Esperanto as natural language [was RE: Learning simplified versions]

Well...I'd say, rather, which uses sounds in ways that can reasonably be classified as vowels and consonants. (Admittedly this is a fine distinction.) I believe there is some indigenous people somewhere which has a language whose sounds are all what a Westerner would call whistling; it is used for (what is for them) long-distance communication, in part because their land lends itself well to long-distance propagation of such sounds. I think they have another language which is used for short-range face-to-face communication, but I don't think that invalidates the point of view that the other one is a perfectly good language. Unfortunately I can't recall details. If I'm not totally hallucinating the memory, perhaps someone with better Web-fu than I can dig them up. If you just want natural languages that aren't based on vowel-and-consonant sounds, many of the sign languages used by the deaf qualify. (There exist sign "languages" which are just signs correpsonding to the letters of some other language's writing system, but there are also sign languages which are truly languages in their own right. I'm talking about the latter, here.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B