Yesterday I wrote about my free online reprint of
Dr. Esperanto's International Language, the 1887 pamphlet which originally proposed Esperanto. Because December 15 is Esperanto Day, the birthday of its creator, L.L. Zamenhof, many bloggers friendly to the idea had agreed to mention his International Language. (See listing at
esperanto-usa.org/.) One such blog was by
Don Harlow and deserves to be quoted here for its evocation of Zamenhof's background. Excerpt:
Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto, is often described as "a polish oculist". During most of his life he was, in fact, a Russian-Jewish ophthalmologist. But the inventor of Esperanto, when we date the language in his life span, was neither an oculist nor an ophthalmologist; he was a teen-age boy. Raised in an environment of extreme multiethnicism, in which language was perhaps the most obvious trait that distinguished group from group, he very early decided that a common language would contribute to a more peaceful world. When you live in an environment where pogroms are an annual affair, a more peaceful world is something to be desired.
All of it below:
Don Harlow's Esperanto Day blog:December 15, 2006
ZAMENHOF'S BIRTHDAY
Today is L. L. Zamenhof's 147th birthday.
I remember Zamenhof's 100th birthday; it was on December 15, 1959. For those who don't know, Zamenhof was the man who created Esperanto. I've always dated my knowledge of the language from almost exactly two months before that 100th birthday because, though I'd been studying the language (off and on) for a couple of years, it was in October of 1959 that I first actually heard the language spoken (by a Japanese globetrotter, giving a half-hour talk at an evening meeting in Randers, Denmark) and was shocked to learn that I could understand everything he said, including one really bad pun. It took me a few more months to actually try to speak the language, but when I did, I carried on a 45-minute conversation, no problems. The only comparison I had for this was with my high-school Latin, which I never thoroughly understood, even when reading, and in which I was never taught to converse.
Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto, is often described as "a polish oculist". During most of his life he was, in fact, a Russian-Jewish ophthalmologist. But the inventor of Esperanto, when we date the language in his life span, was neither an oculist nor an ophthalmologist; he was a teen-age boy. Raised in an environment of extreme multiethnicism, in which language was perhaps the most obvious trait that distinguished group from group, he very early decided that a common language would contribute to a more peaceful world. When you live in an environment where pogroms are an annual affair, a more peaceful world is something to be desired.
Exposed to Latin and Greek in school, Zamenhof at first considered these dead, and therefore neutral, languages to be solutions to his problem. I don't know what disabused him, but I suspect that it was the process of actually learning these languages, which are not only complex but extremely complicated. Zamenhof then set out to devise his own language. Two fortuitous encounters with other languages (English for its simple grammar, Russian for its productive system of word-formation) showed him that the complications involved in the languages he knew were historical accidents, and could safely be ignored. By the time he was entering his twenties, Zamenhof was already testing his new language through translation and original writing. At age 27, in 1887, he published ... and the rest is history.
Nobody knows how many planned languages have been invented over the past century or so. Decades ago, the famous linguist Mario Pei pegged the number at around a thousand. A visit to the list at langmaker.com -- which covers only the most recent years when such languages have been posted on the web -- would suggest that the figure is well above this. But few have acquired communities of speakers; and all the speakers of all these languages, counted over the century or so just mentioned, come nowhere near, by orders of magnitude, the number of people who speak Esperanto today.
This weekend, groups of Esperanto speakers all over the world will be meeting at lunches and even banquets to celebrate Zamenhof's birthday. I'll be at one myself, at noon tomorrow. It is, after all, a birthday that deserves celebration.
Posted by Don Harlow at December 15, 2006 05:10 PM