Esperanto

Esperanto flag

Esperanto is a constructed international auxiliary language. The name derives from the pseudonym (Dr. Esperanto) under which L. L. Zamenhof published the language in 1887. His intention was to create an easy-to-learn language, to serve as an international auxiliary language for global communication. Although it has not been adopted officially by any supranational agency, it has had a growing speaker community continuously using it since its publication. Today Esperanto is used for many activities including travel, correspondence, cultural exchange, literature, and language instruction; it is the most widely used constructed language, and has some native speakers.

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History

Main article: Esperanto history

As a constructed language, Esperanto's history is both short and well-known. Esperanto was invented in the 1880s by L. L. Zamenhof. The first grammar of the language was published in 1887. The number of speakers grew over the next few decades, at first primarily in the Russian empire and eastern Europe, then in western Europe and the Americas. In 1905 the first world congress of Esperanto speakers was held in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France.

Language evolution

A declaration [1] endorsed by the Esperanto movement at the world congress in 1905 limits changes to Esperanto. That declaration stated, amongst other things, that the basis of the language should remain the Fundamento de Esperanto ("Foundation of Esperanto", a group of works by Zamenhof), which is to be binding forever: nobody has the right to make changes to it. The declaration also permits new concepts to be expressed as the speaker sees fit, but it recommends doing so in accordance with the original style.

Many Esperantists believe this declaration stabilizing the language is a major reason why the Esperanto speaker community grew beyond the levels attained by other constructed languages and has developed a flourishing culture. Constructed languages are often hindered from developing a speaker community by continual tinkering, with the constant changes making the language impossible to learn and use.

Many developers of constructed languages are possessive of their brain-children and reject any attempt by others to contribute or have a significant role in the development of the language. (Compare Johann Martin Schleyer's attitude toward Volapük, or James Cooke Brown's with respect to Loglan.) Zamenhof declared that "Esperanto belongs to the Esperantists" and moved to the background once the language was published, allowing others to share in the early development of the language. The grammar description in the earliest books was somewhat vague, so a consensus on usage (influenced by Zamenhof's answers to usage questions) developed over time within boundaries set by the initial, unchanging grammar outline (Auld 1988). Even in the years before the Declaration of Boulogne, the language was fairly stable; only a few significant grammatical changes were made in the earliest years after publication. This gave Esperanto a stability of structure and grammar similar to that which natural languages possess by virtue of their great body of literature and speakers. Thus one could learn Esperanto without having it move from underfoot. Changes could and did occur in the language, but only by acquiring widespread popular support; there was no central authority making arbitrary changes, as happened with Volapük and some other languages.

Modern Esperanto usage may in fact depart from that originally described in the Fundamento, though the differences are semantic (involving changed meaning of words) rather than grammatical or phonological. The translation given for "I like this one", in the phrases below offers a significant example. According to the Fundamento, Mi ŝatas ĉi tiun would in fact have meant "I esteem this one". The traditional usage would instead have been Ĉi tiu plaĉas al mi (literally, "this one is pleasing to me"), which, although it differs from the English phrasing in "I like this one", more closely reflects the phrasing in several other languages (e.g. French celui-ci me plaît, Spanish éste me gusta, Russian это мне нравится [eto mnye nravitsya], German das gefällt mir). The more traditional Ĉi tiu plaĉas al mi is still used as well, though it may be a minority usage.

Other changes from traditional Esperanto have affected the names of some countries, whose endings have changed from -ujo to -io. Also, women's names ending in -a (e.g. Maria) are now recognized although this is strictly an adjectival ending, whereas previously purists would have insisted on the noun ending -o (e.g. Mario).

In addition to these changes, Esperantists have formed many words to express concepts which have arisen since the publication of the Fundamento, but where possible these have indeed conformed to the existing style of the language. For example, early translations proposed for the word "computer" included komputero and komputoro, but the modern word in universal use is komputilo (adding the suffix -il-, meaning 'tool', to the root of the verb komputi, 'to compute'). Eŭro (as in the examples below) is another good example: even though the currency is called euro in official legal documents in all the European Community's official languages which use a Latin script, in Esperanto Eŭro was chosen because it better fits the phonology of the language.

Not all new coinages meet ready acceptance, however. For example, the neologism "ĉipa", meaning "cheap", has appeared as an alternative to the more verbose "malmultekosta", meaning "the opposite of expensive", but remains in minority usage.

