Esperanto
| We will control what you think with |
| Here's how we do it |
Esperanto is a constructed international auxiliary language (auxlang) invented in the late 1800s by one Ludwig Lazar Zamenhof as a replacement for other "international" languages such as English, French, and Latin, with the intent of creating a language with no attachments to any existing body. The name is from the pseudonym that Zamenhof used in his original publication covering the language, meaning "one who hopes"; the original title given by Zamenhof for the language was simply a descriptive name, "Lingvo Internacia" (international language).
The language has something of the status of a grassroots movement. It rose to prominence in the aftermath of Johann Schleyer's Volapük (which survives today mostly in a few old books and a silly Russian slang word for a form of chatroom Cyrillic transliteration); Esperanto filled the same need as Volapük[1] as a politically neutral auxiliary language, but eliminated much of the grammatical complexity, bizarre word mutations, and confusing pronunciation that had decimated the international auxiliary language community.[2] Esperanto is still thought to be the most successful auxlang ever invented, but no real statistics exist on the number of speakers it commands. Esperanto is one of four constructed languages to be issued an ISO language code, receiving the designation: "eo".[3]
The language itself is fundamentally Indo-European in vocabulary, and grammar, with a strong bias towards simplification.[4] The word list is drawn (somewhat arbitrarily) from most of the languages prominent in international discourse at the time, notably English, German, French, Latin, Russian, Yiddish, and a bit of Polish.[5] Many previous auxlang proposals had focused primarily on a single language for grammar and vocabulary.[6]
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[edit] Hands on persecution
There's a fair amount of criticism surrounding the language and movement.
While Esperanto is fairly inoffensive in itself, it seems to have raised the ire of a number of different groups. Hitler classed it as a Jewish language (Zamenhof was ethnically Jewish)[7][8], while Stalin said it was the language of spies.[9] Far too many Esperantists have ended up paying with their lives — for what is essentially a hobby. In another nasty twist of fate, all of Dr Zamenhof's children ended up dying in Nazi concentration camps.
Elsewhere, the Tojo regime in Imperial Japan[10] and the Falange prior to the 1950s[11] also had a crack at Esperanto.
However, on the flipside, Esperanto has been used by some far-left groups. The Yugoslav leader Tito is also known to have been a speaker, and in fact encouraged its use. The Ayatollah Khomeini apparently condoned its use as well, until he found out Esperanto is one of the Bahai religion's pet projects. Bahais are not very popular with the Shia fundamentalist government of Iran. Fascist Italy also liked Esperanto, because it has lots of phonetic similarities with Italian.[12]
Not surprisingly, as a proposed global language, Esperanto has drawn the fire of conspiracy theorists. Some see it as a vehicle for the Illuminati, e.g. George Soros is a fluent speaker. Some Christian fundamentalists have classified it as a Satanic language, despite the fact that a significant number of Esperantists are devout Christians and the Bible is available in the language.
[edit] Criticism
There is also a fair amount of controversy over exactly how the language is supposed to be developed; the project forked early on, with a competing language, Ido, created by Esperantists who felt quite strongly that the language's grammar needed simplification.[13] Many Esperantists consider Zamenhof's work to be immutable; the practical reason given is to preserve intercommunicability and prevent the development of dialects, though it's not uncommon to find a fundamentalist mindset and even a bit of persecution complex among some speakers. (Not entirely unjustified given the movement's history)
Some also hold up Esperanto as an example of how not to design a language. Zamenhof was not a trained linguist and therefore made a number of choices that, even where they exist in natural languages, are often considered unacceptable in a constructed language with pretensions of universalism:
- The primary document of the language, the Fundamento, is written as 16 rules that take for granted a knowledge of the grammar of any of several Western European languages (Actual systematic grammars of Esperanto are quite long and weirdly ambiguous due to Zamenhof's failure to allow for numerous common constructions, including direct/indirect object combinations).
- The two-case noun system would be seen as unnecessary complexity for languages such as English, French, Modern Arabic or Chinese with no real noun case marking at all. Speakers of English could consider it similar to having to remember to distinguish who vs. whom for every single noun.
- The vocabulary and affix systems are pervasively sexist,[14] requiring an explicit suffix (-ino) for anything obviously female. Words with inherently female meanings are rare to nonexistent, even to the point of using patrino, a derivative of the masculine patro, for "mother."[15] An explicit masculine suffix, -iĉo (Paired with rendering all default male roots as gender neutral), is used by some, but is nonstandard; it is unclear whether singular inclusive language is even possible in strictly standard Esperanto. In plural speech the prefix "ge" can be used to describe a gender-neutral group (e.g. "gepatroj", parents); one could arguably use "ge" with singulars to indicate whether any particular gender might fill the role, but it is not standard.
- The phonology is highly influenced by Central European languages such as German and Polish. While the vowel system is simple enough, there is a fairly high number of consonants and somewhat difficult consonantal clusters. Highly difficult consonant clusters are possible in the word formation such as antikvscienco (pronounced as in English -kvsts-) or dormĉambro (-rmch-). While those are extreme examples, consonant clusters are common even in basic vocabulary (/stsientso/ for science), and some languages don't even allow those at all (like Hawai'ian and other Malayo-Polynesian languages) or highly restrict them (Japanese allows "n + any consonant" only). Native speakers of languages with easier to use syllable structures[16] would ironically be out of luck in a world where everyone spoke this supposedly neutral international language. Pity the Standard Arabic, Japanese, or Mandarin Chinese speaker called upon to say "Pronontsado Kai Ekspluatado Esperanton Tro Malfatsila Estas"![17]
- The Esperanto alphabet has five consonants — ĉ ĝ ĥ ĵ and ŝ — with a circumflex diacritic over them (usually replaced with a -h- or -x- in ASCII text)[18]. This is highly nonstandard typographically, borrowing from and conforming to no system used in any natural language orthography standard.
