Aleksander Korzhenkov
Zamenhof
The
Life, Works and Ideas
of the Author of Esperanto
English translation and notes by Ian M. Richmond
Edited by Humphrey Tonkin
Published by Mondial at Smashwords
MONDIAL
in cooperation with
Universal Esperanto Association
Published by Mondial at Smashwords
Mondial
New York
in cooperation with
Universal Esperanto Association
Rotterdam
Aleksander
Korzhenkov:
Zamenhof
The Life, Works and Ideas of the Author of Esperanto
Abridged by the author from
Homarano: La vivo, verkoj kaj ideoj de d-ro L.L. Zamenhof
Kaliningrad: Sezonoj; Kaunas: Litova Esperanto-Asocio, 2009
English translation and notes by © Ian M. Richmond
Edited by Humphrey Tonkin
Copyright © Mondial and Aleksander Korzhenkov, 2009
Translation,
Preface and Notes:
© Esperantic Studies Foundation, 2010
Photos: Archives of the Universal Esperanto Associations
ISBN eBook Edition): 978-1-59569-210-8
ISBN (Paperback Edition) 978-1-59569-167-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010926187
www.mondialbooks.com
Introduction: Esperanto in the World Today
1. A Russian Jew
2. Early influences
3. Zamenhof’s education
4. The origins of Esperanto
5. Esperanto is born
6. Esperanto spreads
7. A struggling young doctor
8. The need for an international language
9. Esperanto’s “French Period”
10. The first international Esperanto congress
11. The movement to reform Esperanto
12. The fruitful years
13. From Zionism to Homaranism
14. Esperanto and the brotherhood of humanity
15. Spirituality and Esperanto
16. The First World War
Works cited
Collected works of Zamenhof
A brief bibliography of works on Zamenhof
A brief bibliography of works on Esperanto
Notes
Introduction
Today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the international language Esperanto is a mature language, spoken and used by hundreds of thousands of people across the world, with its own literature and culture, its own native speakers, its own organizations and promotional activities. But it was not always so. Released to the public for the first time in the late nineteenth century (in 1887, to be precise) Esperanto had its specific origins in the fertile brain of a single individual, L. L. Zamenhof, and in the particular circumstances into which he was born and came of age. It is the story of these origins that Aleksander Korzhenkov’s biography sets out to tell. That biography was originally published in Esperanto; the present version, in Ian Richmond’s excellent translation, is an abridged version of the original text, prepared for English readers by the author.
Zamenhof, as we discover from Korzhenkov, was a child of his times – buffeted by the social upheavals of Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century, eager to find solutions to these social ills, but alive to the new possibilities brought by technological change, and new ways of thinking that accompanied this change. Eager to solve the specific problems of his own day, he created a language equally well suited to addressing those of ours.
There is much about today’s Esperanto movement – or, to give it a more inclusive and accurate name, today’s Esperanto language community – that would surprise its originator; but there are also some similarities that might have gratified him. The language has clearly expanded, and continues to expand, to meet new demands and to adapt to new circumstances. It is used today in ways that Zamenhof could not have imagined; even the language has changed. Most people are unaware that the majority of the lexical elements in the language – the words themselves – were not created by Zamenhof, who built only the bare essentials of the language and left it to develop through its community of users. Like all other languages, Esperanto has grown through use: it may have begun in the mind of Zamenhof, but it has been tested and expanded, proven and adapted, by its speakers themselves. Much of the vocabulary is their work, not Zamenhof’s.
We sometimes assume that Esperanto was the product of a library or a study – born out of the work of an isolated scholar. But, as Korzhenkov’s biography makes clear, this too is erroneous. Esperanto had its beginnings in the musings and invention of a schoolboy, in the unbounded imaginations of a student. It is a young language, with the zest and exuberance of youth; and it carries with it the urgency of the reformist. Zamenhof was all of nineteen years old when he first presented the language to his friends, and a mere twenty-eight when the language was first published. Esperanto has been identified with young people ever since, as any visitor to an international meeting of young Esperantists can see and experience.