Goals of the Esperanto movement

Zamenhof's intention was to create an easy-to-learn language, to serve as an international auxiliary language, a second language for everyone in the world, rather than to replace all existing languages in the world. Some Esperanto speakers, or Esperantists, still want this (they are called finvenkistoj — from fina venko, meaning "final victory") — but others just want to use the language to meet foreigners and learn about other countries and cultures (called raŭmistoj — from Rauma in Finland, where a declaration was made to that effect in 1980).

Dialects and derived languages

No new languages or dialects have formed through fragmentation of Esperanto as they do in natural languages, presumably mainly due to the regular nature of the language and its intended field of use. People tend to create slang and regional variants in the language(s) they use day to day, rather than those used primarily for intercommunication with different-language speakers; in the case of Esperanto, such variations, if heavily different from the official Fundamento version, would make universal comprehension less likely and negate the intended purpose of the language.

Esperanto has slang words — for example, saluton (hello) is sometimes clipped to sal, and fajfi (to whistle) is often used to mean not to care about something. There are many other slang and swear words. There is not as much slang in Esperanto as in other languages, because slang tends to make international communication more difficult.

Through the years many groups and individuals have proposed new language projects as 'reformed' versions of the Esperanto. Almost all of these projects have remained stillborn, failing to progress past the planning stage, and the only one to have had an amount of success has been Ido (Esperanto for 'offspring'). Ido was proposed by the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language in Paris in October 1907. Its main differences were in the fields of alphabet and some grammatical features. Early on there was a relatively large number of people who moved their support behind the Ido project, but the Ido movement itself descended into fragmentation and decline as others proposed further changes. Modern estimates place current speakers of Ido between 250 and 5000. Esperanto is also credited as being the foundation for later competing projects, such as Interlingua and Occidental, but these languages lag far behind Esperanto in terms of speakers.

Some small-scale reform projects, affecting only a small part of the language, have gained a few adherents speaking a somewhat idiosyncratic version of the language: for instance, Riismo, which modifies the language to incorporate non-sexist language and gender-neutral pronouns.

Classification

As a constructed language, Esperanto is not directly genetically related to any non-constructed language. However, its phonology and vocabulary were influenced by Indo-European languages.

Typologically, Esperanto has default SVO, AN word order, and is prepositional. It is primarily agglutinative.

Number of speakers

An estimate of the number of Esperanto speakers was made by Sidney S. Culbert, a retired psychology professor of the University of Washington (himself a longtime Esperantist who commented regarding the logical structure of Esperanto: "If the world could be structured that efficiently"). Culbert concluded that 1.6 million people speak Esperanto at Foreign Service Level 3, "professionally proficient" (possessing the ability to actually communicate beyond greetings and simple phrases) (Wolff 1996). Culbert's estimate was not made for Esperanto alone, but formed part of his listing of estimates for all languages of over 1 million speakers, published annually in the World Almanac and Book of Facts. Since Culbert never published in detail about his sampling methodology, or intermediate results for particular countries and regions, it is difficult to gauge the accuracy of his results. In the Almanac, his estimates for numbers of language speakers were rounded to the nearest million, thus the number for Esperanto speakers is shown as 2 million. This latter figure appears in Ethnologue. Assuming that this figure is accurate, this means that about 0.003% of the world's population speaks the language. This falls short of Zamenhof's goal of a universal language, but it represents a level of popularity unmatched by any other constructed language. Ethnologue also states that there are 200 to 2000 native Esperanto speakers.

Ziko Marcus Sikosek has challenged this figure as exaggerated. Sikosek estimated that even if Esperanto speakers were evenly distributed, assuming one million Esperanto speakers worldwide would lead one to expect about 180 in the city of Cologne. Sikosek finds only 30 fluent speakers in that city, and similarly smaller than expected figures in several other places thought to have a larger than average concentration of Esperanto speakers. He also notes that there are a total of about 20,000 members of the various Esperanto organizations; though there are undoubtedly many Esperanto speakers who are not members of any Esperanto organization, he thinks it unlikely that there are 50 times more speakers than organization members (Sikosek 2003). Others think such a ratio between members of the organized Esperanto movement and speakers of the language is not unlikely. In the absence of Dr. Culbert's detailed sampling data, or any other census data, it is impossible to state the number of speakers with certainty.

