Late 19th century Poland was a place of division and turmoil. The population was incredibly diverse, but not in a happy, elementary school math book illustration way. Yiddish, Russian, German, and Polish were all spoken – mostly used to hurl slurs and insults at opposing ethnicities. At any given moment you could look out of your window to see a craven German strong-arming a miserly Jew, while a drunken Russian looked on in disgust, and a dumb Pole tried in vain to tie his shoes. One group’s success was perceived to be at the cost of another’s. The police force was prejudiced against people they viewed as interlopers. Street signs were growing problematically jumbled. Tensions ran high and violence ran rampant. A breaking point was at hand.
Sound familiar? It shouldn’t. That was a very long time ago. There’s no way you were around to see it. Unless you are a Crow, Lizard Person, or Dracula, of course. In that case – Welcome to the Podcast! Caw! Hissss! or Blah! to you! Don’t forget to check out the web page at theirrationallyexuberant.com for past podcasts, pictures, videos, and the transcript of this episode!
So, enter L.L. Zamenhof, a sensitive young Jewish lad with a penchant for peace and a yearning for learning. He also had, it is said, a yen for Zen, a lust for language, a dictate to abate hate, and a total boner for unity. He was, by all accounts, a great guy, worthy of respect, so shame on you for assuming that I was going to make some inane joke about LLs Cool J or Bean. Dismayed by his surroundings, he came to attribute the fractiousness of his homeland to what he later called “the heavy sadness of the diversity of languages”. He himself spoke Yiddish, Russian, German, French, Hebrew, Polish, Latin, Greek, Aramaic, Lithuanian, Italian, English, and something called Volapuk, which I assumed was old-timey nerd language along the lines of Klingon, but was actually something of a precursor to what we are discussing today.
What are we discussing today? Esperanto. It’s in the title. Pay attention, Champ. Zamenhof’s solution to the problems he observed was a an easy to learn universal language, with a simple grammar and a vocabulary of root words that would be modified by standardized prefixes and suffixes, free from the irregularities that make a language like English so difficult to master. It was based on a combination of several European languages, as well as Latin, but, to this monolingual English speaker, anyway, sounds a lot like Spanish. He worked on the language for years while attending medical school and then practicing Ophthalmology, and finally introduced it in a book, the Unua Libro, in 1887, under the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto (meaning Doctor Hopeful). He called the language Lingvo Internacia, but no one liked that, so they called it Esperanto, which has a nice ring to it.
Now, constructed languages – languages created for an express purpose by a specific individual or individuals, as opposed to evolving naturally over time – have an estensive history that begins long before Esperanto and continues through modern times. They are rarely successful, as evidenced by the fact that the aforementioned Klingon is the second most successful of all time, behind Esperanto. The first known instance is the Lingua Ignota, created in the year 1200 by Hildegard of Bingen for “mystical purposes”. She didn’t bother to teach it to anyone else, presumably because she didn’t have any friends. In the 16th century, the alchemists and Kabbalists also constructed mystical languages of sorts. I’m sure they would have gotten on swimmingly with ol’ Hilde. Many others came and went after that, typically constructed by idealistic philosophers and would be magicians or wizards or witches or whatever. In 1982, author Suzette Haden Elgin created Ladaan, a feminine-centric language to test the effects of gender normative language. Today, most constructed languages are for artistic purposes. Even as we speak, someone is probably sitting alone in a sad little apartment, laboring away at teaching themself Dothraki. It is a strange world we live in, though apparently not strange enough for some people.
These examples are all, to varying degrees, selfish. Esperanto was a different kind of constructed language, one which has popped up from time to time, created not as an intellectual exercise or to bring some imagined power, but to unite the world and bring about peace. It was an objective failure in that regard, but, like Macaulay Culkin, showed some real promise at times and has stubbornly refused to die.
