| Description:
Europanto is a linguistic jest presented as a "constructed language" with a hodge-podge vocabulary from many European languages. It was created in 1996 by Diego Marani, a journalist, author and translator for the European Council of Ministers in Brussels. Marani created it in response to the perceived dominance of the English language; it is an emulation of the effect that non-native speakers struggling to learn a language typically add words and phrases from their native language to express their meanings clearly.
The main feature of Europanto is that there are no fixed rules — merely a set of suggestions. This means that anybody can start to speak Europanto immediately; on the other hand, it is the speaker's responsibility to draw on an assumed common vocabulary and grammar between himself and the audience and to make himself understood.
Europanto is a parody of international auxiliary languages; it imitates the way that such constructed languages draw their vocabularies from different languages. The name Europanto is a portmanteau combination of European and the Greek stem πάντ- (all); however, it is also an imitation of Esperanto, a widely spoken international auxiliary..... full article at Wikipedia |
