Hope floats for speakers of Esperanto

BIALYSTOK, Poland: The elegant Nepali woman, clad in a pink sari, beamed as the tall German man strolled by.

They both called out a greeting: "Saluton!" Then they launched into an animated discussion in Esperanto, a language created from scratch more than a century ago in an attempt to foster global harmony.

Some 2,000 Esperanto-speakers from 63 nations spent last week in Bialystok at an anniversary congress marking the 1859 birth in this northeastern Polish city of their founding father, Ludwik Zamenhof.