09/05/2007 (Agence Europe) - To mark the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Treaties of Rome and Europe Day (9 May), just before the opening of the plenary session in Brussels on Wednesday, the European Parliament welcomed several European Nobel Prize winners for chemistry, physics, medicine, economics and peace. The ceremony was opened by EP President Hans-Gert Pöttering, who thanked the prize winners for their scientific and personal contributions to the success of Europe. In his speech, German professor Reinhard Selten, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994, called for Esperanto to be used, since, he said, it offered a “neutral solution” to the EU's language problem, where there can be discrimination against any national language. The language problem had to be overcome, said Dutch professor Martinus Veltman (Nobel Prize for Physics in 1999), too. With 23 languages being translated in every direction, with all sorts of losses, “we don't understand one another any more,” he said. (gc/hb)