The response to Zamenhof’s book was surprisingly enthusiastic, though his first attempt at marketing didn’t catch on. In the back of the pamphlet which first presented his new language, he included coupons to be filled out and mailed to him as a pledge to learn the language, provided 10 million others did the same. Only 1,000 were returned. Esperanto, from the very beginning, was an unpredictable entity, and, much like the giant baby in Honey I Blew Up the Kids, refused to conform to its creator’s or adherent’s intentions.
Zamenhof’s dream was that the world would recognize Esperanto’s potential to solve all of its problems and the language would be taken up everywhere. This didn’t happen of course, as it was widely ignored by national governments, but small pockets of Esperanto speakers developed across the world, first throughout the Russian Empire and Eastern Europe, then in Argentina, Canada – of course, then Algeria, Chile, Japan, Mexico, and Peru, on to Tunisia, and finally Australia, the United States, Guinea, Indochina, New Zealand, Tonkin, and Uruguay, all between its introduction in 1887 and 1905, which is extraordinary in an age of limited communication. Adherents corresponded by mail and via the 27 magazines that existed by 1905, and have met for a World Congress in various countries every year, with the exceptions of the years during both World Wars, since 1905. There were some serious movements to place Esperanto on a bigger stage. Prior to World War I, it was proposed that it would be named the official language of the territory of Neutral Moresnet, between modern day Belgium and Germany, though the war brought an end to that. The League of Nations proposed making Esperanto their official language. A French delegate vetoed the proposal, but the League did recommend that its members add it to their educational curricula.
Esperanto exists in much the same way today. It’s Wikipedia page estimates the number of fluent speakers at anywhere from one-hundred thousand to two million, which is preposterously unhelpful and imprecise, like telling a friend you’ll meet them for tacos between 6:30 and 2042. That taco date’s never gonna happen, bro. Its online presence suggests the higher side of the estimate. There are countless websites and organizations devoted to Esperanto speakers – many featuring lively speaker interactions, books written in and translated to the language, and a shocking number of Esperantist albums to be purchased on iTunes, most of which are predictably terrible. Some are featured in this very podcast. Movies have been made entirely in Esperanto, most notably the 1962 B-horror flic, Incubus, starring William Shatner. It’s not bad, actually – certainly better than the band of the same name. </code></pre>
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<pre class=”wp-block-code”><code>Esperanto has often been used as a neutral stand in for a foreign language in film – see The Great Dictator and Gattaca, amongst many others – and the United States Military has used it as a language for enemy forces in war games.
There are a few notable speakers and proponents of Esperanto. Billionaire George Soros is one of very few native Esperanto speakers in the world – anywhere from 350 to 2,000. Jules Verne and J.R.R. Tolkien spoke the language. Leo Tolstoy claimed to have learned it in two hours. Pope John Paul II gave several speeches in Esperanto and both Einstein and Fidel Castro were vocal in their support. Morrissey strikes me as an Esperanto guy, but if he knows it, he’s not telling anyone.
It hasn’t all been a slightly disappointing walk in the park for Esperanto, though. It’s had some heavyweight detractors. Hitler for instance. As with most things, he believed it to be a vast Jewish conspiracy and condemned Esperantists to concentration camps. In an incredibly sad twist, Zamenhof’s children all met this fate. There are stories of concentration camp prisoners teaching each other Esperanto. They told the Nazi guards that it was Italian, and the Nazi guards were too busy with hatred and murder to fact check them. Stalin initially studied and supported the language, but changed his mind so that Hitler would like him and had Esperantists killed, as he was wont to do. Noted academic and old crank Noam Chomsky has called Esperanto, quote, “not a real language.”
In all likelihood, Esperanto will continue to exist as it has for the last 128 years – as an idealistic fringe movement and curiosity. It doesn’t seem like there’s any threat of Esperanto becoming a unifying international language, but who knows? I don’t think anyone would have guessed in 1976 that Olympic Gold Medalist Bruce Jenner would become a reality star and wilted husk of a human potentially transitioning into a vibrant woman, but here we are. Like I said, the world’s a strange place.</code></pre>
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