A friend of mine, Teddy Nee, has been learning Esperanto for the past eight months. I’m curious about this artificial language, and why so many people learn it. Teddy has generously furnished the following article about Esperanto.
Originally from Indonesia, Teddy has lived in Taiwan since 2008. He loves to write and is the author of Nee’s Language Blog. He is also a website developer, language tutor, and language enthusiast. He is currently a scholarship-awarded IMBA student at National Taipei University of Technology, Taiwan. Prior to that, he majored in Applied Computing at the International College of Ming Chuan University, Taiwan.
Teddy has been featured in Language Boat’s Perspecitve Collective. He has also written a post called Get To Know The Indonesian Language and he has provided Indonesian translations on Language Boat.
Introduction
Esperanto has just turned 126 years old recently. Like many artificial languages, it has been struggling to survive and to get acknowledgement. The estimates of Esperanto speakers range from 100,000 to 2,000,000 to date, including native speakers who learned it from their Esperantisto (a term in Esperanto to mean “Esperanto speaker”) parents.
History
In July 1887, Ludwik Lazarus Zamenhof published a book to the public in Warsaw (a location in Poland nowadays) to describe an international language, which he called “International Language.” He published the book initially in Russian, and it was then published in Hebrew, Polish, German, French, and English over the next few years. Zamenhof signed his book as “Doktoro Esperanto”, means “Doctor-One-Who-Hopes”. This pseudonym later became the official name of the language – Esperanto.
Ludwik Lazarus Zamenhof was an ophthalmologist from Bialystok (in Poland nowadays), which was part of the Russian Empire by that time. He created the world’s most successful artificial language, Esperanto, out of an idea to foster harmony between people from different countries. The place where he was born and where he spent his childhood gave the inspiration since it was inhabited by four different elements – Jews, Russian, Germans, and Poles. Each of them spoke their own language and saw each other as enemies.
Alphabets and Pronunciation
Esperanto’s alphabets contains 28 letters, with 22 letters are identical with English alphabets (excluding q, w, x, and y). The remaining six letters have diacritic marks. The list of alphabets is shown as follow:
| A | B | C | Ĉ | D | E | F | G | Ĝ | H | Ĥ | I | J | Ĵ | K | L | M | N | O | P | R | S | Ŝ | T | U | Ŭ | V | Z |
| a | b | c | ĉ | d | e | f | g | ĝ | h | ĥ | i | j | ĵ | k | l | m | n | o | p | r | s | ŝ | t | u | ŭ | v | z |
In writing, alphabets with diacritics can be written as a digraphs consisting of a Latin letter and x/ h, this is called “X-system” and “H-system”, respectively. For example, “ĉ” can be represented as “cx” or “ch”.
You can listen to the pronunciation in the recordings provided by Omniglot.
Grammar
First, Esperanto does not have irregular verbs and grammatical genders. Its grammar is extremely simple compared to most languages. Verbs do not change depending on the pronoun. In addition, verbs have only six endings to indicate the tenses– -i, -is, -as, -os, -us, and -u. For example, of the word vidi (to see), we can get:
(Infinitive) To see = vidi
(Past) I saw = mi vidis
(Present) I see = mi vidas
(Future) I will see = mi vidos
(Conditional) I would see = mi vidus
(Imperative) See! = Vidu!
All singular nouns end in –o, all adjectives in –a, and all adverbs in –e. Without knowing the exact meaning of a word, you can know what element the words represent. For example, “belo” is “beauty”, “bela” is “beautiful”, and “bele” is “beautifully”.
Prefixes and suffixes in Esperanto save you a lot of time and energy to boost your vocabulary. For example, the prefix “mal-“ means “direct opposite”. Therefore, “mal-“ and “sana (healthy)” becomes “malsana (unhealthy)”. This word can be extended to be:
The suffix “-ulo” means “individual (person)”. Thus, “malsanulo” means “sick person.”
The suffix “-ejo” means “place”. Thus, “malsanulejo” means “hospital.”
You can find a complete list about prefixes and suffixes here.
Why learn Esperanto?
If learning any foreign language has been difficult for you, Esperanto may be a good option. It could be even much easier if you have some of knowledge of Romance languages, such as Spanish or Italian. Currently, many speakers see Esperanto as an alternative to English as a second language due to its simplicity.
There is an abundance of written materials available on the Internet. Esperanto is Wikipedia’s 32nd largest in terms of the number of articles, with about 190,000 articles. Besides, it is also the largest Wikipedia in an artificial language. Google Translate added Esperanto as its 64th language on February 2012. Esperanto is the language of instructions of the International Academy of Sciences (Akademio Internacia de la Sciencoj (AIS)). AIS is a scientific association and school located in the Republic of San Marino and was founded in 1983.
For a short video, check out this CNN clip about Esperanto.