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Zamenhof Day

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Today is the most important day in the calendar for people who speak Esperanto. It is Zamenhof Day, named after the man who dreamed up the idea of a language that the entire planet would one day speak. Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof was born 150 years ago, and though his dream was never realized, Esperanto is still spoken – in fact it’s undergoing something of a revival in the Internet age. The World’s language expert Patrick Cox reports.

• Esperanto League of North America
• Patrick Cox’s The World in Words Podcast

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MARCO WERMAN: Just in case it has escaped your notice, today is Zamenhof Day. Zamenhof for the uninitiated is Ludwig Lazar Zamenhof, the father of the invented language known as Esperanto. Zamenhof was born 150 years ago today. Anyone who has visited Google’s homepage today may have been tipped off. The page features the green Esperanto flag. That is significant. The likes of Google and You Tube have given Esperanto a new lease on life. Learning the language has never been easier.

[SOUND BYTE]

Esperanto is in fact more than a language. It’s a subculture and a set of idealistic principles. Here’s The World’s Patrick Cox.

PATRICK COX: Okay, first some definitions. In the world of languages, there are the natural ones between six and seven thousand of them right now. There are the invented languages. There have probably been more than a thousand of them. Most never took hold. But then, there’s Esperanto.

[SOUND BYTE]

This group of young people are meeting in a home in Tel Aviv for an evening of Esperanto conversation. You could find similar gatherings in many parts of the world. You could also find reactions like this to the question, why are you spending your time doing this?

MALE: It has become part of my life because I met so many people that only speak Esperanto. I need now to communicate with them.

PATRICK COX: That’s right. Esperanto for a small number of people has become essential, the common language, not English, not Spanish or Chinese or French, but Esperanto just as Ludwig Lazar Zamenhof dreamed it would. Zamenhof was quite a dreamer. It takes one to imagine the

entire world speaking the same language. He was also a man of his time. Here is Arika Okrent, author of In the Land of Invented Languages.

ARIKA OKRENT: The late 19^th century was the age of great optimism for grand social engineering experiments. People really thought not just with language that you could design a society and sort of impose it from above and say this will make life work better.

PATRICK COX: For Zamenhof, the establishment of a universal language was key. He had grown up in Bialystok in what is now Poland, which sat along something of a linguistic fault line. The city was a mix of Russian, Polish, German and Yiddish, all seemingly in competition. Nationalism and ethnic tensions were on the rise. Esther Schor now takes up the story. She is a professor of English at Princeton and is writing a book on Esperanto.

ESTHER SCHOR: Zamenhof was a lover of languages. Even as a young boy, he was convinced that the key to remedying interethnic hatred was to find a language that people could share, people of different nations, different ethnicities, and different races.

PATRICK COX: Zamenhof started to develop a new tongue. It was a hybrid of romance, Germanic and Slavic languages. He published, as free thinkers did in those days, a brochure laying out a simple blueprint for his language. Only 16 rules.

ESTHER SCHOR: It was almost like a recipe book. You could put together affixes, that is prefixes and suffixes, and roots in various combinations. He said go ahead, make your own words up. This is yours now.

PATRICK COX: That was the key. It didn’t impose too much. In Esther Schor’s words, Zamenhof wanted Esperanto to grow on the tongues of its users and it did. Within a couple of years,

thousands of people had taken it up. They came up with new words, more than 2,000 of them. Okay, so we know now that Zamenhof didn’t get his global takeover. But 120 years later, Esperanto boasts up to 100,000 words according to Schor and a whole culture besides.

ESTHER SCHOR: I have to imagine Zamenhof sitting and listening to today’s Esperanto with a great big smile because he would understand what they were saying. He would understand words like pochtelefono, which means a pocket phone or what we would call a cell phone. He would sort of just put it together. What is the picture I get in my head when I hear pochtelefono?

[SOUND BYTE]

PATRICK COX: Yes, that’s a movie in Esperanto. It’s William Shatner flirting in Esperanto. The movie is called Incubus and although it wasn’t a box office hit back in 1965, a newly restored version of it now is a big hit in Esperanto circles. In the internet age, most Esperantos no longer have global aspirations for their language, though some are not above inflating the number of its speakers. There is however a burning passion about what Esperanto stands for. For that reason, Esperantos are determined to keep alive their alternative to the only language that might be called global, English. Esther Schor says the problem with English is that some people speak it well while others speak it barely at all.

ESTHER SCHOR: There is no equality in global English. I think Esperanto, which has a commitment to access and to education asks us to really pause and think hard about what global communication must be. It’s a kind of ethical globalism. I can no longer think about global English without thinking of the challenge that Esperanto puts forward.

PATRICK COX: Esperanto survives, maybe even thrives. Other made up languages, for example, Klingon offers some small amount of competition, but most don’t. That’s why says Arika Okrent you probably never heard of Ladef, Tunish, Sputnik, or Utoki.

ARIKA OKRENT: The lesson from the history of language invention is that if you want your language to be a success, you need to hand it over and let people ruin its perfection. If you want to keep it perfect, then you had better keep it to yourself.

PATRICK COX: Vikto, Fasilfon, Blisssymbolics, or Latinesco. For The World, I’m Patrick Cox.

[SOUND BYTE]

MARCO WERMAN: The Esperanto version of Girl from Ipanemo, this one sung by Flavio Funseca and Alejandro Cossavella ends our show today. I bet you never thought you’d hear that. From the Nan and Bill Harris Studios at WGBH in Boston, I’m Marco Werman. Thank you for joining us.

[SOUND BYTE]

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