As I make my way up Bay Street towards College, I can see a green star through the coffee shop's plate-glass window. Perched a foot above the mahogany table in a small stand, the star--symbol of the Esperanto movement for the duration of its 100-plus year history--welcomes members and visitors to the weekly gathering of Toronto's active Esperantists. Ken and Kathy, two senior members of the club, are there when I arrive. Both greet me with a warm handshake and a hearty "Saluton."
"Esperanto" names both a constructed language and the social movement that practices and promotes it. The language was designed to serve as the world's collective second language, facilitating communication across borders and continents. If we all learned Esperanto, the logic goes, people from anywhere in the world could speak freely with one another.
The movement argues that Esperanto can facilitate these goals better than any other language. As a planned language, Esperanto has a practical edge over anything that has grown "naturally." Its spelling is completely phonetic, its grammatical rules simple and exception-free. It was designed to be learned, and it appears to have been successful; estimates place it at four times easier to pick up than any of its challengers for world language status.
The ideological basis of Esperanto is the vision of international society it offers. Since it is a neutral language, those who use it to communicate do so as equals. The metaphor most often invoked is that of a handshake: both parties have extended themselves, making an effort to facilitate communication. We are all-too-familiar with the extent to which a native speaker of English consistently has an advantage over someone who has merely studied it. Esperanto, which belongs to everyone equally, is equally available to all who wish to learn.
And so I've trekked down the 403 to this Toronto Timothy's (as in "World Coffee", not "fancy name for Horton's") to meet some of Esperanto's enthusiasts. The Toronto Esperantist Circle is an eclectic bunch: some arrive in jeans, some in suits. They have come to the language for different reasons, and are at different levels of experience. What strikes me is their shared enthusiasm for this language--it's evident in the warmth with which they welcome newcomers, and in the earnestness with which they speak about Esperanto's principles.
Most group members are not linguists--several came to Esperanto after unsuccessful experiences in other languages. Kathy and Detlef chuckle together over their struggles with French. Ron, who is hard of hearing, remembers his trouble understanding languages with irregular pronunciations and his resulting frustrations. Curtis' years as a teacher left him too busy to master a language, but now in his retirement, he hopes to fulfil his vow "not to die unilingual." Almost all began their learning from a simple "Teach Yourself Esperanto" book, and told stories of people around the world who had mastered the language without ever having spoken it.
Esperanto's simplicity was among the fundamental goals of its creator, Dr. L.L. Zamenhof. The ability to communicate across borders and languages was not to be a privilege of the upper classes. Anyone could pick up Zamenhof's pamphlet and teach him or herself to speak. To this day, the Esperanto movement believes the ability to learn a second language and communicate with individuals in other countries to be a fundamental human right.
The challenge, of course, is not the difficulty of learning the language, but rather of convincing people that such learning is valuable. One typically learns a language in order to communicate with a group of people. Esperanto, without a territory assured of speaking it, faces a schoolyard dilemma: no one wants to learn it unless the cool kids learn it first. Zamenhof anticipated this problem and attempted a solution. Every copy of his early pamphlet included eight pledges on the back, to be signed and returned to the author, promising that the signatory would learn Esperanto if 10 million others signed the same pledge. This lofty quota was never reached, and the difficulty of demonstrating the language's utility--the fundamental barrier to the success of any planned language--appears to be Esperanto's largest challenge today.
There are many parts of the world in which this challenge is being met with vigour. Dr. Mark Fettes, executive director of the Esperantic Studies Foundation, notes the language's emerging presence in Western and Southern Africa and Southern Asia. Its considerable following in China is emanating from the major cities in which it was once concentrated. In Brazil, Esperanto's longtime stronghold in South America, expansion continues at a rapid rate: Active speakers number in the hundreds of thousands.