Geographic distribution

Esperanto speakers seem to be more numerous in Europe and east Asia than in the Americas, Africa and Oceania, and more numerous in urban than in rural areas (Sikosek 2003).

Culture

Main articles: Esperanto culture, Esperanto literature, Esperanto music

Although Esperanto was used for original literature from the very beginning (the first book included an original poem by Zamenhof, along with several translations), it's generally agreed that the first poets and novelists whose works can bear comparison with the better products of national-language traditions emerged during the period between the two World Wars. Translations from various natural languages constituted a majority of the works published in the early years. Over 100 original novels have been published in Esperanto, besides many novellas, short story collections, and poetry collections. Several important literary magazines have appeared over the years, including Fonto and Literatura Foiro which are still being published today.

Historically most of the music published in Esperanto has been in various folk traditions; in recent decades new music in rock and other modern genres has appeared.

In 1965, William Shatner starred in the only known full length feature film written entirely in Esperanto, Incubus. Several shorter films have also been produced.

Learning Esperanto

Several studies suggest that studying Esperanto before studying any other second language (especially an Indo-European language) may speed and improve learning, because learning subsequent foreign languages is easier than learning one's first, while the use of a grammatically simple auxiliary language lessens the "first foreign language" learning hurdle. In one study (Williams 1965), a group of high school students studied Esperanto for one year, then French for three years, and ended up with a better command of French than the control group, who studied French without Esperanto during all four years. However, the study failed to prove that Esperanto was responsible for this advantage specifically, as it is likely that learning any language will benefit the future study of other languages. See Propedeutic value of Esperanto for other relevant studies.

Relatively few schools teach Esperanto officially; probably a majority of Esperanto speakers learn the language through self-directed study or correspondence courses. Several Esperanto paper correspondence courses were early on adapted to email and taught by corps of volunteer instructors. In more recent years, teaching websites like lernu! have become popular.

Writing system

Main article: Esperanto orthography

Esperanto is written using a modified version of the Latin alphabet, with six accented letters: ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ (c, g, h, j, and s with circumflex), and ŭ (u with breve). The alphabet does not include the letters q, w, x, and y.

Therefore the 28 letter alphabet consists of: a b c ĉ d e f g ĝ h ĥ i j ĵ k l m n o p r s ŝ t u ŭ v z

The unaccented letters are pronounced as the lower-case equivalents in IPA, with the exception of c, which is pronounced [ts]. ĉ is pronounced [tʃ]. ĝ is pronounced [dʒ]. ĥ is pronounced [x]. ĵ is pronounced [ʒ]. ŝ is pronounced [ʃ]. ŭ is pronounced [ʊ], and normally follows an a, e or o; it never appears at the beginning of a syllable except in onomatopoeia. Diphthongs can be formed by the letters j and ŭ.

(See the external PDF file The Alphabets of Europe.)

The six Esperanto accented characters are included in the international form of Morse code.

There are two main ways of transliterating Esperanto into ASCII: the H system and the X system. This is useful on computers or typewriters where typing the 6 special characters is impossible or inconvenient. Many new Esperantists perceive the accented letters as a problem, and often propose "new" methods to transliterate Esperanto, sometimes with substantial modifications. Most of these proposals are ignored or shunned by the community, as such suggestions often come from people who do not know the language well.

The transliteration of Esperanto into ASCII is a topic known to cause flame wars and little constructive discussion, and the reduction of such behaviour is sometimes indicated as one of the main reasons to use Unicode and the proper accented letters. See Esperanto orthography.

Computer support

Formerly most Esperanto texts on computers, if they used the circumflexed letters at all, were encoded with ISO 8859-3. Support for that codepage was not widespread, and most people have switched to Unicode.

Most operating systems have no built-in keyboard layouts for Esperanto, so typing Esperanto texts requires some additional tools.

An Esperanto locale would use "." as the thousands separator and "," as a decimal point. Time and date format among Esperantists is not so standardized as number format, but 24-hour time with colon between hour and minutes, and for dates, either yyyy-mm-dd or dd-mm-yyyy, would be international and unambiguous.

Examples

Here are some examples of Esperanto sentences, with rough pronunciation guides. The five vowels ought to have roughly the same qualities that they do in Italian, Spanish, Tagalog, Maori, Swahili, and many other languages, as well as in the International Phonetic Alphabet. They are all pure vowel sounds (avoid making a diphthong—particularly of the "o"), and are of medium length—so neither clipped nor drawn-out.