Zamenhof’s interest in Esperanto was not primarily linguistic, but ethical, and he did not stop his project for international understanding with the creation of Esperanto, going beyond the language to propose a new religious and ethical rapprochement. Nor were Zamenhof’s ideas approved by all the original adepts of the language. The specifics of his circumstances were not necessarily shared by others, who saw Esperanto as first and foremost relevant to their needs, their priorities. These needs and priorities often did not coincide with the utopian ideals of their founder. But there can be no doubt that, if Esperanto is today available for all purposes, it has survived and flourished thanks to the unrelenting moral conviction of its originator. Zamenhof understood that if a planned language such as Esperanto is to survive and grow, it needs more than a belief in nouns and verbs to sustain it.
Although its origins were specific to a particular time and place, Esperanto’s uses today span many fields of human endeavour. Zamenhof dreamed that his language would one day be used for all types of interlingual communication, and that dream has largely come true – not always for the best. He dreamed of peace, for example, but on occasion the language was used to justify conflict. When World War I broke out, the German High Command chose Esperanto as one of the languages in which to present its side of the argument for war – even as the newly-formed Universal Esperanto Association worked to reunite families separated by the hostilities, and even as conscientious objectors learned Esperanto in prisons in Britain and elsewhere. Socialists embraced Esperanto, but chambers of commerce did too, and not always in mutual agreement. Esperanto was denounced by Hitler and Stalin, and numerous speakers of Esperanto lost their lives in Stalin’s purges only because they used the language to maintain their connections with the larger world. And all but one of Zamenhof’s direct descendants were murdered by the Nazi régime.
After World War II, the United States Army, looking for a language to represent the enemy in military manoeuvres, settled on Esperanto, of all languages, to avoid offending anyone else. Thus, for a brief time, Esperanto became, in army parlance, “the aggressor language.” Almost from the beginning, the new rulers of China under Mao Zedong used Esperanto to present the revolutionary point of view on Korea and Vietnam. Esperanto was quite widely used in the countries of Eastern Europe under socialism, often as an ancillary to their efforts to sway international public opinion – but the Esperanto movement of Eastern Europe, by maintaining its contacts with the west in an era when such contacts were constricted, helped steer these countries through a peaceful transition when the Wall fell. If Esperanto sometimes makes good propaganda, it is also a language of resistance.
Zamenhof had ideas on the uses and purpose of Esperanto that would seem strange today. He specifically suggested the language as a solution to internal language disputes within individual countries, and in fact devoted relatively little attention to its possible use by governments internationally. Soon after his death, efforts were made to interest the League of Nations in its use and adoption, unsuccessfully. Zamenhof’s argument was that the world lacks a common means of linguistic communication and needs one – preferably one that promotes linguistic equality among all, since use of a particular national or ethnic language internationally favours the native speakers of that language.
Today that argument has shifted. For the most part, Esperanto speakers no longer argue that there is no way of communicating across languages (though linguistic incomprehension and misunderstandings continue to plague us); but many maintain that such communication in its present form threatens small languages with extinction and undermines the cultural pluralism that is so necessary in a world that in other respects is becoming homogenized and commercialized. Thus one finds Esperanto speakers espousing the cause of linguistic human rights, of cultural diversity, and of sustainable lifestyles. Zamenhof would surely approve of the high ethical standards of many Esperantists, but might be bewildered by the way in which they manifest themselves – in ways so different from those of the world that he inhabited.
Would the language have come into being if Zamenhof had not felt the pressures he felt, had not been born into the environment of anti-Semitism and rising nationalism that he experienced? Any answer to that question would be mere historical speculation – but one thing is clear: the language that Zamenhof invented has endured into the fundamentally altered world of today and gives every indication of continuing to endure. Origins are important, but they tell us only so much.
