Contents
Telling the story of Esperanto, a language created in an attempt to reduce the number of wars
Project from a cosmopolitan city
In the late 1800s, the city of Bialystok in Poland, then part of the Russian Empire, was a multinational center. It was inhabited by a large number of Poles, Germans, Russians and Jews. Each nation spoke its own language and treated other languages with suspicion. The local Jewish doctor Ludwik Lazar Zamenhof tried to fix this. He devoted his life to creating a universal language that could contribute to the emergence of harmony between people. On July 26, 1887, he published The First Book, in which he introduced and described Esperanto, the result of many years of work.
Simple Universal Language
Esperanto vocabulary is mainly borrowed from nine languages: Russian, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Latin, Polish and Yiddish. The reason for the choice is simple – they were the most familiar to Zamenhof. Esperanto is easy to learn. Nouns have no gender, there are no irregular verbs, and the spelling is completely phonetic (as it is heard and written).
public domain
In the First Book, Zamenhof outlined the 16 basic rules of Esperanto and supplemented them with a dictionary. The book has been translated into over ten languages. At the beginning of each edition, Zamenhof renounced all rights to his creation and declared Esperanto “public property”. Soon Esperanto spread to all continents of the Earth. Since 1905, its speakers from all over the world began to gather once a year for the World Congress – and they still do it.
How they tried to use Esperanto
After the First World War, the League of Nations, the forerunner of the UN, appeared. The purpose of the organization was to prevent destructive military conflicts. At one of the early sessions, an Iranian delegate proposed that Esperanto be accepted as the universal language of international relations. The envoy from France vetoed the idea, fearing that the French language would lose its leading role in diplomacy. In 1922, the French government banned the teaching of Esperanto in all universities in the country for allegedly serving as a tool for communist propaganda.
Hate dictators
In a sad irony, the Soviet authorities also frowned upon the universal language. Esperantists were accused of belonging to an “international spy organization”. Many of them were persecuted and later died during the Stalinist repressions of the 1930s. Hitler considered Esperanto to be proof of a Jewish plot to take over the world. The Gestapo even received a special order to look for the descendants of Zamenhof. All three of his children perished in the Holocaust.
Recognition by UNESCO
After World War II, in 1954, UNESCO adopted a resolution recognizing the World Esperanto Association. A universal language began to be used at the events of the organization. In 1985, UNESCO called on countries to include Esperanto in the school curriculum. For years, China has offered it as a foreign language at several institutes. One of the universities in Poland has a program in Interlinguistics, which is taught in Esperanto.
Esperanto for Peace
Today, Esperanto is spoken by groups of enthusiasts around the world. In total, it is owned by about 2 million people in the world. There are many free resources on the Internet for learning the universal language. It also writes articles on Wikipedia, and there are more of them than in Danish, Greek or Welsh. Followers of Zamenhof see Esperanto as a means to achieve peace. It may seem idealistic, but even the most brutal wars end in peace negotiations. This usually requires translators. Zamenhof wondered if violence could become less common if neutral language helped people overcome differences? So far, there is no definitive answer.