And now, here’s something we hope you’ll really like. This piece began as an explanation of why I learned Esperanto but has since evolved into something larger. This is the first installation in a series of articles, still contractually unresolved in terms of quantity and direction, dedicated to the quest for a universal language and how some merry few have chosen to wrestle with it throughout our history.
“The insufficient nature of language can only be a barrier to more free-flowing thought.”
L.L. Zamenhof
“The word salmon does not tell us anything about the object it represents…Theoretically, a language in which the name of each being would indicate all the details of its destiny, past and future, is not inconceivable.”
Jorge Luis Borges
Little is ever made of the fact that humanity has yet to find an alternative basis for value other than exclusivity. In the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the words you speak, and the stories you tell, judgments are only made on the parts of both yourself and your loyal readers on the reactions of envy from the latter or the sense of self-satisfaction from the former. In most cases, it’s not that you actually enjoy the experience as you go through it in the moment: it’s the liminal knowledge that the pictures are going to turn out, the dinner guests will be engaged, and the postmortem omnibus will be bursting slightly more at the seams.
Or, at least, that’s the overgeneralization I’m deciding to label as human nature.
One could likely copy-paste this drawn-out, bloated introduction into nearly any narration of one’s self-serving exercise in eclectic intellectual growth. Yet few will be more eclectic and self-serving than today’s point of focus—Esperanto.
If you’re unfamiliar with what Esperanto is, you are probably assuming that it’s something Italian, perhaps a scooter brand or a type of UNESCO-protected cheese. You wouldn’t be the first.
But if you do know that Esperanto is a language you might still assume that it is at least peripherally related to Italian. Given the number of times I’ve been asked to speak the language to prove it’s a real thing and been informed that “it’s just Italian” (which seems statistically impossible given the frequency of these experiences relative to how many Italians I’ve met here), these are two sound conclusions, and I’m not just being cynical and condescending. Or, not trying to be. Just be glad I’m not using footnotes.
I started pulling the lime-colored thread six years ago, taking a chance on something I read in a Wikipedia article after hearing it referenced in Quiz Bowl (as most of my academic personality derives from, at this point). Before that, I remember meeting a linguistics specialist for my hometown’s public school system at one of those shuffling meet-and-greets for new families at a church, a man who claimed to speak 26 separate languages. He challenged me with a parlor trick, in which he would say a single sentence composed of words from five languages of my choosing. I decided to make Esperanto one of them, even though I knew nothing about what it sounded like, except that someone had once wanted to make it a universal language of Europe. Obviously, I had no way of verifying: he could have pulled entirely from Klingon, and I would have been none the wiser. This polyglot represented my first encounter with a fully-matured nerd in a cultural and intellectual backwater, and revealed that esoteric interests are the children’s birthday party magic of polite society. You could say I ran with that realization.
I lost the motivation for Spanish long before I found a reason to stop taking it, but found a parallel passion in Esperanto when that motivation ran out. It’s no coincidence that I started learning it at the same time I started reading Kafka and watching Charlie Kaufman movies—the zeitgeist comprised tortured, aphasiatic artists whose splash came under a bridge, and no one better fit the bill than one L.L. Zamenhof.
Zamenhof was born in Bialystok (in what is now Poland) in 1859—a decade removed from the tumultuous European revolutions of 1848, which were far more responsible for creating the modern political world we experience than any other year in human history. However, that might be the foundational fallacy talking for me. At the time, Bialystok was under the jurisdiction of the Russian Empire, but this in no way squandered the diversity—and the resulting ethnic tensions—he grew up around.
His formative years imbued him with two key infatuations: language and peace.
Zamenhof always directed his ambitions toward building a universal auxiliary language, supposedly from childhood. His first plan was to modernize Greek or Latin beyond the halls of academia, but both proved to have too complex a grammar for scalability. The issue of complex grammar was the exact reason why he was skeptical of English as the world’s lingua franca. So he decided that the only reasonable solution was to build a language from scratch with one directive: make it as easy for all of Europe to learn as possible.
For Zamenhof, this was not simply an academic exercise or hobby. It was his life’s purpose.
The world of Russian-ruled Bialystok in the 1860s was divided, tense, and suppressive, exploding into violent anti-Semitic pogroms in 1881. Zamenhof hailed from the Jewish diaspora and participated in the Zionist movement that naturally developed from these conditions. Many in the future would associate Zamenhof’s faith with the nature of the language he created (including one long-winded Austrian in his seminal work), but Zamenhof’s relationship with Zionism had functionally diminished by the time Esperanto became fully formed. While he became absorbed in the movement in his wilderness years and even went so far as to almost single-handedly modernize Yiddish, he was fully divorced from the ideology by 1887.
