A Designed Language

99% Invisible

SiriusXM Podcasts and Roman Mars

Design, Arts

4.8 • 27.5K Ratings

🗓️ 18 February 2011

⏱️ 6 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The idea is simple and quite beautiful: if we all shared a second, politically neutral language, people of all different nations and cultures could communicate freely and easily, and it would foster international understanding and peace.

Transcript

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0:00.0	We get support from UC Davis, a globally ranked university working to solve the world's most pressing problems in food, energy, health, education, and the environment.
0:10.0	UC Davis researchers collaborate and innovate in California and around the globe to find
0:14.2	transformational solutions.
0:16.1	It's all part of the university's mission to promote quality of life for all living things.
0:20.1	Find out more at 21st century.
0:21.9	UC Davis. edu.c. dot edu
0:27.0	this is 99% invisible I'm Roman Mars
0:31.2	Salutto kidd did it be fattas?
0:34.0	Let me start with this.
0:36.0	The invented language of Esperanto has a flag and it kicks ass. Greenfield, white Canton in the upper left corner with a green five-pointed star on it.
0:46.0	I'd be on board because of the design of the flag alone.
0:49.0	Seriously, I could march in the streets behind that flag, but that's not the Esperanto way at all. Esperanto is about hope.
0:58.0	It was created in the 1880s by a Polish eye doctor named Ludwig Zamenhof and he lived in this town
1:05.2	Bialestock where there were Poles, Jews, Germans, and Russians, and they all
1:10.6	spoke different languages and they all hated each other.
1:13.5	So he had this idea that if everybody spoke a common language,
1:17.5	they could communicate, they could get to know each other as people
1:20.7	and there wouldn't be any more racism or conflict which is a beautiful idea.
1:25.2	This is Sam Green.
1:26.2	My name is Sam Green.
1:27.2	I'm the director of Utopia and Four Movements.
1:30.2	One of the Four Movements of Sam Green's live documentary is about Zamanhoff's utopia of Esperanto.
	...

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