March 29, 2021 • 44 mins
Esperanto was developed by a Jewish man living in the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It’s a story linked to both persecution and profound hope. Zamenhof hoped to bring the world together through a shared second language.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Egilson and I'm Holly Fry. Way back in
I was having a conversation with a friend and the
constructed language Esperanto came up in that conversation, and I
(00:25):
had that little thought, Hey, maybe we should do a
podcast on that sometime. And now more than a year later,
we have come to that sometime. I know it was
from because we were in a restaurant in Philadelphia, which
means it was not during the pandemic. Uh was the
(00:46):
last time I was there. Anyway, I really did not
know all that much about Esperanto when I got into this,
aside from the fact that it's a language that was
intentionally created to be easy to learn. Somehow I associated
it with the nineteen sixties, and although that was one
of its peaks and popularity that it's also a way
older language than that. The other big thing that I
(01:08):
associated with Esperanto was the scene in Twin Peaks where
Gordon Cole goes to talk to Shelley at the Double
R Diner and says he's going to engage in some
counter Esperanto, and that was just my whole my whole
knowledge of esperanto, and that right there, mine was largely
from animaniacs. Oh yeah, yeah, because that's how it's it's
(01:29):
usually referenced as like a casual side mentioned in pop culture. Yeah. Yeah,
So we're having I mean, we're we're talking about this
in a fun context in this moment. But parts of
this episode are really really tragic because we're talking about
a language that was developed by a Jewish man living
in the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, and then the speakers of that language were
(01:53):
persecuted and even killed under fascist and totalitarian regimes into
and after World War Two. But at the same time,
this is also a profoundly hopeful and idealistic story because
it's one that's about trying to bring the whole world
together through a shared second language. Most of the languages
that people on Earth used today are categorized as natural languages,
(02:15):
meaning that they evolved over time as people used them,
often bringing in influences from other similarly evolving languages as
they went. People generally learned to communicate through those languages
before formalizing all of the rules associated with them. We
have talked on the show before about how grammar came
to be a thing and people started applying rules, and
(02:36):
how if you look at older texts, you'll see things
like completely um style, choice based spellings and ramatic grammatical
usage and um the use of various punctuation. So a
language does not need, by the way to be spoken
to be considered a natural language. For example, most sign
languages are classified as natural languages. Construct did languages or
(03:01):
calm langs can also evolve over time, and many of
them do, but they start with someone intentionally planning out
the language is rules, including things like grammar, syntax, vocabulary,
and pronunciation. Sometimes this creation is to develop a language
for a fictional world, like Klingon or Thracky or Tolkien's
(03:22):
Elvish languages, but constructed languages can also serve more practical purposes.
For example, constructed international auxiliary languages try to give speakers
of multiple natural languages a common language to communicate with.
Esperanto is one of these auxiliary languages. Also, there are
whole linguistics discussions about the interplay between natural and constructed
(03:45):
languages and whether these labels are even accurate, So this
is just the broadest of overviews. Philosophers around the world
have proposed ideas about constructed languages for millennia. One of
the earliest surviving examples of a constructed language was created
by previous podcast subject Hildegard von Bingen, who started constructing
a language that she called Lingua ignota or hidden language
(04:08):
in the twelfth century, although her efforts and the surviving
records of that language are both incomplete. Yeah, after we
did that episode on her, we got several notes saying,
the folks for surprised we had not mentioned that, so
now we have. There have been naturally arising Lingua francas
and creoles and pigeons and other shared ways of communicating.
(04:31):
That's also been going on for millennia. But by the
nineteenth century, people were also trying to intentionally create languages
that would make it easier for people who didn't share
a common language to communicate with each other. Before the
development of Esperanto, the most popular such language was Volapuk,
which was developed in the early eighteen eighties by German
(04:53):
priest Johann Martin Schleier. Volapuk drew from English and from Romance, languages,
but with enough changes that those origins weren't all that
recognizable to the people trying to learn it. Volapook also
had a complicated set of grammar rules, so overall it
was not considered to be easy to learn. But there
(05:13):
were hundreds of Volapook clubs and more than three hundred
textbooks written in twenty five different languages during the peak
of its popularity. That peak was in the late eighteen eighties,
and one of the big reasons for its decline after
that point was the introduction of Esperanto in eighteen eight seven.
Esperanto's creator was a Jewish ophthalmologist known as Laser Ludwik Zamenhoff,
(05:37):
who went by the initials l L professionally. Zamenhoff was
born in Biala Stock on December eighteen fifty nine. His
name from birth was E. Liaser, The name he went
by morphed a few times over the years before becoming
those initials that he used as an adult, and you'll
also see those names transliterated with a number of different spellings. Also,
(05:59):
that day of his birth is in the Gregorian calendar.
At the time, the Russian Empire was still using the
Julian calendar, and that put his date of birth as
December third, eighteen fifty nine. Today yali Stock is in Poland,
but at the time it was part of the Russian
Pale of Settlement, which was the region of Czarist Russia
in which Jewish people were allowed to live. Consequently, its
(06:22):
population was about seventy percent Jewish. The other thirty percent
primarily included Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians who were ethnically Polish, Russian, German,
and Belarusian. People from these different groups didn't necessarily share
a common language, and in his childhood Zamenhoff saw a
lot of tension and strife among these disparate groups of
(06:44):
people that were all living in Balastock. Some of this
came from religious divisions, but Zamenhoff thought that a major
factor was that lack of a common language, people just
couldn't understand each other. Zamon Hoff's father, Marcus, was a
language teacher, and in eighteen seventy three, when Laser was
about thirteen, the family moved to Warsaw so that he
(07:05):
could take a job teaching at the Warsaw Gymnasium. He
was actually one of only three Jewish instructors there. Marcus's
position also meant that Laser could attend the school tuish
and free. By this point, Laser was following in his
father's footsteps in terms of studying languages. The Zamenhoff family
spoke Yiddish and Russian at home and in their day
(07:26):
to day lives, and they knew Hebrew as a religious
and scholarly language. In addition, Laser learned Polish, German, Italian, French,
and English. He had also started to learn Aramaic, Latin,
and Greek. He had taught himself those last two because
they were required for admission at the Warsaw Gymnasium, but
(07:46):
they had not been taught at his school. In Balis talk,
Marcus Zamenhoff seems to have wanted the family to assimilate
with Russian society as much as possible, and in eighteen
ninety eight he started working as a censor for the
Czarist Regie. He was censoring Yiddish and Hebrew publications. That
same year, Laser started working on a way to bridge
(08:07):
the divisions that he saw in the world around him.
He had this idea for a universal language that would
be easy enough to learn that people could pick it
up as a second language without too much trouble. He
and some of his friends from school started working on
this project in December of eighteen seventy eight. Even though
he was a language instructor, Laser's father did not seem
(08:28):
to have approved of this work. In some accounts, someone
told Marcus that Laser's focus on a universal language was
a sign of mental illness. In others, the fear was
that this project would distract Laser from his studies. But
either way, Laser decided to study medicine rather than languages
at the University of Moscow, and when he left for
(08:49):
university in eighteen seventy nine, his father made him leave
his notebooks with his language notes behind and later burned them.
We need to set up a little bit of contact
before we move on to the next part of the
story of Esperanto, and we will do that after a
quick sponsor break. L. L. Zamenhoff was born during the
(09:16):
reign of Czar Alexander the Second, and as Emperor of Russia,
Alexander had instituted a series of reforms. This included emancipating
Russia's surfs. Some of these reforms had also affected the
Russian Empire's Jewish population. As we noted earlier, Jews could
live only in the pale of settlement, but Alexander had
(09:37):
loosened those restrictions at least some what. He had also
repealed an assimilation program that forced Jewish men into compulsory
military service. None of this erased anti Semitism by any
stretch of the imagination, but at least in some ways
there had been a little bit of progress. But then,
in one Alexander was assassinated, and rumors spread that his
(10:01):
assassination had been part of a Jewish plot. This led
to widespread programs and other violence against Jewish communities. Alexander's successor,
Alexander the Third, was deeply anti Semitic and blamed his
predecessor's relative liberality toward the Empire's Jewish population for both
the assassination and the violence that followed. Zamenhof returned to
(10:26):
Warsaw from Moscow during this wave of anti Semitic violence.
