Esperanto

Background to the development

The founder of Esperanto, Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, grew up in the city of Bjelostock, which is now Polish and belonged to the Russian Empire at the time. Due to the ethnically diverse population of Poles, Lithuanians, Germans and especially Jews, ghetto-like structures formed. There were often physical conflicts and pogroms. Already in his school days, Zamenhof had the idealistic idea that a neutral language was necessary to prevent the formation of ghettos and racism, and would ultimately be a key to world peace.

The three objectives

In 1887 Zamenhof published a pamphlet in Warsaw containing the basics of the language. In his Unua Libro ("First Book"), financed by his wife Klara Samenhof, he simultaneously formulated three goals for his language:

1. "The language must be very easy, so that anyone can learn it, so to speak, playfully."
2. "Everyone who has learned this language must be able to use it at once for intercourse with other nationalities, quite apart from the extent to which this language is recognized by the world, whether it has many, few, or no adherents, i.e., that the language may serve at once, from the outset, in consequence of its peculiar construction, as a means of international intercourse."
3. "To find a means of overcoming the indifference of the world, and of encouraging it to make immediate and 'en masse' use of this language, as of a living language, but not only with a key to it in hand, or only in cases of extreme necessity."

The first objective is to be achieved, inter alia, by the following means:

• The spelling is phonematic. Each letter has only one pronunciation.
• There is no grammatical gender (Not like in German: Der Löffel, die Gabel, das Messer).
• There is only one declension.
• There is only one conjugation.
• The language is agglutinative, which means that all word stems remain unchanged in conjugation and declension.
• There are very few grammatical rules and they apply without exceptions.

The first edition of Unua Libro, in Russian, contains 40 pages in A5 format. The grammar section in it contains 16 rules on six pages.

Development until 1914

In 1889, an address list of the first followers followed, and the magazine La Esperantisto, published in Esperanto in Nuremberg, was also founded.

In 1898 Louis de Beaufront founded a French Esperanto society, which later became the first Esperanto national association. Marie Hankel translated the poem "La Espero" written by Zamenhof. In the setting by Baron Félicien Menu de Ménil of Paris, this became the international anthem sung at all major festivities of Esperantists in all countries.

The Esperanto World Federation was founded in 1908. Until the outbreak of the First World War, there were associations or at least local groups on all continents.

From 1914 to the end of the Second World War

Nordische Rundfunk AG began broadcasting news in Esperanto every Monday at 6 p.m. under the title Dek minutoj da Esperanto 'Ten minutes of Esperanto' on October 5, 1924. On the other hand, between the two world wars, there were obstructions in more than a dozen countries. In Nazi Germany, among many others, planned language associations were also banned.

Under Joseph Stalin's rule in the Soviet Union, there was no publicly announced ban, but already with the beginning of the Great Purge, among many other groups, leading Esperanto speakers were arrested and deported. The secret service NKVD initially listed, among other things, "all people with foreign contacts." A 1940 order from Lithuania listed "Esperantists" alongside stamp collectors among the groups of people to be registered. Thousands of Esperanto speakers were arrested and imprisoned in camps; Rytkov estimated that among the 1.5 million arrested were 30,000 Soviet Esperanto speakers, several dozen of whom were shot; thousands later died in camps.

After the Second World War

During the Cold War, it took a long time before Esperanto associations could be founded in the Eastern European states. One exception was Yugoslavia, where an Esperanto World Congress was held as early as 1953. In 1959, the first World Congress in an Eastern Bloc country took place in Warsaw. Gradually, contacts and cooperation developed between the national associations in East and West. In the 1960s, two feature films were made in Esperanto, Angoroj (France, 1964) and Inkubo (USA, 1966). In 1980, the Chinese national association was allowed to join the Esperanto World Federation.

After the Second World War, the number of national associations in the Federation increased steadily. In 1948 the Federation had 19 national associations, in 1971 already 34, in 1989 there were 47 and in 2013 a total of 71. However, the number of people belonging to these associations did not grow at the same rate and also decreased again. In 2016, it was at its lowest level since 1947. In contrast, there is an increasing number of groups on the Internet (e.g. social networks and contributors to projects such as Wikipedia, language courses, dictionaries and programs).

In 1953 the first Esperanto congress after the Second World War took place in Germany in Frankfurt am Main.

The words consist mainly of invariable word elements which are joined together. For example, the majority of nouns and adjectives and pronouns are formed by adding a -j: domo 'house', domoj 'houses', the object case by adding another -n: domojn 'houses (acc. plural)'. The root is not changed, as it often happens in German. The agglutinative principle visible here is also known from Finnish, Hungarian and Turkish, for example.

Zamenhof aimed at a regular language construction in order to minimize the learning effort, especially in morphology and word formation. There is only one scheme for the declension of nouns and the conjugation of verbs. Even the verb "to be", which is irregular in many languages, is conjugated in Esperanto according to the same scheme as all other verbs:

For better recognition, some types of words have specific endings. -o, for example, is the ending for nouns: domo 'house'; -a is the ending for adjectives: doma 'domestic', etc. Even some words that are neither nouns nor adjectives end in -o or -a, so that the final vowel alone is not sufficient to determine the part of speech.

Many Esperanto words originate from Latin or Romance languages. A good part of them can also be found in other languages (cf. Esperanto muro, German Mauer, Polish mur, Dutch muur from Latin murus; French: mur, Italian/Portuguese/Spanish: muro). However, a fairly large proportion also comes from Germanic languages, especially German and English (depending on the text corpus, this proportion is estimated at five to twenty percent). In addition, there are a number of words from Slavic languages, especially Polish and Russian (such as Esperanto kolbaso, Polish kiełbasa, Russian колбаса́). In addition, a few words were borrowed from Greek (Esperanto kaj, Greek και). The choice of which language Zamenhof took a word from he determined by expediency, first by which word might be familiar to most, then often to avoid confusion. However, there are also false friends, as in other language pairs (Esperanto regalo means to entertain, cf. French régaler, to entertain; a shelf is translated in Esperanto as bretaro, literally collection of boards).

Some words are known in several Indo-European languages, for example Esperanto religio 'religion': English religion, French religion, Polish religia; Esperanto lampo 'lamp': English lamp, French lamp, Polish lampa, etc. Sometimes there are deliberate hybrid forms in Esperanto, for example ĝardeno 'garden': The spelling resembles English garden, the pronunciation resembles French jardin.

The spelling is phonematic, which means that only one phoneme (speech sound) is assigned to each character and only one character to each phoneme. It uses letters of the Latin alphabet, supplemented by oversigns (diacritical marks). For example, ŝ corresponds to German sch and ĉ to tsch (e.g. in ŝako 'chess' and Ĉeĉenio 'Chechnya'). (See also Esperanto spelling).

Sample Language
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 1:

Ĉiuj homoj estas denaske liberaj kaj egalaj laŭ digno kaj rajtoj. Ili posedas racion kaj konsciencon, kaj devus konduti unu al la alia en spirito de frateco.

All men are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should meet one another in a spirit of brotherhood.