Tim Sneath

Musings of a Client Platform Guy

An Open Letter from the President of the United States of Google

An Open Letter from the President of the United States of Google

esperandmThe world’s ability to communicate with one another is a key factor in its rapid evolution and economic growth. The Esperanto language was invented last century as a politically neutral language that would foster peace and international understanding. Since the launch, we’ve seen first-hand the benefits of a constructed language:

  • A pure form of communication that is unsullied by cultural context;
  • Broad adoption by as many as 10,000 speakers
  • Independent (yet mostly compatible) dialects that not only bring additional choice for speakers also foster healthy competition and innovation

We expect even more communication between people in the coming year and are therefore focusing our investments in languages that are created based on constructed language principles. To that end, we are changing the spoken and written language of this nation to make it consistent with the form of speech already supported by the Language Creation Society. Specifically, we are supporting the Esperanto and Klingon languages, and will consider adding support for other high-quality constructed languages in the future. Though English plays an important role in speech today, as our goal is to enable open innovation, its further use as a form of communication in this country will be prohibited and our resources directed towards languages that are untainted by real-world usage.

These changes will occur in the next couple months but we are announcing them now to give citizens using other languages an opportunity to translate the libraries of the world into Esperanto.

Dankon, nedankinde!

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  • Brilliant. :)

  • strangely, though, users of other languages don't have to pay royalties if they want to use their language commercially...

  • is that an MS-backed opinion? you hypocrite

  • Clearly the English language is being diluted given your phrase (especially from a Brit) like "... in the next couple months..." without the use of the word, "of" after "couple". :P

  • The fun thing is, this is essentially what Atatürk did with the Turkish language reform in the 1930s. And it worked!

  • Very brilliant, indeed. Bravo, Tim!

  • Superb read! Thanks!

  • Hilarious!

  • Well done sir . . . I quite enjoyed this.

  • The analogy doesn't stack up. The English language isn't encumbered by patents. You don't have to pay expensive royalty fees to speak or write English. Anyone can speak English regardless of whether you're a poor lone individual, or a multi-millionaire, there are no barriers to entry.

    The same can't be said about H.264

  • I do agree, it's brilliant... but isn't google dropping the support only on the client side (chrom* project)?

    At least as long as they keep enconding every videos as they do now (by supporting both h.264 and webM) nothing will change, but the fact that google won't waste time in maintain html5 support in two different(and perfectly alternatives) ways. Someone please corrects me if i got something wrong.

  • As Bueller would have said, that's just 'Choice' =)

  • This is what France did in the early XXth century, removing all the regional vernaculars and replace them with a single French language. And it worked at that time.

  • Spot on, fantastic :)

  • Jackass

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