He might have been motivated out of concern for his
family's safety and his father's finances in the wake of
the programs. He didn't go back to Moscow after this point.
He enrolled in the University of Warsaw, and he finished
his medical degree there in eighteen eighty four. The violence
the Zamenhov witnessed in the early eighteen eighties, including in Warsaw,
(10:50):
led him to advocate for the establishment of a Jewish homeland,
But unlike most other Zionists, he didn't think this homeland
necessarily needed to be in the levant. He knew Jews, Christians,
and Muslims all saw sites within that region as sacred,
and as a result, he thought that trying to establish
a Jewish nation there could lead to further strife. Instead,
(11:12):
when he first started writing about this, he wrote about
the possibility of buying a tract of unoccupied land along
the Mississippi River and the United States and settling there.
So this is a little bit of a tangle. Land
along the Mississippi would not really have been unoccupied when
that was the idea. It was getting unoccupied land. But
(11:32):
this idea also was not very well received within the
Jewish community. Zamon Hoff ultimately renounced Zionism, but before he did,
his later publications on the subject focused more on the
idea of a Jewish nation in the general region where
Israel is today. During these same years, zamon Hoff also
promoted the idea that this proposed Jewish state needed to
(11:55):
have a modern language to bring together and unify its population.
In his mind, the Yiddish already being spoken by many
Ashkenazi Jews where he lived did not exactly fit that bill.
He thought of Yiddish as a jargon rather than a
fully developed language, And on top of that, people spoke
different forms of Yiddish depending on where they lived, and
(12:16):
Sephardic Jews were more likely to speak Judeo Spanish also
known as Ladino rather than Yiddish. So as he was
studying medicine, Zamenhoff was also trying to work out a
way to modernize Yiddish into what he saw as a
more robust and functional language. As a side note, at
almost exactly the same time, another man, Eliezer ben Yehuda,
(12:39):
was also working on uniting the Jewish people through a
common language. In this case, this language was Hebrew, which
was mostly being used for religious texts and observances rather
than for daily conversation at that point. In eighteen eighty one,
benya Huda announced that he would speak only Hebrew among
his friends and family, and in eighteen eighty four, he
established a Hebrew language newspaper. His efforts went on from there.
(13:04):
Zamon Hoff later said that he had supported Benya Juda's
early efforts with the revival of Hebrew, although the specifics
of that aren't really documented anywhere. After finishing his medical degree,
zamon Hoff spent some time working as a doctor. Before
long he decided to specialize and then started an internship
(13:24):
in ophthalmology at Warsaw Jewish Hospital. He also spent some
time studying in Vienna. After a couple of years in
which he moved from place to place, he went back
to Warsaw and opened an ophthalmology office in his home,
and he moved away from the idea of modernizing Yiddish
and back onto his project of developing a universal language
(13:44):
that could unite all of humanity. While living in Warsaw,
zamon Hoff met Clara Zilbernick and they fell in love.
She encouraged his efforts to develop a universal language, and
the two of them used it to write each other
love letters. Clara's father was well off, and when she
and Laser got married, her dowry was ten thousand roubles.
(14:05):
The intent was that this money would help Zamenhoff establish
his ophthalmology practice, but with his father in law's permission. Instead,
he used some of it to publish a forty page
booklet on his universal language in eighteen eighty seven. This
first booklet was published in Russian, and additions in Polish, French,
and German followed soon after. English and Swedish editions came
(14:28):
out in eighteen eighty nine. In English, it's title read Dr.
Esperanto's International Language Introduction and Complete Grammar. Esperanto came from
the language itself, meaning hopeful one. Eventually the language became
known as Esperanto, and in Esperanto this publication became known
as Unua Libro or first Book. Here is how Zamenhoff
(14:52):
described the world he imagined being possible in this first book.
If everyone spoke the shared language of Esperanto quote, the
impassable wall that separates literatures and people's would at once
crumble into dust, and all that was written by another
nation would be as acceptable as if in our own
mother tongue. Reading would prove common to all, and it
(15:15):
would advance education, ideals, convictions, tendencies. The whole world would
be as one family. To that end, Zamenhoff drew from
languages that would already be familiar to people in much
of the Western world. It used the Roman alphabet, with
the words themselves mainly coming from Latin and Germanic and
Slavic languages. This actually also comes up as a criticism
(15:39):
of Esperanto that it's not nearly as easy if you
don't already speak a Romance, Germanic or Slavic language. If
you do, you can piece together meanings of things relatively easily,
but if you don't it's a lot harder. So beyond
these recognizable roots, salmon Hoff also try to make the
(16:00):
language itself really simple and easy to learn. It had
only sixteen basic rules with no exceptions. Every letter had
only one pronunciation, and every sound was represented by only
one letter. So in Esperanto there's none of this. Is
that a long A or a short a, nothing like
r u f F and r o u g h
(16:21):
being pronounced the same way like, there's non issues. This
language had no silent letters or irregular verb endings, and
the stress always went on the next to last syllable
of the word. Esperanto also had only one definite article law,
which was used regardless of gender, number, or case. Words
(16:44):
in Esperanto also signaled which part of speech they were.
Singular nouns and died an oh plural nouns, and o
j adjectives and did an a and adverbs and e
verbs in their basic form ended an i with past
ten s ending in i s, present tense in a s,
and future tense in os. Rather than creating a vocabulary
(17:07):
of tens or hundreds of thousands of words in this
first publication, Zamenhoff created nine hundred root words that could
be modified with prefixes and suffixes to create a vocabulary
between ten thousand and twelve thousand words. So, for example,
the prefix mall m l means opposite, and the root
(17:28):
bona means good, so malbona means bad, or dura means hard,
so maldura means soft. The idea was that people would
only need to learn a smaller number of roots and
then modify them through these prefixes and suffixes to create
a much wider, more complete vocabulary. We've used the past
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tense here because we're talking about Zamenhoff's first edition of
the book, but Esperanto still exists. People still speak it today.
The number of word roots has grown from about nine
it in that first book to as many as nine
thousand or even more. We will talk more about how
Esperanto grew and spread after another sponsor break. L. L.
(18:17):
Zamenhoff's cope was that this universal language would give people
from around the world a second language in common. It
wouldn't be the official language of any nation, so there
would be no country that could claim ownership of Esperanto,
and no native speakers to look down on people who
weren't as fluent. There are a few people who do
(18:39):
speak Esperanto as their first language, kind of scattered around
the world today, though salmon Hoff also saw this as
facilitating all kinds of exchange among different cultures. Rather than
needing to learn multiple languages to speak to people from
different countries, you'd only need to learn Esperanto. And rather
than translating works of literature into new orus languages, they
(19:01):
could all be translated into one language, Esperanto. The first
book contained this pledge at the end, quote I the
subscriber promised to learn the international language invented by Dr
Esperanto if it be shown that ten millions of persons
have given publicly the same promise. Reportedly, only about one
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thousand people returned these pledge forms to Zamenhoff, but soon
Esperanto clubs were being established in Western Russia and in
other parts of Europe. Esperanto quickly became more popular than
the constructed language of Volapook that we mentioned earlier. And
we also mentioned that Volapook had a reputation for being
hard to learn, and there's a cute nod to it,
(19:44):
and that the Esperanto word for Gibberish is volapukago. While
Esperanto clubs are being established around Europe, zamon Hoff was
really struggling financially. He was trying to promote his universal
language while also trying to maintain his optimology practice. Eventually,
money got so tight that he sent his wife and
their first child, Adam, to live with her father for
(20:05):
a while so he could look for a place where
they could afford to live. They had a daughter, Zophia,
in eighteen eighty nine, and at that point Clara's father
gave them some money under the condition that they come
back to Warsaw. They did, although they eventually moved to
the smaller town of grown Note, which had a lower
cost of living. In eighteen ninety four, Zaman Hooff tried
(20:26):
to reform his original rules for Esperanto. It's alphabet used
diacritical marks on some of the letters, and most of
the combinations of letters and accent marks didn't exist in
any other languages. So this caused the problem of printers
not having them in their type. They were harder for
people with low vision to read, and they didn't exist
(20:46):
in Brail at all. It would be a few more
years before say a Field Kart and de Lander would
develop a Brail alphabet for Esperanto. The Esperanto community resisted
these revisions, though, thinking that it would kind of be
like starting over. The diacritical marks are still part of
the alphabet, and especially in old printed texts, there have
(21:07):
been a variety of workarounds for them. Yeah, I would
say some of these workarounds are more successful than others.