More recently there have been some moves to ameliorate some of the gender differentiation in the language.
[edit] False friends
For fun, here are a few "false friends", i.e. words that look similar to various English ones, but have a completely different meaning.
- Adulti - to commit adultery
- Atendi - to wait.
- Bildo - A picture.
- Blanka - White.
- Demandi - to inquire
- Dika - thick
- Dungo - Employment
- Farti - To fare, as in "Kiel vi fartas?" (How are you)
- Fake - "By specialization"
- Flava - Yellow
- Frazo - A sentence
- Jam - Already
- Novelo - Short story
- Pretendi - to claim
- UK - abbreviation for the Esperanto World Congress
[edit] The Green Star
The first edition of the Fundamento was bound in a cover with bright green stars on it, because that was the only cover the printer had lying around that day. As a result, the green star quickly became the emblem for Esperanto, to the point where you can now buy Esperanto stickpins that display a green star.
Of course, this meant that green became the official color for Esperanto and for the Esperanto movement. This causes no end of confusion with environmentalism, whose advocates also use green as their color.
[edit] Conclusion
On the whole, Esperantists are mostly sane and well-meaning people, and there's no harm in learning it and becoming part of the community. However, the Auxlang community is known to be rather quick to fight and stir up trouble, and the Esperanto community, being the largest single portion of it, is no exception. It is a relatively easy language for just about anyone to learn,[19] though speaking it is not typically as easy as many proponents may claim, especially if the speaker is not familiar with European languages.
[edit] See also
- English spelling reform
- Lojban, another artificial language.
[edit] External links
- Esperanto.net—Language information in English
- Vikipedio: Wikipedia in Esperanto
- Justin B. Rye's extensive fisking of the Esperanto language and culture
- Rebuttal to Rye's site by Claude Piron
- On a Critic of Esperanto by Claude Piron
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ from two words "vola" and "pük", both taken from English meaning "World" and "speech"… no I'm serious.
- ↑ Yes, it literally killed every tenth new language… it was that horrible. Like listening to Vogon poetry in Ubbi Dubbi.
- ↑ The others are Volapük (vo), Interlingua (ia) and Interlingue/Occidental (ine)
- ↑ Zamenhof spoke Russian at home and studied in that language, too. Esperanto is mostly influenced by English, French, Russian, German and found regularity from languages as diverse as Lithuanian, Finno-Ugric languages, and Turkic languages.
- ↑ The only Esperanto word of note with a Polish origin is "kolbaso" (sausage), but much of the grammar reflected Polish idioms
- ↑ Volapük used heavily modified English words and Latin grammar, Universalglot used the Spanish/Italian-like Romance languages but not Latin itself, Communicationssprache used French, and Solresol is based on no natural language.
- ↑ Hitler considered Esperantists to be part of the International Jewish Conspiracy (as he explained in Mein Kampf), and therefore needed to be destroyed.A brief article (in Esperanto) on Nazi-era language politics surrounding Esperanto and a translation.
- ↑ An article in Spanish about the Holocaust and its effects on the Esperanto community.
- ↑ "Donald J. Harlow, The Esperanto Book, chapter 7". Donh.best.vwh.net. http://donh.best.vwh.net/Esperanto/EBook/chap07.html. Retrieved 2010-12-05.
- ↑ Lins, Ulrich (2008). "Esperanto as language and idea in China and Japan" (PDF). Language Problems and Language Planning (John Benjamins) 32 (1): 47–60. ISSN 0272–2690. http://benjamins.com/series/lplp/32-1/art/05lin.pdf. Retrieved July 2, 2012.
- ↑ La utilización del esperanto durante la Guerra Civil Española, Toño del Barrio and Ulrich Lins. Paper for the International Congress on the Spanish Civil War, (Madrid, 27–29 November 2006).
- ↑ Esperanto: The World's Most Popular Constructed Language, Part 1
- ↑ Esperantists on the non-Ido side of the debate claim that Ido was the brainchild of a very small group with an axe to grind, who bamboozled the world into thinking they represented a larger swath of the Esperanto movement than they actually did.
- ↑ While this is true of many natural languages as well, the issue is whether such a situation is appropriate in a constructed language with an explicitly political, arguably left-wing mission.
- ↑ In this regard, Esperanto takes minimalism to an extreme: the "proper" word for "bad" is literally "not good" (malbona), a feature later parodied in Orwell's Newspeak. As such "patrino" is suffering the same fate; however, many feel that such a situation is still unacceptable.
- ↑ These make up perhaps a third of world population, due to containing non-European languages such as Mandarin, Japanese, Javanese and Malay and a thousand smaller ones.
- ↑ Ĉu ŝi scias ĉe ĉi-scene la sklavo ŝtelas la sceptron?
- ↑ The letter ŭ has a breve diacritic, not a circumflex diacritic; in ASCII text, it is usually replaced with a w, but can also be rendered as ux.
- ↑ So they say