It is not down in any map; true places never are.
— HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby-Dick
Utopia as a concept is a play on words. It’s from two Greek words that mean ‘Not-place.’ Utopia doesn’t exist. Ironically, dystopia seems extremely close these days.
Similarly, world peace is clearly a utopian concept. It will never happen.
But theoretically, what would be the biggest move towards world peace we could make?
I would argue that removing communication barriers would help. On the most basic level, language is one of these obstacles.
LUDWIK ZAMENHOF, the inventor of Esperanto, would have agreed with me.
People have been trying to make up universal languages for several hundred years now. The closest someone got was ZAMENHOF, an optician by trade, who saw the the world was becoming more and more divided.
ZAMENHOF’s idea was that if people had a mutually intelligible language that included parts of their existing languages, they might not do so much warmongering.
As the book Bridge of Words by ESTHER SCHOR outlines with clarity, warmth and a good dose of hope: In the short term, the language was pretty much a failure. After he died though, all sorts of great things came from it, including its near adoption as the official language of the USA (ironically to try to persuade more Mexicans to migrate to the US) in 1911. Ho Chi Minh also learned Esperanto in his time in London (1914-17)
I hope you’re inspired to understand the people around you better when you read this.
Is la proksima tempo (Until next time),
Marc
P.S. I realise this is two books related to language in two weeks, I won’t carry on, even though I would love to talk about language learning all day.
SNIPPETS
A good amount of the discourse on Esperanto happens online because the speakers of the language are dispersed all over the world and take an active interest in continuing to adapt the vocabulary and grammar.
“Only connect,” wrote E. M. Forster; ah, if it were just that easy. But even now, in the Internet age, Esperanto is about connection, not connectivity; about social life, not social networks. Esperanto has no passwords. It is a homemade, open-access affair invented by one man—an amateur in every sense of the word—and made available to all. The Internet may point Esperanto toward a future rather different from its past. But Esperanto reminds us why we strove to make communication easier, faster, cheaper, and ubiquitous. The Department of Defense may have wanted the Internet for security; what the rest of us wanted was one another.
Having spent many years studying (loosely to be fair) German grammar, I want to say thank you to ZAMENHOF for his efforts:
Like the proverbial Indian wood carver who sculpted elephants by “removing everything that is not elephant,” Zamenhof crafted Esperanto by turning language over in his hand and then paring it away to an austere simplicity.
I totally love how weird linguists get about words. This is an extract from an account of a residential Esperanto course:
There are no pledges to sign, no vows to take, but it goes without saying that we’re to speak only Esperanto, morning, noon, and night; on campus and off (assuming the company of other NASKers). And almost without exception, we do. Had there been an explicit rule, it would have been simple: Neniam krokodilu! (Never crocodile!). Krokodili is the first slang word any Esperantist learns; it means “to speak one’s native language at an Esperanto gathering.” But Esperantists, a great many of whom are polyglots, are given to fine distinctions: aligatori (to alligator) means to speak one’s first language to someone else speaking it as a second language; kajmani (to cayman) means to carry on a conversation in a language that is neither speaker’s native tongue.
I recently listened to the story of how Tinder got its first users. I’ve got to say, it’s eerily similar to how Esperanto proved its viability:
Toward the end of the brochure appeared eight coupons, printed on a single page: Promise I, the undersigned, promise to learn the proposed international language of Doctor Esperanto, if it will be shown that 10 million people publicly give the same promise. Signed: Name: Address: The scheme was in equal measure canny and grandiose. Zamenhof knew that people would be more likely to commit to learning a new language if they could be assured of a community; but ten million promises? The combined populations of Warsaw and Paris numbered under four million. While waiting for the phantasmal ten million promises to materialize, Zamenhof invited criticism, vowing to maintain a one-year comment period, at the end of which he would tally the “votes” and publish “an abstract of the proposed changes.” Only then would the language receive its “final form” from an unspecified “academy of the tongue.”
👏APPLAUSE ESPERANTO, APPLAUSE:
I’ve just looked up the Esperanto word for jet lag, horzonozo: hor/zon/-, a compound root meaning “time-zone,” plus the -ozo ending, meaning “a sickness.” Timezonesickness.
There’s a part of the book that I only remember as a sweet love letter to human connection which reads like a novel. It stars a guy who the author affectionately calls Phong who has a slightly odd command of the English language. Here’s an extract of a letter that Phong writes:
At the moment, I wish you were here. I will take you visit Hanoi streets in autumn, it is so beautiful, as your soul, and you will feel fresh of life, weather … also feel typical perfume of a typical flower in Hanoi autumn, milk flower, I like autum [sic.] as it’s sad and nice.… I was so regretable [sic.] for your dog. He was piteous.
Unintentional poetry on repeat in my mind:
Hanoi autumn /
milk flower /
I like autum as it’s sad and nice /
I was so regretable for your dog /
He was piteous.
For your viewing pleasure
One peculiarity of Esperanto is that it doesn’t have a natural accent. I assume this is also true of other constructed languages. But it means that it is spoken with accents from all around the world which is very much in line with the philosophical basis for its creation.