Like I was reading trying to read one old, old
printed thing, and it just looked like these letters were identical,
when really some of them were supposed to have accents
over them and some of them were not. Samon Hoff
started an Esperanto magazine called Esperantisto, and he started translating
(21:32):
literature in other languages into Esperanto. One such translation was
an excerpt of Leo Tolstoy's Reason or Faith, But then,
because of Tolstoy's writing on civil disobedience, this translation led
to La Esperantisto being banned in Russia and it ultimately folded. However,
translating works of literature, including Hamlet, really helped Samon Haff
(21:55):
flesh out the Esperanto vocabulary as he coined new root
words to fit the needs of the text. In eight seven,
zamon Hoff and his family moved back to Warsaw. He
re established an optimology practice once again in his home,
and he maintained it for the rest of his life.
Many of his patients who were among Warsaw's poorest people
(22:16):
who lived in the city's Jewish ghetto. Even though zamen
Hoff had moved away from the idea of Zionism and
from the idea of creating a common language specifically for
the Jewish people, he hadn't at all lost sight of
the ongoing anti Semitism and marginalization that Jewish people were facing.
He really recognized that Jews were not seen as Russian,
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and he thought that no matter how many generations passed
that was always going to be the case. In nineteen
o one, he published Hillelism, a project in response to
the Jewish question, and that was named for Rabbi Hillel
the Elder, who was born around a hundred and ten BC.
Many of Hillel's teachings were rooted in empathy, with one
(23:00):
of his most widely quoted being do not do to
your neighbor that which is hateful to you. Initially, Helllism
reframed Jewish identity to focus on universal ethics rather than
Jewish law, with rituals having a cultural rather than a
religious meaning. Basically, it tried to create a religiously neutral
(23:20):
bridge between Jewish identity and Russian life. Zamenhoff also saw
Helllism and Esperanto as connected, with Esperanto being part of
that religiously neutral bridge. Also in nineteen o one, North
America's first Esperanto club was established. That happened in Montreal.
In nineteen o four, the language was exhibited at the St.
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Louis Exposition, and Laser and Clara welcomed another daughter named Lydia.
A group of English and French esperantists that's people who
are fluent in Esperanto also gathered to plan their first
international meeting that year as well. That meeting took place
in Boulogne Surmier, France in nineteen o five. Delegates at
(24:02):
the five meeting ratified a document that came to be
known as the Declaration of Boulogne, which specified that Esperanto
was neutral and that it belonged to no one, and
that the only authority of the language was the book
Fundamento to Esperanto, which Zamenhoff published in nineteen o five.
Esperanto had really taken off among French intellectuals, and this
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French popularity had actually created some issues. France was still
reeling from the political scandal known as the Dreyfus Affair
after Jewish Army Captain Alfred Dreyfuss was falsely convicted of
treason in eighteen ninety four. This conviction had caused a
massive schism in France, with the anti Dreyfusard faction spreading
(24:46):
all kinds of deeply anti Semitic propaganda. This is actually
on the list for a future episode at some point.
Because of all the fur many of the French intellectuals
who had become fascinated with Esperanto ide to distance themselves
from zaman Hooff, his Jewishness and the ideas of Hellelism
that he was promoting. Even so, zamon Hoff was inducted
(25:09):
into the French Legion of Honor in nineteen o five.
Violent programs also continued in the Russian Empire during these
same years, killing at least two thousand Jewish people between
nineteen o three and the start of the Russian Revolution
of nineteen o five. In nineteen o six, Zamenhoff spoke
about these programs in Geneva, calling for Esperanto to become
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a shared language to try to break down religious barriers.
By this point, he had also revised his ideas of
Hellelism into something that he called homer and Esmo that
roughly translates to humanitism. And although this contained a lot
of the same concepts that Hellelism had, zamon Hooff saw
Homeranismo as a neutral ethical framework to unite all of humanity.
(25:58):
In a lot of ways, esper Onto and Homerinizmo went
hand in hand. Esperanto was a shared language to unite
the world, and homeransm was in Zamenhof's words, a neutral
human religion which would unite not just Jews and Gentiles,
but also theists and atheists into one global community with
a shared set of ethical principles. It really really had
(26:21):
a lot in common with that earlier idea of Hellenism,
but with a slightly different focus. So although part of
the Esperanto community shared this sense of global ethics and
global unity, others, including a lot of the French intellectuals
that we mentioned earlier, were really more focused on the
language itself and its practical uses. In Zamenhof sent Louis
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de beau frant to represent him and the language at
the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language,
but rather than representing Esperanto, which he was expected to do,
de beau front, a non anamously proposed that the committee
adopt a different language. It was Edo, which was Esperanto
(27:06):
for offspring. The beau front described Edo as a revised
version of Esperanto, and it eventually came out that he
was the one who had submitted it to the committee.
The sparked the first of several schisms within the Esperanto community,
as the edists broke away from the Esperantists. Salmon Hoff
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was really shocked and disheartened by de beau Frant's actions
and by the division that followed. But also in nineteen
o seven, zamon Hoff was nominated for the Nobel Peace
Prize for the first of fourteen times. Multiple different parties
made the nominations over the years. The first nomination came
from twelve members of the British Parliament. Other nominations included
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forty two members of the French Parliament in nine Painter
and Esperanto promoter Felix Stone Moschell and Charles Robert Roche,
who was himself awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or
Medicine in nineteen thirteen. The Universal Esperanto Association or u
e A was founded in nineteen o eight, and the
(28:09):
language continued to spread around the world. It was introduced
into Japan after the Russo Japanese War, and it became
something of a fad there in nineteen o five and
nineteen o six. Eventually, the Japanese religion Omoto adopted Esperanto
as its language. Dr Vilhel Molli proposed renaming Neutral Morris Net,
which was a small neutral patch of territory in Western
(28:32):
Europe as a mikhaeo or place of friendship in Esperanto,
and he commissioned in Esperanto National Anthem in nineteen o eight.
Germany eventually annexed Neutral morris Net and it became part
of Belgium after World War One. Even though the idea
wasn't for Esperanto to be any nations like official language,
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the idea that this like tiny neutral patch of territory
might use Esperanto as an official language was kind of
captivating to people. Zamon Hoff had been a heavy smoker
for a lot of his life, and by the nineteen
teens he was showing symptoms of heart disease as he
became increasingly ill. His son Adam took over part of
the medical practice, but beyond that, zamon Hoff just didn't
(29:14):
want to slow down. Calmarinismo and Esperanto were just so
deeply important to him. He kept promoting and writing about
them and adding more and more works of literature onto
his list to translate into Esperanto. Zamon Hoff traveled to
Paris in nineteen fourteen for an Esperanto convention, and he
got trapped there when nations started closing borders at the
(29:35):
start of World War One, a network of Esperantists helped
him get back home via Scandinavia. That same year, a
bill was introduced into the US Congress to teach Esperanto
in the schools of Washington, d c. Although that got
stuck in committee. There were also people in the US
who were advocating for the teaching of Esperanto to break
(29:56):
down racial barriers, including black journalist and essayist William Pickens.
