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Jill Kitson: Welcome to Lingua Franca. This week: Does the world need Esperanto? For this, the third of four programs, Robert Dessaix has been teaching himself Esperanto.
Robert Dessaix: Saluton, auskultantoj! Hello, listeners!
That was Esperanto. Or I think it was; I'm a bit of a novice.
Ever since that cataclysmic event recorded in Genesis 11, you remember 'And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to pass ...' Well, I won't read the whole thing, but the gist of it is that Noah's descendants got together to build a mighty brick tower whose top reached unto heaven itself, and the Lord took objection to the enterprise. 'And now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do,' he said to himself, after one or two 'Beholds', and so 'went to', as he put it, and confounded their language and 'scattered them abroad from thence / upon the face of all the earth'.
Since about the Renaissance, indeed, occasionally even earlier, heedless of the Lord's jealous rage last time around, a stream of thinkers, including Descarte and Leibniz, has tried to come up with a way of restoring to the whole earth 'one language and one speech'.
The real urgency behind this push to invent a universal language came from the way the world began to shrink so rapidly 500 years ago. All of a sudden some European became conscious of how inconvenient, how inefficient, language confusion was, if you wanted to colonise and trade with peoples speaking Chinese, Aztec, Sinhala, and also how inefficient European languages were, with their senseless genders, for instance, feminine tables, and masculine trees and so on, tangled verb endings, irregularities at every turn.
Meanwhile the Malays and Chinese had managed to build impressive civilisations without so much as a past tense, let alone a subjunctive, or genitive plural. This was food for thought.
Towards the end of the 19th century, perhaps in an effort to forestall the spread of English as the British Empire encircled the globe, there was quite a flurry of invented languages, virtually all appearing on the continent of Europe.
As the century came to a close, Universal-Sprache took brief root, for instance, and also Mundolingue. Here's a specimen:
'Amabil amico,
Con grand satisfaction mi ha lect tei letter ... Le possibilita de un universal lingue pro le civilisat nations ne esse dubitabil, nam noi ha tot elements pro un tal lingue in nostri lingues, sciences, et cetera.'
Really, you may just as well have spoken Italian or Spanish and been done with it. At least there were Italian and Spanish books and newspapers to read, and the possibility of a trip to Barcelona or Bologna.
And then there was Volapuk, invented by a German parish priest. It was very fashionable around 1889, with its slightly sinister slogan, 'For one humanity, one language'.
It had hundreds of thousands of speaker around the world, it was even promoted by a famous French department store, Printemps. However, within a decade or so, the whole movement had fallen apart, just like the tower of Babel, although this time, as a result of in-fighting and power struggles. By the end of the century the field was wide open again, and ripe for conquering by the newcomer now waiting in the wings, which is still with us, over a century later: Esperanto.
It was very much the child of its times, like Theosophy, perhaps, or even Communism, which explains both its rapid spread in the early part of the 20th century as well, I think, as its eventual failure, if that's the right word, to live up to the hopes of the hopeful Dr Esperanto, the founder of the movement.
That was not his real name, obviously. He was a Russian-Polish Jew from Bialystok in Tsarist Poland called Dr Ludwik Zamenhof.
It's unsurprising that a denizen of Bialystok, where Russians, Poles, Germans and Jews had been at each other's throats for centuries, might think to himself in the 1880s: If only we had a language in common, a neutral language, owned by none of us, perhaps we might hate and mistreat each other less. It's a misguided thought, I'd suggest, there's no reason for polyglot to equal peace-loving, but understandable.
It's also unsurprising that after the nightmare of the first world war, so many people around the world were inclined, in an era of modernism, to imagine peace in universalist terms.
A century later, we live in a rather different world, one where diversity (in dialects, ethnicities, customs, beliefs) is widely celebrated as a very fine thing, while anything that smacks of a grand narrative (a universal truth, a universal movement, anything hegemonic) is regarded with suspicion, although not universally, naturally. Like the Lord in the eleventh chapter of Genesis, although for different reasons, we don't much like the sound of the earth being of one language and one speech any more, we don't like monoliths, and we rejoice when they come tumbling down.
But don't you see, a dedicated Esperantist would probably want to say at this point, the marvellous thing about Esperanto is that it actually undercuts the hegemony of English ('the killer language', as David Crystal has called it, which strangles smaller languages, mashes them up and then quickly swallows them). Esperanto, its proponents might argue, do argue, because it's not the language of any particular nation or people, comes with no colonising agenda, no inherent world view. Esperanto offers itself as a universal auxiliary language, everyone's second language, not a replacement for national languages.
There are, I understand, some native speakers of Esperanto; the children, I presume of dedicated Esperantists, who speak it at home. But by and large it's an auxiliary second language, mostly, it would seem, for speakers of smaller European languages such as Croatian or Albanian or Finnish, but also for Cubans, Vietnamese, Brazilians, Koreans, West Africans; and even a few Australians.