In one respect Zamenhof was ahead of his time and ahead of his fellow Esperanto-speakers. He recognized the dangers inherent in religious differences at a time when such differences were seen as less of an issue than they are today. Arguably, he felt the difference of religion more than he felt the difference of language in his fellow human beings. He urged tolerance and understanding, but above all he urged cooperation in the creation of international norms of ethical living that would apply to all human beings. His was a voice crying in the wilderness: precious little attention was given to finding such norms in his own day. But, half a century later, many of his beliefs saw fulfilment in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and other human rights instruments that issued from it. It is significant that the Universal Esperanto Association, even before the Declaration came into force, wrote respect for human rights into its constitution – and that one young diplomat who helped draft the document, Ralph Harry of Australia, was an active Esperantist. This was just one place where the work of the United Nations and the work of the Esperantists intersected.
Later, UNESCO went on to recognize the achievements of Esperanto in bringing people together around common ideals all across the world. Its resolution of 1954 was reinforced by a similar, indeed broader, resolution thirty years later. In 1959, on the occasion of the centennial of Zamenhof’s birth, UNESCO recognized Zamenhof as one of the “great personalities” of humankind. Today, the Universal Esperanto Association enjoys formal cooperative relations with both UNESCO and the United Nations, and its staff and volunteers are active in disseminating news and information to Esperanto speakers about the work of these organizations, and doing what they can to support such efforts. The dream of many Esperantists, that one day Esperanto, as a neutral and easily-learned means of linguistic communication, might play a role in facilitating the operations of such organizations as the United Nations and the European Union by enfranchising those whose languages are seldom heard in their deliberations has not yet come true. But it remains an active part of many Esperantists’ agendas. In fact, a key element in the platform of the Universal Esperanto Association is a belief in what the Association calls linguistic democracy – the creation of an international environment in which we deal with one another in linguistic equality and in which everyone is on an equal footing. Its so-called Prague Manifesto of 1996 lays out this belief.
Although Article 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserts that “everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status,” we know that all too frequently difference of language is used to bar democratic participation, or to limit human rights. A primary task of the Universal Esperanto Association, indeed of all right-thinking people, is to convince the public at large (and their governments) that to discriminate against someone on linguistic grounds is as reprehensible as such discrimination on grounds of race, or sex, or religion.
It is not only because it enables worldwide communication in a spirit of equality that Esperanto is particularly valuable for young people less weighed down by the prejudices of age and of negative past experience. The language in fact holds great pedagogical promise as a schools subject. Experiments have shown that, as a language easily acquired not only by speakers of European languages but also by others, it constitutes an ideal introduction to foreign language study. It is currently being used in this way in a group of schools in the United Kingdom as part of a program known as Project Springboard. The language also has a place in university curricula: courses in interlinguistics (the study of planned language) and Esperanto studies are offered in numbers of universities across the world.
Perhaps the largest boost for Esperanto has been something wholly unimagined by Zamenhof, and well outside the scope of his ideas – namely the internet. Internet learning probably now accounts for more new speakers of Esperanto than all printed textbooks and local courses put together. Vast quantities of material in or on Esperanto are now available over the internet. Esperanto has always been a language larger than its discernible footprint: books in the language have mostly been distributed outside commercial channels, organizations have kept a relatively low profile as they work to provide their members with the services needed to become active Esperantists, and the rich literary and artistic culture of Esperanto has gone on largely unrecognized by those outside Esperanto itself. Today, this invisible community is becoming increasingly visible. The internet, accessible to Esperantists all across the world, is more and more the preferred means of publication, and the preferred place of learning. Formerly isolated, new learners of the language have easy access to spoken Esperanto, not only through conventional spoken material on the internet but also through internet radio; they can find other learners across the world without difficulty, and they have no need to join an organized Esperanto association to enjoy these privileges. Therefore, what was before mostly a movement of membership organizations has become a diverse and often unpredictable speech community.
