Esperanto fans keep artificial language flourishing
The elegant Nepali woman, clad in a pink sari, beamed as the tall
German man strolled by.
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Ludwik Zamenhof |
They both called out a greeting: “Saluton!” Then they launched into
an animated discussion in Esperanto, a language created from scratch
more than a century ago in an attempt to foster global harmony.
Some 2,000 Esperanto-speakers from 63 nations spent last week in
Bialystok at an anniversary congress marking the 1859 birth in this
northeastern Polish city of their founding father, Ludwik Zamenhof.
It is hard to say how many people speak Esperanto, which has devotees
worldwide but never achieved the breakthrough Zamenhof dreamed of.
“There are no official statistics, and estimates range from the
hundreds of thousands through to two million. But I think to be honest
under a million is more realistic,” said Jaroslaw Parzyszek, 46, head of
the Bialystok-based Zamenhof Foundation.
More than a language
For users, Esperanto is more than a language. It offered global
social networking well before the birth of the Internet.
She started learning in 1990 from a Pole in Nepal’s capital Kathmandu.
She now teaches it, and was attending her fifth annual congress. The
Bialystok edition, which wrapped up Saturday, was the 94th.
Esperanto’s seeds were planted in the 1870s. It grew out of an
idealism that saw its founder nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize 13
times before his death in 1917 but an idealism that fell foul of Nazi
Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union who saw it as a threat and even
killed or jailed Esperanto supporters.
“When he was young, my grandfather saw the hostility among people who
couldn’t understand one another. And he said to himself: ‘If these
people could understand one another, they could understand the reason
for their differences, and appreciate these differences,’” said
Polish-born Louis-Christophe Zaleski-Zamenhof, 84, who lives in France..
Zamenhof devised the easy-to-learn tongue from elements of Romance,
Germanic and Slavic languages and a dash of Latin and Greek.
Fellow students
He tested it on fellow students while studying ophthalmology, and
published it in 1887. “Esperanto” was his writer’s pseudonym, a
reference to the word “hope”. Francois Randin, 58, from Switzerland a
country known for misunderstandings between German, French and
Italian-speakers said he fell in love with Esperanto 15 years ago. “The
beauty of Esperanto is that it’s so simple not simplistic yet so rich,”
said Randin, sporting a necklace with its global symbol, a five-pointed
green star.
The language is regulated by the 45-member Akademio de Esperanto,
which works to keep it up to date via suggestions from speakers.
“We Swiss got the word ‘fonduo’ into the dictionary,” Randin said
with a grin.
“I can’t see a way for it to become the international language
because English has pretty much filled that role already.
But does it have a future as a language, a culture and an
internationalist entity? Yes it does!” he said.
AFP
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