Esperanto: The artificial language that aimed to unite humanity
Esperanto: The artificial language that aimed to unite humanity
A language for the world has been the dream of many thinkers for millennia. Esperanto was created to fill that role. Here is its story.
Esperanto is perhaps the most successful constructed language of the "batch" that popped up between the 1860s and the 1940s. The text mentions Volapük, but was also Universalglot, Latino sine flexione, Idiom Neutral, plus a bunch of conlangs derived from Esperanto.
It's easy to look at those projects nowadays and say "nope! [feature] is the wrong way to go!"; for Esperanto this would be probably
- rather convoluted phonotactics
- large consonant set
- a "masculine is unmarked" approach to derivation (NB: the feminine -in- was there since the start, the masculine -iĉ- is a recent development)
- the small case system being a bit of the worst of both worlds (less syntactic freedom than a full-fledged case system, still added complexity that one needs to learn)
- the vowel alternations not working so well in practice
But Linguistics back then was barely a science, and those guys like Zamenhof were doing things by gut instinct.
And, more importantly, those conlangs were part of a historical context, where you got a bunch of factors making the intellectuals believe that one language was the solution for everything:
- Nationalism was already well established as a political meme, creating conflicts; with linguistic identity being often seen as synonymous for national identity.
- Increased communication across speakers of different languages. Steam locomotives would "kick in" around 1830, but their social impact would be felt later on.
- War. I don't think that it's a coincidence that the "batch" of conlangs that I mentioned popped up between the Franco-Prussian War and the Second World War.
Once you "glue" those factors together, the idea of a language not tied to any national identity, for the sake of peace, pops up naturally.
Specifically in the case of Esperanto, there's also the fact that Zamenhof was ethnically Jewish. That would make him a direct target of nationalism, and perhaps give him the "insight" to split apart ethnic identity and language (as you have the ethnic identity being associated with Hebrew, not with Zamenhof's native Yiddish).
26Esperanto would be more solid if it weren't so Eurocentric. Idolinguo, one of its forks, solved a few of the issues Esperanto had in regards to grammar, but the Eurocentrism is still there.
7Currently Esperanto is in a weird "double dilemma":
- it's weakly designed, but languages with a better design barely have speakers;
- it's spoken by a relatively low amount of people, but the other options are all languages associated with national identities.
With the Eurocentrism being part of the first dilemma - yes, it could be solved by better design, but every Esperantido (including Ido, that you mentioned) has only a fraction of the L2+ linguistic community behind Esperanto.
While not everything, I feel like a lot of issues can (and should) be addressed by its linguistic community; I see the -iĉ- masculine suffix as an example of that (addressing the "males are default" social issue that "leaked" into the language).
8Currently Esperanto is in a weird "double dilemma":
- it's weakly designed, but languages with a better design barely have speakers;
- it's spoken by a relatively low amount of people, but the other options are all languages associated with national identities.
Reminds me of the programmer's expression: "there are two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about, and the ones nobody uses"
7I generally have a problem with it the statement that Esperanto is poorly designed. When considering that it does enough things right. That it uses internationalisms, that it can be sung, that it gives enough expressivity, that it's mechanical enough to be learnt by it's grammar, etc.
It always sounds as if Esperanto is Latin with a thousand of exceptions, designed like french with spoken language does not equal the written text of the language, etc.
When in fact the opposite is the case. People then point to one of the current language projects, which are supposedly "better" in one dimension or another. That's just optimizing to some standard of perfect.
1
Compared to current Global language that is English, that is still a better option according to this argument
4
It's still spoken. Great second language, very easy to learn but also very robust.
4Se vi estas Eŭropulo, ĝi estas tre facile lerni. Mi estas eterne komencanto, do mia skribo ne estas bone, sed mi povas leĝi ĝin.
As a native English speaker "-n" trips me up a lot and in general remembering roots and affixes ruin my output. But, input is solid "leĝ-" looks and sounds like "legible" so "leĝi" is "to read", most of the roots are parsable like this.
2I'm surprised I can basically understand >90% of this even though I've never seen any Esperanto in my life
3Eĉ se vi ne estas. Kvankam la lingvo estis desegnita base de aliaj eŭropaj lingvoj, ĝi estas universale facile lernebla. Fakte, estas granda komunumo de esperantistoj en Ĉinio, Koreio, ktp. Nu, la fekan akuzativon ni vere ne bezonis...
3