Thus it would be fair to say that Esperanto has gone in directions both fervently dreamed of and totally unimagined by its founder, but generally in directions that only serve to underline the importance of his work. The Universal Esperanto Association, which I have the honour to represent at the United Nations, is only the strongest of many Esperanto organizations, international, national, and special-interest. Working out of our headquarters in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, we collaborate with 69 affiliated national associations across the world – from Argentina to Mongolia, from Benin to Canada, from Iceland to Iran – and enjoy active cooperation with many others. We organize a World Congress of Esperanto annually, recently celebrating the 100th anniversary of the founding of the series at Boulogne-sur-mer (1905). These congresses continue to attract several thousand Esperantists from across the world, but today they are only the largest of literally hundreds of such events, for people of all ages and all walks of life. The Universal Esperanto Association runs a library, operates a bookstore, and is a publisher of Esperanto books. Above all, it is an organization that, while eschewing conventional politics, works for ideals of equality and international understanding, democracy and participation, peace through mutual respect. Zamenhof might have expressed these principles differently, for the times were different; but in essence it is the legacy of this remarkable individual that we seek to perpetuate in our work.
Humphrey Tonkin
Past President of the Universal Esperanto Association
Representative of the Association at the United Nations
Zamenhof
The
Life, Works and Ideas
of the Author of Esperanto
1
Lazar’ Markovitch Zamenhof (later known more widely as Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof) was born on December 15, 1859, into a Jewish family in what was then the Russian city of Bialystock.
Although Bialystock is now in Poland, the city and the region around it changed hands many times over the centuries, passing mostly back and forth between Poland and Russia. From 1569 to 1795, for example, the city was in the Polish part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Following the breakup of the Commonwealth and its division among the Prussian, Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, for a short time Bialystock became part of Prussia. Under the 1807 Treaty of Tilsit, however, the Russian empire gained the city and the surrounding region.
By the time the Zamenhof family settled there in the 1850s, Bialystock was the regional centre for the Russian administrative district of Grodna, which was located outside the boundaries of the Polish kingdom in a region ceded to the Russian empire by the 1815 Congress of Vienna. Nevertheless, the Kingdom of Poland and the Russian empire shared a very personal connection, the Russian emperor being also the king of Poland. Bialystock’s complex political history helps to explain why there is often some confusion about Zamenhof’s true nationality.
In the second half of the nineteenth century the population of Zamenhof’s birthplace was 65–75% Jewish with the remainder made up of Polish, Russian, German and Belarusian minorities. The surrounding villages were populated mostly by Belarussians and Poles. At that time, Bialystock was known for its rapidly developing textile industry, from which it got the nickname “Manchester of the North.” Ninety percent of Bialystock’s manufacturers and merchants were Jewish.
It was to this thriving centre of manufacturing and Judaism that Zamenhof’s grandfather moved his family in 1857 from the smaller city of Tykocin, not far from Bialystock. In their new home, the younger son of the Zamenhof family, Mark (Mordecai), met and married Liba Rachel Sofer, the daughter of a prominent Jewish merchant, and moved into number 16 Jatke-Gas, called “Butcher’s Shop Street” by the Jewish population. Here, the young couple’s first child, Lazar’ (later known as Ludovic), the future creator of Esperanto, was born on December 15, 1859, the nineteenth day of Kislevo of the year 5620 in the Jewish calendar.
The
house on “Butcher’s Shop Street” where Zamenhof was born
Ludovic Zamenhof always identified himself as a Russian Jew, but that designation needs some clarification, because the Russian empire was home to various groups of Jews, including Caucasian, Crimean and Bukharan groups. The Zamenhofs belonged to the group known as Litvak Jews. This particular group of Ashkenazi Jews, originally from the former Litva, which included the present-day Lithuania and large parts of north-east Poland, Belarus and Ukraine, spoke a specific dialect of Yiddish, Litvish Yiddish, and looked to Vilnius as their cultural centre. Besides their dialect and their geographical origin, the Litvak Jews differed spiritually and intellectually from other Jewish groups in Russia. Hasidism, for example, which flourished in Ukraine and southern Poland, was less widespread among the Litvak Jews. On the other hand, the intellectual Haskalah movement, which was inspired by the Enlightenment and had first appeared among German Jews toward the end of the 18th century, had more followers among the Litvaks than among the other groups.
