In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language

by Arika Okrent

  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 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 -o, adjectives in -a, adverbs in -e:

  The verb endings differ with tense:

  Other endings modify the meaning in different ways. The feminine is formed with -in, diminutives with -et:

  The Russian -skaya (place for) that had inspired Zamenhof to build words through affixation became -ej (pronounced “ey”):

  The opposite sense of a word can be formed by prefixing mal-:

  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 wissen—“to know.” Gelassen is an adjective meaning “dispassionate,” but also, as in this sentence, the past participle of lassen, “to leave.” Habe can be “property” or the first-person-present form of haben, “to have.” Den is a special form of der (the), and ihn is a special form of er (he, it). You need a lot of special knowledge about German to get this translation right.

  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.

  Kar-a amik-o!

  Mi present-as al mi* kia-n vizaĝ-o-n vi far-os post la ricev-o de mi-a leter-o. Vi rigard-os la sub-skrib-o-n kaj ek-kri-os: “Ĉu li perd-is la saĝ-o-n? Je kia lingv-o li skrib-is? Kio-n signif-as la foli-et-o, kiu-n li aldon-is al si-a leter-o?” Trankvil-iĝ-u, mi-a kar-a! Mi-a saĝ-o, kiel mi almenaŭ kred-as, est-as tut-e en ordo.

  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 Hamlet, bringing into the world yet another rendering of the melancholy Dane's soliloquy on existence: “Ču esti aŭ ne esti,—tiel staras nun la demando.” The first Esperanto magazine, La Esperantisto, was published in 1889 in Germany. The movement attracted some prominent supporters, including Tolstoy, who wrote an essay for La Esperantisto on “the value of reason in solving religious problems.” When this resulted in a ban of the magazine in Russia, Tolstoy wrote to the authorities, promising not to contribute anything else to it. His plea couldn't prevent the magazine's downfall, but others were already rising to take its place.

  Meanwhile, there was trouble in Volapükland. Volapük 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 Volapük societies and clubs in the world and twenty-five Volapük journals. Even people who didn't care to learn it at least knew about it. President Grover Cleveland's wife named her dog Volapük. The craze was big enough to be mocked in local papers such as the Milwaukee Sentinel:

  A charming young student of Grük

  Once tried to acquire Volapük

  But it sounded so bad

  That her friends called her mad, And she quit it in less than a wük.

  Within a few years, most of the Volapükists had switched to Esperanto.

  Those umlauts, the focus of many a Volapük lampoon, no doubt cost Schleyer a good number of English- and French-speaking customers. Not only did they add a threatening air of foreignness to the appearance of a Volapük text (“If ätävol-la in Yulop, älilädol-la pükik mödis”—“If you should travel in Europe you will hear many languages”); they also helped disguise the fact that Volapük was for the most part based on English roots. Pük (language), for example, comes from “speak,” but it's hard to tell. It's likewise hard to see the “love” in löf, the “smile” in smül, the “proof” in blöf, or the “explaining” in seplänön. The problem went beyond umlauts, though. Schleyer, in trying to adhere
to his principles of easy pronunciation (no “th” sound, minimal use of r, one-syllable roots), turned “friend” into flen, “knowledge” into nol, and “world” into vol. (The word Volapük is a compound meaning “world language.”)

  And for the childish mind the temptations of Volapük are great. If you think the word pük is funny, then you will love how it figures into all kinds of other words related to the concept of language:

  Because I have one of those childish minds, I can't help throwing in another example here. “To succeed”? Plöpön.

  Like Esperanto, Volapük had a system of affixes that extended the meaning of a root in a regular way, but when the prefixes and suffixes piled up on the poor little roots, the roots became even harder to pick out.

  Despite all this, people were using it. In 1889, the year La Esperantisto was first published, the third international Volapük congress was held in Paris, and the proceedings were entirely in Volapük. The language worked well enough.

  The downfall of Volapük lay elsewhere. Some of the Vol-apükists, dissatisfied with this or that detail of the language, began to petition Schleyer to make changes. He adamantly refused, and when the members of the recently formed Volapük Academy proposed reforms and then denied Schleyer the right to veto them, he left in a huff to form his own academy. The reformists, each with his own idea of how to proceed, published their own colorfully named modifications of Volapük—Nal Bino, Balta, Bopal, Spelin, Dil, Orba—and pretty soon a person who wanted to learn Volapük had no idea which version was worth his or her time. Esperanto, with its growing numbers, started to seem like a better investment. The fourth Volapük conference never happened.

  In 1905, 688 people from twenty countries convened in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, for the first international Esperanto congress. They wore the symbol of Esperanto, a green five-pointed star, and so were able to identify each other upon arrival at Paris train stations, where they gathered into conspicuous, animated groups for the trip to the coast. Until then, Esperanto had primarily been a tool of written correspondence. Many of them were speaking it for the first time, excited to see it actually working. A reporter from the New York Herald noted that “all appeared to converse with great facility.”

  As a gesture of respect to the host country, the congress opened with a polite singing (in French) of the distinctly un-Esperanto-like call to violence of “La Marseillaise.” (“To arms, O citizens! / Form up in serried ranks! / March on, march on, / May their impure blood/Flow in our fields!”) An energetic, tearful singing of the Esperanto anthem, “La espero,” followed (“On the foundation of a neutral language / people understanding each other/will agree to form one great family circle”), and then, after greetings from the mayor and the president of the chamber of commerce, Zamenhof took the stage to wild cheers and applause. He spoke of invisible, powerful spirits in the air and images of a new future, and he ended with a prayer to a “powerful, incarnate mystery” that “peace be restored to the children of mankind.” The audience stood, waving handkerchiefs and shouting, “Vivu Zamenhof! Vivu Esperanto!”

