Who invented esperanto

He claims to be fluent in 7 languages, and proficient in many more. The hyper-regularity of Esperanto makes it supremely easy to learn, and its newness, its foreignness, primes the monolingual brain to learn more complicated newness even more quickly. He believes in Esperanto as a springboard to other languages so much that he convinced his girlfriend to learn Esperanto as her first foreign language, and filmed every minute of her progress.

Esperanto, on the other hand, is pure self-esteem. Esperantists like to talk about logic: Zamenhof made the grammar to be logical; Chuck Smith found that logicality intriguing; Benny the Irish Polyglot finds that the language's logic makes it a logical choice for language hacking; and Duolingo chose Chuck Smith as the logical person to create its Esperanto course. But by what logic did Duolingo decide to make an Esperanto class at all? Over 30 million English speakers have signed up to learn Spanish on Duolingo, and even more Spanish speakers have signed up to learn English.

Esperanto is the 13th language to be offered, chosen over many others with speaking populations 10 times larger. Esperanto, though, has enthusiasm. When Duolingo first launched, Luis von Ahn, its founder, was surprised to find that Esperanto was the number one most requested new language for the program.

Esperantists are linguistic evangelists — the community saw an opportunity for expansion, and pounced. Two of the other languages available on Duolingo fit a similar bill, though by dint of history rather than original intent; Irish and Ukrainian are both associated with strong nationalist movements. Irish was the first of many languages that English would violently suppress, and Ukrainian is shoring up its ramparts to avoid the same fate from Russian regional control.

Esperanto, of course, was designed precisely to transcend linguistic nationalism and ultimately avoid conflict, but the end result is similar: a small group of people intensely invested in seeing their language spread. But Esperanto on Duolingo makes sense in a deeper way, as well.

Both the language and the app were created, at least in part, to solve the same problem: the world is divided by language, and more importantly, the majority is often forced to learn the native tongue of a powerful minority in order to get by.

There might be 13 languages available for English speakers on Duolingo, but English courses are available in 22 world languages. Zamenhof saw the same problem and took a more radical tack. Instead of starting a network of free, worldwide language schools, he invented a free, worldwide language. Twenty-five thousand people have signed up to be notified when the Esperanto Duolingo course goes live. If just those people complete the course, that would qualify as an Esperanto baby boom.

But Chuck Smith is thinking bigger: "I keep saying that, by the end of the year, over , people will be learning Esperanto on Duolingo. The world will probably never see the Fina Venko, but the internet does have a way of hypercharging communities that never could have existed before it.

Who could have imagined that more than one Brony would ever exist, or that Americans would want to write thousands of pages of Harry Potter slash fiction.

And soon, Esperanto might not even be the least likely artificial language to get a signal boost from Duolingo: the Klingon course is on track to debut in Linguistically, the language is the exact opposite of Esperanto. Its grammar was designed to be as difficult to learn as possible, and its vocabulary is strongest when discussing the warlike and brutal traditions of Klingon culture.

But whereas Schleyer's language wasconsidered alien and ugly when it appeared in , Zamenhof was to craft a language that many regarded as a thing of beauty. It is probably the only language to have no irregular verbs French has 2,, Spanish and German about each and, with just six verb endings to master, it is reckoned most novices can begin speaking it after an hour. Rather than create a vast lexicon of words, then expect people to learn them all, Zamenhof decided on a system of root words and affixes that alter their meanings "mal-" converts a word into its opposite, for example.

And because word endings denote parts of speech nouns end in "-o", adjectives in "-a", etc , word order is immaterial. Although modern Esperanto now has around 9, root words, most meanings can be expressed by drawing from a pool of about and simply combining them - a creative process that is regarded by Esperantists as acceptable and even commendable.

Three-quarters of the root words are borrowed from the Romance languages, the remainder from Germanic and Slavic tongues, and Greek. This means that around half the world's population is already familiar with much of the vocabulary.

For an English speaker, Esperanto is reckoned to be five times as easy to learn as Spanish or French, 10 times as easy as Russian and 20 times as easy as Arabic or Chinese. While critics seize on the obvious downside of this Eurocentricity - namely that it puts speakers of other languages at a disadvantage - Esperantists argue that the regularity and simplicity of Zamenhof's scheme quickly outweigh any lack of familiarity with root words, and point to the popularity of Esperanto in Hungary, Estonia, Finland, Japan, China and Vietnam as proof of Zamenhof's pudding.

Apart from its logical construction, Esperanto has another appealing characteristic: it is phonetic and orthographic, meaning that each letter represents only one sound, and each sound is represented by only one letter. In , at the age of 28, Zamenhof was ready to go public.

His first brochure on the language, just 40 pages long but setting out the entire structure, was published under the pseudonym "Doktoro Esperanto" - "Doktoro" meaning "Doctor" in the new language and "Esperanto" meaning "he who hopes". As the booklet moved around the world, letters began pouring in, many written in what people were calling "Dr Esperanto's International Language" - a name soon abbreviated to "Esperanto".

After 12 months, Zamenhof published the names and addresses of 1, supporters, among them the secretary of the American Philosophical Society.

