Ludwik Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto, was born in 1859 in the city of Bialystok, now part of Poland. I have a historical atlas of eastern Europe that includes a map of “ethnolinguistic distribution” during this time. On the left side is a smear of Polish orange, speckled with tiny purple dots of German. On the right is a dramatic swath of Russian pink. Snaking down the middle is an irregularly shaped confusion of multicolored stripes. Bialystok sits in the center of it. Zamenhof wrote that his city of birth
marked the way for all my future goals. In Bialystok the population consisted of four different elements: Russians, Poles, Germans and Jews. Each of these elements spoke a separate language and had hostile relations with the other elements. In that city, more than anywhere, a sensitive person might feel the heavy sadness of the diversity of languages and become convinced at every step that it is the only, or at least the primary force which divides the human family into enemy parts. I was brought up to be an idealist; I was taught that all men were brothers, while at the same time everything I saw in the street made me feel that men as such did not exist: only Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews and so forth. This always tormented my young soul, though many might laugh at such agony for the world in a child. Because at that time it seemed to me that adults had a sort of almighty power, I kept telling myself that when I was grown up I would certainly destroy this evil.
Zamenhof began to develop his new language in earnest during his teenage years, after his rapidly growing family (he was the eldest of nine) moved to Warsaw, where his father, Marcus, took a position as the official Jewish censor. The job involved vetting all Hebrew publications for any statements that could be construed as insulting to the tsar, an ambiguous task requiring Marcus to gauge the paranoia of a government that was already disinclined toward him and other Jews. He was a strict father, and the pressures of his new responsibilities sometimes made him cruel. Ludwik responded by becoming dutiful and well behaved.
The family spoke Russian and Yiddish at home, but Ludwik was familiar with Hebrew through his father (more as a scholarly language than as a religious one). Young Ludwik picked up Polish on the street and Latin, Greek, French, and German at school. His first attempts at inventing his own language didn’t go well. He began by developing a lexicon of one-syllable words, like ha and ka, but found that he couldn’t remember the meanings he’d assigned to them. He made things easier on his memory by substituting roots from languages he had studied—such as
I noticed the formation of the (Russian) word
At about the same time, he began to study English in school. For a speaker of Russian, with its complex systems of verb conjugation and noun agreement, its accusative, genitive, locative, and other sundry cases, English must have appeared a dream of simplicity. He felt the freedom of gliding over ice-smooth paradigms—“I had, you had, he had, she had, we had, they had”—and purged his nascent language of unnecessary grammatical markers.
On December 17, 1878, a Proto-Esperanto congress convened. Despite his shyness, Ludwik had convinced some of his schoolmates to involve themselves in his project. They gathered in his cramped apartment to celebrate over cake and take part in that most Esperanto of activities—the singing of hymns. On this day they sang a poem by Ludwik that succinctly captures the sentiment that inspired his diligence:
Enmity of nations Fall, fall, the time has come May the whole of humanity be united as one.
This poem is an example of early Esperanto. The language was further tweaked and modified when Ludwik was forced to reinvent it from scratch. Before he left for university to study medicine, a colleague of his father’s had remarked that Ludwik seemed awfully wrapped up in this language of his. Fearing that it would distract the young man from his studies, Marcus demanded that he leave it behind. The compliant son handed over his lovingly filled notebooks, and some time after he set out for Moscow, his father threw them on the fire. Ludwik didn’t discover this until he transferred home to the University of Warsaw. But he had no time to brood. Soon the enmity of nations bubbled up into a wave of violent pogroms that swept through Russia, including a two-day spree of bloodshed in Warsaw. More determined than ever, he started all over again.
In the next five years he finished his education and began his practice as an oculist, general medicine having proved to induce debilitating guilt when he couldn’t do anything to help a patient. He continued revising and refining his language, and he met his future wife, Klara. She embraced him and his language, and they used it to write love letters to each other.
The official birth of Esperanto occurred in 1887, the year that Zamenhof, using Klara’s dowry, self- published a small book titled
Nothing says success like bitter, angry jealousy in the hearts of your competitors. In this case, the names read like the product of the perverted etymological strategies of the modern-day pharmaceutical industry: Interlingua, Ido, Glosa, Globaqo, Novial, Hom-Idyomo. These are just a few of the many languages proclaimed by their advocates to be simpler, more logical, and more beautiful than Esperanto. But Esperanto can afford to be smug. It’s the only one you’ve heard of.
And this drives the other guys nuts. When I first became curious about the topic of constructed languages, I joined a Listserv called Conlang. The next day my in-box held 287 messages. After a few days of this, I decided I wasn’t that interested and unsubscribed. I didn’t know that I’d innocently stepped right into the “flame war” that ultimately led to the “great split,” after which things calmed down considerably.
The split was between two groups. The first was composed of people interested in quietly developing and discussing the languages they crafted for science-fictional worlds, what-if-a-language-did-this playfulness, or Tolkienesque fun (the true conlangers). The second was composed of those who wanted to talk about an international auxiliary language for the real world (the auxlangers). The auxlang group included a few devoted Es- perantists and a larger number of supporters of alternate projects. Most of the war was conducted within the auxlang group, as vitriol hurled at Esperanto for its “totally ridiculous spelling system,” “the backward and confusing affix system,” and “the accusative -n abomination.” Additional fighting took place between the various Esperanto competitors—Ido took on Interlingua, and a new version of Novial took on an old version of Novial. The conlangers got fed up with “this stupid argument about something that is never, NEVER, going to happen anyway, FACE IT!!!” and the auxlangers, no doubt tired of being called “deluded lunatics” in the one place it was supposed to be safe to talk about invented languages, agreed to split off and form their own list. The conlangers went back to tame exchanges about tense-aspect marking and vowel harmony, and the auxlangers took it outside.
Every anti-Esperantist auxlanger is convinced that he (no need to fret about gender-neutral pronouns on this one) represents a superior product. Perhaps one of them does. Perhaps all of them do. It doesn’t matter. At an