In nineteen sixteen, Zamenhoff's brother, Alexander took his own life
after being conscripted into the Russian Army. Alexander had been
really deeply traumatized by what he had witnessed as a
doctor earlier during the Russo Japanese War. L. L. Zamenhoff
(30:17):
died the following year, on April fourteenth of nineteen seventeen,
at the age of fifty seven. Clara kept up with
his work after his death, corresponding with esperantists and promoting
the language. She died of cancer on December six Zamenhoff
had conceived of Esperanto as a neutral language, and the
Declaration of Boulogne had affirmed that neutrality, But after Zamenhoff's death,
(30:40):
and after the end of World War One, a range
of social and political organizations adopted and advocated for the language.
These included socialists, labor organizations, vegetarian organizations, and members of
the High Faith. While there had always been people of
various religions and political alignments who had learned an advocated
(31:00):
for Esperanto, in the nineteen twenties it became increasingly associated
with leftist political and social movements. Meanwhile, the Universal Esperanto
Association advocated for Esperanto with the League of Nations. A
proposal for Esperanto to be adopted as the league's official
language was blocked by France, which argued that French was
(31:22):
already a universal language. Brazilian ambassador Raoul de Rio Bronco
blocked a resolution that Esperanto be taught in schools, calling
it a language of quote ne'er do wells and communists.
I love the idea that France, the French was a
neutral language. Well, like this is our universal language. We
(31:43):
certainly speak it. Yeah, well, I didn't get into it
in this outline. Will probably talk about it in the
behind the scenes, but like there's also been a lot
of conversation about like, but now English is the universal
language and I'm like, come on, really right. When the
Russian Revolution and began in nineteen seventeen, Russian esperantists generally
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supported it, and eventually the Bolshevik government officially supported the language.
In turn, the Esperanto Union of the Soviet Republics. You'll
see that as s e U organized itself according to
Bolshevik principles, which led to a schism between the s
EU and the U e A. Yeah, the U e
A was like, this goes against the idea of being
(32:24):
politically neutral. However, when Joseph Stalin came to power, Esperanto
fell out of favor in the Soviet Union, and by
nineteen thirty six there were mass arrests of esperantists. The
SEUs leaders were executed, Esperantists were persecuted, and Imperial Japan
as well. In these years. In Germany, Heinrich Himmler shut
(32:47):
down the German Esperanto Association in nineteen thirty six. Overall,
the Nazi regime saw the language and its associated movement
as radical and dangerous. Reich Minister of Propaganda of Joseph
Gebbels called Esperanto quote the language of Jews and communists.
Adolf Hitler also condemned the idea of Esperanto or a
(33:09):
similar universal language in his book Mind comp describing it
as a tool that Jews would use to take over
the world. The Nazi regime persecuted and killed Esperantists, including
those with and without Jewish ancestry. World War Two continued
to strain the idea of Esperanto as being politically neutral.
Many Esperantists were anti fascists, and the movement had always
(33:32):
been focused on these principles of peace and international understanding.
Networks of Esperantists offered to aid people who were being
persecuted under the Nazi regime, but at the same time,
national German Esperanto organizations were established during these years that
excluded Jewish members and otherwise tried to appease the Nazis,
(33:53):
and in the nineteen thirties, Nazi Party member Anton Vote
was the vice president of the u e A. The
Zaminha family were all victims of this violence. In persecution,
the Zamenhoff home in Warsaw was bombed in nineteen thirty nine,
and afterward Adam, Zophia and Lydia Zamenhoff, as well as
Adam's wife, Wanda, were all arrested. Wanda was eventually returned
(34:15):
to the Warsaw Ghetto, and she and their son went
into hiding and ultimately survived the Holocaust. So as we
noted earlier, Adam Zamenhoff was a doctor and he had
become the director of a hospital. Zophia was a pediatrician.
Lydia was a writer and a translator. She had converted
to the High Faith and had traveled all over the
(34:36):
world studying and teaching and lecturing. The American Assembly of
the High Faith had invited Lydia to the United States
to teach esperanto classes in nineteen thirty seven, but when
it turned out that teaching those classes violated the terms
of her visa, her request for an extension was denied
and she was forced to return to Europe. In night,
(34:58):
Nazi officers shot Adam Zamenhoff to death during the Palmiria massacre.
In January of nineteen Lydia and Zofia Zamenhoff were both
executed at the Treblinka death Camp. Zofia reportedly went to
Triblinka voluntarily, possibly because she did not want to leave
her patients. Although Esperanto had already spread so many other
(35:19):
parts of the world before World War Two, many of
its speakers and its largest organizations had been in Europe,
and in the face of these horrific tragedies, that really
took some time before the language started to revive again.
After the war, the Esperanto community had also faced yet
another schism after Swiss esperantists undermined a planned move of
(35:40):
the u e A headquarters from Geneva to London. A
new organization, the Internacia Esperanto Lego i e L, was
established in London, and most of the national Esperanto organizations
left the u e A and joined it. The two
organizations were merged after the war. The World Esperanto Congress
(36:01):
was convened in nineteen forty seven. That was the first
time that it had been held since nineteen thirty nine.
People started advocating for Esperanto at the United Nations as
a way to encourage and facilitate international communication. In nineteen
fifty four, the General Conference at UNESCO past the Montevideo Resolution,
which supported Esperanto as an international auxiliary language. Poland hosted
(36:26):
the World Esperanto Congress in nineteen fifty nine, which was
the first time that the Congress had been held in
that part of Europe since the World War two years.
The first feature films in Esperanto were produced in the
nineteen sixties. There was and Goroy in nineteen sixty four,
and in Cuba, which is also called Incubus, which starred
William Shatner in nineteen sixty six. He apparently learned his
(36:49):
lines sphonetically. Esperanto's progress was complicated in some parts of
the world during these years. In China, for example, Esperantos
were imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution in the nineteen sixties
and seventies, while the Chinese government simultaneously used the language
for propaganda purposes, even though Zamenhoff had created the language
(37:11):
with the idea that it would bring peace and unity.
In the nineteen sixties, the U. S. Army used it
for war games in which the enemy combatants had their
own uniforms and spoke Esperanto. As part of this, the
army put out a publication called Esperanto the Aggressor Language.
The army eventually dropped this program because it turns out
(37:32):
that even though Esperanto is meant to be easy to learn,
it is still time consuming to learn a whole language
for war games. Esperanto's popularity started to wane a bit
in the latter part of the twentieth century, but since
then the Internet has made it a lot more accessible
to more people. By the early twenty first century, it
was also becoming more popular in parts of the world
(37:53):
whose official languages aren't based in Latin, so places like
China and parts of Africa. The language app Duo lingo
Is showed the first version of its Esperanto course in
I took a tiny number of those while working on
this episode, not enough to hold on any sort of conversation,
but I did do a few. It is clear that
(38:15):
online classes and apps have led more people to learn
at least some Esperanto like Tracy, but exact numbers are
really pretty unclear. Estimates range all the way from one
hundred thousand speakers to a couple of million. The Universal
Esperanto Association has members in more than one d twenty countries.
But it also seems like in some ways the online
(38:37):
spread of the language is both a blessing and a curse.
More people are learning the language, but not necessarily with
the connection to Zamenhoff's ideals of unity and bridge building.
Like back when most people learned Esperanto almost exclusively through
clubs and pen and paper correspondence courses, there were directories
(38:58):
of people who would welcome other Esperantists into their homes.
Those directories still exist, but it's just it's not as
feasible to do something like that when a huge number
of people are learning a language through an app without
necessarily that shared cultural context. The Internet's enthusiasm for Esperanto
also means that resources in Esperanto can weigh out number
(39:21):
resources for other languages that have a lot more speakers.
The Fifth World Esperanto Congress was supposed to be held
in in Montreal, but because of the pandemic, that was
postponed until instead a series of virtual events took place
from June to September. Also December fifteen. L. L. Zamenhoff's
(39:43):
birthday is now Zalmonhoff Day. I enjoyed working on this episode, uh,
even as the tragic parts are really hard to work on. Yeah,
um uh, do you have listener mail in Esperanto for us?
