Sunday, December 11, 2011

Princino de Marso

As some of you may be aware, in Thousand Suns, I sometimes use words and phrases from the constructed language of Esperanto as stand-ins for the futuristic universal human language of Lingua Terra (a name cribbed from H. Beam Piper). This not only felt "right," since a lot of Golden Age SF uses Esperanto in a similar fashion, but was fun, too, since I've had a strange fascination with Esperanto since I was a teenager.

Anyway, I recently came across references to a translation of Burroughs's A Princess of Mars into Esperanto, the cover for which I've reproduced below. I'd love to find a copy of it somewhere, though I wouldn't actually be able to read it, since, despite my interest in the language, I'm far from being fluent in it. Still, I thought it was kind of cool.

6 comments:

  1. You can download a pdf of it via the following link.

    cindymckee.com/librejo/Burroughs,EdgarRice-PrincinodeMarso.pdf

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  2. Sweet, I've been trying to teach myself Esperanto for the last year and a half, now I have an excuse to push the issue.

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  3. Have you seen the horror film Incubus (1966) starring William Shatner and spoken entirely in Esperanto? Strangely good and filmed just before Star Trek started; it could almost be an episode where Kirk is lost on some strange planet...

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  4. Harry Harrison's "lingua galactica" was Esperanto. Although generally only the more cosmopolitan and seasoned travellers spoke it. many worlds retained their own language groups.

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  5. As a dabbling but inept Esperantist, I'll have to take a look at this. Though I won't be able to read it either.

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  6. @Zenopus Archives:

    Didn't Roddenberry originally planned on filming the entire first Star Trek series in Esperanto?

    Personally, I don't quite get the point about Esperanto (sure, it's easy to learn - if you speak a European language). But it definitely beats using Asian characters for your futuristic alphabet XD

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