Israel Shenker. Smithsonian. Volume 17, January 1987.
In Neurim, Israel, the 42nd International Youth Esperanto Congress had just begun, and one delegate was having her diaper changed.
Tali Wandel, not yet two years old, was the fourth person to register for the conference. She may still be in diapers, but it is never too early to start learning a language of such overwhelming idealism. Esperantists dream of the day their vernacular becomes everyone’s second language: babies will babble in it, teenagers will rebel in it, adults will grumble in it and graybeards will reminisce in Esperanto to a fare-thee-well.
The 106 delegates from 18 countries chattered away in the language as though it had been around since the Flood. It is only one of scores of artificial languages that have bid fair to inundate the Universe, but Esperanto has put rivals into the past tense. Estimates of the number of speakers range from one million to 16 million, give or take a zero or two. That falls several billion short of the goal, but at Neurim no dream seemed impossible.
The original dreamer was one Zamenhof, a Jewishoculist (1859-1917) who grew up in Bialystok, which was then in Russian Poland. It was a place where Russians, Poles, Germans and Jews had trouble coexisting in any number of languages, creating a confusion evident even in the array of different first names pinned on Zamenhof—everything from Lazar through Lazarus and Ludovic to Ludwig.
Craving a tongue that would bring men closer to Eden and farther away from nationalism, in 1887 L. Zamenhof offered a book about a Lingvo Internacia by Doktoro Esperanto. The pseudonym Esperanto (which means “one who hopes’) became the name of the language. Since then, thousands of works both original and translated have been published in Esperanto; Zamenhof himself translated Hamlet.
It was elementary for him, since he fashioned a langauge in which logic dominates and exceptions are scorned. Words and roots are drawn from Latin, German, French, English and Slavic, but you notice right away how many cognate words there are. Dormi is to sleep, mangi to eat, paroli to speak; vulpo is a fox, birdo a bird, drako a dragon. There are “false friends,’ of course. Adulto is not adult but rather adultery, and domagi is not to damage but to begrudge.
The rules of grammar and syntax are reduced to the manipulation of elementary affixes, and by maximizing the adaptations of individual roots, memorizing of vocabulary is minimized. Barely 2,000 roots provide Esperantists with a 10,000-word working vocabulary. Spelling and pronunciation are phonetic, and wherever it appears, a letter is always pronounced the same way.
Stirring in a dose of circumflexes
The language has the five vowels of English, but noq, w, x or y. To handle such sounds as the ch- of child, the terminal gargle of the Scottish loch, the sh- of show, the zh- sound of treasure, Zamenhof stirred in a small dose of circumflexes. Thus, for example, c is pronounced ts, and c ch. A g sans circumflex is hard as in go, with circumflex soft as in gem. The slightly rounded upside-down circumflex is bestowed on u, whose caparisoned incarnation suggests the sound of the English w.
Zamenhof’s 16 rules of grammar can easily fit onto apage. Sample: “(1) There is no indefinite Article; there is only a definite article (la), alike for all sexes, cases and numbers.’
Parts of speech are plain to eye and ear. Singularnouns end in o, thus viro man, patro father, knabo boy, filo son. The feminine is formed by adding in, so that virino is woman, patrino mother, knabino girl, filino daughter. The plural adds j (pronounced like y in boy): patroj thus means fathers, patrinoj mothers.
Verbs, which wander all over the lot in English,form tidy ranks in Esperanto. Present tense ends in as, past in is, future in os. And the verb stands firm: Mi estas (I am), vi estas (you are), li estas (he is), si [pronounced “she’] estas (she is). It is as though English were to say: I am, you am, he am, she am. It am awkward in English but sounds fine in Esperanto.
All adjectives obligingly end a, adverbse. The prefix mal denotes opposite: malbela is ugly, malbona bad and malserioza lighthearted. Affix ej indicates place: kafo is coffee, kafejo is coffee house. The short and the long of it: et forms the diminutive, eg magnifies. Domo is house, dometo cottage, domego mansion. Esperanto even has a prefix fi that daubs with disdain: homo is a person, fihomo a scoundrel, vorto a word, fivorto a nasty word.
In theory, at least, a trained linguist can acquire a reasonable command of Esperanto after only a dozen or so hours of study. The rest of us may need a hundred hours—a good deal of it devoted to practicing aloud. Herbert Platt, secretary of Britain’s Esperantists, originally practiced the language by talking to his dog.