I do this. It's not been Esperanto, but it is
from Caroline. It's about our nineteen eighteen flu episode, and
(40:05):
Caroline says, hello, lovely ladies. I hope you're doing well
and enjoying some lovely spring weather. I'm writing this email
right after the release of the first part of Revisiting
the Flu pandemic. While I understand that there's a lot
to cover there, especially in the overlap of the current pandemic,
I was disappointed, in a little shock that you did
not discuss how both pandemics affect those with chronic illness,
(40:26):
especially in regards to mask mandates. Throughout the episode, I
noted three opportunities for you to do so, where you didn't.
I understand that you had a lot to cover, and
I do not believe this was done maliciously, so I
thought I'd take the time to do so. I could
spend all day discussing how the pandemic has negatively impacted
us with chronic illness, but I wanted to specifically address
mask mandates because this, in my view, is the most
(40:47):
problematic in the social realm. Although I could tell you
did try to be compassionate with this issue, there were
times where it felt like you slipped into stereotyping those
who don't wish to wear masks of selfish ne'er duels,
although there's no denial that this is some the population.
This again completely dismisses situations where people do have very
serious but personal reasons for not wearing a mask. UM.
(41:08):
The remainder of the email talks a lot about Caroline's
own personal medical history, so I'm not going to read
all of it, but thank you for sharing that with me, Caroline. UM. So, first,
I apologize if I made anyone who is chronically ill
or disabled UM feel excluded or talked over or dismissed
(41:29):
in working on that episode. There are some valid reasons
that people have for not wearing masks, and at the
same time, there are also a lot of non disabled
people who are using disability as a shield to do
crap like print out fake Americans with Disabilities Act notices
and like harass store employees and generally make things unsafe
(41:51):
for everyone, and it outrages me, and I didn't feel
like it was something that I could like bring into
the episode without feeling like I was giving uh acceptability
or weight to the people who are doing that. UM.
Because overwhelmingly the disabled and chronically ill people in my
life feel more unsafe because of that type of behavior
(42:16):
of people who are like using disability as a shield
to not wear masks just because they don't want to
do it and want to be jerks to others. UM. Also, Uh,
there is just not a lot of data yet about
disability and chronic illness in the flu pandemic, beyond the
(42:36):
chronic respiratory diseases that came up several times in the episodes,
like tuberculosis. UM. And part of that is because the
nine eighteen flu was happening during the eugenics movement, during
a time when overwhelmingly disabled and chronically ill people were
living in like special homes and special schools or being
(42:59):
cared for at home in a way that they weren't
in the public eye very much. UM also like a
shortcoming within the field of history that's just isn't something
that historians have looked at a whole lot recently, and
the papers that have started to be coming out over
the last decade or so or kind of like, wow,
there's almost nothing about this. UM. The field of disability
(43:20):
studies itself is also really new, so it's like that
field has not had a lot of time to go
back into like the archives, to really pour over that
and create a comprehensive history of how the pandemic affected
people with chronic illnesses and disabilities. So again, UM, I
(43:40):
apologize if there were people. I apologize if the way
I wrote that episode made people feel excluded or anything
like that. I I feel like there's a lot of
complicated stuff with this, So thank you again to Caroline
for sending that note. UM, if you would like to
write to us about the US or any other podcast
(44:01):
or history podcast at i heeart radio dot com. We're
also all over social media at MS in History, and
that's where you'll find our Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest
and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on
the i heeart Radio app and Apple Podcasts and anywhere
else that you get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in
(44:24):
History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For
more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Egilson and I'm Holly Fry. Way back in
I was having a conversation with a friend and the
constructed language Esperanto came up in that conversation, and I
(00:25):
had that little thought, Hey, maybe we should do a
podcast on that sometime. And now more than a year later,
we have come to that sometime. I know it was
from because we were in a restaurant in Philadelphia, which
means it was not during the pandemic. Uh was the
(00:46):
last time I was there. Anyway, I really did not
know all that much about Esperanto when I got into this,
aside from the fact that it's a language that was
intentionally created to be easy to learn. Somehow I associated
it with the nineteen sixties, and although that was one
of its peaks and popularity that it's also a way
older language than that. The other big thing that I
(01:08):
associated with Esperanto was the scene in Twin Peaks where
Gordon Cole goes to talk to Shelley at the Double
R Diner and says he's going to engage in some
counter Esperanto, and that was just my whole my whole
knowledge of esperanto, and that right there, mine was largely
from animaniacs. Oh yeah, yeah, because that's how it's it's
(01:29):
usually referenced as like a casual side mentioned in pop culture. Yeah. Yeah,
So we're having I mean, we're we're talking about this
in a fun context in this moment. But parts of
this episode are really really tragic because we're talking about
a language that was developed by a Jewish man living
in the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, and then the speakers of that language were
(01:53):
persecuted and even killed under fascist and totalitarian regimes into
and after World War Two. But at the same time,
this is also a profoundly hopeful and idealistic story because
it's one that's about trying to bring the whole world
together through a shared second language. Most of the languages
that people on Earth used today are categorized as natural languages,
(02:15):
meaning that they evolved over time as people used them,
often bringing in influences from other similarly evolving languages as
they went. People generally learned to communicate through those languages
before formalizing all of the rules associated with them. We
have talked on the show before about how grammar came
to be a thing and people started applying rules, and
(02:36):
how if you look at older texts, you'll see things
like completely um style, choice based spellings and ramatic grammatical
usage and um the use of various punctuation. So a
language does not need, by the way to be spoken
to be considered a natural language. For example, most sign
languages are classified as natural languages. Construct did languages or
(03:01):
calm langs can also evolve over time, and many of
them do, but they start with someone intentionally planning out
the language is rules, including things like grammar, syntax, vocabulary,
and pronunciation. Sometimes this creation is to develop a language
for a fictional world, like Klingon or Thracky or Tolkien's
(03:22):
Elvish languages, but constructed languages can also serve more practical purposes.
For example, constructed international auxiliary languages try to give speakers
of multiple natural languages a common language to communicate with.
Esperanto is one of these auxiliary languages. Also, there are
whole linguistics discussions about the interplay between natural and constructed
(03:45):
languages and whether these labels are even accurate, So this
is just the broadest of overviews. Philosophers around the world
have proposed ideas about constructed languages for millennia. One of
the earliest surviving examples of a constructed language was created
by previous podcast subject Hildegard von Bingen, who started constructing
a language that she called Lingua ignota or hidden language
(04:08):
in the twelfth century, although her efforts and the surviving
records of that language are both incomplete. Yeah, after we
did that episode on her, we got several notes saying,
the folks for surprised we had not mentioned that, so
now we have. There have been naturally arising Lingua francas
and creoles and pigeons and other shared ways of communicating.
(04:31):
That's also been going on for millennia. But by the
nineteenth century, people were also trying to intentionally create languages
that would make it easier for people who didn't share
a common language to communicate with each other. Before the
development of Esperanto, the most popular such language was Volapuk,
which was developed in the early eighteen eighties by German
(04:53):
priest Johann Martin Schleier. Volapuk drew from English and from Romance, languages,
but with enough changes that those origins weren't all that
recognizable to the people trying to learn it. Volapook also
had a complicated set of grammar rules, so overall it
was not considered to be easy to learn. But there
(05:13):
were hundreds of Volapook clubs and more than three hundred
textbooks written in twenty five different languages during the peak
of its popularity. That peak was in the late eighteen eighties,
and one of the big reasons for its decline after
that point was the introduction of Esperanto in eighteen eight seven.
Esperanto's creator was a Jewish ophthalmologist known as Laser Ludwik Zamenhoff,
(05:37):
who went by the initials l L professionally. Zamenhoff was
born in Biala Stock on December eighteen fifty nine. His
name from birth was E. Liaser, The name he went
by morphed a few times over the years before becoming
those initials that he used as an adult, and you'll
also see those names transliterated with a number of different spellings. Also,
(05:59):
that day of his birth is in the Gregorian calendar.
