Molly Jefferson
Staff Writer
The concept of creating a language to unite the world is beautiful, but it will not be Esperanto.
English is statistically the most widely spoken language. Approximately 1.5 billion people around the world speak English, making it easy for many to consider it the closest thing society has to a universal language. Of course, some attribute its widespread use to colonization and centuries of cultural displacement, but few stop to consider why it continues to grow as a global norm.
What if we integrated a new language into society? One that does not come with a tragic history, has no culture, and is easy to learn for people from all backgrounds? The answer is simple: Create a language from scratch and use it–not to replace anyone’s native language–but to promote easy international communication.
Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof did just that. Zamenhof completed Esperanto in 1887. He published “Fundamento de Esperanto” in 1905, which introduced Esperanto to the world and provided the basics on how to learn it. His purpose in creating Esperanto was to develop an accessible and neutral language for international use and unity.
When I first started my research on Esperanto, I wondered why it was not considered revolutionary and was not taught everywhere. That is, until I got to the first page of the first lesson on Esperanto from esperanto12.net.
“Marko estas mia amiko.”
This phrase might be very easy for you to understand if you have ever studied Spanish, Italian, or French. Many Romance languages have the same structure for this sentence. Spanish, Italian, and French generally follow subject-verb-object sentence structure. So, assuming you have some knowledge in one of the aforementioned languages, we can deduce that “Marko” is a name and that the rest of the sentence means “is my friend”.
If your native language is not a Romance language, and you have never studied one, you probably had a hard time translating “Marko estas mia amiko.” The majority of Esperanto follows this word structure. For Zamenhof to claim that Esperanto is easy for everyone to learn and to understand, he cuts out the majority of language speakers in general.
In other words, Esperanto is highly eurocentric and utilizes Latin as a basis for the language. Zamenhof’s claim of making an accessible language loses validity when 90% of the world’s languages do not run on its basic structure and mouthfeel.
So, if the goal is to invent an auxiliary language that everyone on the planet can learn easily, and Esperanto is the closest thing we have to one so far, we still have a long way to go. Back to the drawing board.
