Lingvon

I've been allowing myself to be distracted by Esperanto lately.  

Some readers may be aware of the fact that I find the existence of Esperanto highly amusing.  I don't know why, but the concept just tickles my fancy.  Also, the word.  I love saying "Esperanto".  It's one of those words that feel good in the mouth, if you know what I mean.

I have been known to bring Esperanto into a conversation just because I felt like saying the word.  I had the opportunity to tell a couple of Americans and a German about it's existence at my language course in Estonia, so that livened up the meet-and-greet.  They thought it was an interesting concept, too, even if they couldn't quite understand why it would actually be a thing.  The Greek girl knew what I was talking about, though, and she was more derisive.  She was, however, impressed when I mentioned that there were groups of people who spoke Esperanto as one of their first languages (always in conjunction with a "real" language - from what I've read, no one has been crazy enough to create a completely Esperanta community where all children speak nothing but Esperanto for the first few years).

I was thoroughly impressed when I discovered that ProQuest gives people the option to limit their searches to find articles written in Esperanto.  Sadly, the only journal articles written in Esperanto are more or less about Esperanto (and language in general), so if you were hoping to find Esperanta articles about rotator-cuff injuries or baseball, you would be largely out of luck...

However, while I've been fascinated by the existence of Esperanto (and quite fond of saying the word) for years, until I went to the Esperanto museum in Vienna I had never actually looked at the language or the historical/cultural space that it fills.  

To be honest, I've always regarded Esperanto as being, well, useless.

Let's face it, English actually is what Esperanto wanted to be (except for the cultural neutrality thing), and while the number of people who speak Esperanto is roughly equivalent to the number of people who speak Estonian, there isn't really any place on Earth one can go where speaking Esperanto will help you buy a loaf of bread if you are lost and alone in a small town.  At least Estonian is highly useful in Estonia.  

Also, Esperanto seems to be such a dilettante language.  It’s not something you learn to survive – you learn it because you’re educated and are privileged enough to be able to learn a language you don’t need “on the street”.  It wouldn't surprise me at all if you found that anyone who actually speaks Esperanto also speaks English, French, German or Spanish - so why learn Esperanto when you would be better served by one of the big four?

Sure, Esperanto has a large community of users all over the world who love it, defend it, gather together to speak it, translate works of great literature into it, and write poetry in it… but the same could be said of Klingon. 

Should Hamlet in Esperanto really be seen in a different light to Hamlet in Klingon?

Standing in the Esperanto museum I was struck by two things:  1) the language is actually quite interesting from a linguistic point of view, and 2) it’s not a language so much as a pseudo-religious movement.

Firstly, the language:  Apparently there’s some evidence that learning Esperanto can be a useful stepping stone to learning more complicated languages.  The structure is simple and easy to pick up, and it draws attention to the way a language works.  In theory, after learning Esperanto, language learners are better positioned to understand what they are doing when learning another language.

The language does seem remarkable easy to absorb.  I’ve spent less than two hours looking at it, and I already know how to alter a word to mark it as a nominative or accusative noun, an adjective or an adverb – after three years I still struggle doing this in Estonian.  Yet it’s also vaguely Finno-Ugric in the way you attach prefixes and suffixes to create a wide variety of words from the same basic root. 

I am mildly concerned by the weird positive-negative thing it has going.  The word for cold is “malvarma”, which literally means “not warm” – just like the word for short (“mallonga”) means “not long”.  The word for hot, “varmega”, means something like “significantly warm”.  I don’t know why, but I feel like “not warm” is an insufficient way to express “cold”.  If someone asks you what the water is like, and you say “not warm”, that wouldn’t really have the same level of warning as “cold”.

Anyway, the language is kind of interesting, and possibly more useful to me, personally, than Italian (for example).

As for my comment that it is a pseudo-religious movement?  Well, it’s kind of like the Scouts, actually – a group of people engaging in activities that are meant to make the world a better place and getting together for regular camps and conferences.  The history of the language is steeped in a concept that the world can be a wonderful, apolitical place where people speak to each other in neutral languages with no cultural baggage and share things and live in harmony.  A place where people talk to each other instead of fighting.  A place where peace and co-operation reign.

Esperanto speakers are embracers of an ideal.  They’re a club in which the members have chosen their own language and culture – and it is an oddly optimistic one.  They write books, plays and poetry, and happily forget that Esperanto will never be quite what Zammenhof was hoping for.  But, it is good that they don’t lose hope.  The very word “Esperanto” means “hope”, after all...