Bonan Tagon: Esperanto Feature

Since I started learning Esperanto in June, I have been asking people—friends, family, even mere acquaintances—if they know what it is, and nine times out of ten, they didn’t. People figure out that it’s a language from context, but from there, they’re completely clueless. I don’t blame them. The first question people usually ask is for the country associated with it, as most languages, like Hungarian, Japanese, Malay, Armenian, etc. are immediately connected with a country of origin.

To answer that question, there isn’t one. Esperanto is a constructed language (colloquially known as a conlang), which means that someone invented it. People create conlangs for a multitude of reasons, including easing human communication, adding a layer to a fictional world (think Klingon, Na’vi, Elvish), or just as a form of experimentation in linguistics. Esperanto was created in the late 19th century by L.L. Zamenhof, a Polish ophthalmologist who witnessed bitter conflict in a time when hate and prejudice between various ethnic groups—Poles, Jews, Russians, Lithuanians, Tatars, Germans—was commonplace. Zamenhof believed that the root of these problems was the mutual misunderstanding brought on by the lack of a common language. For years, he worked on creating his own language then struggled to raise enough money to have it printed. Zamenhof’s hard work culminated in the publication of La Unua Libro, or The First Book, in 1887. Though Zamenhof originally called his conlang Internacia Lingvo (International Language), people adopted the name Esperanto from his pen name, Doktoro Esperanto (Doctor One Who Hopes).

Esperanto began to catch on in Europe, gaining thousands of followers within a decade. People also started learning it America: I discovered an article in the Cornell Daily Sun from March 1907 called “Esperanto Invades Cornell” that reads, “Esperanto is the new universal language recently devised by Dr. Zamenhof, of Warsaw, Russia [sic]. Its growth has been phenomenal, having already gained a foothold in 31 countries, and all of the larger universities are now beginning to take an interest in it.” Nowadays, over 2 million people speak Esperanto with some degree of fluency, and world congresses of Esperanto speakers have been held on every continent except Africa and Antarctica.

So why did so many people take an interest in Esperanto? Perhaps I can answer that by describing my own experience. Firstly, it’s easy to learn. Since I started learning less than four months ago, I’ve reached a level of proficiency in Esperanto that is about equal to my skill in Spanish—which I started about four years ago. Much of that is owed to Esperanto’s lack of irregularities. In fact, La Unua Libro contains only 16 grammar rules. I learned how to speak in the present, past, and future tenses in a day (you just change the endings of verbs, which don’t even need to be conjugated).

Secondly, I admired the mission. Lots of people say that it’s pointless to learn Esperanto because its mission is to unite all of the people of the world under one neutral language, and clearly it isn’t even close. I don’t give this argument any credit. It’s like someone saying that politicians are all horrible, and for this reason, they refuse to vote. It’s not an impossible mission, though it will be if everyone adopts a fatalistic attitude about the language problem.

Thirdly, I fell in love with the culture and the community of Esperantists. Esperanto is something that I can unabashedly gush about to people who don’t know about it, but I also love speaking it with other people. I’ve spoken with people from other states and even other countries in Esperanto, and there’s something gratifying about using it, especially if it bridges a real language gap between myself and the other speaker. There are ways to apply it practically as well. The Pasporta Servo is a hospitality service for Esperantists that publishes a directory of people around the world who are willing to host other Esperantists, often for free. My dream is to travel the world, lodging with Esperantists and experiencing the cultures of each country while being able to communicate in Esperanto with the natives.

My passion for the language encouraged me to form the IHS Esperanto Society this year with Andrey Shakhzadyan ’17, a fellow Esperantist. I wanted to spread Esperanto knowledge at IHS and figured that starting a club wouldn’t be a bad way to start. As of this writing, we have about ten members, though admittedly almost all of them are personal friends. Despite this, we hope that more people will show interest in joining and learning to speak Esperanto. We’ve played games such as frazludo (literally sentence-game), which is a sentence-building game using a board and word cards. In addition, we’ve watched videos in English as well as in Esperanto. My hope is that we’ll be able to attend an Esperanto convention in upstate New York or Canada or host an event that uses Esperanto at the school.

The IHS Esperanto Society meets in K120 on Tuesdays after school. If you have any interest in language (though there’s absolutely no commitment to learning) or simply relaxing after a long day, you should consider stopping by.