by Norman Berdichevsky (Dec. 2007)
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League of Nations and the United Nations encouraging its instruction and use. It comes as a shock that there are many tens of thousands (very possibly hundreds of thousands) of Esperanto speakers who use it in every sense as a “living language” capable of generating a loyalty and devotion among its community of speakers. These include those who learned it as children from their parents. All of them continue to shape and change it and have invested it with the deepest emotions and have even generated their own cosmopolitan literature, culture and slang without a physical homeland.
Britain, Australia, New Zealand and the continental size “island” of America hardly needed to confront anyone outside of their own tongue. Even today, the idea of an “auxiliary language” strikes many as a far fetched and an outmoded ideal when the media continually reassure the public that English has become the “world’s international language.”
U.K. is the center (centre) of the multi-billion dollar industry of teaching English world-wide, there has been some support for Esperanto in the British Parliament in the form of a lobby group. At the time of the centenary of Esperanto in 1987, it numbered more that 200 members of the Upper and Lower Houses (mostly Labour/Labor). A proposal for an Esperanto language service by the BBC was squashed in 1967 after a few initial broadcasts – due to unpublicized pressure from the vested interests of the English language teaching, the British Council and textbook industry.
Finland during 1944 when fate throws together a Finnish sniper who deserts and is on the run from his German commander, a Russian captain who is facing a court-martial and a Lapp widow. For the first time in film history, subtitles enable only the audience to understand what each one of the characters means to say but is unable to communicate to the others.
Volapük – Esperanto for losers” (New English Review, December 2006), concludes that Esperanto must be “soulless”. She is also convinced there is no Esperanto literature worth reading. I know there IS – both original literature in Esperanto and works translated from Esperanto into English and dozens of other languages. Moreover, a Scottish Esperantist, William Auld, was a recent candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature but he, as well as other great Esperanto writers, such as Sandor Szathmari, Raymond Schwartz, Julio Baghy, Ferenc Szilagyi, Kalman Kalocsay, Jean Forge, Gaston Waringheim and Claude Piron may be just names that evoke a shoulder shrug but their works have been read and appreciated and held in the highest regard by the speakers and readers of a language that indeed has a culture if not a homeland.
Iran and has always been considered heretical by Muslim theocrats in all Muslim countries.
Germany in 1884, followed by a second one in 1887 and another in 1889. The question of how many of Volapük’s adherents could actually speak the language was made clear at the first two congresses when all the delegates used German as the language of business and the third one failed miserably in its attempt to actually use the spoken tongue proving just how unwieldy and impractical it was.
Poland was a town divided between Jews, Germans, Poles, Russians and Lithuanians. While still a teenager, Zamenhof strove to create a practical and easily learnable language that could be used as everybody’s “second language.” The first Esperanto textbook (in Russian) was published in July of 1887, made possible in part, by a generous dowry from the young man’s father-in-law.
Baltic Republics after their annexation to the USSR in 1940.
League of Nations
France, he launched his own language project “Ido”, employing a clever ruse. He sponsored an international committee in 1907 to judge various competing projects that included Esperanto and other devised languages, none of which had any existence outside of the drawing board. Manipulating the rules by which to judge the candidates so as to exclude Zamenhof and using a secret “insider”, Couturat employed the politically ultra-conservative Marquis Louis de Beaufront to support Ido.
Albania, Belgium, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, Chile, China, Finland, Haiti, India, Italy, Colombia, Persia, Romania, South Africa and Venezuela but bitterly opposed by France. The French delegate, Gabriel Hanotaux, former French Foreign Minister demanded the exclusion of Esperanto from any consideration as an international auxiliary language and extolled the use of French as the “classical language of diplomacy”. He prohibited the presence of any French delegate at international meeting in which Esperanto was permitted.
Vatican by the Vichy government), forbade the use of any French classroom for the instruction of Esperanto and provided a clandestine subsidy to the Ido movement to further contradict the claims of Esperantists. Conservative circles in France even expressed satisfaction that the United States had opted not to become a member of the League of Nations, a step that would have further increased the prestige of English.
Europe and the anti-Semitism of the Nazis. For Hitler, the explanation was much simpler, as expressed in his autobiography
Columbia University in New York which had invited several distinguished European linguists to do research there.
Columbia University connections enabled the publication of many scientific abstracts in Interlingua thus making it for a time quite visible.
Great Britain, who is best recalled for such works of scientific popularization as Mathematics for the Millions and Science for the Citizen. His novelty was an even greater effort to appease Classical tradition by devising a tongue whose vocabulary consisted entirely of roots from Greek but whose grammar was syntactically borrowed from Chinese recalling the “universal appeal“ that Schleyer imagined Volapük would exert on the world stage. This added an element missing since the days of Volapük to appease the sensibilities of the greatest number of speakers on the planet. His book appeared in 1943 but evoked little reaction in the midst of world war
high point for Esperantists was the gathering of a million signatures on a petition submitted to UNESCO in 1954 and favoring the international language at the organization’s meeting in Montevideo
Swiss State radio services to recently end their Esperanto language daily broadcasts after 40 years. Budgetary restrictions and the need for the Swiss to offer programming in Arabic for the many “guest workers” and for the Poles to expand services in Ukrainian and Belorussian meant that the only “easy savings” would be in ending a service for a “vague, indefinite and cosmopolitan” audience.
* Author’s note; see my article “Zamenhof and Esperanto” in Ariel, 1986. No. 64. pp. 58-71.
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