Esperanto

Esperanto is an international auxiliary language created by Ludwig Zamenhof in the 19th century. Zamenhof, a Russian Jew, grew up in multilingual Białystok, in what is now Poland, amid intercommunal tensions. At an early age, he hit on the idea of creating a neutral international auxiliary language as a peace project to allow people to communicate person to person across ethnic divides.

There have been many projects for universal, planned languages, but Esperanto stands apart as the language of a small, but vibrant and cosmopolitan speech community in the 21st century.

Historically, Esperanto speakers divided into a “neutral” movement that became the global Esperanto organization UEA (Universala Esperanto-Asocio), and a fuzzily leftist movement, SAT (Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda).

For the official take on what’s happening, one can read Esperanto magazine (monthly, subscribers only), published by the UEA; for an unofficial one, the independent LiberaFolio web bulletin.

For an insightful and very funny English-language introduction to our oddball world, you should absolutely check out In the Land of Invented Languages (Okrent 2009). For historical detail up to the late years of the Cold War, see The Esperanto Movement (Forster 1982). The recent book Esperanto and its Rivals (Garvía 2015), which I haven’t read yet, explains the success of Esperanto relative to competing projects in terms of their founders’ differing models of language community and authority. If you read Slovene, my wife and I have published an essay on the topic (Moe and Zlatnar Moe 2015).

Esperanto was made to be easy to learn. It is to European languages much as Othello (Reversi) is to chess – but the Othello marketing slogan “a minute to learn, a lifetime to master” is relevant here, too.

Popular free learning resources online include a course at Duolingo and the Esperanto movement’s own Lernu.net. Someone is probably teaching a course somewhere near you.

To actually learn to speak it fluently, you should plan to spend some vacation time at an international gathering somewhere.

The leading print dictionary is the brick-sized Plena Ilustrita Vortaro (PIV), also searchable online, and the handier non-illustrated abridged edition, Plena Vortaro.

Reta Vortaro is another excellent online Esperanto dictionary. While PIV is in Esperanto only, Reta Vortaro has (variable) support for keywords in many languages, including English.

Computer-related terms can be searched at the multilingual Komputeko site, with an English-Esperanto list available in PDF.

You will find a variety of English-Esperanto dictionaries on the web. If you want a serious print dictionary on your desk, you may want to try John C. Wells’ English-Esperanto-English Dictionary.

As for grammar, some Esperanto enthusiasts will tell you that Esperanto has only 16 simple rules. Actually, the truth is that Esperanto is a real language, so a grammar book can be made as long as you like.

The traditional Bible is Plena Analiza Gramatiko (PAG). A 32-MB scan of the 1985 edition, a 599-page brick, can be downloaded.

But I think you’re better off with Bertilo Wennergren’s excellent Plena Manlibro de Esperanta Gramatiko (PMEG), which takes a more modern approach, and which Bertilo has made freely available on the Web from the beginning.

PAG and PMEG are both in Esperanto, of course, and you’ll need to learn some Esperanto to be able to read them, so the “16 rules” do come in handy after all.

Wells’ dictionary (see above) includes a reference grammar in English.

There are national Esperanto associations in many countries. In the US, contact Esperanto-USA; in the UK, the Esperanto Association of Britain; elsewhere, well, google it.

There may be a local club near you. Local Esperanto clubs are the traditional base of the movement. Don’t expect a young crowd.

The world association is Universala Esperanto-Asocio (UEA), which holds an annual gathering called Universala Kongreso (UK).

The UEA also organizes Delegita Reto, a network of volunteer “delegates” on whom members can call for assistance around the world, whether for tourism or other matters. They are listed in the UEA’s annual handbook.

In my personal experience, this actually works. I turned to a delegito in Sarajevo when I went to Bosnia to do fieldwork a few years after the war, and it was a fantastic help. Your mileage may vary.

The youth organization TEJO organizes its own gathering, Internacia Junulara Kongreso (IJK), and publishes the general-interest magazine Kontakto and the internal bulletin TEJO Tutmonde.

They also have a global volunteer network of people who will let you stay in their homes for free, Pasporta Servo. Sounds great for Inter-rail, but I’ve never actually used it, so can’t tell.

There are many other meetings around the world.

The language is named Esperanto, meaning “one who hopes” (it’s the active present participle of esperi, to hope). Zamenhof originally just named it “international language”, and published it under the pen name Doktoro Esperanto: “Dr Hopeful”, if you like. People took to calling it “the language of Dr Esperanto”, which inevitably got shortened to just Esperanto.

Speakers and advocates of the language refer to themselves as esperantistoj, esperantists. There is a long-standing internal debate over whether this entails an esperantismo with some sort of substantial value orientation beyond liking the language.

The study of auxiliary and constructed languages is called interlinguistics.

The monthly Monato magazine carries news from around the world, written by correspondents from the countries concerned. Le Monde diplomatique has an Esperanto edition.

