The International Language of Rollercoasters
Based on a discussion in soc.culture.esperanto about how best to translate “rollercoaster” into the international language Esperanto.
(When giving some of the Esperanto phrases that were put forward, I’ve done my best to translate as per the prefixes and suffixes, to give you some idea of how the word has been constructed.)
For those of you who don’t know much about Esperanto – a bit of background. It is what is known as a “planned language”; constructed by a man called Zamenhof in 1887, who thought that communication between people with different first languages would be much easier if there were a “bridge” language – an easy language that people could learn as a second language. It is difficult to estimate the number of speakers worldwide at the present time – perhaps ten thousand “fluent” and about a million with some basic knowledge of the language. You may have heard some Esperanto yourself – especially in science fiction as inter-racial communication used in a fictional future – Harry Harrison’s “Stainless Steel Rat” books, more recently in the film “Blade Trinity”, and in the TV series “Red Dwarf”, which gave us the wonderful phrase “Bonvolu alsendi la pordiston, laŭŝajne estas rano en mia bideo” (Could you please send up the porter, there appears to be a frog in my bidet). Most recently it was featured on QI, with panellists having to guess the meaning of a phrase in Esperanto (a Monty Python reference; it was “My hovercraft is full of eels.”)
Esperanto is made easy to learn by a simple grammar system and a small vocabulary, with a system of prefixes and suffixes so that words can be moulded to suit – for example, vacuum cleaner is “polvosuĉilo”, literally “dust-suck-tool-thing”. Esperantists are encouraged to use existing vocabulary to get their meaning across by making words that describe the thing they are talking about – modern things such as computers, the internet and so on, that didn’t exist when the language was invented, mean that Esperantists are often having to find new words for new things. The Internet has been something of a boon for Esperantists, being as we are far-flung around the globe, and discussion about the best ways to describe things are often conducted these days on the net.
Which brings me to coasters; I was finding myself having to describe to another Esperantist that we were going to be going on various rollercoaster trips this year, and not knowing the word for rollercoaster. The usual dictionaries didn’t shed any light, so I found myself having to use the flexibility of Esperanto to create a word that would get my meaning across. So, what is a rollercoaster? After some discussion, kicking around phrases involving trains, travelling, rails, undulation, fun and excitement, we decided that the least cumbersome but most descriptive phrase would be “onda relrajdo” (wavy rail-ride-thing).
Later that day, I posted a question to soc.culture.esperanto, one of the online Esperanto hangouts, to see what everyone else thought. Much interested discussion occurred (Esperantists, after all, are people that have chosen to speak another language in order to communicate with others more easily, so we tend to be very interested in linguistic challenges!).
It turned out that the usual accepted phrase was “ondanta fervojo” (waving iron-road-thing), which is all well and good but as the “fer” part of “fervojo” literally translates as “iron/metal”, this would not please the Woodies (wooden coaster enthusiasts) among us very much… I pointed out later in the thread that it would a bit silly to say that Megafobia was a wooden waving iron-road in Wales… wooden and metal? I preferred to put the rail back in and have onda relvojo (wavy rail-road-thing).
Esperantists from other countries pitched in with what it was in their own languages – the French say “montagnes russes” and Italians “le montagne russe” (both meaning Russian mountains), although another French phrase was “Grand Huit” (Big Eight) The Finnish phrase, in Esperanto, was given as “montarvojo” (mountain-group-road-thing). The Dutch have achtbaan (Eight-road?)
Eventually, it was decided that many phrases would be possible – in addition to those previously mentioned, people also came up with ondatrajneto (wavy-train-little-thing), granda oko (big eight-thing), onda amuzfervojeto (wavy fun-metal-road-little-thing), but that a lot of these phrases might be confusing if they were unfamiliar or based on a different native language to that of the reader; hopefully the meaning would be made clearer by the context of the rest of the paragraph.
