One Traveler

One hundred fifty years ago today, in Bialystok, was born Ludovic Lazar Zamenhof. A Jew, from a region that had passed among Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, and Bielorussian cultural hegemony, Zamenhof grew up in a linguistic, cultural, and religious Tower of Babel.

His response was to create Esperanto, a highly successful artificial auxiliary language.

I’m celebrating the birthday with a dinner party this evening. So are people all over the world—the language today has several million speakers, including hundreds of denaskuloj, or native speakers. (Literally, from-birth-ones.)

Though he was to earn his living as an oculist, Zamenhof was keen on languages, and on solving the practical problems of communication and understanding. His ethical anxiety over this, no less than his brilliant solution, are early presages of his uncommonly gifted mind.

(Global ethical anxiety is a prima facie symptom of high IQ. If your kid is worried about big issues, don’t take him in for therapy or Ritalin; take him in for intelligence testing, and if possible, get him the hell out of school. Of course, poor Zamenhof stood to have the stuffing beaten out of him if he spoke Yiddish to a Russian! Sometimes global anxiety and local anxiety are remarkably congruent. A blessed few can extrapolate from the latter to the former.)

As a young man, he began to study English—perhaps his sixth language. He realized (his other languages all being highly inflected) that extensive noun and verb paradigms aren’t necessary for clarity. At the same time, the rigid word order of English doesn’t work easily for native speakers of other languages.

At the time, the attention of the world was fixed on a pretty successful artificial international language, devised by a German Jesuit. The language was named Volapük—derived from two English words, vol for world and pük for speech—with the genitive -a ending. “World’s Speech,” in essence.

The motto of this languages was Menad Bal, Pük Bal— “one world, one speech.”

Esperanto disagrees. We say Dua lingvo pro unu mondo— “a second language for one world.” We don’t seek to replace natural languages.

Volapük (and please don’t say vole-a-puke) had only one verb paradigm, but it was so complex that there were more possible verb forms than speakers of the language. While philosophically elegant, it was barbarous and cumbersome in practice. It had its day, and then faded.

Zamenhof, who grew up speaking Slavic languages and Yiddish, based his vocabulary on Romance roots—roots that are instantly intelligible to anyone who has studied, say, French. Seventy percent of the core vocabulary also overlaps with English words that have French roots.

A few Germanic (ŝranko, shelf), Slavic (prava, true), and Yiddish (ho ve, oy vey!) words found their way in, as did a few Greek words (kaj, and). The main advantage of the language for non-Romance speakers was, and remains, its grammatical flexibility and its ingenious rules for agglutination—that is, gluing words together at will, according to a pool of affixes. (This works for Magyar, Turkish, Finnish, and Chinese, among others.)

This is the “national flag” of the Esperanto movement. It is green, the color of hope. The word “esperanto” means “one who hopes.” It was Zamenhof’s pen name; he signed himself Dr. Esperanto. The green star makes, for me, a beautiful and hopeful contrast to the bloody red star that tortured the twentieth century.

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For the curious, I copy the following from the website of Esperanto-USA, the American organization dedicated to the language:

[Begin quote]

Esperanto builds words out of smaller words. Linguistics call Esperanto an agglutinative language; many people call it a “Lego” language. For instance, the word for “hospital” is malsanulejo. Look how that word is build up from smaller words:

mal (un) + san (healthy) + ul (person) + ej (place) + o (noun)= unhealthy person place = hospital

If you leave out different parts of malsanulejo you’ll be able to make more words:

san + ul + ej + o = healthy person place = spa
san + ul + o = healthy person
mal + san + ul + o = unhealthy person = sick person
san + a (adjective) = healthy
mal + san + a = unhealthy

See how easy it is to make a new word from smaller pieces? Now, let’s replace san (health) with another word, riĉ (“rich”, pronounced the same in Esperanto but with a long “i” sound). We’ll still keep mal, ul, ej, o and a. We can make:

mal (un) + riĉ (rich) + ul (person) + ej (place) + o = unrich person place = poor house

Based on the above, can you figure out the meaning of these Esperanto words?

mal + riĉ + ul + o = ?

riĉ + ul + o = ?

The correct answers are “poor person” and “rich person.” Let’s put together a sentence that uses several of these words:

La malinteligenta malsana riĉulo ne vizitis la mansanulejon.

We took mal (un) and added it to inteligenta (intelligent) to make “silly” / “foolish”. The sentence means, “the foolish, sick rich person did not go to the hospital.” With these basic “building blocks” of the language, you can have a vocabulary of hundreds of thousands of words with very little memorization.

[end quote]

Anyhow, if you’ve read this far, raise a glass today in memory of Dr. Esperanto, and his beautiful (and I daresay achievable) vision of a more peaceful, more communicative world.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Brains, Esperanto, Language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.