Given the predominance of English in the worlds of technology, politics, business, the internet, entertainment, tourism and probably even sport, today; few English speakers seem to feel a strong need for another international auxiliary language. Perhaps we're being hegemonic, perhaps we're just lazy, but we think the world's already got one, and it's ours.
Well, what are the advantages and disadvantages of Esperanto compared with English? Its greatest advantage as an auxiliary language, not necessarily as a living literary language, is its regularity. Esperantists speak of its simplicity, but regularity is probably a better way to put it. In Esperanto, and I must admit I find this slightly unnerving, there are no exceptions. None.
Each letter is pronounced in just one way, for instance, and each sound is represented by just one letter-pretty much like Polish actually, and very unlike English or French. All nouns end in 'o'. Here are a few you might recognise: grupo, patro, pantalono, vento/wind, and all adjectives in 'a'. For example, bruna/brown dolca/sweet, kara/dear. All plurals are formed in the same way, all verbs in the present tense end in 'as', in the past in 'eis'-all. No fiddling about with take/took/taken or I sneeze/he sneezes, no wondering about the plural of 'oasis' or 'octopus', no hesitation about where the accent falls, it always falls, again, curiously as in Polish, on the second-last syllable. Once you've entered the gate of Esperanto-speak, all streets are straight. Easy enough to find your way about no doubt, but linguistic epiphanies may well be thin on the ground.
Its grammar is actually quite complex, whatever Esperantists may say. There are active and passive participles, there's even a subjunctive of sorts; there's an accusative case ending for nouns and adjectives-something we've done without for over 1,000 years in English-and quite a dizzying array of prefixes and suffixes, some thirty of them in all. 'Granda' is big, 'Malgranda' is small; 'Domo' is a house, 'Domego' is a mansion. 'Patro' is the word for father, so mother must be 'Patrino'. 'Ino' being the obligatory feminine suffix. 'Hundo' is a dog, so 'Hundejo' is a kennel (a dog place). 'Lerni' is to learn, so 'Lernejo' is a school (a learning place). Complex, you see, but utterly regular.
Which makes it perfect for signs in public places, I suppose. 'Toilet', 'Bus-stop', 'Lenin Square' and so on. Perhaps in some overseas cities there are such signs.
And useful for unambiguously telegraphing information about the weather, say, or shipping timetables. But I'd have thought, infinitely less satisfactory than English for murmuring sweet nothings in, or concocting a limerick, for telling artful lies, playing with ambiguities, being funny, talking to the dog, or just being utterly you and nobody else in the world, for being fully human, in other words. But perhaps that's not the function of an auxiliary language.
The other much vaunted advantage of Esperanto over English is, as I mentioned, that it's neutral. There's no automatic connection with corporate America, the entertainment industry, Australian values (whatever they might be) , the British class system, Christianity, the Enlightenment, or anything else from the rich and tumultuous history of the English-speaking peoples. Esperanto appears at first, to be free-floating, untethered to any particular moral universe.
This is not quite the case, of course. It is in reality, an Indo-European language, reflecting in a stripped-down, regularised way, how a Russian speaking Jew from Bialystok in Tsarist Poland saw the world; it bears no relation to how a Hopi Indian sees the world or a native Bantu, Arabic or Korean speaker. It is the very model of the highly determined Indo-European way of seeing: The world is gendered, there are subjects and objects, the feminine flows from the masculine, actions must be defined as past, present or future. There are inflexions for number and tense, the vocabulary is Latin or Germanic for the most part, with all the baggage those words bring with them. So to speak Esperanto is to look at the world through European eyes.
In any case, English is not quite as monolithic as it seems. It may indeed be the language of the Pentagon, Hollywood, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, amazon.com, most international conferences, but it's now much more than that: it's the native tongue of hundreds of millions of people as different from one another as Jamaican street kids, Pakistani cricketers, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Barbra Streisand; and it's already the auxiliary international language of half the planet. And English has the advantage over an invented language that any living language will have, it's being recreated every minute of every day, in billions of conversations in every country on earth; in countless books, films, television and radio programs, on the internet-recreated organically: that is, in ways that grow out of its extraordinarily, perhaps incomparably, rich history and flexibility.
I must admit that I can imagine few occasions where I, as an English speaker, would really need to say to anybody the sorts of things I find explained in Teach Yourself Esperanto; an Albanian or Burmese might feel differently, but try as I might, I just can't hear myself saying 'Shall we go to Switzerland?' or 'The mouse is under the bed' in Esperanto to anybody I am likely to meet, for all the stories of Nigerians writing joyfully to Mongolian pen-pals in Esperanto, and tourists from Manchester coming across an Esperantist in Zagreb just in time to get directions to the 'stacio' to catch their 'trajno' (spelt with a 'j').
Still, Esperanto has proved to be quite a resilient, if little-known, invention. It's hard not to wish it well, its aims are so pure, its ideals so admirable. However, unless it can make itself demonstrably useful, beyond the usual level of facilitating pleasant conversations between people from widely differing cultures, by, say, being granted official status at the United Nations or in the European Union for starters-well, I suspect its pleasures will remain known to a very small minority of the planet's inhabitants.
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