In Germany, members of the World Language Club printed a magazine in Esperanto, and by it was time to pull everything together and call the first Universala Kongreso, or Universal Congress. But as the advancing century grew ever more bloody, Zamenhof's hope that this new form of communication might elevate the human condition was to be sorely tried.

Alongside his medical work, the doctor developed his ideas through correspondence with enthusiasts around the globe. But by he was exhausted. He died aged 57, while the worst human conflict the world had yet seen still raged around him. And worse was to come. Had he lived another 20 years, he would have seen Esperantists being rounded up and shot. Even Zamenhof's hopes might not have survived such a blow.

In the rd edition of Orienta Stelo, the newsletter of the Eastern Esperanto Federation, there's an item recording the sad passing of Phyllis Strapps. In her early 20s, having moved to Ilford to work as a teacher, she discovered Esperanto, and for more than 70 years she remained loyal to Zamenhof's philosophy, teaching the language to anyone who would learn it, and travelling the world to meet fellow Esperantists.

Hers was a life of endless evening classes - of diplomas and socials and Esperanto weekends at her beach chalet in Felixstowe. In her front window at home was a sign saying "Esperanto parolata" - Esperanto spoken here - and in her spare room a bed was always made up for Esperanto guests. But if all this suggests little more than a harmless enthusiasm, then it is only half the story. For the years of Strappo's life spanned the hardest of times for the language she loved.

Within a few years of Zamenhof's first brochure, Tsarist Russia banned all publications in Esperanto. Groups of revolutionary Esperantists were springing up across Europe and the world's ruling elites were alarmed. Soon, Stalin would call Esperanto "that dangerous language" and Hitler would describe it as a tool of Jewish world domination. When Iran proposed that Esperanto be adopted by the League of Nations, France blocked the move and promptly banned the language from schools.

Meanwhile, governments across central Europe actively discouraged Esperanto, no doubt fearing what would happen if workers of the world could share their experiences and aspirations. The Nazis exterminated speakers they came across in their occupied territories, while Stalin, who spoke of "the language of spies", had Esperantists deported or shot the Soviet government maintained controls until the late s. In Japan in the s, Esperanto speakers were similarly persecuted, and even killed.

They were notably described at that time as being "like watermelons - green on the outside but red inside" green was adopted early on as the colour of Esperanto. In one of those twists of history that set the head spinning, rightwingers in the US were to use an identical jibe against environmentalists decades later. The suspicion that Esperanto was a communist plot made it similarly unpopular in Franco's Spain, and many Esperantists had indeed fought on the Republican side during the civil war.

But while China's nominally communist government has from time to time encouraged its use for official purposes, private use of Esperanto was ill-advised during the Cultural Revolution. She was excited: it was her first trip outside London on her own. Most of the other speakers were men in their 20s. The experience was powerful: Esperanto was a puzzle she had solved on her own, and now she was able to share it with the world. She slowly built her confidence and soon joined a group in north London; interested enough to bear taking three different buses to go to every meeting.

The global community that Lowenstein was joining was put together via snail mail, paper magazines and yearly meetings. They met in conferences and became friends. Some met their partners there, as she did. Their children became native Esperanto speakers. Even old computer communication services like Usenet had Esperanto-speaking hubs, and a lot of pages and chat rooms sprouted in the early days of the Web.

Today, the younger segment of the Esperantio is keen on using social media: they gather around several groups in Facebook and Telegram, a chat service. Esperanto and the internet were a nice fit. The movement is very compatible with the cooperative ethos of the early days of the Web. Esperanto speakers tend to be committed to the cause, and saw their work as a contribution to it.

Also, the internet was a natural meeting point for this geographically dispersed crowd. But the idea behind it is not new. All that made Esperanto one of the most overrepresented languages on the internet. To date, the Wikipedia page has some , articles in it , which puts it almost on par with the Turkish a language with about 71 million speakers or Korean 77 million speakers versions.

Both Google and Facebook have had an Esperanto version of their most popular products for many years, and some language learning services have appeared here and there.

There is even a free hospitality service exclusive for Esperanto speakers called Pasporta Servo passport service.

In , Luis Von Ahn had an idea. Giving a TEDx talk , he said he would translate the Web by teaching new languages to users. The tool by which he would do it would be named Duolingo. Chuck Smith got excited. He learned of Esperanto while researching for a paper in college. It was a better solution than English, he says, because of its regularity and lack of exceptions. He soon discovered Pasporta Servo, and suddenly learning it made more sense.

Meanwhile, technological developments like the telegraph meant that people from vastly different backgrounds were suddenly in closer contact than ever.

Even though a Yiddish-based grammar would have been a natural choice for appealing to the Eastern European Jews who had inspired him, Zamenhof based his new tongue on the Romance languages. Partly because Zamenhof let the language grow naturally, Esperanto is now said to be spoken in over countries, boasts a Wikipedia site with more than , articles and has , signups on language-learning app Duolingo.

But Esperanto also had another reason to succeed: though other invented languages of the era were designed for practical purposes—to further scientific collaboration or assist with trade, for example—its pie-in-the-sky aims had immediate and broad appeal.