Esperantists tend to be enthusiasts, ever ready to help learners, be pen pals or even extend hospitality to their fellow Esperantists. Indeed the language seems to attract those with an unworldly, idealistic bent. Esperantists dream of furthering peace on Earth through language, with conflicts avoided or resolved because once Esperanto takes hold, people, no longer divided by language barriers, will understand one another. Alas, civil war, uncivil litigation and family feuds seem to continue when people understand each other only too well. Cynical Evelyn Waugh once remarked that the “Esperanto through which contact can be made with people of the most remote sympathies’ is alcohol.
The very ranks of the Esperantists have often been divided by virulent dissent. In Zamenhof’s lingua franca, id denotes offspring, as in kato cat, katido kitten. One notable splinter group called their version of Zamenhof’s invention Ido, which means off-spring in Esperanto. (Bertrand Russell reported visiting Louis Couturat, an eminent philosopher, who regretted that Ido did not lend itself to a noun analogous to Esperantist. Russell suggested “Idiot.’)
In Britain’s Parliament, Zamenhof’s original Esperanto is backed by 177 M.P.s, the largest all-party group in that august body. They feel that for linguistically insular Britons the language could be a great help in dealing within organizations like the European Economic Community. The EEC in fact is financing a study of Esperanto’s potential as a ponto lingvo (bridge language) between its nine official languages. Forty-four national Esperanto organizations are affiliated with the Universala Esperanto-Asocio located in Rotterdam. Ivo Lapenna was UEA secretary-general for eight years, president for ten. In his native Dalmatia, he had to learn Serbian and Croatian, and at school studied Italian and French. When he moved to Zagreb, Latin, Greek and German were added to the curriculum. “If Esperanto had been generalized,’ he suggested, “I could have given the endless hours I gave to those languages to other studies. Esperanto will be a world language … but not very soon.’
The Earth swarms with free wheeling enthusiasts, such as the Biciklista Esperantista Movado Internacia, last sighted pedaling into the future, and the International Esperantist Naturist Organization, a tiny offshoot which embraces nudity in its passion for the promotion of international understanding. Albania once seriously considered making Esperanto compulsory in schools. About a dozen countries beam short-wave programs around the world in Esperanto, among them China and Poland. So does the Vatican. Monda Turismo, the World Esperanto Tourist Association, which offers more than 200 Esperanto holidays, is going strong. The Bulgarian Esperanto Movement owns a training center at Pisanica, and Scotland has an Esperanto laureate, poet William Auld, who has euphoniously translated Blake’s “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright/In the forests of the night…’:
Tigro, tigro, brile brula
En arbaro nokt-obskura… Humorist Robert Benchley noted that Esperanto was supposed to unite the best features of all languages “without all this monkeying around with pocket dictionaries.’ But, he suggested, “When Esperanto is finally made the universal language, we shall all have to go back to school again.’
At the Neurim conference all the true Esperantists dismiss such counterrevolutionary rhetoric. And thus, Amri Wandel, father of little Tali, though he is an Israeli, speaks to his pre-school daughter in Esperanto (Tali’s mother, Gila, uses Hebrew). “Esperanto has nothing superfluous and nothing missing,’ said Amri. He is an astrophysicist at Stanford, and former president of the World Esperanto Youth Organization. He came to the language via a correspondence course of 16 lessons. “Last year in Germany I gave a talk on astrophysics, and everything was in Esperanto,’ he said. Quasar it turns out, is kvazaro. The big bang? La granda eksplodo.
The current president of the Esperantist youth. English solicitor Ian Jackson, lives in Hong Kong. He went out in the midday sun of Israel wearing a long-sleeved shirt and tie, demonstrating the stoicism that built the Empire and survived its dissolution. “Throughout this week I will be totally in Esperanto,’ he said. “I will be cursing in Esperanto and certainly dreaming in Esperanto. The language is not perfect—most Esperantists would agree with that—but about what should be changed we don’t agree. We’ve got a bit of a chaotic situation with one of our suffixes. Feminists object to viro and virino. They don’t like the feminine being based on the masculine.
“In Esperanto you can use a single root to make a noun, an adjective, an adverb. You can even make prepositions into verbs, which can be useful in poetry. Take tra (through). In Esperanto you can say La amo trais min (Love throughed me).’