At the time, the Russian Empire was still using the
Julian calendar, and that put his date of birth as
December third, eighteen fifty nine. Today yali Stock is in Poland,
but at the time it was part of the Russian
Pale of Settlement, which was the region of Czarist Russia
in which Jewish people were allowed to live. Consequently, its
(06:22):
population was about seventy percent Jewish. The other thirty percent
primarily included Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians who were ethnically Polish, Russian, German,
and Belarusian. People from these different groups didn't necessarily share
a common language, and in his childhood Zamenhoff saw a
lot of tension and strife among these disparate groups of
(06:44):
people that were all living in Balastock. Some of this
came from religious divisions, but Zamenhoff thought that a major
factor was that lack of a common language, people just
couldn't understand each other. Zamon Hoff's father, Marcus, was a
language teacher, and in eighteen seventy three, when Laser was
about thirteen, the family moved to Warsaw so that he
(07:05):
could take a job teaching at the Warsaw Gymnasium. He
was actually one of only three Jewish instructors there. Marcus's
position also meant that Laser could attend the school tuish
and free. By this point, Laser was following in his
father's footsteps in terms of studying languages. The Zamenhoff family
spoke Yiddish and Russian at home and in their day
(07:26):
to day lives, and they knew Hebrew as a religious
and scholarly language. In addition, Laser learned Polish, German, Italian, French,
and English. He had also started to learn Aramaic, Latin,
and Greek. He had taught himself those last two because
they were required for admission at the Warsaw Gymnasium, but
(07:46):
they had not been taught at his school. In Balis talk,
Marcus Zamenhoff seems to have wanted the family to assimilate
with Russian society as much as possible, and in eighteen
ninety eight he started working as a censor for the
Czarist Regie. He was censoring Yiddish and Hebrew publications. That
same year, Laser started working on a way to bridge
(08:07):
the divisions that he saw in the world around him.
He had this idea for a universal language that would
be easy enough to learn that people could pick it
up as a second language without too much trouble. He
and some of his friends from school started working on
this project in December of eighteen seventy eight. Even though
he was a language instructor, Laser's father did not seem
(08:28):
to have approved of this work. In some accounts, someone
told Marcus that Laser's focus on a universal language was
a sign of mental illness. In others, the fear was
that this project would distract Laser from his studies. But
either way, Laser decided to study medicine rather than languages
at the University of Moscow, and when he left for
(08:49):
university in eighteen seventy nine, his father made him leave
his notebooks with his language notes behind and later burned them.
We need to set up a little bit of contact
before we move on to the next part of the
story of Esperanto, and we will do that after a
quick sponsor break. L. L. Zamenhoff was born during the
(09:16):
reign of Czar Alexander the Second, and as Emperor of Russia,
Alexander had instituted a series of reforms. This included emancipating
Russia's surfs. Some of these reforms had also affected the
Russian Empire's Jewish population. As we noted earlier, Jews could
live only in the pale of settlement, but Alexander had
(09:37):
loosened those restrictions at least some what. He had also
repealed an assimilation program that forced Jewish men into compulsory
military service. None of this erased anti Semitism by any
stretch of the imagination, but at least in some ways
there had been a little bit of progress. But then,
in one Alexander was assassinated, and rumors spread that his
(10:01):
assassination had been part of a Jewish plot. This led
to widespread programs and other violence against Jewish communities. Alexander's successor,
Alexander the Third, was deeply anti Semitic and blamed his
predecessor's relative liberality toward the Empire's Jewish population for both
the assassination and the violence that followed. Zamenhof returned to
(10:26):
Warsaw from Moscow during this wave of anti Semitic violence.
He might have been motivated out of concern for his
family's safety and his father's finances in the wake of
the programs. He didn't go back to Moscow after this point.
He enrolled in the University of Warsaw, and he finished
his medical degree there in eighteen eighty four. The violence
the Zamenhov witnessed in the early eighteen eighties, including in Warsaw,
(10:50):
led him to advocate for the establishment of a Jewish homeland,
But unlike most other Zionists, he didn't think this homeland
necessarily needed to be in the levant. He knew Jews, Christians,
and Muslims all saw sites within that region as sacred,
and as a result, he thought that trying to establish
a Jewish nation there could lead to further strife. Instead,
(11:12):
when he first started writing about this, he wrote about
the possibility of buying a tract of unoccupied land along
the Mississippi River and the United States and settling there.
So this is a little bit of a tangle. Land
along the Mississippi would not really have been unoccupied when
that was the idea. It was getting unoccupied land. But
(11:32):
this idea also was not very well received within the
Jewish community. Zamon Hoff ultimately renounced Zionism, but before he did,
his later publications on the subject focused more on the
idea of a Jewish nation in the general region where
Israel is today. During these same years, zamon Hoff also
promoted the idea that this proposed Jewish state needed to
(11:55):
have a modern language to bring together and unify its population.
In his mind, the Yiddish already being spoken by many
Ashkenazi Jews where he lived did not exactly fit that bill.
He thought of Yiddish as a jargon rather than a
fully developed language, And on top of that, people spoke
different forms of Yiddish depending on where they lived, and
(12:16):
Sephardic Jews were more likely to speak Judeo Spanish also
known as Ladino rather than Yiddish. So as he was
studying medicine, Zamenhoff was also trying to work out a
way to modernize Yiddish into what he saw as a
more robust and functional language. As a side note, at
almost exactly the same time, another man, Eliezer ben Yehuda,
(12:39):
was also working on uniting the Jewish people through a
common language. In this case, this language was Hebrew, which
was mostly being used for religious texts and observances rather
than for daily conversation at that point. In eighteen eighty one,
benya Huda announced that he would speak only Hebrew among
his friends and family, and in eighteen eighty four, he
established a Hebrew language newspaper. His efforts went on from there.
(13:04):
Zamon Hoff later said that he had supported Benya Juda's
early efforts with the revival of Hebrew, although the specifics
of that aren't really documented anywhere. After finishing his medical degree,
zamon Hoff spent some time working as a doctor. Before
long he decided to specialize and then started an internship
(13:24):
in ophthalmology at Warsaw Jewish Hospital. He also spent some
time studying in Vienna. After a couple of years in
which he moved from place to place, he went back
to Warsaw and opened an ophthalmology office in his home,
and he moved away from the idea of modernizing Yiddish
and back onto his project of developing a universal language
(13:44):
that could unite all of humanity. While living in Warsaw,
zamon Hoff met Clara Zilbernick and they fell in love.
She encouraged his efforts to develop a universal language, and
the two of them used it to write each other
love letters. Clara's father was well off, and when she
and Laser got married, her dowry was ten thousand roubles.
(14:05):
The intent was that this money would help Zamenhoff establish
his ophthalmology practice, but with his father in law's permission. Instead,
he used some of it to publish a forty page
booklet on his universal language in eighteen eighty seven. This
first booklet was published in Russian, and additions in Polish, French,
and German followed soon after. English and Swedish editions came
(14:28):
out in eighteen eighty nine. In English, it's title read Dr.
Esperanto's International Language Introduction and Complete Grammar. Esperanto came from
the language itself, meaning hopeful one. Eventually the language became
known as Esperanto, and in Esperanto this publication became known
as Unua Libro or first Book. Here is how Zamenhoff
(14:52):
described the world he imagined being possible in this first book.