The stress syllable in Esperanto words is always the penultimate, shown capitalized in the examples here:

Hello: Saluton [sah-LOO-tohn]
How much?: Kiom? [KEE-ohm]
Do you speak Esperanto?: Ĉu vi parolas Esperanton? [choo vee pah-ROH-lahss ess-peh-RAHN-tohn?]
I like this one: Mi ŝatas ĉi tiun (Ĉi tiu plaĉas al mi) [mee SHAH-tahss chee TEE-oon (chee TEE-oo PLA-chahss ahl mee)]
Is it cheap?: Ĉu ĝi estas malmultekosta? [choo jee ESS-tahss mahl-mool-teh-KOHSS-tah?]
Are you an Esperantist?: Ĉu vi estas Esperantisto? [choo vee ESS-tahss ess-peh-rahn-TEESS-toh?]
Five euros: Kvin eŭroj [kveen EH-wroy]
Do you accept US dollars?: Ĉu vi akceptas usonajn dolarojn? [choo vee ak-TSEP-tahss oo-SO-nine doh-LAH-royn?]
Please give me a receipt: Bonvolu doni al mi kvitancon [bon-VOH-loo DOH-nee ahl mee kvee-TAHN-tsohn]
Thank you: Dankon [DAHN-kohn]
It is a nice day: Estas bela tago [ESS-tahss BEH-la TAH-goh]
I love you: Mi amas vin [mee AH-mahs veen]
Goodbye: Ĝis revido [jees reh-VEE-doh]

Official status

Esperanto is not an official language of any country, although there were plans at the beginning of the 20th century to establish Neutral Moresnet as the world's first Esperanto state, and the shortlived artificial island micronation of Rose Island used Esperanto as its official language in 1968. However, it is the official working language of several non-profit organizations, mostly Esperanto organizations. The largest of these organisations, the World Esperanto Association, is in official relations with the United Nations and UNESCO in a consultative role.

Esperanto in English-language media

The television series Red Dwarf postulates a future in which Esperanto is widely spoken along with English, so much of the signage visible in the series is written in both languages. The movie Blade: Trinity is set in a generic city which writer/director David Goyer nevertheless wanted to represent as bilingual (as many cities are worldwide), so the second language spoken in this nameless city, and visible on most of its signage, is Esperanto. In the film Gattaca, the intercom messages are in Esperanto.

The Stainless Steel Rat novels by Harry Harrison (an Esperanto speaker) also postulate a future where Esperanto is spoken, and a small fraction of the dialogue is in Esperanto. The language is also used in the setting of Philip José Farmer's Riverworld novels, as well as in stories by Poul Anderson, John Brunner, John Barnes, and other science fiction writers (Harlow 1996).

In the video game RPG Morrowind, the main character can collect short books. One of these books (titled N'Gasta! Kvata! Kvakis!) is written in a coded form of Esperanto.

References

Auld, William. La Fenomeno Esperanto ("The Esperanto Phenomenon"). Rotterdam: UEA, 1988.
Harlow, Don. The Esperanto Book. Self-published on the web (1995-96).
Sikosek, Ziko M. Esperanto Sen Mitoj ("Esperanto without Myths"). Second edition. Antwerp: Flandra Esperanto-Ligo, 2003.
Williams, N. (1965) 'A language teaching experiment', Canadian Modern Language Review 22.1: 26-28
Wolff, David T. Posting to soc.culture.esperanto of 27 March 1996 quoting Dr. Sidney Culbert on his then unpublished research on the number of Esperanto speakers.

External links

Information on Esperanto

Dictionaries

All free Esperanto dictionaries
Reta Vortaro, an Esperanto dictionary
The Alternative Esperanto Dictionary
Esperanto – English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary – the Rosetta Edition.

Esperanto courses

Lernu.net – see also Lernu!
Free Esperanto Course – E-mail correspondence course
Kurso de Esperanto – Software and e-mail correspondence course (multilingual)

Esperanto organizations

Esperanto League for North America – US national organization
Universal Esperanto Association

Criticism

Learn Not to Speak Esperanto by Justin B. Rye
Is Esperanto's Vocabulary too Large?

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