The duo Ĵomart and Nataŝa, originally from Kazakhstan but now based in Sweden, have made the sweetest sounds in Esperanto music for a generation. The Esperanto rock music phenomenon has largely come out of Scandinavia, with groups such as Amplifiki, Persone, Esperanto Desperado and La Perdita Generacio. For literary texts set to folk tunes and competently performed, try the Dutch group Kajto.

Vikipedio, the Esperanto-language Wikipedia edition, has over 230,000 articles (of varying quality).

Some quality comics have been published in Esperanto translation, including Tinĉjo (Tintin) and Asterikso (Asterix). A few original amateur strips have come and gone, like Martin Weichert’s Gogo la testudo (Gogo the turtle).

Esperanto sadly lacks a Hollywood or a broadcasting corporation. You will, however, find a variety of video clips at the http://esperanto-tv.com portal. For people of eccentric taste, two original Esperanto-language feature films are available on YouTube: Angoroj (1964), a crime story set in Paris; and Incubus (1966), a weird art-horror thing with William Shatner and others mouthing their lines in savagely mispronounced Esperanto.

Esperanto is often used as a prop to suggest a certain ambience. One of the two main species in the acclaimed Saga comics series, the horned moon-dwellers, use (very flawed) Esperanto, especially for magic spells. Movies and TV series that have used Esperanto as a prop include Chaplin’s Great Dictator (ghetto signage – replacing Yiddish for some reason) and Red Dwarf (spaceship signage). Rumours that the Minionese pidgin in Despicable Me etc. includes Esperanto, however, seem to rely on the false claim that “para ti” or “para tu” is Esperanto. The best use of Esperanto I’ve seen a movie is Captain Fantastic (2016), where two of the girls speak a few lines of Esperanto as a private language among themselves. For the record, they do it well; ignore the clueless critics who say otherwise.

The alphabet (Table 1) is Latin with the addition of a few accented letters (circumflex over ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ and breve over ŭ). Ŭ is used to form the diphtongs aŭ and eŭ (e.g. Aŭstralio, Eŭropo). Each letter corresponds to one phoneme, and the other way around, so words are spelled as they are pronounced. The accent is on the second-to-last syllable: alfabeto.

All verbs end in -i in the infinitive. The present tense, regardless of person or number, is formed with -as; the past, with -is; and the future, with -os. The conditional is formed with -us, and the imperative with -u.

Similarly, you can form active and passive participles in all three tenses with the corresponding suffixes -int-, -ant-, -ont- and -it-, -at-, -ot- (irinta, gone; iranta going, ironta going to go; vidita seen; vidata being seen; vidota to be seen in the future).

All singular nouns end in -o, and all adjectives in -a. There is no gender, but there is concordance between nouns and adjectives in case and number. For plurals, -j is added: bona amiko (a good friend); bonaj amikoj (good friends). The accusative case, denoting the object or place at which an action is directed, is formed by adding -n: Mi havas bonajn amikojn (I have good friends); Ŝi iris en la ĉambron (She went into the room). The definite particle is la (the); its absence expresses the indefinite: La knabo havas hundon (The boy has a dog).

To turn an adjective into an adverb, replace -a with -e: Vi bone parolas la lingvon! (You speak the language well!).

Esperanto’s vocabulary derives from European languages: Romance, Germanic, and Slavic in order of frequency, with a preference for words that are part of a common international stock. New words continually enter the language, and are ratified by widespread community use. In a world dominated by English loan words, Esperanto speakers prefer to forge their own, to the point of using Tut-tera teksaĵo (TTT) for the World Wide Web (WWW).

In Esperanto, unchanging word roots are combined with other roots and endings to form various meanings, like building with Lego bricks. To the extent that a root such as rapid- implies a word class, the link is very fluid: rapida swift, rapide swiftly, rapidi to hurry, rapido quickness or a hurry.

A characteristic of Esperanto is the ability to derive a large number of words from a smaller stock of roots by adding prefixes and suffixes. Other languages do the same; in English you find wine in a winery, baked goods in a bakery, and nuns in a nunnery, just as in Esperanto you find them in a vinejo, bakejo or monaĥinejo, but you can expect a bit more regularity in Esperanto, where you also find learning in a lernejo (school) and sales take place in a vendejo (shop). The most striking, perhaps, is the use of mal- to form antonyms: granda large, malgranda small; juna young, maljuna old; bona good, malbona bad.

The table of correlatives (Table 2) also contributes to systematizing the vocabulary. A set of pronouns and adverbs – interrogative, demonstrative, indefinite, comprehensive and negative, for things, persons, places, qualities, manners, numbers, etc. – can be formed from a small set of beginnings and endings.

Since kio asks for a noun and kia for an adjective, you might expect to see kie ask for any kind of adverb, but it actually only means “where”, whereas “how, in what way” is kiel. One advantage of having “where” end in a vowel is that you can tack on the accusative -n to form kien, whither. The particle ĉi indicates proximity: tio that, či tio this, tiel či like this, čiuj či all these. Words ending in -o, -a, and -u take the plural -j and the accusative -n. To ask “how many”, kiom is usually used with the partitive da: kiom da tomatoj, how many tomatoes.