Doktoro Esperanto's Dream

A made-up language still speaks to transnational ideals

By ILAN STAVANS

Doktoro Esperanto was the pseudonym used by Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof when he constructed, in 1887, a manual for Russian readers on a utopian language he had been devising since adolescence. It was an artificial tongue, made to bring peace to humanity. Soon the language became known as Esperanto (the word translates as "Hopeful"), and for more than 100 years, it has spread across the globe, not quite at lightning speed but in a sustained fashion. Zamenhof was born almost 150 years ago, and this is a suitable occasion to evaluate his legacy.

It is difficult to say with any precision the number of Esperanto speakers in the world today. Estimates range from 100,000 to a couple of million — a minimal percentage of the world's population. But no other tongue created deliberately has ever been nearly as successful.

The tension between the global and the local are at the heart of Zamenhof's enterprise. The quest for an über-tongue is as old as the story of the Tower of Babel. In Genesis 11:1-9, God punishes humankind for the hubris of dreaming of building an architectural structure to reach heaven by giving people multiple languages. Reversing the punishment — building a total language — has been an obsession for many thinkers for years. Descartes was interested in it, as were the French Encyclopedists. John Wilkins, a 17th-century English clergyman, visualized, in "An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language," a verbal system in which words would be built in a nonarbitrary fashion. Jorge Luis Borges, infatuated with the same idea (see his stories "The Aleph" and "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius") praised Wilkins's proposal but recognized its limitations. "The impossibility of penetrating the divine pattern of the universe cannot stop us from planning human patterns," Borges wrote in 1941, "even though we are conscious they are not definitive."

Other theories by thinkers like George Dalgarno and Gottfried Leibniz (whose dream of a comprehensive language was ridiculed by Voltaire in Candide) produced formats that ranged from the mathematical to the metaphysical. Collectively, their objective has been to bring order into the chaos of polyglotism, to confront what in Latin is known as confusio linguarum.

Zamenhof didn't quite share that objective. What he aspired to was to establish a universal second language. He worried that the lack of a common vehicle of communication among individuals from different backgrounds interfered with progress. Zamenhof's proposal wasn't to replace natural languages but to unite their speakers through a common linguistic code. That is, a German speaker would continue using Goethe's tongue but would turn to Esperanto as a bridge to communicate with a French or Spanish speaker.

The dialectic between the general and the particular, however, creates a trap. Why would the speaker of Portuguese bother to learn a second language, unless he had an immediate need to do so? Zamenhof's hope reminds me of a line of the 1983 movie To Be or Not to Be, produced by Mel Brooks, in which a character is described as being "world famous in Poland." Furthermore, there's almost always been a lingua franca available, as is the case of English today. English might not be the most frequently used language in the world, but it surely is the most influential. Why would we need Esperanto? In the history of artificial languages, the direct antecedent of Esperanto is Volapük, created in 1879 by a German priest and soon spread by world congresses to other parts of Europe, North and South America, Russia, and parts of Asia. But it ultimately collapsed, in large part because it was too difficult.

Esperanto is not only simpler than Volapük. It is spoken by a group of people whose devotion to Zamenhof's concoction has an evangelical connotation. It is transnational in its capacity to bridge borders.

Ask what ignites their passion for Esperanto, and they tell you how easy its structure is: Words are pronounced exactly as they are spelled, nouns end in "o" with a "j" that makes them plural, adjectives end in "a," the definite article is "la" with no indefinite article, etc. With a four-to-six-week crash course, you'll be up and running. Plus, knowledge of the language allows you to understand the semantic roots of other tongues, starting with Latin. As a lab linguist, Zamenhof structured Esperanto following the semantic roots of several languages, especially Latin and its children, the Romance languages. Finally, there's the international camaraderie.

Devotion to — even interest in — Zamenhof himself is less intense. Born in Biaystok, in what is now Poland, Zamenhof was the product of a city and a period in history feverish about nationalism. He came from the same cultural and geographic area, Lithuania, that inspired another controversial philologist, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, a Zionist known for orchestrating the revival of Hebrew as a modern language and for laying the ground for its adoption as the language of Israel.