His reason was simple: Zionism was nationalism, and nationalism was contrary to the unity of mankind, regardless of the motivation.
The idea that any group of people—religious, national, or otherwise—was somehow destined for a greater fate than another was deeply troubling for Zamenhof. He disputed the notion that the Jews were God’s chosen people despite being one and was firmly supportive of self-determination, regardless of the context. Certain physical barriers would always exist to a united humanity, but to Zamenhof, religion and language were relatively vestigial in the global age. All language served to transmit ideas, and all religion served to codify sets of morals that were functionally the same regardless of where they went. In a strikingly anachronistic turn, Zamenhof seemed to envision a cultural monopoly as the solution to the widespread turmoil of the 19th century—not to eradicate culture, but neutralize it.
All of these philosophies were distilled into his universal auxiliary language project, which dominated his teenage years. He debuted the first “proto-Esperanto” in 1878 to a group of friends by reading a poem. It was his 19th birthday: Zamenhof wanted to inextricably link his origins and the language’s origins, ideally in yet-to-be-written history books. There’s no definitive source on what the first words he read aloud in Esperanto were, but if I had to guess, it was this song that he authored called Jam temp’ esta’, or The Time has Come!
Malamikete de las nacjes,
Kadó, kadó, jam temp’ está;
La tot’ homoze in familje
Konunigare so debá.
Enmity of nations,
Fall, fall, the time has come! [lit. “already it is time!”]
All humanity in a family
Must unite.
(Note: This is a proto-Esperanto that somewhat distanced from modern grammar. I will discuss this distinction momentarily.)
However, Zamenhof wasn’t the only one to submit to this zeitgeist. Most of Tolstoy’s work in some way implies that global peace should be humanity’s ultimate ambition, and Hugo was speaking about an international brotherhood of Europe as early as 1849. But no better testament exists across history to the endemism of a specific cultural or intellectual attitude to a given time than simultaneous discovery: Newton and Leibniz independently discovered calculus, Elisha Gray filed a patent for the telephone on the same day as Bell, and Joule, Mayer, and Helmholtz all arrived to functionally the same conclusions surrounding energy conservation within months of each other. While Zamenhof first privately released proto-Esperanto in 1878, the “first” auxiliary language in Europe was actually the lesser-known Volapuk, invented by a German Catholic priest in 1879. Zamenhof claims no knowledge of Johann Martin Schleyer, the inventor of Volapuk, until 1880, and the latter claims no knowledge of the former until 1887—corroborated by the vastly different systemic structures of the two.
Volapuk primarily consisted of English, German, and French words that were mutilated by an alternative phonology and alphabet meant to put it in an uncanny valley of semantics: unfamiliar without inventing an entirely new vocabulary. While I do not know it myself, its grammar is easily learnable through a simple system of affixes, without irregulars—the defining characteristic of any artificial language worth its salt. Volapuk and Esperanto share much of the same grammar, which Zamenhof distilled into 15 simple rules. Ideally, someone equipped with that pamphlet and a passing familiarity with most of the tongues of Europe could learn either in an evening, which Leo Tolstoy famously claimed to do.
Both languages find definition in agglutinativism, but Esperanto more so—i.e., new words are formed by combining root words and affixes. For example, malsanulejo, the word for hospital, is derived from the roots mal- (negation), san- (health), ul- (person), and -ejo (place associated with), which together form a place for a person of bad health. In this manner, learning Esperanto is essentially an exercise in memorizing the semantic roots, which are conveniently morphemic in most cases. Approximately 80% of these roots come from Romance languages, with the remainder coming from German, Greek, or Slavic languages.
Interestingly, one of the most central covenants of Esperanto is the absence of slang: after all, regional dialects and grammatical innovation defeat the purpose of having an internationally standardized language. A coded message is understood only so long as it remains unmodified after the key is created. For that reason, the language has remained entirely static since 1905, precisely as the kuracisto (doctor) of Esperanto ordered. Except for a few sticking points concerning noun gender (which are widespread among Slavic languages), no one seems to be particularly opposed to this either.
