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Achieving the impossible with Esperanto A special feature by www.languageadvantage.com

Ian Fantom, remains amazed at how easy it can be to learn a language. Ian is Information Officer of the Esperanto Association of Britain and an Information Scientist.

There can be nothing more satisfying in language teaching than to see forty or so kids from many different language and ethnic backgrounds enthusiastically chatting and holidaying together in an acquired second tongue. And there can be nothing more encouraging than to see the more hesitant ones at the beginning of such a week
communicating with their newly gained friends with apparent ease by the time the week is out. Impossible? That's what a representative of Spain's education ministry thought, until she came to see for herself.

There are such meetings every year, for children, for families, for young people, and for anyone else who is interested.

That language is Esperanto.

So what is Esperanto, and what is the magic behind it?

Esperanto is a public domain planned language, created over a hundred years ago, to help people from different countries and cultures to communicate on equal terms. Its inventor, Lazarus Zamenhof, disclaimed any copyright for the language; it belonged to everyone, everywhere from the moment it was published. The number of Esperanto speakers worldwide is now possibly over a million, although to what level of fluency remains controversial.

The main impetus behind Esperanto is the quest for international understanding, not just in the narrow linguistic sense, but in the wider sense of tolerance of other cultures and other traditions. Esperanto speakers are generally well aware of the linguistic and cultural arrogance of those who pay little attention to local sensitivities when abroad. With Esperanto, you meet on common ground, rather than one person having a constant struggle to find words that come so fluently to the other. This concept has been traditionally know as 'La interna ideo de Esperanto'.

It was precisely because of such attitudes which surrounded Lazarus Zamenhof during his childhood in the multiethnic town of Bialystock in the Russian Empire (now in Poland), that Esperanto came into being. His great hope was for an ending of interethnic conflict when in 1887 he published his Lingvo Internacia under the psuedonym Doktoro Esperanto (Dr Hoper, as in 'hope'). In order for people to treat each other as equals, he reasoned, they should not try to impose their language and culture on each other. A common language should therefore be a second language for all. To achieve that, you need an extremely easy language to acquire: one which is very regular, phonetic and allows rapid development of vocabulary by extensive word-building. Unusually for his times, however, he recognised that language is more than words and grammar. He set himself the task of translating works of world literature, including the Old Testament, and various works by Shakespeare. He, himself, wrote original poetry in his new language. Amongst others, he attracted the attention of Tolstoy, who wrote regularly in the Esperanto magazine, and that in turn attracted the attention of the Czar's censors, who banned the magazine. Fortunately, Laza's Dad was also a censor ...

Today, Esperanto has an immediacy that it has never enjoyed before. Most of my own emails from outside the UK are in Esperanto, and so I am in touch with the world Esperanto community on a daily basis. Esperanto used to be a language that the vast majority of speakers would use primarily in local Esperanto clubs, in letter writing, or passively in reading magazines and newsletters. Making contact abroad was a special occasion. I used to strain to the sounds of my short-wave radio receiver to pick up broadcasts in the language from Swiss Radio, Polish Radio, Vatican Radio and Chinese Radio in Esperanto. Nowadays, many people can access Esperanto radio broadcasts on the Internet. Whatever the total number of Esperanto speakers is, instant communication and easy travel are now undoubtedly dramatically increasing the number who can converse fluently in the language.

So how is this fluency achieved? Psychologist Claude Piron in Switzerland is a former translator for the United Nations, and author of the book Le défi des langues. He describes Esperanto as being unique, in that it is the only language that speakers feel they can identify with, even though they have learned it as a second language. That undoubtedly has much to do with the feeling of equality, and therefore of identity with the wider speech community, as with the relative ease of learning and using the language.

It is estimated that there are about a thousand families who use Esperanto in their daily lives. Many of these families will be at least trilingual, with the parents having different native languages in addition to Esperanto. In many cases the children are brought up speaking Esperanto, as well as the parents' languages and the language of the local environment. My wife, whose mother was English and father Dutch, was brought up speaking Esperanto and Dutch until she was seven, and Esperanto and English thereafter. We carried on the Esperanto tradition with our three children. The financier George Soros, who escaped Hungary for the West by participating in an Esperanto youth congress, had been brought up in an Esperanto-speaking family. His father wrote a book, 'Maskerado cirkau* la Morto', about family life under Nazi occupation in Hungary, a book which recently appeared in English translation under the title 'Masquerade Around Death'.
* (accent on c and u)

Claude Piron has noticed that children who have been brought up bilingually within the family, seem in some ways to find Esperanto more 'natural' than their ethnic language. We all notice young children saying, for instance, 'I goed' rather than 'I went' in English. Esperanto has no such exceptions. Once children, or any beginners for that matter, have learned a rule, they can apply it quite generally. So, if they know that Mi estis is the Esperanto for 'I was', they can also say Vi estis [You were], Mi iris [I went], Ili kuris [They ran] and so on.