For Zamenhof, his Jewishness was at the very heart of his identity. As he wrote much later, when Esperanto was becoming widely known,
I am a Jew, and all my ideals, their birth, maturity and steadfastness, the entire history of my constant inner and external conflicts, all are indissolubly linked to my Jewishness. I have never hidden the fact that I am a Jew; every Esperantist knows my ethnicity. I am proud to count myself a member of this ancient people, which has suffered so much and fought so hard, and whose sole mission in history consists, in my opinion, of uniting the peoples of the world under the banner of “one God”, that is to say, in a single ideal for the whole of humankind.... If I had not been a Jew from the ghetto, the idea of uniting humanity either would never have entered my head or it would never have gripped me so tenaciously throughout my entire life. No one can feel more strongly than a ghetto Jew the sadness of dissension among peoples…. My Jewishness is the main reason why, from my earliest childhood, I gave myself wholly to one overarching idea and dream, that of bringing together in brotherhood all of humanity. That idea is the vital element and the purpose of my whole life. The Esperanto project is merely a part of that idea; I am constantly thinking and dreaming about the rest of it.
(Letter to Michaux, 1905: Mi estas Homo 99,100)
Zamenhof’s Jewishness would later be the cause of much unease among leading Esperantists of the early period, who often tried to obscure his ethnicity with the neutral statement that he was a Warsaw physician. Following the first Universal Congress of Esperanto in Boulogne-sur-mer in 1905, for example, the Parisian Esperantist Émile Javal wrote to Zamenhof that of more than seven hundred articles about Esperanto published on the occasion of the Congress only one mentioned his Jewishness. For their part, Polish Esperantists, including “the first historian of Esperanto,” Adam Zakrzewski, tried to present Esperanto’s creator as a Pole, rather than a Russian, because he lived for many years in Warsaw.
Location
of Bialystock, in today’s Poland
Location
of Bialystock, in Russia,
near the border with Prussia, around
1900
Zamenhof
in 1879
2
Zamenhof’s mother tongue was Russian, however. He was educated in that language and used it at home and in his family circle throughout his life. As a child, he even dreamt of writing poetry in Russian and, at the age of ten, wrote a five-act classical tragedy in that language. This dual cultural heritage – Russian and Jewish – was shared with his father, Mark. Unlike most Russian Jews of his time, who were tradespeople, merchants or doctors, Mark Zamenhof had opted for scholarly pursuits. After moving to Bialystock, Mark worked as bookkeeper and language instructor to the wealthy Zabłudowski family. Later, he co-founded a school for Jewish girls, in which he taught languages. Among his scholarly pursuits, Mark authored two textbooks while living in Bialystock, An Introductory Course in General Geography for Elementary Schools (Warsaw, 1869) and A Textbook of the German Language for Russian Young People (Warsaw, 1871).
In January 1863, little more than three years after Ludovic Zamenhof’s birth, the Polish regions of the Russian Empire erupted as the Poles sought independence from Russian control. Although the Litvak Jews had their origin in the former Litva region, where the rebellion was centred, the majority of them, including the Zamenhofs, did not support the rebels. The rebellion was severely suppressed by the Russian authorities and lasted little more than a year. The Litvak Jews’ loyalty to the Russian Empire earned them the good graces of the authorities. Consequently, following the rebellion, Mark Zamenhof was granted a teaching post at a state-run school for Jews and thereby joined the ranks of the Russian civil service, which gave him both a good salary and a stable career. Indeed he was later (1883) appointed to the position of censor with responsibility for vetting German newspapers, and later also Hebrew and Yiddish publications.
