“It’s easy to see why the League was so enamored. Modern, efficient, progressive, Esperanto embodied a certain spirit of early 20th-century internationalism. Channeling what he called “the spirit of European languages,” Zamenhof had forged a hybrid of Romance, Germanic, and Slavic elements, streamlined for maximum transparency (no irregular verbs!) but distinctive and ingenious when it came to word formation.”
“Chains of prefixes and suffixes work virtuoso wonders in Esperanto, with –eg- making anything bigger, -et- making anything smaller, and mal- turning anything into its opposite.”
“More thoroughly and elegantly than the English suffix –ly, Esperanto’s –e transforms any noun into an adverb; Kiel vivi vegane is an Esperanto pamphlet whose title translates to “How to Live Veganly.” There is no lack of idioms, slang, or linguistic color.”
“While it never achieved the fina venko (final victory) projected by its more devoted acolytes, Esperanto is today “a living language with a worldwide community,” reports Esther Schor in her fascinating new history Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language.”
“Why Esperanto — and not Lingua Ignota, Volapük, Interlingua, or any of a thousand other constructed languages? As “conlanger” David Peterson, who invented Dothraki for Game of Thrones, points out in The Art of Language Invention, every consciously created language bears the imprint of its era.”
“Medieval languages for addressing God, like the mystic polymath Hildegard von Bingen’s Lingua Ignota, gave way to “philosophical languages” in the 17th and 18th centuries, which sought to encode the structure of all knowledge. (Imagine the Dewey Decimal System as a spoken tongue.)”
“Today the hobbyists of the Language Creation Society, inspired by sci-fi and fantasy but ever more informed about Earth’s linguistic diversity, share “artlangs” online.”
“The timing was fortunate, too: Esperanto launched right after the collapse of Volapük, invented in 1879 on divine inspiration by the German Catholic priest Martin Schleyer. Saddled with endless, intricate verb endings, Volapük apparently never transcended its user base of “male, educated, German-speaking Catholics,” according to Schor.”
“Today Esperanto is as much a movable feast as a movement, a cheerful diaspora that lives on at characterful classes and congresses where diehards for the interna ideo mingle with fearsome polyglots and hardcore language nerds.”
“The greatest danger Esperanto faces is that a language born out of a hope for universal understanding could end up as just another hobby, cultivated in convention halls that next week will be filled with memory junkies, chess fanatics, or Trekkies.”
“Born in an age of nationalisms, it sometimes seems like a language in search of a country. There’s no army, but Esperanto has many of the other trappings of a nation-state: a flag, an anthem, a literature with its own rigorous poetics, and even places of pilgrimage like Zamenhof’s Bialystok and an Esperanto-speaking farm-school in the Brazilian Amazon.”
“In 1996, the UEA pledged itself to support seven core objectives: democracy, global education, effective education, multilingualism, language rights, language diversity, and human emancipation.”
“Its grammar may have a geeky appeal, but plainly humanism, internationalism, and love of language are Esperanto’s bedrock.”
“In an age of mass linguistic extinction, Esperanto is an unlikely point of light, a rare example of a language community that relies less on transmission from parents to children than on the passion of self-selecting adults concerned explicitly with communication and justice.”
“If English is an expanding empire, Esperanto is a quirky and fractious co-op, still hanging on a century after its creation.”