wish everybody does the same. Any other option in Ireland is better.

Some days ago, in our weekly Esperanto meeting, Lernu was not reachable. I don’t know why. So we didn’t have or usual source of Esperanto material and we had to find others. We ended up in another copy of Gerda Malaperis. Since we didn’t have audio to listen to, we read it aloud, taking the places of the characters.

All of the first 8 chapters, at least, are dialogs. It was such an amazing experience that I think we’ll continue in that fashion. Recordings might be useful for studying alone (and learning pronunciation) but for a group, it is much more fun to just read the dialog, and act it if possible. So I think it would be amazing to have a web site with dialogs in Esperanto categorized by amount of characters and difficulty, so we could pick the right one for each occasion.

Making the application to do that wouldn’t be hard, I could do it, but where can we take the dialogs from? It could be editable, wiki-style, but then, would anybody contribute? What do you think?

That’s what I want. A good on-line Esperanto dictionary. All Esperanto dictionaries I see on-line are so convoluted that are useless. Maybe I’m missing some, I don’t know. For building the ultimate dictionary I would take Lojban’s dictionary, jbonlaste, as an example.

Just go straight to the search page and ignore the fact that it’s a community driven dictionary, Wikipedia-style. There search for something, I don’t know, woman. The first thing you may notice is that, even though it supports lot’s of languages, you didn’t have to specify which ones to search for. You just typed the word and hit search, from whom they might have got that strange idea?

You can argue that it’s only searching on English and Lojban. If it was up to me, “Any” would have been the default option, pick it up and search for red to see how that’s interesting. Now, you click on xunre and you find out a lot of information for that word, like the type, the rafsi (like an abbreviation in Lojban) and the explanation of its meaning.

If you don’t know how Lojban works, it’ll be hard to understand the explanation of the meaning and that’s beyond this post. Keep reading and you reach the amazing part, the “Notes: See also…”. Here you have synonims or other words you might be interested in. From there you start to browse the dictionary learning many new words related to the original one. That’s an amazing tool. For example, the first one is skari, which means color. When you go skari’s page you see: “Gloss Word: color“. Notice that color is also a link, which let’s you go back and forth between English and Lojban as you please.

That last point is essential. I not only use English, I also use Spanish and some day, maybe Esperanto. When I’m searching for a term I go back and forth between various related words, in various languages until I reach the conclusion: “this is the right word, there are other similar words, but this is the closest one“. I also test that it translate to the meaning I want in both, English and Spanish. It’s very rare to find an ambiguous term in both English and Spanish, but it is common in each of the separately.

Ever since I started learning Esperanto I disliked the fact that it was a sexist language, biased towards males. Thankfully, I am not the first one to think at this, and some people already worked on it. I was rejoiced to read Maire Mullarney’s concerns about it on Everyone’s Own Language. The solution is Riism.

Riism (Riismo in Esperanto) basically adds a masculine suffix and a new gender-neutral pronoun. The pronoun is ri, so li and ŝi both become ri. You could say “mi amas ri”, meaning “I love him/her”, thus expressing your love without having to reveal your sexuality inclinations.

And the suffix is -iĉ-, so patro is parent, not father, patrino is still mother, but father is patriĉo. In the Esperanto group at work we started to play with it, I hope more people will embrace it.

This kind of gender-neutrality is not something new, other languages such as Finnish, Swahili, Chinese and of course, Lojban, already work this way.