Mark Zamenhof attempted to combine his ethnic-religious and his national identities. Nachum Sokolov, editor of the Warsaw Hebrew-language newspaper Hacefira (also spelled Hazefirah, “time” or “the dawn”) and later secretary general and president of the World Zionism Organization, accurately described Mark’s cultural duality when he wrote:
[He] belonged to two worlds: to the patriarchal, orthodox and traditionalist world through his customary daily life, but also to that of a conscious assimilationist tendency with which he sympathized. This inner conflict between the two cultural tendencies and between the two ways of life made him, the father, a tragic figure... He was highly educated in the area of Judaism – he was a brilliant Hebrew stylist and an erudite Talmudic scholar – yet he adhered to the cultural movement of the “Maskilim” (the Enlightened Ones), who promoted the assimilation of the Jewish populations into the reigning culture, preserving only the religious difference.
(Kohen-Cedek, 199)
3
The young Zamenhof was thus exposed, through his family, to intellectual and cultural ideas beyond the strict realm of traditional Judaism. His education also took place in the broader world of the reigning culture. In 1870, he began studies in the Bialystock Gymnasium, where he remained a student until late 1873, when his father moved the family to Warsaw to take up a teaching position at the Warsaw Veterinary School and the Real School (a type of Gymnasium). Mark Zamenhof was one of only three Jews teaching in Warsaw’s secondary schools at that time; he later went on to teach at the Women’s Gymnasium and the First Men’s Pro-Gymnasium (a junior school). As the son of a secondary-school teacher, Ludovic received free tuition. In Warsaw, he enrolled in the Second Men’s Gymnasium, but was not able to begin his studies immediately. He studied at home for several months in order to learn Latin and Greek, which had not been taught at the Bialystock Gymnasium, but were required for the Warsaw school. He did not return to school until August of 1874.
Ludovic did not spend all his time studying, however. From his earliest childhood, he had reflected on the situation of the Jews, on the relations between peoples and on the possibility of an inter-ethnic language. His father was not at all happy about his son’s interest in an international language. Ludovic’s brother Lev once wrote that their father “spoke about his son’s work to the director of a Warsaw Gymnasium who told him that his son was lost forever, that his work was the surest symptom of the onset of an incurable madness”(Ludovikologiaj biografietoj 30). Mark Zamenhof made his son promise not to publish his language project until he had finished his university studies, which he began in August of 1879 in the Faculty of Medicine at the Imperial Moscow University.
At the same time as Ludovic Zamenhof, Anton Chekhov, the future short-story writer and dramatist, was also a medical student at the Moscow University. He and Zamenhof had little or no contact outside of their classes, however, because friendships between Jewish and Christian students were rare at that time.
Despite the fact that Jews comprised only 4% of the population of Russia in the late nineteenth century, they made up 12.2% of Gymnasium students and 8.8% of university students. In particular, many Jews studied medicine and law. It was among these students that Zamenhof found friends.
While at Moscow University, Zamenhof wrote the first analysis of Yiddish grammar, Provo de gramatiko de novjuda lingvo (Attempt at a Grammar of the New Jewish Language). Written originally in Russian under the pseudonym L. Gamzefon, this study was unpublished for 100 years. The work was finally translated into Esperanto and published by the Fondumo Esperanto (Esperanto Foundation) in a parallel Russian–Esperanto edition in 1982.
On the March 1, 1881, the terrorist organization Narodnaja Volja (The People’s Will) assassinated Czar Alexander II. The situation in Russia quickly became unstable. In several Ukrainian cities pogroms were perpetrated against the Jews. The ideology of Narodnaja Volja backed the pogroms as a form of revolutionary conflict. Although only a few Jews were killed – several dozen of the rioters were killed by the police and army – the pogroms worried the new Jewish intelligentsia, who realized that the integration of Jews into Russian society was a failure.
Because of this unstable situation, Zamenhof returned to Warsaw at the end of his second year of studies and enrolled for his third year at Warsaw University in August 1881. Three years later, he received his medical degree and began searching for a suitable place to set up his practice.