I can confirm that my own children were speaking mature Esperanto at a very early age. Most people, though, learn Esperanto later in life as a second language, and for them the regular structure greatly simplifies the learning process. Building words and sentences in Esperanto is rather like playing with Lego or Duplo building blocks. That's how I presented it to my children's primary school, and they loved it.

Roots and endings

Suppose we have a Lego block with the letters bel. This represents the idea of something being beautiful. In English, we have the words beauty, beautiful, beautifully, depending on the context. In Esperanto, bel is not used as a stand-alone word, but needs an ending to indicate its role in the sentence. If we want to refer to a person's beauty (i.e. use it as a noun), we put next to it a Lego block with the ending o, to give belo [beauty]. If we want to use it as a dependent word to describe something (i.e. an adjective), we find the Lego block with an a on it, giving bela [beautiful]. If we want to attach bel to a verb (i.e. use it as an adverb), then we add e, to give bele [beautifully]. If you now want to create words that don't have direct equivalents in English, then how about beli [to be beautiful], belas [is beautiful], belus [would be beautiful]?


Prefixes and suffixes

Then we have prefixes and suffixes which will change the meaning of the root, giving words like beligi [to beautify], malbeligante [making (something) ugly], and malbelega [really ugly]. I've even heard the word belaca (accent on c) which in the context meant: supposedly beautiful but ... ugh!


Word building

Bel is also used in word building, as in belsona [euphoneous: bel+son+a; son=sound]. This is possible because bel comes packaged with only its meaning, and nothing more. There is no English equivalent of bel. If there were, perhaps it would be beaut, in which case the noun would be formed by adding y. Note, though, that the adjective in English is derived from the noun, and that the adverb is derived from the adjective. In Esperanto, words aren't derived, but built up from roots (or stems, or radicals).

This illustrates a fundamental difference between Esperanto grammar and European grammars. In this sense, Esperanto can be considered as oriental, but dressed in European clothing. We don't know whether Zamenhof intentionally followed oriental grammar, or whether he derived it by working backwards from European languages, but I have come across one short quote that suggests that this was intentional. Anything non-European at that time would have been considered 'uncivilised', and so any attempt at a constructed language would have had to look European.

We can see how word-building works in practice by taking a sentence. Let's try a fairly complex one: Lia fratino kuris rapide al la lernejo which means 'His sister ran quickly to school'.

We can start to see the sentence structure merely by putting the syntactic endings in red. This gives Lia fratino kuris rapide al la lernejo. The parts that aren't in red never change, unless you want to change their meaning. These parts are made up of roots. So if we take the root kur, which represents the idea of running, then you can freely put this together with syntactic endings, such as: as [present], is [past], os [future], us [condition], u [volition], and o [noun]. This willl give you: kuras [run, runs], kuris [ran], kuros [will run, shall run], kurus [would run], kuru [run, should run], kuro [run, running]. You can then do the same with any other action words, as you please.

If you're really into the Esperanto way of thinking, there's no such thing as verb conjugation; there's just plain simple word-building. If you were to replace the Esperanto roots with ideograms or pictograms, you'd begin to see the similarity in approach with some oriental languages.

Let's go back to the sentence Lia fratino kuris rapide al la lernejo. The root rapid represents speed. So kuris rapide means 'ran quickly'. We could also talk about rapida kuro [a quick run], if we know that a is the adjective ending, and we remember that o is the noun ending.

This in itself means that we dramatically cut down on new vocabulary when learning the language. But that's only part of the story. There are also semantic endings - endings which change the meaning of the roots. Let's put those in green. Now we have: Lia fratino kuris rapide al la lernejo. You may have guessed that frat means 'brother', and so fratino means 'sister'. Lern means learning and lernejo means 'school'. In English, we have the endings -ess for feminine, and -ery or -ary for place, as in lioness, duchess, rookery, aviary, library, etc. But you can't talk about a bulless, a brotheress, or a husbandess; nor can you talk about a workery, a bookery, or a coffeeery! Eatery is coming into vogue, though, as if it were a translation of the Esperanto mangejo (accent on g)!


