The World Cup soccer tournament wasn’t kind to teams from the Americas – early qualifiers included Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil.   Argentina’s super-star Messi failed to deliver big in their game against France – and though Colombia, Mexico and Uruguay showed early flashes of potential, they were all eliminated early on leaving Brazil and Uruguay to carry the torch for teams from the Americas into the quarter-finals.   Belgium defeated Brazil, and France vanquished Uruguay   The championship game will be France against upstart Croatia, a country of slightly more than 4 million people on July 15, 2018.

And while nationalist fervor was on full display in the World Cup spectacle, we’ll take a small departure from our usual discussion today to talk about Doc’s foray into linguistics and the language of Esperanto – a language developed over 130 years ago by a multilingual Polish physician to overcome the barriers of language differences.    

Join Doc and Danielle for  a highly stimulating and timely discussion about the potential for Esperanto as one avenue in helping bridge language and even national barriers in the wake of the nationalistic tides that are rising world-wide.   It’s a pretty sure bet however, that there will ever be an Esperanto soccer team competing in future World Cups! 

For more information on Esperanto –  http://esperanto-usa.org/esperanto/en

An excellent book on the the history of Esperanto by Esther Schor- https://english.princeton.edu/research/bridge-words-esperanto-and-dream-universal-language