consideration to the poor soul at the other end of that assumption. And in doing so, he was a very early pioneer of the next major era in language invention.
Ludwik Zamenhof and the Language of Peace
A Linguistic Handshake
By the time Wilkins, Dalgarno, and the rest of the intellectual circle of the philosophical language inventors were dead, French had become the international language of culture and diplomacy. Scientific academies in Berlin, St. Petersburg, and Turin adopted French as an official language. Treaties were drafted in French, even when neither party was a French-speaking nation. The elites of all European nations could conduct their business in French. Scientists and philosophers no longer focused their attention on creating a new universal language—they had one that worked well enough.
Language projects cropped up here and there, of course, especially after the work of Leibniz came into fashion among scholars in the 1760s. French was fine for communication purposes, but it was no perfect mathematical system. A couple of projects attempted to make French a bit more orderly, while others continued the tradition of starting from scratch with letters, numbers, and symbols in the quest for that perfect system. One of these, the Pasigraphie of Joseph de Maimieux, gained a bit of success—for a few years around 1800, it was taught in schools in France and Germany, and Napoleon was reported to have admired it. But probably only in theory. Had he actually tried to use it, his assessment may have been different. He would have found himself lost in a thicket of tables, sub-tables, columns, and lines, all serving to carve up the world of experience into arbitrary categories, all filled with odd-looking symbols that were hard to distinguish from each other.
Maimieux, like most language inventors at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was still using a method that was now old and tired and, after two hundred years, had never resulted in a language that people wanted to use. When he died in 1820, no doubt dismayed that his brief brush with success had remained so brief, he might have comforted himself with the thought that he had tried to do something that was simply impossible. If the establishment of an international network of teaching programs was not enough, if the endorsement of an emperor was not enough, then nothing was enough. No one would ever be able to get people to use an invented language.
But if he could have seen not even very far into the future, to the end of the nineteenth century, he would have been amazed. Not only would he have seen fierce new enthusiasm and optimism for the prospects of a universal language, he would have seen people, thousands of people, speaking to each other, writing to each other, and most of all arguing with each other in invented languages. The arguments were over which version of which language was the one best suited to be the universal language. Hundreds of projects and revisions of projects appeared during this time. In the end, none of them would become the universal language. But one of them, perhaps even more surprisingly, would become a living language.
Kim Henriksen is way cooler than you’d expect an accordion-playing Esperantist to be. Tall, lean, and muscular, with creative facial hair and a European-cowboy style, he looks younger than he is. In Esperantoland, he is something of a rock star. Through the 1980s, his band Amplifiki played international youth congresses all over Europe, releasing hits like “Tute ne gravas” (No Big Deal) and “Sola” (Alone). The band’s name came from an old Esperanto dictionary word for “amplify,” but a prurient mind might read it as
“Esperantoland” sounds a lot sillier in English than it does in Esperanto. There is no land of Esperanto, of course, though not for lack of trying on the part of the Esperantists. In 1908 the tiny neutral state of Moresnet, the orphan of a border dispute between the Netherlands and Prussia, rose up to declare itself the first free Esperanto state of Amikejo (Friendship Place). More than 3 percent of the four thousand inhabitants had learned the language (a higher percentage of Esperanto speakers has never been achieved in any other country), and their flag, stamps, coins, and an anthem were ready to go. But in the increasingly tense and nationalistic atmosphere of prewar Europe, there was no place for a friendship place, and Esperanto never got its piece of terra firma. Instead, the proponents of Esperanto have made do with a virtual homeland. Esperantoland is located wherever people are speaking Esperanto. And contrary to what I had assumed, they really are speaking Esperanto.
The earthly setting of my first Esperanto experience was the MIT campus, the 2003 venue for the annual congress of the Esperanto League of North America. As I drove from New Jersey through hellish Fourth of July traffic toward Cambridge, the clearest mental picture of an Esperanto congress I could muster was five gray-haired radicals on folding chairs bantering about the Spanish civil war and their stamp collections. I imagined they would be speaking Esperanto, but not for everything. Surely, as soon as something worth saying came up, they would lapse back into English. Just in case, though, I studied up. I brought my dictionary and grammar book and practiced having the maturity not to giggle when I spoke the textbook phrase for “How are you?” or more specifically “How are you faring?” which is rendered as “
More than eighty people turned up at the conference, and I can say that almost all of them spoke only Esperanto the entire weekend. Some were the retired teachers and spry socialist grandpas I was prepared for. Their emotional proselytizing about the noble ideals of “our dear language” clicked right into the Esperanto landscape I’d imagined. But there was no place in that landscape for Kim (known as Kimo in Esperantoland) and his 3:00 P.M. presentation on the importance of rock music in the history of Esperanto culture.
I really wanted to hear what he had to say on the subject, but I had a terrible time understanding him. Three obstacles hindered my full comprehension. One was my incomplete grasp of the language. I had studied Esperanto for only six weeks, by myself, from a book. I thought I was doing pretty well. I understood every word of the opening lecture on the future of the Esperanto movement. I held my own in conversations about topics ranging from the language imperialism of English to Esperanto haiku. In fact, I was doing so well that I started to enjoy meeting my fellow conference goers so I could chitchat about my meager Esperanto experience. “Oh, I started a month and a half ago, no teacher, just a book,” I would toss off casually. If I really wanted a pat on the head, I’d add, “This is actually the first time I’ve ever heard it spoken.”
I can be a bit of a show-off when it comes to facility with language. I have an aptitude for it that is probably much less impressive than that of the average European, but I’ve figured out how to work it to my full advantage by picking languages with high impact-to-proficiency ratios. Pretty good Hungarian gets you a lot more love in Budapest than perfect French buys you in Paris, and one well-placed word of Ibo to a Nigerian taxi driver can reward you with enough compliments to beat back the insecurities from all other parts of your life for a week. I wasn’t expecting an ego boost from Esperanto. We are all speaking a second language here. Who’s to impress? So when I heard, “Only six weeks? You’re doing wonderfully!” I might have milked it a little. But I grew suspicious after four or five speeches about how we must do everything possible to encourage young people and keep them in the movement. A quick look around told me that I qualified as a young person (I was thirty-three at the time). The flattery may not have been inspired by my dazzling language skills.
The second obstacle to my full understanding of the role of rock music in Esperanto culture was Kimo’s
