Is Python the Esperanto of programming languages?

[Erik Max Francis]

Dave Brueck wrote:

> Truly, you haven't lived until you've heard William Shatner speaking
> Esperanto.

It truly is amusing.  Some of the other actors actually do a pretty
competent job (such as Milos Milos), but Shatner's pronunciation is
truly bad.  In some cases you can see him trying to use a French accent.

The general story seems to be that after the script was translated to
Esperanto (which was apparently at the sudden whim of the director --
the actors had no idea that it would be done in Esperanto when they
signed up), teaching the actors the language pronunciation and basic
rules wasn't done, since Esperanto is purely phonetic and has very
simple grammatical rules.  Of course, that's true, but if you don't know
those rules, you can't pronounce it correctly :-).  (Shatner's
commentary track on the film seems to suggest otherwise -- he talks
about having trainers -- but then I wouldn't trust Shatner's word on
this, he sounds completely off his rocker.)

William Harmon (a well-known Esperantist) had this to say about the
film:

"It is not a typographical error.  It's the film _Incubus_ with Shatner.
I was one of the preview audience in San Francisco.  The manuscript was
translated to Esperanto by Charles Chomette from Los Angeles, but when
he proposed teaching the actors about pronunciation to the stage
manager, the response was, 'Absolutely not -- we can't spare the time or
money for that -- you say that the language is completely phonetic, so
we will not have a problem.'" [1]

. 

1. 
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=19981023123036.13839.00000009%40ng-ft1.aol.com&rnum=1

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