If everyone spoke the shared language of Esperanto quote, the
impassable wall that separates literatures and people's would at once
crumble into dust, and all that was written by another
nation would be as acceptable as if in our own
mother tongue. Reading would prove common to all, and it
(15:15):
would advance education, ideals, convictions, tendencies. The whole world would
be as one family. To that end, Zamenhoff drew from
languages that would already be familiar to people in much
of the Western world. It used the Roman alphabet, with
the words themselves mainly coming from Latin and Germanic and
Slavic languages. This actually also comes up as a criticism
(15:39):
of Esperanto that it's not nearly as easy if you
don't already speak a Romance, Germanic or Slavic language. If
you do, you can piece together meanings of things relatively easily,
but if you don't it's a lot harder. So beyond
these recognizable roots, salmon Hoff also try to make the
(16:00):
language itself really simple and easy to learn. It had
only sixteen basic rules with no exceptions. Every letter had
only one pronunciation, and every sound was represented by only
one letter. So in Esperanto there's none of this. Is
that a long A or a short a, nothing like
r u f F and r o u g h
(16:21):
being pronounced the same way like, there's non issues. This
language had no silent letters or irregular verb endings, and
the stress always went on the next to last syllable
of the word. Esperanto also had only one definite article law,
which was used regardless of gender, number, or case. Words
(16:44):
in Esperanto also signaled which part of speech they were.
Singular nouns and died an oh plural nouns, and o
j adjectives and did an a and adverbs and e
verbs in their basic form ended an i with past
ten s ending in i s, present tense in a s,
and future tense in os. Rather than creating a vocabulary
(17:07):
of tens or hundreds of thousands of words in this
first publication, Zamenhoff created nine hundred root words that could
be modified with prefixes and suffixes to create a vocabulary
between ten thousand and twelve thousand words. So, for example,
the prefix mall m l means opposite, and the root
(17:28):
bona means good, so malbona means bad, or dura means hard,
so maldura means soft. The idea was that people would
only need to learn a smaller number of roots and
then modify them through these prefixes and suffixes to create
a much wider, more complete vocabulary. We've used the past
(17:48):
tense here because we're talking about Zamenhoff's first edition of
the book, but Esperanto still exists. People still speak it today.
The number of word roots has grown from about nine
it in that first book to as many as nine
thousand or even more. We will talk more about how
Esperanto grew and spread after another sponsor break. L. L.
(18:17):
Zamenhoff's cope was that this universal language would give people
from around the world a second language in common. It
wouldn't be the official language of any nation, so there
would be no country that could claim ownership of Esperanto,
and no native speakers to look down on people who
weren't as fluent. There are a few people who do
(18:39):
speak Esperanto as their first language, kind of scattered around
the world today, though salmon Hoff also saw this as
facilitating all kinds of exchange among different cultures. Rather than
needing to learn multiple languages to speak to people from
different countries, you'd only need to learn Esperanto. And rather
than translating works of literature into new orus languages, they
(19:01):
could all be translated into one language, Esperanto. The first
book contained this pledge at the end, quote I the
subscriber promised to learn the international language invented by Dr
Esperanto if it be shown that ten millions of persons
have given publicly the same promise. Reportedly, only about one
(19:21):
thousand people returned these pledge forms to Zamenhoff, but soon
Esperanto clubs were being established in Western Russia and in
other parts of Europe. Esperanto quickly became more popular than
the constructed language of Volapook that we mentioned earlier. And
we also mentioned that Volapook had a reputation for being
hard to learn, and there's a cute nod to it,
(19:44):
and that the Esperanto word for Gibberish is volapukago. While
Esperanto clubs are being established around Europe, zamon Hoff was
really struggling financially. He was trying to promote his universal
language while also trying to maintain his optimology practice. Eventually,
money got so tight that he sent his wife and
their first child, Adam, to live with her father for
(20:05):
a while so he could look for a place where
they could afford to live. They had a daughter, Zophia,
in eighteen eighty nine, and at that point Clara's father
gave them some money under the condition that they come
back to Warsaw. They did, although they eventually moved to
the smaller town of grown Note, which had a lower
cost of living. In eighteen ninety four, Zaman Hooff tried
(20:26):
to reform his original rules for Esperanto. It's alphabet used
diacritical marks on some of the letters, and most of
the combinations of letters and accent marks didn't exist in
any other languages. So this caused the problem of printers
not having them in their type. They were harder for
people with low vision to read, and they didn't exist
(20:46):
in Brail at all. It would be a few more
years before say a Field Kart and de Lander would
develop a Brail alphabet for Esperanto. The Esperanto community resisted
these revisions, though, thinking that it would kind of be
like starting over. The diacritical marks are still part of
the alphabet, and especially in old printed texts, there have
(21:07):
been a variety of workarounds for them. Yeah, I would
say some of these workarounds are more successful than others.
Like I was reading trying to read one old, old
printed thing, and it just looked like these letters were identical,
when really some of them were supposed to have accents
over them and some of them were not. Samon Hoff
started an Esperanto magazine called Esperantisto, and he started translating
(21:32):
literature in other languages into Esperanto. One such translation was
an excerpt of Leo Tolstoy's Reason or Faith, But then,
because of Tolstoy's writing on civil disobedience, this translation led
to La Esperantisto being banned in Russia and it ultimately folded. However,
translating works of literature, including Hamlet, really helped Samon Haff
(21:55):
flesh out the Esperanto vocabulary as he coined new root
words to fit the needs of the text. In eight seven,
zamon Hoff and his family moved back to Warsaw. He
re established an optimology practice once again in his home,
and he maintained it for the rest of his life.
Many of his patients who were among Warsaw's poorest people
(22:16):
who lived in the city's Jewish ghetto. Even though zamen
Hoff had moved away from the idea of Zionism and
from the idea of creating a common language specifically for
the Jewish people, he hadn't at all lost sight of
the ongoing anti Semitism and marginalization that Jewish people were facing.
He really recognized that Jews were not seen as Russian,
(22:39):
and he thought that no matter how many generations passed
that was always going to be the case. In nineteen
o one, he published Hillelism, a project in response to
the Jewish question, and that was named for Rabbi Hillel
the Elder, who was born around a hundred and ten BC.
Many of Hillel's teachings were rooted in empathy, with one
(23:00):
of his most widely quoted being do not do to
your neighbor that which is hateful to you. Initially, Helllism
reframed Jewish identity to focus on universal ethics rather than
Jewish law, with rituals having a cultural rather than a
religious meaning. Basically, it tried to create a religiously neutral
(23:20):
bridge between Jewish identity and Russian life. Zamenhoff also saw
Helllism and Esperanto as connected, with Esperanto being part of
that religiously neutral bridge. Also in nineteen o one, North
America's first Esperanto club was established. That happened in Montreal.
In nineteen o four, the language was exhibited at the St.
(23:42):
Louis Exposition, and Laser and Clara welcomed another daughter named Lydia.
A group of English and French esperantists that's people who
are fluent in Esperanto also gathered to plan their first
international meeting that year as well. That meeting took place
in Boulogne Surmier, France in nineteen o five. Delegates at
(24:02):
the five meeting ratified a document that came to be
known as the Declaration of Boulogne, which specified that Esperanto
was neutral and that it belonged to no one, and
that the only authority of the language was the book
Fundamento to Esperanto, which Zamenhoff published in nineteen o five.
Esperanto had really taken off among French intellectuals, and this
(24:25):
French popularity had actually created some issues. France was still
reeling from the political scandal known as the Dreyfus Affair
after Jewish Army Captain Alfred Dreyfuss was falsely convicted of
treason in eighteen ninety four. This conviction had caused a
massive schism in France, with the anti Dreyfusard faction spreading
(24:46):
all kinds of deeply anti Semitic propaganda. This is actually
on the list for a future episode at some point.
Because of all the fur many of the French intellectuals
who had become fascinated with Esperanto ide to distance themselves
from zaman Hooff, his Jewishness and the ideas of Hellelism
that he was promoting. Even so, zamon Hoff was inducted
(25:09):
into the French Legion of Honor in nineteen o five.
Violent programs also continued in the Russian Empire during these
same years, killing at least two thousand Jewish people between
nineteen o three and the start of the Russian Revolution
of nineteen o five. In nineteen o six, Zamenhoff spoke
about these programs in Geneva, calling for Esperanto to become
(25:32):
a shared language to try to break down religious barriers.