The European union is the focus of many of the movement's hopes. Dr. Geoffrey Greatex, current president of the Canadian Esperantist Association (KEA), notes that the EU's translation difficulties have highlighted the problem that Esperanto seeks to solve. The EU's 11 official languages currently produce 72 directions of translation. This figure will increase significantly when the languages of new member states are added, bringing the number of official languages to 20. Estimates put translation costs as 33 percent of the total budget. A few French, Italian and EU parliamentarians have suggested employing Esperanto as a bridge language for translation. A speech given in Maltese would first be translated into Esperanto, and then into the other 19 official languages from there; this is likely simpler and more accurate than translating the Maltese directly into languages such as Portuguese and Estonian, even leaving aside the difficulty of finding translators with such extensive talents.
The coffee shop table is crowded with examples of Esperantic culture. Ken shows me publications from Korea, Latvia, and Sweden. Kathy and Scott pull out several Esperanto CDs, and briefly debate the merits of Kathy's classical guitar rhythms and Scott's electronica. There is mention of the wide variety of texts that have been translated, from virtually every classic author. A new book (either a translation into Esperanto or an original work) is published every day of the year.
It's simplicity challenges our
standard notions of
language
My own hunting revealed that Esperanto has appeared in Elvis Costello liner notes (for Blood and Chocolate) and in a Michael Jackson video (for History). The cult film Incubus, starring William Shatner, was done entirely in Esperanto. Original Esperanto poetry by William Auld was nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature in 1999 and 2000. A Google search (which can be done in Esperanto, incidentally) for "Esperanto" brings up 930 000 pages.
Esperanto is not the first attempt at a world language. Descartes and Leibnitz championed the idea in the 17th century as a means of fostering logical thought and the exchange of ideas. Particularly notable attempts included Basic English and Volapuk, but the first took a dive for being harder than it seemed, the second for its problematic constructions and its creator's refusal to improve them.
Zamenhof signed off on his design in 1905, but it has changed little in the years since its invention. Its simplicity challenges our standard notions of language: Esperanto is explained and exhausted in 16 exception-free rules. Every letter in the 28 character alphabet is pronounced the same in every circumstance; "one letter one sound," and "stress on the second-last syllable" rules allow anyone equipped with the alphabet guide to pronounce any Esperanto word correctly. The language is built on a group of root words: suffixes indicate whether the word is a noun, an adjective, an adverb or a verb in one of the six tenses. Greatrex emphasizes the richness of expression possible in the word combinations, a preemptive defence against presumptions that a planned language is incapable of expressing the breadth and depth of human thought. Brian Kaneen, a past president of the KEA, was first drawn to the language for its word-building capabilities. Greatrex notes, "there are things you can express in Esperanto that you can't express in any other language."
Esperanto appears to be having a particularly difficult time in North America; Fettes admits that here in Canada it remains a well-kept secret. This phenomenon may be the result of our views on foreign languages and our travel patterns. The typical North American seldom travels beyond territories that speak the English language. Even when we do, Fettes believes we tend to see such travel as tourism, focussed more on seeing the sights than meeting and interacting with the local people. Esperanto thus opens a significant window through which to view the world: "To some extent Esperanto only becomes interesting when you start thinking about getting in touch with the rest of the world in a different kind of way, which is an idea that might not occur to you if you're not aware that it's even possible."
The ability for a different kind of travel is one of the major reasons people learn the language. There is a directory containing the names of over 1 200 Esperantists from around the world who open their homes free of charge to fellow Esperantists. The stories that emerge from cross-border travel point to the remarkable opportunities for communication and belie concerns that the language is currently not useful. Kaneen praises the language's ability to "get a totally different take on a given country, instead of speaking only to waiters and hotel personnel." An exchange trip to Poland convinced Fettes, since he was able to communicate in an area where the native language was an entirely "closed book."
Many of the most heartwarming stories begin in these exchanges. This has certainly been the case for Jeremy, one of the more vocal members of the Toronto Circle, who told me about a recent trip to Japan during which he visited three Esperantist families. He visited the Hiroshima peace museum with a local family, and was able to speak with them about their experiences:"It was not your Holiday Inn tour bus tour... I could study Japanese for 20 years, and I'd never be able to speak it as well as we could communicate in Esperanto."
