Esperanto isn't just something Microsoft uses to tease Google for abandoning video codecs, it's a legitimate, manufactured language. Created in the late 1800's by Dr. Ludwig L. Zamenhof, Esperanto was designed to be an easy to learn language that would help folks from all over the world understand each other. Seeing as how Google Translate shares similar goals, the Mountain View firm felt Zamenhof's homemade tongue would be the perfect fit for its machine translation service. Despite a rather small sample size of pre-existing translated material to feed the Google language machine, the firm says Google Translate handled Esperanto surprisingly well -- partially crediting the
