On Esperanto

Towards the end of the 1800s the city of Białystok, which belonged to the states of Poland, Russia, Prussia and today again to Poland, was a cosmopolitan centre where Poles, Russians, Germans and many Jews who spoke Yiddish lived, forming 75% of the entire population. These Jews were the ones who dominated the textile industry. In 1921, 88% of the merchants were Jews and 89% of the factories belonged to Jews. On 15 December 1859 Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof was born in Białystok, the famous Jew who was going to invent the artificial language he called Esperanto. At home he spoke Yiddish, Russian and Polish with his parents. From his father, who was a schoolteacher, he learned German, French and Hebrew. At school he learned the classical languages: Latin, Greek, Aramaic. He was also interested in Italian, Spanish and Lithuanian. English he learned much later.

At the age of 10 he wrote a play called 'The Tower of Babel, or the Tragedy of Białystok'. This idea of writing a play came to him after seeing the conflicts that existed between the various nations of Białystok, which had no common language in which to understand one another. In 1878, when he was 19, he wrote the first version of Esperanto and called it 'Universal Language'. This first version was burned by his father, who wanted Ludwik to pay more attention to his studies instead of writing books, and so he studied medicine in Moscow and in Warsaw and became a good ophthalmologist. Ten years had to pass before he returned to his book. The first book of Esperanto came out in Warsaw on 14 July 1887. Ludwik Zamenhof signed his book under the name 'Doktoro Esperanto'. In the book were the 165 rules of grammar and the 917 roots of words from the languages of certain countries of Europe, such as the Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages (Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, Poland, Slovakia, Czechia, Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia).

The idea was to invent the easiest possible language, one that could be learned in the shortest time. It seems that Leo Tolstoy learned Esperanto in very little time. There was even an international congress of Esperanto in 1911 in Antwerp. All this was so that a common language could be the instrument of a world peace between different cultures. Meanwhile Zamenhof was very preoccupied with the Jewish question, that is with antisemitism and the pogroms carried out against the Jews. He was active in the Zionist movement of 'Hibbat Zion'. But he published a declaration affirming that the Zionist movement could not solve the problems of the Jewish people: 'I am convinced that every kind of nationalism can give humanity nothing but great misfortune.' With time he developed a personal philosophy he called 'Homaranismo', meaning 'Humanitarianism', a philosophy based on the wisdom of the famous Jewish sage of the first century BCE (Before the Common Era), Hillel. With this philosophy Zamenhof tried to reform Judaism so that the Jews would not be victims of antisemitism.

Ludwik Zamenhof died in Warsaw on 14 April 1917. His daughter Lidia, who became a teacher to teach Esperanto, converted to the Bahá'í religion and lived in the United States, but in 1938 she had to return to Poland because the Americans would not extend her visa, and in Poland she was forced to remain in the Warsaw ghetto and died at Treblinka. The vocabulary of Esperanto is composed of English, French, Italian, German, Greek, Latin, Polish, Russian and Yiddish. These were the languages Zamenhof knew very well. Although they have a kinship with the languages of Europe, the grammar and pronunciation resemble Turkish a great deal. That is to say, in Esperanto there is no gender, masculine or feminine. 'Table' is not 'the table (f.)', it is just 'table'. 'Eye' is not 'the eye (m.)', it is just 'eye'. In the pronunciation, which is completely phonetic, all the letters are always pronounced the same way and do not change their pronunciation before other letters.

Between 1907 and 1917, the year he died, Zamenhof was 14 times a candidate for the Nobel Prize, and the Universal Esperanto Association was a candidate more than 100 times. Although this prize was never given, today it is said that there are more than 2 million people who speak this language. After the First World War the 'League of Nations' was formed to avoid conflicts between nations. The delegate of Iran proposed that Esperanto be the official language of the Assembly. Only France vetoed it, for fear that French would lose its importance, its influence and its prestige in diplomacy. They did not permit the teaching of Esperanto in the universities, saying it was a game of the communists. In the Soviet Union they said this language is a game of spies. In Nazi Germany they said this is a game of the Jews who want to conquer the whole world. It is after 1954 that UNESCO put Esperanto in its programme. MULTAJ DANKOJ = Many thanks