Nonetheless, Jackson doesn’t see Esperanto being legislated as the world’s international language. “Even if you had a resolution in the United Nations General Assembly,’ he notes, “everyone would ignore it, as they do all the other resolutions. But if you want to travel around alone or in a small group and stay in people’s homes, Esperanto is ideal.’
To a cosmopolitan European, Esperanto sounds like the speech of an Italian who has stuttered through France, Spain and Germany, then babbled across Central Europe, borrowing all the way, understood—and misunderstood—everywhere. Esperantists, however, think it’s very euphonious, combining the swing of Italian with the resonant buzz of the Slavic languages. They seem to think, too, that the Yugoslavs have the best accents in Esperanto. Jackson’s own English-accented Esperanto has some doubtful sounds. At least several of his nuances escaped colleagues like Henrik Karlsson, from Sweden, who has been studying the language for 55 years and now—at age 75—makes a practice of going to Esperanto meetings all over the world. Officially he was a bit old for the Neurim meeting but young Esperantists welcome enthusiasts of any age.
Israel’s Eldad Salzmann, a mere 26,vaunted Esperanto’s merits in computer translations. “If you try to translate from Greek to Norwegian via English, chances are you’ll go wrong,’ he said. “If you use Esperanto you won’t have these problems.’ In Esperanto, hardware is hardvaro, software softwaro. Pirated software is liftvaro.
“The language is so flexible in compounding words,’ suggested Vancouver’s Paul Hopkins. “In English we have “doghouse,’ but the place where a horse lives is a “stable.’ You can’t say “horse house.’ In Esperanto you can. Esperanto is a universal language, spoken all over the world by a certain number of people. If you can find them. When I travel, people at hotels and restaurants speak to me in English because they want my money. Esperantists are not after my money. There’s no financial advantage to learning Esperanto.’
A 30-year-old economics teacher from Seoul, So Jinsu, arrived from South Korea after two weeks in Europe: “I didn’t understand what people were saying, but I telephoned Esperantists in every city and I had no problem. For me it is the first time to visit Europe or Israel, but I don’t feel I’m in a foreign country. When I meet Esperantists I’m at home.’
Anat Zajdman treated the conference to piano recitals of two Scott Joplin rags, as well as the appropriate choral theme on world brotherhood from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. There were demonstrations of dance, theatrical sketches, even travelogues on distant lands and landmarks.
Subsidized by her Esperantist grandparents, Liz Warner, 19, went into training for Neurim with a three-week intensive course at San Francisco State University, where some of the world’s best Esperantists teach the language each summer. To become fluent, she lived with four local Esperantists. One was Curt Ford, 26, who accompanied her to Neurim. “I found myself sitting at a table with a Hungarian, a Pole, a Finn and a Japanese,’ he said. “Thanks to Esperanto, we had no language problems.’
Dutchman Peter Ottenhoff helpsrun the National Institute of Education and Sciences. It teaches some 20 languages, and he is en route to learning all of them. “We’re a small country and have to make an effort to learn other people’s languages,’ he explains. “That puts us at a disadvantage. With Esperanto everybody’s on the same level. Chinese know it, French know it. My wife is a Flemish girl. We met each other via Esperanto. If we have problems in Dutch we change to Esperanto.’
When delegates gathered outsidethe mangejo (dining room), Judith Epstein asked what was holding things up. Another delegate, who had been studying Esperanto for only a month, struggled to reply and finally resorted to international shruggery. At daily meals (matenmano, tagmango and vespermango) shyer delegates often sat silent, trying to recall the word for dessert, torn between deserto and dezerto. Meanwhile a choir practiced for public performance and a tenor launched into Esperanto’s version of “Clementine’:
En Kaverno, en kanjono,
laborante je la min’,
Vera mastro estis patro,
de filino Klementin’. The usual third line about the father being a ’49er wouldn’t make any sense to non-American Esperantists. Besides, “kvardek na-ulo’ (’49er) would have killed the meter, so it has been replaced with “a true master was the father…’
A class of beginners from West Germany, Italy, Denmark, Scotland and Israel gathered in a Neurim classroom. Teacher Josef Murjan began by writing the Esperanto alphabet on the blackboard, and then the numbers: unu, du, tri, kvar, kvin, ses, sep, ok, nau, dek. So much for one to ten. Cent is of course a hundred, mil a thousand. In Zamenhof’s native Poland mil naucent okdek sep (1987) will be marked next summer with a centenary Warsaw conference.
