Winnie-the-Pooh, this year’s childrens’ extravaganza, is now well underway, and you can see some new photos here.
And Winnie is firmly in the spotlight today because, as the BBC reports, the-Pooh is set to return to bookshelves in a new adventure – more than 80 years after his literary debut in 1926.
In that time, Winnie-the-Pooh has become a firm family favourite, his appeal crossing the generations. Here are some things you may not know about him…
:: A A Milne named the character Winnie-the-Pooh after a teddy bear owned by his son, Christopher Robin.
:: In turn, Christopher named his teddy after a Canadian bear called Winnipeg which lived at London Zoo
:: The game Poohsticks, in which competitors drop sticks into a river upstream of a bridge and see which comes out downstream first, is first mentioned in “The House at Pooh Corner”.
:: The annual World Poohsticks Championships have been held at Day’s Lock on the River Thames since 1984.
:: Disney made its first cartoon based on the characters in 1966.
:: Milne’s first book, Winnie-the-Pooh, has been translated into dozens of languages including Latin and Esperanto.
:: There is a street in Warsaw, Poland, named after Winnie-the-Pooh.
…and finally…
:: The late Labour MP Gwyneth Dunwoody once lead a campaign to try and repatriate Christopher Robin’s original toys from the New York Public Library where they are currently kept…
[Via PA, courtesy of BBC]
It’s good to see that Winnie-the-Pooh was published also in Esperanto. It is regretable therefore that only a few people know that it has become a living language.
During a short period of 121 years Esperanto is now in the top 100 languages, out of 6,800 worldwide, according to the CIA factbook. It is the 17th most used language in Wikipedia, and in use by Skype, Firefox and Facebook.
Native Esperanto speakers,(people who have used the language from birth), include George Soros,World Chess Champion Susan Polger, Ulrich Brandenberg the new German Ambassador to NATO and Nobel Laureate Daniel Bovet.
Further information can be seen at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8837438938991452670 A glimpse of the language can be seen at http://www.lernu.net
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8837438938991452670
Hello Brian – fancy meeting you here!
Don’t worry – I am a member of the Crescent Theatre and quite a few people here know I speak Esperanto. I always make sure to mention it whenever my biography appears in a Crescent programme!