MY JOURNEY into the land of Esperanto, the most famous planned language that the Polish ophthalmologist Ludwik Lejzar Zamenhof 鈥� the Polish name spells Ludwik 艁azarz Zamenhof and pronounces something like 鈥榣udvik wazash zamenxof鈥� with the first two vowels in the last name being nasal 鈥� created in 1887, began on a serious note in the first week of February 2023. It was in the early 1980s when I first knew of Esperanto, intended to be an international auxiliary language, when I read Galpa Yakhan Bhasha Niye (Stories of languages), the second, ordinary edition, in paperback published by Muktadhara in April 1980 that I bought at Shahnewaz Library at Munshipara, where a number of bookshops then almost lined along a road in Dinajpur.
The book also had a deluxe edition in white print, hardbound. But it was easy for me to buy the paperback edition, in newsprint, which sold for Tk 8 while the hardbound one sold for Tk 11. When the book first came out in October 1976, only hardbound in white print, the price was Tk 18. A chapter that dealt with moves to overcome linguistic barriers devoted the last paragraph entirely to Esperanto, the chapter gave Zamenhof鈥檚 name as LI Zamenhof though.
It said that grammatical rules of the language are extremely regular, and there are only 16 of them, with all nouns ending in -o and plurals with an added -j, as in -oj, and all accusatives ending in -n. Later, I knew that all adjectives end in -a and they match with nouns in number and case. All adverbs end in -e. There are three tenses and, effectively, two moods of verbs but for the infinitive. And, words are pronounced as they are written.
After bumping into the language quite a few times, I downloaded off the Archive site Ivy Kellerman Reed鈥檚 A Complete Grammar of Esperanto. The enthusiasm died down within a week. I then signed up with Duolingo, an online platform that Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker founded in 2011 as a free way to learn languages. A beta version of the Esperanto course was opened to all by the end of May 2015. The 鈥榮table鈥� course finally opened on March 25, 2016 with 61 skills and more than 240 lessons. But I had never tried it before the first week of February 2023 when I decided to spend at best six months on learning the language. Esperanto is a good, arguably not the perfect, example of an agglutinative language, which employs a morphological process where words are formed by morphemes, or smallest part of words, stringed together.
The gamified Duolingo Esperanto course offers streaks of continuous learning for days, with XPs, or experience points, on practice, a virtual currency called the lingot that can buy some privileges and hearts that encourage learners to pay more attention to lessons as five hearts a day can be easily lost on each wrong answer. This leaves the learners to wait for 24 hours for the heart bucket to replenish. Whilst the loss of hearts on mistake forces learners to pay rapt attention to learning the language, the streak, which requires learners to continue with lessons, at least one of them, every day, tempts learners into not breaking the continuous efforts. The course also offers a daily goal of XPs, depending on the situation of the learners, along with a daily goal of learning time. I completed the Duolingo course of 45 units in 151 days.
Learning Esperanto takes, it is generally viewed, less time than learning natural languages. It is said that the length of training should roughly be around 700 hours to learn languages such as French, Spanish or Portuguese, around 1,300 hours to learn languages such as Bangla, Hindi, Urdu or Russian, and around 2,500 hours to learn languages such as Arabic, Chinese or Korean. Esperanto should take less time than what all these languages do, but it has probably never been rigorously measured. Yet, some estimates say that the length of training for Esperanto should be around 200 hours. This breaks down to more or less 57 weeks with half an hour鈥檚 study a day. Duolingo has also segmented the learning sessions into leagues such as bronze, silver, gold, sapphire, ruby, emerald, amethyst, pearl, obsidian and diamond, with a provision for relegation. This appears a good way for Duolingo to make learners hold down their sessions.
Esperanto, which means 鈥榦ne who hopes鈥�, was born to meet an intended need for a 鈥榥eutral language鈥�, without the religion and ethnicity baggage. Zamenhof, or Ludoviko Lazaro Zamenhofo in Esperanto, thought that the world needed a single, simple language that would get past the barriers of religion or ethnicity. The 鈥榠nternal idea鈥�, or interna ideo, of Esperanto, in Zamenhof鈥檚 words, is: 鈥�Sur ne怒trala lingva fundamento forigi la murojn inter la gentoj kaj alkutimigadi la homojn, ke 膲iu el ili vidu en sia proksimulo nur homon kaj听fraton.鈥� (in modern English, 鈥極n the basis of a neutral constructed language, to eliminate barriers between people of different language and cultural identities, and to accustom people to recognise that 鈥渙thers鈥� are both human beings and siblings.鈥�)
Zamenhof published his book called International Language, originally Mezhdunarodnij Yazyk in Russian which is commonly referred to as Unua Libro (First Book), under the pseudonym of Dr Esperanto in 1887. The book, with 16 basic rules and a lexicon of nine hundred words, marks the beginning of the Esperanto movement. But the name Esperanto did not arise until 1889, when people began to call the language by Zamenhof鈥檚 pseudonym. The name of Unua Libro was also retroactively applied when Zamenhof published Dua Libro (Second Book) in 1988. Zamenhof reproduced much of the Unua Libro content as Fundamento de Esperanto in 1905. He established Fundamento as the only obligatory authority over Esperanto.
Since then, Esperanto has come to have an estimated two million users in Esperantujo, not the physical land but a community of speakers of the language spanning over 120 countries considered a single country; and 2,000 of them are said to be native speakers. And, it is assumed that since 1887, 10,000 titles have been published in Esperanto. Esperanto also boasts of a Wikipedia site, or Vikipedia in Esperanto, with more than 230,000 articles. Duolingo now has 428,000 signups for Esperanto. Esperanto also has a fictional old Esperanto form, too, called Arcaicam Esperantom, or ar磨aika Esperanto in Esperanto which means archaic Esperanto, based on an idea broached around 1930. Esperanto, in fact, has a proto form, or an early version of the language, dating back to 1878. The sociolect is different in grammar and spelling from the standard Esperanto but well serves to show texts written in the assumed old form of the language.
Esperanto is not the first invented, planned or constructed language. There are several hundreds. Even seven years before Esperanto, a German catholic priest made Volap眉k, but it died out as people say that he did not want anyone else to make any changes in it. Arika Okrent, a linguist, in her In the Land of Invented Languages says that Zamenhof did not meddle with what people started doing with Esperanto, which she thinks is a reason for Esperanto鈥檚 success. She thinks that Esperanto has another reason to succeed. Esperanto鈥檚 pie-in-the-sky aims had immediate and broad appeal.
Noam Chomsky, widely believed to be against planned languages, said, 鈥榯he concept of inventing a language is very misleading.鈥� Okrent, who lists five hundred planned languages in her book, speaks of nine hundred languages having been invented in nine hundred years. Esperantists believe that Chomsky said this about the language project of 1887. He later said that Esperanto had a couple of hints that people who knew the language could use based on their linguistic knowledge to make a language out of it. Esperantists say that people should not say that Zamenhof invented or created Esperanto. They should rather say that Zamenhof created the basis of the language Esperanto.
Okrent says that the appeal that Esperanto holds has endured even as it failed to become a widely spoken language. She believes that Esperantists are drawn to this vision of world harmony. People began to make a language out of what Zamenhof began with. And, Duolingo is a good site to begin learning Esperanto.
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Abu Jar M Akkas is deputy editor at 抖阴精品.