Travel may be broadening, but as Esperantists keep pointing out, foreign tongues can be terribly confining and divisive. Genesis suggests that at one time “the whole earth was of one language,’ and that when Mankind—in overweening pride—began to build a tower (Babel) to Heaven, God confounded their language and scattered them about the Earth, where the towering babble has now unhappily resolved itself into as many as 4,000 spoken tongues.
Accepting the biblical account, many men have believed and still believe in a single primitive language. Scottish enthusiasts have held that Gaelic was the language of the Garden of Eden (others insisted it was Chaldean or Samaritan). Dedicated linguistic evangelists of all sorts find it hard to emancipate themselves from the peculiarities of their own tongues. German universalists showed a tendency to demand umlauts, the French had a faiblesse for the subjunctive. Yet through the centuries, to help undo babble, foster international brotherhood and serve the cause of commerce and of learning, legions of ingenious linguists have labored to create one acceptable, universal tongue, not so much to replace local vernaculars as to serve as an auxiliary for all international communication.
The first attempts to create artificial languages were based on logic, rather than on any existing tongues. In the 17th century, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Rene Descartes proposed a universal philosophic language. Sir Thomas Urquhart, a Scottish 17th-century man of letters imprisoned by the English for dissidence, offered any one of his jailers who might be willing to spring him a new language, which he called Logopandecteision. It provided seven syllables per word and 12 parts of speech, but never won him a key to his cell.
Another visionary sounded off foran onomatopoeic language, with special assignments for vowels; a betokened great affairs; e things delicate, subtle and sad; i little things; o passion; and u dark, hidden things.
In 1962 Fuishiki Okamoto, at age70, reduced Babel to something he called BABM, boasting with apparent justice that it resembled no spoken language. Bewt was an ant, biwc a gnat, bowf a locust, bwah a moth, bwaq a bedbug.
Jean Francois Sudre, a 19th-centurymusic master, composed Solresol, employing nothing but the syllables of the musical scale. All words were drawn from do, re, mi, fa and sol forth. Misol meant good, solmi evil, solmido Satan, and Domisol, the perfect arpeggio, God. Sudre stopped fiddling when he reached a vocabulary of 11,732 words. You can speak it, sing it, play it on your mandolin, he said, but the world turned a deaf ear.
There have been numerous numerical languages. In Timerio, the blueprint of a Berlin architect named Tiemer, “I love you’ was 1-80-17, and an improper fraction could break up a marriage. In 1938 Dutchman Karel Janson devised a simplified written language called Picto, with some 300 signs (pictos) and 12 symbols, enough to constitute the equivalent of 10,000 words in Dutch. But, alas! Picto looked like the tablecloth doodlings of a restive diner and was positively unspeakable.
Increasingly, however, the luminaries of language have deserted such artificial contrivances in favor of another category referred to as “natural languages’—but rationalized and simplified.
Universal-Sprache presented itself as un nuov glot nomed universal glot. Before the glot set in, Johann Martin Schleyer, a Roman Catholic priest, spoke up. Disciples credited him with knowing 50 (unless it was 83) languages. It was not enough, so—lying sleepless on the night of March 31, 1879—he devised Volapuk (world speech), pruning words back down to their roots, e.g., “wisdom’ was sap from Latin sapienta).
Bravely confronting the consequencesof reform, Schleyer rechristened himself Jleyer. Karl Lentze, the first Volapuk professor (or Volapukatidel) boasted that in Volapuk a verb could have 505,440 different forms. Others thought this nothing to boast about, and simplified the tongue to produce many versions with names like Bopal, Balta, Veltparl, Langue Universelle. Dil and Dilpok. Founding father Jleyer demanded the last word, however, and bitter schisms multiplied.
The Italian mathematician, GiuseppePeano, whose work inspired symbolic logic, figured out a Latino Sine Flexione (Latin Without Inflexions) or Interlingua, something devoutly wished by generations of schoolchildren. Another innovator even offered a utopian brew of French and English. Viner was “to drink wine,’ morviner “to drink more wine,’ mostviner “to drink the maximum possible wine,’ aviner “to abstain.’ George Henderson, a 19th-century recidivist tinkerer, proposed outright Anglo-Franca. It was French and English with Siamese twinnings such as assey youself (sit down) and meself … weselfs. Me pren the liberte to ecriv to you in Anglo-Franca.