Most of this was just the license of a moderate savant. Some of it means something, like that point on slang. Because ultimately, Esperanto wasn’t a linguistic project but a political one. Aside from the First International, there was little recourse in the 19th century for those who opposed nationalism. After all, it was a time when the nationalism of six countries was the primary motor for the motion of the entire world. Zamenhof wasn’t a socialist and certainly wasn’t an anti-Zionist, but he was certainly anti-nationalist: to put it bluntly, the nationalism of the strong was ignoble and the nationalism of the weak was imprudent.
Zamenhof’s philosophy draws on a broader Jewish mystical philosophy called Homoranismo, which I’ll basically ignore for the sake of efficiency, but one can safely understand as Zamenhof’s ultimate end. Many Esperantists, myself included, treat these points with detached, paternalistic reverence, but have otherwise opted for the more functionalist finvenkismo, which prioritizes the global adoption of the language as the fin venk, or end goal, of each practitioner’s life and activism. For a brief intervening period, those involved even took it seriously.
In the first thirty years of Esperanto’s lifetime, there were a variety of immediate successes worth mentioning. Sympathetic governments in Hungary, China, and Bulgaria incorporated the language into official school curricula. Regular publications of La Esperantisto were available across Europe, often with Leo Tolstoy, arguably the world’s most famous Esperantist, contributing. In just 15 years, the language was widespread enough that Valdemar Langslet reported being able to travel from Sweden to the Black Sea, speaking only Esperanto and staying in the homes of other Esperantists —a tradition of hospitality that is honored today through an online network of Esperantists called Pasporto Servo. By 1905, the first Esperanto World Congress came into being, and the language was noticeable across three continents—but these were merely means to a much larger end. The whole point of this language was to change the world.
As you could probably infer, there are a few reasons why the world as it turned in 1900 was not inclined to be changed by any of this. Most of Europe (reasonably) thought Esperanto was Socialist dribble. Most of the actual Socialist dribblers didn’t particularly care, and anyone in the disunion probably had a problem with the fact that a Jew started it. These were the days of the First International, when it was good politics to start a small genocide in Namibia because your numbers were declining in the polls. A la Zhou Enlai, it was still too soon to tell whether a well-meaning actor could truly change society from the bottom or simply from the malfeasance of the top. The question of how much agency the people could have in changing the linguistic structure of the world without global cataclysm was the first (and really only) existential problem that the Esperanto movement has had to confront.
It was in this paradigm of nationalistic suppression that our third protagonist enters the fold: another Esperantist adventurer by the name of Edmond Privat, one of those rare libertines who spends his youth as well as all hope to and spends his silver years recalling it to all who will listen. The documentation of these adventures was difficult enough to find, but well worth doing in understanding the contributions of the man second-most-important in the movement behind Zamenhof himself.
In 1905, Privat walked 600 miles at age 16 to attend the World Esperanto Congress, where he was acclaimedas one of the best speakers present. Shortly after that, he traveled to the United States as a kind of ambassador for the language, and even sought a personal audience with President Theodore Roosevelt. Privat made little progress on that front, but he was undeterred. After spending most of the 1910s as a war journalist documenting what he found to be the bottom-up causes of continental conflict (shockingly, nationalism was to blame), he decided that Esperanto and the associated community would benefit from a productive presence at the League of Nations.
Now, given that this piece up until this point has framed Esperanto as a seemingly unmitigated success story, the attentive reader may sense that we are nearing an inflection point in the language’s history, one that explains why I remain the outsider for speaking something that was supposed to be universal. Privat’s efforts at the League of Nations did not pan out, but not due to anti-Semitism, nor even anti-communism. It was largely the French that took issue with the idea that a lingua franca would subsume their cultural influence not only in much of Europe but also throughout the African continent. After all, it was a different time, one in which Paris was at the center of the world’s politics and French graced the tongue of any refined diplomat–and certainly not a world particularly inclined to disavow itself of nationalism as a whole.
And a name-drop in Mein Kampf certainly didn’t help the community a few years after that.
In the great question of superpositioned causality in world history, I feel that the choice to refuse an international language was the true death knell for the burgeoning period of globalism that almost defined the interwar years. I’m aware that the world in 1920 was far from perfect, even if nationalism took a back seat for a few decades. But I just believe that a path to decolonization that didn’t require nearly 200 million dead between World War II and the dictatorships that followed should certainly be preferred. Mackinder be damned, not every war is fought simply because of geographic reasons. I’m confident that the world would be a better place if we all put in the few efforts needed to speak something that imitates consistency around the world, and I’m tired of acting like it wouldn’t be.
