L氏 Taichung, Taiwan

This version, edited & commentated by Paul Turner in 1971, published by Oxford University Press, is according to Dr. Shan Te-Hsing of our Academia Sinica, "(This version) is still based on that by Davis", "because of its abundance of reference and reasonable price, has enjoyed one of the most wide readership".

P. Turner added tons of notes to each chapters. Those notes are all piled up in the back of, which gives readers a hard trek all the way to the back in order to find them. We readers of this Gulliver's Travels have the priviledge of experiencing in first person the hardship of Travels. Those notes, however, are essential to decipher the true (acrimonious) meaning of those sentences or words, so that they don't merely rush past our mind without leaving any traces. Let's not mention all the 15-16 century archaic form of words or grammar.

Seriously, this book is sometimes a bit too realistic to be scary, so I might not even categorize it as Horror.

At first I thought, ok, this is so typical American, that values democracy, thinks that every nation should embrace it unconditionally. Russia becomes an empire, China collapses, Israeli-Palestinian grudge simply fades. However, there soon appears that our author also knows that limit, where totalitarian regimes can mobilize more efficiently their people to fight.

And there, on its language, the author surely tried hard to produce different patterns of speeches, yet a certain familiarity still haunts the whole book. And above all, everybody speaks English all too well. lol

這本書還真的是純粹的繪本, 連圖中的文字都用雙重鏡像之類的手法變成不能辨識. 不過一想到這本繪本的重點: "無國界", "異鄉"這點也就很容易理解了. 用架空世界來處理"移民"的命題不僅新奇, 也讓這本繪本有了超越國籍和語言的感染力.尤其像在下這樣有著長期旅居經驗的人更是感觸良多.

The story of Arrival is about a husband of a family in an old country full of "dragons", who comes to the New World first to settle down for the family to move. From the details in the book, all those weird creatures, strange-looking food and the gap of languages, we could see the bewilderness of the first generation immigrants.

But all the aliens will at last come to a point when they become the "local resident". That's the time when they find out there can be more than one home. As the last page the daughter shows a new immigrant the way, we could see the self-identification as a citizen of New World.

這個故事屬於所有到異鄉尋找光明未來的人們.
This is the tale of all those who come to an alien place for a brighter future.

(Forgive me for commenting this book about Esperanto in English.)
The book Esperanto: Language, Literature, and Community, written by French Esperantist Pierre Janton and edited by former president of UEA Humphrey Tonkin, is a comprehensive guide to the Lingvo Internacia, latter Esperanto (Language of Hope), aimed for new learners and outsiders of the Movement.
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The anthology reviewed the history of Conlang in general and then Esperanto in particular in the first two chapters, the grammar of Esperanto in a Ch.3, the difference of E-o compared to other European languages in Ch.4. There is also a chapter dedicated each to the Esperantist literature and the Esperantista Movado (Esperantist movement).

Due to its length, the book is not for complete record of any aspect of the language, but a general review of it. Chapter 1,2 and 6 especially interesting to me, about how the language develops out of Dr. Zamenhoff's effort and selflessness and finally into a mature means of communication that is at the same time property of all the human being, promising a world with a common tongue.

The quick review on grammar, on the other hand, is not for beginners, but its idea of liberating the linguistic theory from Latin domination is very impressive.