Word order

Another point to notice in Esperanto sentence structure is the extremely free word order. There are just a few word types that do require strict word order in Esperanto, as in English. You can say al la lernejo [to the school], but you can't say lernejo la al [school the to]. Generally speaking, the words in Esperanto that require a fixed word order are the ones that don't require endings.

The words that do have endings are very free with respect to word order, because you can quickly hear or see which words are connected. Our example sentence, Lia fratino kuris rapide al la lernejo, could be turned right round, giving: Al la lernejo rapide kuris fratino lia! That gives a very simple way of switching the sentence topic; instead of talking about 'his sister', we are now talking about 'going to school'. The English equivalent would be something like 'School's where a sister of his was running fast to'. It doesn't quite sound right, does it? In practice, you'd probably say something like: 'The school. That's where his sister was running to so fast'. I'm a native speaker of English, but I usually find it easier to change the emphasis in an Esperanto sentence than in an English sentence.


Spelling

The other thing that stumps me sometimes in English is spellling! I use a dictionary in Esperanto for the more obscure words; I use a dictionary in English for some of the perfectly common words. Esperanto is completely phonetic (linguists read: 'Esperanto is phonemic'!). If you can say a word you can spell it, and if you can spell it you can say it. The stress is always on the last vowel but one, even in words like filozifia [philosophical]. I once asked a three-and-a-half-year-old: Kiuj literoj estas en la vorto 'epidiaskopo'? [What letters are there in the word 'epidiascope']. He listed them out quite correctly, then asked Kio estas 'epidiaskopo', pacjo? (accent on c) [What is an epidiascope, Daddy?]. OK, I had his attention on something that he happened to be interested in doing, and was good at, but the example still makes the point. He was then able at a later stage transfer that ability to spelling in English. But neither he nor I will ever be as good at spelling in English as we are in Esperanto.

Positive about Esperanto

Esperanto is now experiencing something of a renewal; as global communication becomes technically so immediate, Esperanto is being used much more intensively. Isolated speakers, spread thinly throughout the world, can now be in daily communication with the Esperanto-speaking community, and this is undoubtedly leading to greater language familiarity and fluency. Surprisingly, for us Europeans, the Internet has made a radical difference to the Esperanto communities in some developing countries, where even the thought of possessing a telephone may be still a dream for many. In Nigeria, for instance, I was told that using an Internet Cafe to send and pick up emails was not only faster, but also cheaper, than the traditional mail. The African movement is at last waking up - and often it's people in refugee camps who learn Esperanto first, in difficult conditions of ethnic strife.

There is a literature in Esperanto comparable with that of many ethnic languages, including two moveies - a thriller, Angoroj, in 1964, and the 'cursed' film Incubus, in 1965, starring William Shattner of Star Trek fame. This was lost for many years, but was recently rediscovered and published on video and DVD.

There is also a host of Esperanto get-togethers of all sorts, ranging from small youth groups to the annual Universala Kongreso de Esperanto [normally translated as 'World Esperanto Congress']. This incorporates conferences and meetings about Esperanto, but is also a festival of Esperanto.

Next year's World Esperanto Congress is to be in China. The Chinese ruling party congress was in the news not long ago for including Esperanto amongst the languages of its web site. Chinese radio, together with Polish radio and Radio Vatican have broadcast in Esperanto for years. Last year's congress was in Brazil, and I was surprised to find how positive the average Brazillian in the street was towards the language. If the rest of the world were ready for Esperanto, then certainly Brazil would be.

September 26 is the European Day of Languages. If any school is thinking of teaching a different language for the day, then Esperanto is the obvious choice! I've also written a web course, 'Esperanto Viva!', which will introduce anyone who is interested in Esperanto not only to the language itself, but also to the world-wide culture, the community, and the concept.

Various studies have indicated that Esperanto can be effective as an initial teaching language, so that children can grasp the concepts of language, and gain confidence at the same time, before tackling the ethnic languages.

I first became interested in Esperanto when the head of a nearby school gave us a talk when I was 13. He had introduced Esperanto into his school in order to improve the learning of French. He was so enthused by the results, that he kept it going for years. I bought a sixpenny booklet and read the intro and first lesson on the way home. Three years later I picked up my brother's Teach Yourself Esperanto. It took me just two months to reach the stage that I had reached with German. After that, I couldn't stop. So be warned.

Esperanto links coming very soon!!

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