Esperanto
Esperanto is an artificial language designed for international communication on a neutral and free basis. Who designed it? Well, a prototype of Esperanto was launched in the Polish city of Warsaw, in 1887, by Lejzer Ludvik Zamenhof, a 28-year-old eye doctor. He insisted on not being called its designer and on hiding behind the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto, the doctor who hopes, which people then turned into the name of the language. Zamenhof was not the first person to launch a constructed language project (this point is explained a bit later). But he was the first person to leave a prototype to the community of users who would flesh it out and develop it as a full language.
How does it work? Quite apart from its phonetic writing which means there are no strange spellings to learn by heart, Esperanto words are also designed to be easy to learn and use. This is mainly achieved by breaking an idea up into little pieces of thought and putting these bits together. Arbo, a tree. Aro, a group of things. Arbaro, a forest. Skribi, to write. Aĵo, something concrete, something tangible. Skribaĵo, some writing, something written. Ilo, a tool. Skribilo, a pen. Skribilaro, stationery, a bunch of things you need to write with, paper, pens, erasers, etc. Ejo, a place. Skribejo, a room where we sit and write. Skribilejo, a place where you keep pens. Isto, a professional. Skribisto, a professional writer. Skribilisto, someone who professionally makes or sells pens. Skribilaristo, a stationery producer or seller.
Why does this make the language easy to learn? Because it cuts your learning time to a fraction of what you need for other languages. You don’t have to learn separate words for frato, brother, and fratino, sister, for frateco, brotherhood, or for fratineco, sisterhood. Once you know lerni, to learn, you also get lernejo, school; lernanto, schoolboy; lernantino, schoolgirl; lernilaro, textbooks and lab equipment; lernado, constant study; lernigi, to teach; lernigisto, teacher. You can also joke by using a word like lernisto, which can only mean professional schoolchild, maybe your way of showing impatience that somebody has been repeating a class, year after year, and is much older than all the other children in the class!
To see that this works for other examples, think about vi vidas, you see, and you automatically learn also vidaĵo, view; vidado, vision; vida, visual; vidanto, viewer; videjo, gallery; vidinda, worth seeing; vidindaĵoj, tourist sights or attractions. In no other language can you learn so little and immediately get so many meaningful words made with the bits you’ve picked up.
What is the point of having an easy-to-learn language like this? The point is that this is the least painful and the least unfair way for people from different countries to find a common language of world peace and friendship. It is fair that everybody should make some effort to learn a neutral language. Since the language belongs to no group, there’s nobody with a native accent who can laugh at foreigners. That makes everyone equal. And nobody has to make a huge effort to get into the language, which makes it fair.
That’s about justice. But is it any use? What can you do with the language? Where does anybody speak it?
Eastern Europe, where Esperanto was first launched, is still where the largest concentrations of people speak it. But speakers exist all over the world, from Iceland to India, from Korea to Colombia. Esperantists, as speakers of the language are called, use it mainly to get in touch with others across frontiers, especially when they travel. Finding your counterparts abroad is easy since many Esperantists are listed in directories, which are increasingly web-based. They also communicate a lot through the Internet.
Okay, so you can reach people in this language. What does it get you in real life? When you stay at homes of fellow Esperantists you’ve located through a mutual hospitality network like Pasporta Servo ‘passport service’, you not only stay and eat cheaply, you also get good advice about low-budget tourism. The hosts you meet this way put you in touch with people in your profession in various countries.
This may not look like a practical gain if you think that since English is the most widely learnt foreign language you can reach the world through English. At the sheer practical level, though, a trip through Japan or Spain or Poland is much easier to manage in Esperanto than in English, which is not spoken by the passers-by, shopkeepers and ticket counter staff you need to deal with. In those countries, for very little money and with a good deal of personal warmth, you can get Esperantists to escort you on the crucial shopping trips or to draw you foolproof maps.
Maybe you think Esperanto is unfair, because it was launched by Europeans and is full of European words? That’s a good point. But you need to place it in context. People had been trying for three centuries to design a perfectly fair language equally remote from everybody. The best result of those efforts had been the 1879 project called Volapük. It sounded like this: O Fat obas, kel binol in süls, paisaludomöz nem ola. Kömomöd monargän ola. Jenomöz vil olik, äs in sül, i su tal. (Esperanto translation: Ho Patro nia, kiu estas en la ĉielo, sankta estu nomo via. Venu regno via. Fariĝu volo via, kiel en la ĉielo, tiel sur la tero.) Pronouns show how regular it was: ob ‘I’, ol ‘you’, om ‘he’, of ‘she’, os ‘it’; obs ‘we’, ols ‘you all’, oms ‘they men’, ofs ‘they women’. This was the first international project that hundreds of people learnt and started using. When Esperanto came along in 1887, why did all Volapükists switch over to it? Why have all later efforts to replace Esperanto as the default invented language for international use uniformly failed, to the point where nobody seriously tries any more?
The secret is simple. Esperanto has its doors open to the internationally used words like telephone, telegraph, capitalism, industry, hydroelectricity, etc., which most languages, even Japanese and Indonesian, have on the whole borrowed from Greek and Latin. To make these imports work properly, it helps that other Esperanto words are a bit like them. But at the same time, as explained earlier, the language leans over backwards to make it easy for users to invent words that express what you mean without learning lots of new words.
The language does this? That’s just a way of talking. The Esperantist public does it. This public has been working hard to make the language easier and more democratic, to open its doors as wide as humanly possible.
What about countries and institutions? Well, no country teaches Esperanto as a compulsory subject, though it is an optional school subject in many countries and a radio broadcast language in Poland, China and a couple of other countries. But the United Nations Organization has recognized the desirability of learning it and the contribution of Esperanto to world peace since the 1954 UNESCO resolution that led to the recognition of Universal Esperanto Association, based in Rotterdam, as an apex non-governmental organization. The main purpose of the world Esperanto movement is to work as a clearing house across ethnic groups working for fairness, for the survival of high quality in the small languages, to make sure that literature written in these languages is read and valued outside its countries of origin.
Written by Probal Dasgupta, professor of linguistics at the Indian Statistical Institute, the president of Universal Esperanto association