The ability to communicate in this manner--directly and honestly between individuals from vastly different parts of the world--is often cited by Esperanto enthusiasts as the language's best feature. "Very often when you're trying to speak another language and you don't know it very well, you end up saying not what you really want to say, but only saying what you know how to say," Detlef emphasized. Kathy agreed: "If I have something to say to an individual in another country, I don't have to spend years to learn their language, they don't have to spend years to learn my language, in which each of us would feel uncomfortable. I can speak directly to that person."
The extent to which Esperanto has spread and is spreading around the world is almost entirely the result of private citizens' efforts. There are no Goethe Institutes or ESL textbook subsidizations. Resources are limited, and so the movement has relied on the passion and generosity of its speakers for its dissemination. Detlef and Ken are among a group of 16 individuals who volunteer to correct excises from a free ten-lesson Internetcourse. Newcomers to the Toronto Circle are welcomed and encouraged to try out their broken Esperanto at weekly meetings, or to borrow books and instruction manuals from the club's library. Greatrex and Kaneen both mention multi-week courses they have taught free of charge. The Esperantic Studies Foundation has given funding to several educational websites; personally, I recommend lernu.net, in which one is guided through the language by an amusing green character named Zam.
Esperanto still has a great distance to travel before being recognized in North America. "To judge from North American linguistics textbooks, Esperanto is a taboo or pariah topic," admits Kaneen. But he goes on to assert that "what the language has achieved in 117 years largely through the efforts of informed private individuals is in fact quite miraculous to my mind." His answer to criticism is simple: "To anyone who claims that Esperanto has failed, I would simply say, 'Take half an hour and look into it. If you are too dumb to see the practical advantages of Esperanto, then the laugh is really on you. It's your loss, not mine.'"
I had the good fortune of witnessing some naysaying in person when the gentleman from the next table at Timothy's approached the Toronto Circle. He criticized Esperanto as a failed academic experiment from the 1950's that no one uses, claiming that a language with no culture could never succeed. The club members were well-prepared. Jeremy and Detlef demolished his assumptions and brought forward counterexamples to virtually every claim. The gentleman's timing was a bit unfortunate, since the club members had brought magazines from around the world for me to see, and Esperanto music was playing over Timothy's stereo at the time (an acoustic album by the Swedish band Persone ). It is but one example of what Jeremy calls a "social neurosis about Esperanto."
Esperanto does have a culture -
it is the culture of a cosmopolitan
international comunity
For Esperanto does have a culture--it is the culture of a cosmopolitan international community. Fettes refers to the Esperanto movement as "a vision... A small working model of a different kind of globalization, where people make contact with one other across national boundaries on a global level, in ways that are quite different to those that are supported by the big processes of globalization that are going on right now." The visions of grassroots globalization are akin to what we see in the social movements more familiar to our campuses and communities.
"Of course there's idealism," says Fettes, "Otherwise, just go learn English... or go and teach English to unfortunates who haven't grown up with it." But Esperanto is the kind of tempered idealism of which Zamenhof conceived. There are no claims to a utopia of universal assent; it's an "ongoing project in working through differences that's permanently open ended. We're not going to get to a point where everyone's on the same wavelength, but it provides a means wherein people can at least discuss their differences, even if they end up agreeing to disagree."
As I sip my coffee, Detlef tells me about his perception of barriers: "Esperanto is a little bit like an environmental issue. A lot of people agree that something should be done, but nobody wants to take the first step. People are afraid it's going to cost them something, and nobody wants to give up any advantage they may have previously held." But in hearing Kathy describe chat rooms filled with individuals from every continent, in envisioning Ken patiently correcting exercises sent in from over the world, and in hearing Jeremy's stories of the yearly World Congress, where people from 85 countries see the same movies and speakers without a single translator, the "Espere"--the hope--is what I see most clearly.
"I feel like a world citizen," says Kathy earnestly, "Where I didn't before."