During World War II, Lancelot Hogben presented Interglossa, which was strong on Greek roots, but like Esperanto tossed out all synonyms to keep down the size of the working vocabulary. Hogben called it “semantic spring-cleaning.’ Ron Clark and Wendy Ashby, who work and dream in a London bed-sitter, scrubbed Interglossa clean down to Glosa, which they called the “simplest language ever devised.’ “Grammar is the linguistic rubbish of the ages,’ they proclaimed, “so Glosa has no grammar.’
Of course there is Basic English, devised by C. K. Ogden, who spoke of the need for “Debabelization’ and cruelly suggested that what Europe needs is 50 more dead languages. Ogden boasted that Basic English could be learned in two weeks, and with 850 words say just about everything. In 1943 Winston Churchill, master of non-Basic English, generously commended Ogden’s innovation to a Harvard audience. But translated into Basic English, Churchill’s most famous speech, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat,’ came out something like, “blood, work, eye wash and body water.’
Widely used languages, applied internationally, are also spoken for by those seeking universal communication, sometimes with historic precedent. Greek was spoken over much of the Western world for a time. So was Latin, though it was never quite universal—stubborn subjects and recalcitrant verbs, not to mention the Visigoths, saw to that. In any case, in fact in all its cases, Latin lacked regularity, logic and brevity and it was hardly easy to learn.
French was once the internationally accepted instrument of diplomacy, but it has hundreds of irregular verbs, thousands of verb endings and lacks and lexical richness of English. Moreover, le francais has lately found it impossible to withstand the assault of l’anglais, resulting in the fragmentary and dubious Franglais.
In 1902 H. G. Wells suggested that English might be the answer to a planet’s prayers, and 12 years later obligingly fantasized an atomic war that led to an English-speaking World Republic. English now rules the world of air travel, including hijackings, and is regarded by many researchers as the “Esperanto of science.’
English has a rich vocabulary andversatile syntax, but the spelling is execrable. So is the pronunication. Malay, used widely in Asian commerce, has been proposed, and Swahili has gained acceptance all over East Africa. Mandarin Chinese has conquered China, a land that includes a sizable portion of humanity, using about 50 active languages. More millions speak Mandarin, in fact, than the millions in India who speak Hindi rather than any one of that subcontinent’s 225 tongues.
Anthropologist Margaret Meadliked the idea of a minor language, not associated with a great power, in preference to a single international tongue. To honor her Armenian son-in-law she nominated his language, but also saw the possibilities of Pidgin English, although acknowledging that Pidgin bore the stains of servitude and lacked nuances. In Papua New Guinea the Pope delivered the Lord’s Pidgin Prayer: Papa bilong mipela yu stap long heuven, ol I santium nem bilong yu… .’ When Israel chose Hebrew as the national tongue, it disappointed Yiddish-fanciers already fluent in their international language. Isaac Bashevis Singer, who won his Nobel Prize for works in Yiddish, once dismissed Hebrew as “a soulless Esperanto.’ Singer began his Nobel acceptance speech in Yiddish, but far from proving universal it was Greek to the assembly. Leon Lipson, professor of law at Yale, has proposed Yiddish as the world’s second language, to be used for the minor keys of life. “It would be used for irony, despair, satire and double-edged flattery,’ he explains. His proposed title: Desperanto.
There are thus innumerable rivalsfor Zamenhof’s universal dream, or as John Rapley, of the Universala Esperanto-Asocio, put it, backsliding into English: “Some are with us, and some are agin’ us.’
It is the enthusiasm of people likeArmi Wandel for teaching the language to the young, however, that gives Esperanto more hope than any of its rivals for a return to some form of linguistic Eden. “Perhaps the most important thing in the Esperanto movement is our belief that a universal language is something that is just meant to be,’ Amri says.
There is something to what he says, perhaps. At the conference, his baby daughter, Tali, interrupted a slide show on the 1986 Beijing Esperantist congress, which attracted 2,500 delegates from all over the world. Her ululation sounded for all the world like a child crying.