In February 1885, Doctor Zamenhof moved to the town of Wiejsieje in the Suwałki administrative district (now in north-eastern Poland), where his married sister lived, and began to practice there. After four months, however, he decided that he was ill-suited to general practice. Consequently, the young doctor returned to Warsaw and selected ophthalmology as his specialization. For six months he interned in the ophthalmology department of the Warsaw Jewish hospital. In late 1885, he moved to the district capital, Płock (or Plotzk), and began to practise as an ophthalmologist. It quickly became evident to him, however, that his specialized knowledge was insufficient and, in May 1886, he went to Vienna to begin advanced study at the ophthalmology clinic of the Vienna General Hospital. On completion of his studies there, he returned to Warsaw, where the Zamenhof family had moved to number 40 Muranowska Street. It was at this address that he opened his medical office.
In the meantime, Ludovic had made the acquaintance of Clara Zilbernik, the youngest daughter of Sender Lejbovitch Zilbernik, a soap manufacturer and an upstanding member of the Jewish community. On March 18, 1887, Zamenhof and Clara’s engagement was announced. The young couple was married on August 9 in Warsaw and set up house at number 19 Przejazd Street in Warsaw.
Clara’s dowry of ten thousand roubles was enough for the young family to live on for several years, during which time Zamenhof was expected to make his medical practice profitable. However, with his father-in-law’s consent, Zamenhof invested half the dowry in the publication and promotion of his International Language.
4
Zamenhof had been busy devising an international language ever since his years as a Gymnasium student. When later asked about the development of Esperanto, he explained the principles on which his language planning was based (Letter to Borovko: Mi estas Homo 33-38). He had realized early on that in order to be international a language would have to be neutral, belonging to no nation or ethnic group that might be privileged by its use over others who would have to learn and use it as a foreign language. In this respect, the ideal neutral solution would be an ancient language, but he thought Latin and Greek to be too complex for common use.
Accordingly, he began to reflect on a planned language solution. The creation of a language with a large number of grammatical rules and ponderous dictionaries seemed too huge a task for one man, however. Moreover, it was hardly possible to mould an easy-to-learn grammar from those of the Russian, German, French, Polish, Hebrew, Latin, and Greek languages that he spoke from childhood or had learned later.
In his fifth year as a Gymnasium student, Zamenhof was introduced to English and was surprised to find that its grammar was much simpler than those of Latin and Greek. As a result, he began to exclude from his language project superfluous and little-used forms, irregular verbs and other exceptions. In this way, he quickly arrived at a grammar that contained only the most essential rules and could be outlined in only a few pages.
Having solved the problem of an overly complex grammar, Zamenhof was left with the difficulty of learning a vast vocabulary. Initially, he tried to solve the problem by using a series of logically constructed words along the lines of a, ab, ac, ad... ba, ca, da... e, eb, ec...be, ce, de... aba, aca, ada..., etc in which each element had a specific meaning. His attempts to use such forms, inspired by the philosophical languages invented in the 17th century, showed him that, despite their rigid logic, they were difficult to learn and almost impossible to memorize. He therefore abandoned logical classification and turned to the vocabularies of the Romance and Germanic languages, selecting especially words that were recognizable internationally. The difficulty with this solution, however, was that the new language’s vocabulary would be just as huge as those of the languages it was taken from, since every word in the national language would require an equivalent in the new language.
His solution was to adopt a system of word formation using affixes. Thanks to this system, it was possible to learn only the basic root-word, to which the addition of invariable suffixes and/or prefixes would create words in the same semantic field without the necessity to learn each one separately. For example, the root-word vend (=related to selling) allows the formation of words like vendi (to sell), vendejo (store, shop), vendisto (salesperson, salesman), vendistino (salesperson, saleslady), vendaĵo (item for sale), etc.
When he began his last year (the eighth) at the Gymnasium, he distributed his Lingwe Uniwersala, an early version of Esperanto, among his classmates. On the 5th of December 1878 in the Zamenhof family home, he celebrated with several classmates “the canonization of the language.” On the festive table lay the grammar and dictionary of the new language along with several translations into the Lingwe Uniwersala. Unfortunately, none of these items has survived. The young men reportedly conversed in the new language and enthusiastically sang the anthem
Malamikete
de las nacjes
Kadó, kadó, jam temp’ está!
