http://time.com/4417809/esperanto-history-invention/
The Serious History Behind
Esperanto
July 26, 2016
Image Esperanto creator L.L. Zamenhof.
Olivia B.Waxman -
July 26, 2016
The first Esperanto textbook was published on July 26, 1887,
by its inventor L.L. Zamenhof.
Over 1,000
speakers of Esperanto have been expected to gather this week at the 101st World Esperanto Congress in Slovakia to celebrate
Tuesday as the 129th anniversary of the “birth” of the language, as July 26,
1887, marked the publication of the first Esperanto textbook by L.L. Zamenhof.
The Polish doctor created the language, which is essentially a set of roots
that can be turned into words with
certain endings that create different parts of speech.
Though
Esperanto can be seen as something of a punchline today, its
origins can be found in serious world-historical matters.
Zamenhof
identified the need for a “neutral tongue,” as TIME once called it, while growing
up in Bialystok in northeastern Poland, home of a mostly Jewish population and
a few main ethnic groups that were not communicating. Humphrey Tonkin, the
former president of the University of Hartford and the Universal Esperanto
Association who currently represents the latter at the United Nations, explains
that while Zamenhof was in medical school in Moscow in his 20s, his world
changed: “The czar gets assassinated, Jews are accused of carrying out the
assassinations, and there’s a whole round of pogroms in Russia that eventually
spread westward into Poland.”
The wave of
anti-Semitism underscored Zamenhof’s thinking that the world needed a single
language that would make it possible for people to bridge gaps of religion or
ethnicity. Meanwhile, technological developments like the telegraph meant that
people from vastly different backgrounds were suddenly in closer contact than
ever. “It’s also a period when the first international organizations get
created, like the Universal Postal Union and Universal Telegraphic Union,”
Tonkin says. “[It was] an earlier wave of globalism that destroyed with the
rise of nationalism in the beginning of the 20th century.”
Considering
that context, the language’s structure was strategic. Even though a
Yiddish-based grammar would have been a natural choice for appealing to the
Eastern European Jews who had inspired him, Zamenhof based his new tongue on
the Romance languages. “He picked a language structured like Latin because
Latin had prestige and Yiddish had none,” Tonkin says. The name Esperanto —
meaning “one who hopes” — comes from the pseudonym under which the Jewish
doctor published the textbook during a period of severe censorship of Jews in
the Russian empire, but also because (in a soap-operatic twist) “he couldn’t
use his own name because his father was one of the censors who censored Hebrew
and Yiddish works.”
Esperanto
wasn’t the first invented language of its time. A German Catholic priest tried
to make “Volapük” catch on seven years earlier, but it died out because, “he
didn’t want anyone else to make decisions about it,” says Arika Okrent,
linguist and author of In the Land of Invented Languages. “Zamenhof just
said, ‘Here it is,’ and he didn’t meddle with what people started doing with
it.'”
Partly
because Zamenhof let the language grow naturally, Esperanto is now said to be
spoken in over 120 countries, boasts a Wikipedia site with more than 230,000
articles and has 465,000 signups on language-learning app Duolingo.
But
Esperanto also had another reason to succeed: though other invented languages
of the era were designed for practical purposes—to further scientific
collaboration or assist with trade, for example—its pie-in-the-sky aims had immediate
and broad appeal. And, Okrent says, that appeal has endured even as Esperanto
has failed to become a widely spoken, everyday language.
“Esperanto
people were drawn to this vision of world harmony,” she says. “The ideals kept
it going through subsequent decades where it became clear that it wasn’t going
to work in the way most people thought it would.”//-
JAM EN LA JARO 1923
TIME MAGAZINE INFORMIS PRI ESPERANTO
THE
LEAGUE OF NATIONS: Esperanto Spurned
Monday, Aug. 13, 1923
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,727293,00.html
"The movement to make Esperanto a world language for auxiliary
international purposes received a rebuff from the Commission of International
Coöperation, which had been invited to express its opinion on the question by
the Assembly of the League of Nations.
The
Commission decided to eschew synthetic languages, and to invite the League to
favor the selection of a living language as one of the most powerful means for
bringing the nations of the world together. English and French must fight it
out.
Even
Esperanto can be tinged with politics...".