I made the mistake of having a small Green star on my phone case for a couple of months this year, thinking that having the Esperanto emblem would be flair enough to keep my employment at Chotchkie’s—and inspire good conversation. The often suboptimal reality of human interaction put these hopes to bed the first time I had to explain what the star means at a pre-formal dinner.
“What’s on your phone case?”
“It’s actually a symbol for this language I speak.”
“What language?”
“Esperanto.”
The conversation was still intriguing at this point.
“Where do they speak that?”
“Actually, nowhere, officially. There are only 3 million people in the world who speak it, and it was originally conceived as a vehicle for denationalization, but it got shut down by Hitler and the French in the 1920s.”
“Oh, cool.”
Talk about building intrigue.
It was one of those moments where you assume that your conversation partner will take idiosyncrasy as profundity, but something gets lost in translation, and you’re left feeling like a jackass, and a pitied one at that. The pitch clearly needs refining. I need to prepare myself better to spout a poetic flow of syllables that makes it seem more like an antique tongue and less like a Reddit in-joke. And the public face needs improvement—shiny, happy people making lots of money always sell better than tweed and testosterone.
I learned Esperanto because I wanted indie cred among the sort of people who write Jeopardy questions for fun, and because I thought it would please the great black box known as college admissions. It’s poetic and right that I misspelled “ophthalmologist” in one of my supplementary essays, and I’d like to think that single mistake is what barred me from Yale. Esperanto remains my greatest asterisk, my most powerful idiosyncrasy, the thing that will perpetually make me self-assured that I care about intellectual pursuits for their own sake and am somehow different from my peers in a constant state of self-advancement. I’m not. There’s no basis for morality that’s not somehow derived from self-advancement. But what I’m interested in is the sort of self-advancement that also pushes the limits of what is semantically possible, to break the paradigms of thought rather than work within them.
Everyone remembers who pops the balloon more than they do who blows it up in the first place.
I question whether this whole pursuit is simply driven by a desire for notoriety. If it is, I’ve buried this desire so deeply in my subconscious that I can’t distinguish it anymore. It’s esotericism with an unlocked door, a meaningless affiliation that you care about more than any other pursuit. It wasn’t for aesthetic reasons that Zamenhof chose green for the language. It’s a color that is fundamental to our existence but has little replication in the human body. Before environmentalism, it was pastoralism, pulling us towards some universal condition that we have since lost, or perhaps forced away. We all secretly yearn for universal unity on some level, but justifiably so, have found our individual reasons as to why we can’t obtain it, just as we have our individual reasons as to why untamed nature is a harsh mistress.
Esperanto does not imbue you with any new wisdom, nor does it really shift your worldview in any meaningful way by doing so. If you are willing to learn it, you likely already subscribe to its central philosophies of unity and peace (I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide where my loyalties lie) and won’t change significantly from beginning to end. You will meet like-minded people from diametric backgrounds who can provide you with reaffirming anecdotes as to why you think the things you do, but you won’t suddenly gain righteousness among the nations. If anything, you will independently derive what Aristotle figured out 2,500 years ago: innovation works only by recombining familiar ideas, and nothing is truly unlearnable. Esperanto isn’t a simulacrum as the excitable would hope: in the end, it’s just a Frankenstein’s monster, as most good ideas eventually reveal themselves with time. Further, that monster has an implacable accent but is a Continental man through and through.
While an achievement by any sense of the word, Esperanto is functionally an accelerated and codified slang that would naturally emerge on a sufficient timescale.
Not so esoteric now.
What, then, is the alternative? Is it possible to create an international language that is truly divorced from all national or prior associations? Is it possible to fundamentally alter the way we think by how we speak and communicate, and if so, is Esperanto really going about it the right way?
Most of what was said thus far is probably wrong, and I want to find out which parts are and aren’t. But linguistic determinism is the island at the center of the Seven Bridges, the nexus we’ll continue to pass through as long as you’re willing to stick with me on this journey. This treatise isn’t a history paper, nor is it a Gonzo joint. It’s an attempt at something real and important that will make ceiling tiles fall from the heavens.
Function follows form. I want to understand not only the philosophy of those who began speaking the language but also the philosophy of anyone who ever sought to design their own method of communication. To know what it means to restructure the very basis of our ideas, identity, and expression; to alter your existence fundamentally. I have an idea of where to go, but not where to end. The road through Monument Valley has no speed limits, and I’m on a full tank, tripping through places that I’ve seen before but never been.
Without giving too much away, experience is the best teacher.
by Trevor Darr