La tot’ homoze
in familje
Konunigare so debá.
(Hostile barriers between peoples,
Fall, fall, it is time!
The whole of humanity
Must come together as one family.)
Although only the name “Lingwe Uniwersala” and the above four-line anthem have survived from this early project, it is clear that it was based on the same three main principles as present-day Esperanto: an international vocabulary, a regular grammar and word formation using affixes.
A few months later, the devotees of Lingwe Uniwersala graduated from the Gymnasium and went their separate ways. Zamenhof’s language project was suspended for a short time while he studied for his final exams and then because of his move to Moscow. Once settled in Moscow, however, he continued work on his project and sometimes made serious changes to the language. Each time he made a significant change, he produced original texts and translations in order to try out all aspects of his language. Of these interim projects, only a few texts have survived. These are contained in three notebooks Zamenhof used for his Lingvo universala during the summer vacations of 1881 and 1882.
It is interesting to note that, for today’s Esperantists, the language of the notebooks from 1881 and 1882 is more difficult to understand than the anthem from 1878, even though the notebooks are closer in time to the final version of Esperanto. The main reason for this is Zamenhof’s use in the notebooks of a great number of one-syllable roots whose origin is barely recognizable. These short words and one-syllable roots for the most frequent words resulted from the influence on Zamenhof’s new language of the newly popular international language project, Volapük. However, Volapük’s influence on Zamenhof was ephemeral.
He continued working on his language, perfecting it and rejecting whatever might be superfluous to its development. Most importantly, he paid less and less attention to inventing new details, and more and more to making it harmonious, investing the language as a whole with a definable spirit. That was the effect of the five years he spent polishing the language.
5
The international language project was put into its final form in the spring of 1885 in Wiejsieje, where Zamenhof had begun to practise medicine. He spent the next two years looking for a publisher until his prospective father-in-law, Sender Zilbernik, even before the marriage, suggested paying for the publication out of his daughter’s dowry. The Warsaw printer Chaim Kelter gladly agreed to take on the work. On the 14th of July, 1887, after typesetting and vetting by the censor, the 42-page booklet appeared under the title, Meždunarodny’ jazyk. Predislovije i polnyj učebnik (por Rusoj), i.e. International Language. Foreword and Complete Textbook (For Russian Speakers). The 27-year-old author hid himself behind the pseudonym D-ro Esperanto, Doctor Hopeful. This publication date (July 26 in the Gregorian calendar) is considered Esperanto’s birthdate.
Before the end of the year, Kelter printed the Polish, French and German versions of the booklet, which later became popularly known as the Unua Libro (First Book). The Russian version had to be reprinted only six months after the initial printing. Translations and adaptations followed in various languages: among others, English (1888); Hebrew, Yiddish, Swedish, Lithuanian (1889); Danish, Bulgarian, Italian, Spanish, Czech (1890).
Zamenhof’s Unua Libro consisted of four parts, of which the longest was not the Complete Textbook (Plena lernolibro), but rather the Foreword (Antaŭparolo), which filled pages 3 to 30. In the Foreword, Zamenhof first talked about the problems language diversity causes in every sphere of life and emphasized particularly that it provokes dissension among peoples. Like many language-project authors, he believed also that an international language would have great practical benefits for science and commerce, as well as for literature, but he placed particular emphasis on “the enormous usefulness to humanity of an international language that, without intruding into peoples’ home life, could be a language of government and social interaction, at least in countries with diverse language groups.”
The Foreword also contains several texts in the international language: Our Father, Extract from the Bible, A Letter, In a Dream I Saw a Princess (translation of a poem by Heine), and two original poems by Zamenhof, Mia penso (My Thought) and Ho, mia kor’ (Oh, My Heart).