Esperanto celebrates the 150th anniversary of its author’s birth
Posted by Jaiken Struck on July 22nd, 2009As the community of Esperanto speakers prepares to mark the 150th anniversary of its author’s birth, the appeal of this language designed to foster harmony and coexistence continues.
There are currently believed to be about one million people around the world who speak Esperanto, devised in the 1880s by Dr Ludwig Lazar Zamenhof (1859-1917) whose 150th birthday is being marked this month by an International Esperanto Congress in his birthplace, Bialystok, Poland.
Language is identity, and Esperanto speakers have a strong sense of community, based on tolerance and equality. “You’d have to be pretty weird not to be accepted in an Esperanto club,” says Mr Miklaf who belongs to a group of speakers in Tel Aviv.
Some argue that this tradition of tolerance goes back to the original values of its founder. “If I wasn’t a Jew from a ghetto, the idea of uniting humanity would either have never occurred to me, or it would have never taken such a firm hold of me throughout my life”, wrote Zamenhof in 1905. A resident of Warsaw, Zamenhof was alarmed at the growing wave of anti-Semitism throughout the Russian empire.
Zamenhof’s book Dr Esperanto (meaning Dr Hopeful) offered a simple grammar and a vocabulary of 900 words derived from Romanesque, Germanic and Slavic languages. Through a system of suffixes and prefixes it had a built-in ability to generate new words.
“Everyone who has learnt Esperanto knows the joy of using this flexible and witty language”, says Esther Schor of Princeton University, who is writing a book on the history of Esperanto. Zamenhof believed that his language was so simple that even an uneducated person could learn it in a week. This assessment was probably optimistic. But today most speakers would agree that a couple of months is sufficient to become fluent.
These days, Esperanto has gone far beyond being a purely Jewish, or minority, project. It connects people even in troubled parts of the world.
Read More: BBC News
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