Esperanto conference, I witnessed a tired-looking man in a gray T-shirt defiantly introduce himself as an Interlingua supporter. “I think it is a better language,” he announced. “It’s clearer, more logical, and more beautiful than Esperanto,” and then, without the slightest trace of irony, “but I have no one to speak it with.”
Esperanto may never have risen to its position of prominence if it hadn’t suffered its own great split early on. In the lore of Esperantoland, it is called the Schism, and if this makes you think of religious wars, you aren’t far off. The Schism served to draw off the people who were interested in the language itself (the prestigious scholars with linguistically sophisticated suggestions for improving and perfecting it) from the people who were interested in the idea behind the language (the idealistic true believers, or, depending on whom you ask, the kooks).
Zamenhof was an amateur. He had no training in philology, no university chair. But because he was driven by the serious (if naive) hope that his language would help society, he devoted his energy to persuading people to use it rather than convincing them to appreciate its design. His book had included a form for the reader to sign, agreeing to learn the language if ten million others also signed the form. Fewer than a thousand came back, but enough interest had been generated to inspire him to translate the original Russian text into Polish, French, and German. He left the English translation to a well-meaning German volunteer, who produced choice manglings such as “The reader will doubtless take with mistrust this opuscule in hand, deeming that he has it here to do with some irrealizable utopy.” Before its chances were completely killed in the English-speaking world, an Irish linguist took interest and produced a more readable translation.
The book laid out a grammar of sixteen rules and a lexicon of about nine hundred words. Though the lexicon has grown considerably since then, the basic structure of the language has remained essentially unchanged to this day. Words are formed from roots and affixes. Nouns end in -
The verb endings differ with tense:
Other endings modify the meaning in different ways. The feminine is formed with -
The Russian -
The opposite sense of a word can be formed by prefixing
These, among other affixes, extend the range of the relatively small vocabulary of roots provided in the book. The affixes never change their form, so they are always recognizable. You can always at least tell whether a word is a noun or an adjective, whether a verb is past or present tense. The roots never change their form when they join to an affix, so you can always find them in the dictionary. This is not the way most languages work. Zamenhof gives an example from German, with the translation you would get if you looked it up word for word in a dictionary:
The second word, weiss, can be an adjective meaning “white,” but here it is the first-person-present form of the verb
But for the Esperanto version, you don’t need special knowledge, just the meaning of each piece:
“I don’t know where I left the stick; have you not seen it?”
Zamenhof doesn’t spend much time explaining the rules of word formation. The lost-stick sentence is the only example for which he provides a translation. He provides other demonstration texts without translation, expecting that the reader will be able to puzzle them out and learn by example. He wanted to show that it was possible to begin using the language with barely any explicit study. He suggested that people test the language by writing to a friend in a foreign land, enclosing a small leaflet with the translations of a few roots and affixes, and leaving it up to the recipient to make sense of it. One of his demonstration texts is an example of such a letter. Give it a try.
The translation:
Dear Friend, I can only imagine what kind of face you will make after receiving my letter. You will look at the signature and cry out, “Has he lost his mind? In what language did he write? What’s the meaning of this leaflet that is added to the letter?” Calm down, my dear. My senses, at least as far as I believe, are all in order.
The translation shows that Zamenhof understood what kind of reaction this little experiment was likely to provoke. However, once the recipient had translated this far, another kind of reaction often set in. If you just tried the translation yourself, perhaps you know what I’m talking about. Are you a secret lover of sentence diagramming? A crossword puzzle aficionado? Have you ever read the dictionary for pleasure? Yeah, you know what I’m talking about. If you are a certain type of language-interested person, decoding an Esperanto letter can be an enjoyable little challenge. Much more enjoyable than reading a screed about the language’s virtues.
The letter-writing test helped the language to spread. Small clubs of enthusiasts formed. Zamenhof came out with another textbook, a dictionary, and a translation of
Meanwhile, there was trouble in Volapukland. Volapuk was the project of a German priest named Johann Schleyer, who got the idea to create a universal language directly from God during one sleepless night in 1879.
His system had great success in Germany and soon spread as far as the United States and China. By the end of the 1880s there were over two hundred Volapuk societies and clubs in the world and twenty-five Volapuk journals. Even people who didn’t care to learn it at least knew about it. President Grover Cleveland’s wife named her dog Volapuk. The craze was big enough to be mocked in local papers such as the
A charming young student of Gruk Once tried to acquire Volapuk But it sounded so bad That her friends called her mad, And she quit it in less than a wuk.