Both were Yiddish speakers, a fact that, I believe, explains their universalist ethos. Perceived for centuries as a kitchen jargon useful to women, children, and the illiterate, der mame loshn, "mother's tongue," was spoken then by millions in the Pale of Settlement and beyond. It nurtured a transnational philosophy. Total strangers from Warsaw, Odessa in Ukraine, and Vilnius in Lithuania were able to understand one another in spite of their regional differences. And Yiddish was stateless. It was believed to have a long future precisely because it had no army behind it.

Ben-Yehuda fought to reverse the dominance of Yiddish in Eastern Europe — because he believed it to be a language of Jewish victimhood — by methodically upgrading Hebrew. In contrast, Zamenhof sought to supplant Yiddish with an inclusive language not meant exclusively for Jews. As a result, no one files tax forms in Esperanto. Nor does the language have a speaker who is a prime minister. But while it is homeless, it does have a flag and an anthem, "La Espero" ("Hope"). One of the anthem's stanzas reads:

Nia diligenta kolegaro
en laboro paca ne lacigos,
gis la bela songo de l' homaro
por eterna ben' efektivigos.

Our diligent colleagues
in peaceful labor will never tire,
until the beautiful dream of humanity
for eternal good is realized.

Beautiful visions of humanity often die on arrival. There are countless obstacles that bring them down. Among them is religion. Indeed, as Zamenhof matured, he came to believe that a common second language would not be enough. There also needed to be a common religion. Hence he established another movement called Homaranismo, a philosophy based on the work of the Jewish scholar Hillel, credited with the often-repeated quotation: "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?"

Homaranismo was a disappointment. The project pushed Zamenhof away from scores of Esperanto followers. And it didn't do much good in Europe. Decades after he proposed it, his three children died in the Holocaust.

As Esperanto speakers commemorate the anniversary of the language's founder this year, it is important to remember that its reception in the United States — lukewarm — hasn't been a uniform pattern. While I do know scores of American educators who speak about Esperanto with fervor, in higher education as a whole most people tend to ignore it altogether. Elsewhere, Esperanto is taught in numerous places as different as Vietnam and Brazil. The Universala Esperanto-Asocio, founded in 1908, is a kind of central committee overseeing its vitality. There are chapters in almost 120 countries. For a long time, the base of Esperanto was Europe, but it has slowly shifted to Asia and the Americas.

Countries like Cuba have radio broadcasts in Esperanto. A bookshelf of classics by writers like Goethe and Pushkin is available in translation by luminaries like Antoni Grabowski. Numerous periodicals are published globally, including Monato, a kind of Newsweek out of Belgium, and the triweekly Heraldo de Esperanto. Such novelists as the Hungarian Julio Bahgy and the French Raymond Schwartz are known for their work in Esperanto. Why then do most of us in America see it as unworthy?

In large part, the answer has to do with our allergy to foreign languages. Americans look at English as a kind of Esperanto, since it is spoken widely around the world. Why go to the trouble of learning a second language, especially one as ethereal as Esperanto?

Comparing Esperanto with Spanglish — the parlance of large masses of Latinos in the United States — is useful for analytical purposes, however distinct the two might be in their metabolism. Spanglish has no standardized grammar; it's messy. But in spite of — perhaps because of — its chaotic nature, Spanglish is a native tongue that is perceived by Latinos to be an expression of their collective identity. For the most part (although not exclusively), its home is on this side of the Rio Grande.

For a vast majority of those who speak it, Esperanto isn't a native language. Its critics say it isn't messy enough. It doesn't borrow from other languages, as living languages do, or lend parts of its own reservoir to them. It is also constantly being accused of having no roots and no cultural background. In other words, what keeps Esperanto rolling is the ideology behind it, not its practical side. The dream is driven by the utopianism of transnationalism — the very thing that is also its Achilles' heel.

Still, the utopianism of Esperanto is admirable. I own the Encyclopedia of Fictional and Fantastic Languages, edited by Tim Conley and Stephen Cain — which includes a vast assortment of examples, including imaginary tongues from different epochs like the ones in Star Trek, Lilliputian, Molvanian, and Valinorean. In the encyclopedia's foreword, the author Ursula K. Le Guin laments that its editors omitted examples like Esperanto, which, in Le Guin's words, "though utopian are not fictional." The fact that Esperanto isn't fictional is proof that humankind never tires of looking for ways to become whole again.

Ilan Stavans is professor of Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College. His latest book is Resurrecting Hebrew (Schocken, 2008). His anthology Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing (Library of America) will be published in October.

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