  Not everyone was pleased. Some of the intellectual French Esperantists, who had reviewed Zamenhof's speech prior to the congress, had urged him to focus on the practical side of the language, its utility in travel and commerce, its potential in the sharing of scientific knowledge. Sentimental and religious overtones would make their cause look foolish, they argued. They wanted to be taken seriously.

  They were also becoming restless about language reforms they thought were necessary. Unlike Schleyer, Zamenhof did not de-clare his language his own property, but the property of its users. Zamenhof had welcomed critiques in the beginning, and he even published a reformed version of Esperanto, incorporating the requested changes, in 1894. But this new version was rejected, in a vote, by the growing community of committed Esperantists who were already using the language as it was. They had been inspired by his message of universal peace, and they saw the requests for changes as disrespectful heresy. The lesson of Volapük had also been learned by many of them—once you start with the reforms, it's hard to stop. From then on, Zamenhof refused to impose changes, even, in 1906, when some reformists offered him 250,000 francs to do so.

  That same year, when Zamenhof addressed the second international Esperanto congress in Geneva, he angrily rejected the calls to divorce Esperanto from its ideals, saying, “We want nothing to do with that Esperanto which must serve only commercial ends and practical utility!” The Schism came in 1907, when a delegation of prestigious university professors, including one chemist who would later win the Nobel Prize, chose to back an anonymously submitted proposal for a revised version of Esperanto called Ido (Offspring). While many of the prominent, well-educated, and practical-minded Esperantists joined the Ido faction, the rest rallied around their betrayed hero. More than thirteen hundred unashamed idealists from forty countries showed up at the 1908 congress in Dresden. They wore green stars and waved green flags, attended Esperanto poetry readings and theatrical performances, sang hymns, and by all accounts had a grand time.

  The Idists, meanwhile, focused on the much less enjoyable pursuits of being logical and respectable. The official slogan of the first international Ido congress was “We have come here to work, not to amuse ourselves.” But the congress didn't occur until 1921, by which time most of Ido's momentum had been sapped by infighting about further reforms. Most of the original supporters had by then left to work on their own language projects, which they deemed superior.

  *Mi present-as al mi (I present to myself) is the way “I imagine” is expressed in languages like German and Russian.

  A Nudist, a Gay Ornithologist, a

  Railroad Enthusiast, and a Punk

  Cannabis Smoker Walk into a Bar …

  Esperantists today have it rough outside of Esperantoland. No matter how elegant their arguments, how calm and reasoned their defenses of the internada lingvo, they are inevitably met with one of two responses: dismissive humor or sneering disgust. Here is a gentle example of the former, as meted out by the Times Higher Education Supplement:

  The hunt for outstandingly obscure journals has upset readers conversant in Esperanto. A number contacted us after the Australian publication Esperanto sub la suda kruco was nominated, informing us that the journal was neither academic nor, in their opinion, obscure. Jacob Schwartz, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explained: “I hope you can understand why speakers of Esperanto, who battle against this daily ridicule from misinformed people, would be offended to be considered ‘obscure.’”

  We would like to apologise to readers of Esperanto sub la suda kruco, and we await complaints from infuriated subscribers to The Journal of Fish Sausage with anticipation.

  There is no possible way you could respond to this that would result in your being taken seriously. Often, the hopeful Esperantist doesn't realize he's doomed at this point and tries to make his case: “Well, look now, Esperanto is spoken by people in more than eighty different countries. It has a rich original literature of more than forty thousand works. It is easy to learn.” His listeners’ eyes glaze over as they mentally sort him into their nonsensical-people pile.

  At least dismissive humor is not mean. Another frequent reaction to the idea of Esperanto is anger, especially from people who care about language. On an ask-a-linguist Internet message board, a place where laypeople can have their questions about language answered by a panel of professional linguists, one of these professionals responded to an innocent question about whether Esperanto can be a native language, writing: “I will not try to conceal my contempt for the basket cases who teach their unfortunate children Esperanto.” Contempt? As far as I know, those children grow up to be slightly eccentric but well-adjusted musicians, not serial killers.

  Still, it is not hard to understand why so many people find Esperanto so repellent. Language is not just a handy tool for packing up our thoughts and sending them along to others. It's an index to a set of ex
periences both shared and extremely personal. More than any other expression of our culture, it is the way we do things—the way we complain, argue, comfort others. We love our languages for this. They are the repositories of our very identities. Compared with them, Esperanto is an insult. It asks us to turn away from what makes our languages personal and unique and choose one that is generic and universal. It asks us to give up what distinguishes us from the rest of the world for something that makes everyone in the world the same. It's a threat to beauty: neutral, antiseptic, soulless. A Mao jacket. A concrete apartment block.

  Strange, then, that I don't think I've ever been anywhere more colorful than Esperantoland. On my second trip there, the sixth All-Americas congress in Havana, I was exposed to so much culture that I started to get a headache. We sang “Guantanamera” in Esperanto on ten separate occasions in ten different Cuban musical styles. At the Arta Vespero (Evening of the Arts)—a staple of Esperanto congresses where delegates from the host country get to strut their stuff—we watched a three-hour extravaganza of every performable art Cuba has to offer, from traditional dances by little girls in white dresses to rumba rap music. For the finale we made a hundred-meter conga line, weaving our way through the Museum of the Revolution. At another staple, the Nacia Vespero (Evening of Nations), attendees from twenty other countries took the stage. A contingent of Mexicans sang folk songs, a Costa Rican played the piano, a Frenchman did a comedy routine about escargots. No, Esperantists don't want to take away your unique identity. On the contrary, they can't get enough of it. They just want you to express it in Esperanto so that everyone can appreciate it.