By this point, he had also revised his ideas of
Hellelism into something that he called homer and Esmo that
roughly translates to humanitism. And although this contained a lot
of the same concepts that Hellelism had, zamon Hooff saw
Homeranismo as a neutral ethical framework to unite all of humanity.
(25:58):
In a lot of ways, esper Onto and Homerinizmo went
hand in hand. Esperanto was a shared language to unite
the world, and homeransm was in Zamenhof's words, a neutral
human religion which would unite not just Jews and Gentiles,
but also theists and atheists into one global community with
a shared set of ethical principles. It really really had
(26:21):
a lot in common with that earlier idea of Hellenism,
but with a slightly different focus. So although part of
the Esperanto community shared this sense of global ethics and
global unity, others, including a lot of the French intellectuals
that we mentioned earlier, were really more focused on the
language itself and its practical uses. In Zamenhof sent Louis
(26:45):
de beau frant to represent him and the language at
the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language,
but rather than representing Esperanto, which he was expected to do,
de beau front, a non anamously proposed that the committee
adopt a different language. It was Edo, which was Esperanto
(27:06):
for offspring. The beau front described Edo as a revised
version of Esperanto, and it eventually came out that he
was the one who had submitted it to the committee.
The sparked the first of several schisms within the Esperanto community,
as the edists broke away from the Esperantists. Salmon Hoff
(27:26):
was really shocked and disheartened by de beau Frant's actions
and by the division that followed. But also in nineteen
o seven, zamon Hoff was nominated for the Nobel Peace
Prize for the first of fourteen times. Multiple different parties
made the nominations over the years. The first nomination came
from twelve members of the British Parliament. Other nominations included
(27:49):
forty two members of the French Parliament in nine Painter
and Esperanto promoter Felix Stone Moschell and Charles Robert Roche,
who was himself awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or
Medicine in nineteen thirteen. The Universal Esperanto Association or u
e A was founded in nineteen o eight, and the
(28:09):
language continued to spread around the world. It was introduced
into Japan after the Russo Japanese War, and it became
something of a fad there in nineteen o five and
nineteen o six. Eventually, the Japanese religion Omoto adopted Esperanto
as its language. Dr Vilhel Molli proposed renaming Neutral Morris Net,
which was a small neutral patch of territory in Western
(28:32):
Europe as a mikhaeo or place of friendship in Esperanto,
and he commissioned in Esperanto National Anthem in nineteen o eight.
Germany eventually annexed Neutral morris Net and it became part
of Belgium after World War One. Even though the idea
wasn't for Esperanto to be any nations like official language,
(28:53):
the idea that this like tiny neutral patch of territory
might use Esperanto as an official language was kind of
captivating to people. Zamon Hoff had been a heavy smoker
for a lot of his life, and by the nineteen
teens he was showing symptoms of heart disease as he
became increasingly ill. His son Adam took over part of
the medical practice, but beyond that, zamon Hoff just didn't
(29:14):
want to slow down. Calmarinismo and Esperanto were just so
deeply important to him. He kept promoting and writing about
them and adding more and more works of literature onto
his list to translate into Esperanto. Zamon Hoff traveled to
Paris in nineteen fourteen for an Esperanto convention, and he
got trapped there when nations started closing borders at the
(29:35):
start of World War One, a network of Esperantists helped
him get back home via Scandinavia. That same year, a
bill was introduced into the US Congress to teach Esperanto
in the schools of Washington, d c. Although that got
stuck in committee. There were also people in the US
who were advocating for the teaching of Esperanto to break
(29:56):
down racial barriers, including black journalist and essayist William Pickens.
In nineteen sixteen, Zamenhoff's brother, Alexander took his own life
after being conscripted into the Russian Army. Alexander had been
really deeply traumatized by what he had witnessed as a
doctor earlier during the Russo Japanese War. L. L. Zamenhoff
(30:17):
died the following year, on April fourteenth of nineteen seventeen,
at the age of fifty seven. Clara kept up with
his work after his death, corresponding with esperantists and promoting
the language. She died of cancer on December six Zamenhoff
had conceived of Esperanto as a neutral language, and the
Declaration of Boulogne had affirmed that neutrality, But after Zamenhoff's death,
(30:40):
and after the end of World War One, a range
of social and political organizations adopted and advocated for the language.
These included socialists, labor organizations, vegetarian organizations, and members of
the High Faith. While there had always been people of
various religions and political alignments who had learned an advocated
(31:00):
for Esperanto, in the nineteen twenties it became increasingly associated
with leftist political and social movements. Meanwhile, the Universal Esperanto
Association advocated for Esperanto with the League of Nations. A
proposal for Esperanto to be adopted as the league's official
language was blocked by France, which argued that French was
(31:22):
already a universal language. Brazilian ambassador Raoul de Rio Bronco
blocked a resolution that Esperanto be taught in schools, calling
it a language of quote ne'er do wells and communists.
I love the idea that France, the French was a
neutral language. Well, like this is our universal language. We
(31:43):
certainly speak it. Yeah, well, I didn't get into it
in this outline. Will probably talk about it in the
behind the scenes, but like there's also been a lot
of conversation about like, but now English is the universal
language and I'm like, come on, really right. When the
Russian Revolution and began in nineteen seventeen, Russian esperantists generally
(32:04):
supported it, and eventually the Bolshevik government officially supported the language.
In turn, the Esperanto Union of the Soviet Republics. You'll
see that as s e U organized itself according to
Bolshevik principles, which led to a schism between the s
EU and the U e A. Yeah, the U e
A was like, this goes against the idea of being
(32:24):
politically neutral. However, when Joseph Stalin came to power, Esperanto
fell out of favor in the Soviet Union, and by
nineteen thirty six there were mass arrests of esperantists. The
SEUs leaders were executed, Esperantists were persecuted, and Imperial Japan
as well. In these years. In Germany, Heinrich Himmler shut
(32:47):
down the German Esperanto Association in nineteen thirty six. Overall,
the Nazi regime saw the language and its associated movement
as radical and dangerous. Reich Minister of Propaganda of Joseph
Gebbels called Esperanto quote the language of Jews and communists.
Adolf Hitler also condemned the idea of Esperanto or a
(33:09):
similar universal language in his book Mind comp describing it
as a tool that Jews would use to take over
the world. The Nazi regime persecuted and killed Esperantists, including
those with and without Jewish ancestry. World War Two continued
to strain the idea of Esperanto as being politically neutral.
Many Esperantists were anti fascists, and the movement had always
(33:32):
been focused on these principles of peace and international understanding.
Networks of Esperantists offered to aid people who were being
persecuted under the Nazi regime, but at the same time,
national German Esperanto organizations were established during these years that
excluded Jewish members and otherwise tried to appease the Nazis,
(33:53):
and in the nineteen thirties, Nazi Party member Anton Vote
was the vice president of the u e A. The
Zaminha family were all victims of this violence. In persecution,
the Zamenhoff home in Warsaw was bombed in nineteen thirty nine,
and afterward Adam, Zophia and Lydia Zamenhoff, as well as
Adam's wife, Wanda, were all arrested. Wanda was eventually returned
(34:15):
to the Warsaw Ghetto, and she and their son went
into hiding and ultimately survived the Holocaust. So as we
noted earlier, Adam Zamenhoff was a doctor and he had
become the director of a hospital. Zophia was a pediatrician.
Lydia was a writer and a translator. She had converted
to the High Faith and had traveled all over the
(34:36):
world studying and teaching and lecturing. The American Assembly of
the High Faith had invited Lydia to the United States
to teach esperanto classes in nineteen thirty seven, but when
it turned out that teaching those classes violated the terms
of her visa, her request for an extension was denied
and she was forced to return to Europe. In night,
(34:58):
Nazi officers shot Adam Zamenhoff to death during the Palmiria massacre.
In January of nineteen Lydia and Zofia Zamenhoff were both
executed at the Treblinka death Camp. Zofia reportedly went to
Triblinka voluntarily, possibly because she did not want to leave
her patients. Although Esperanto had already spread so many other
(35:19):
parts of the world before World War Two, many of
its speakers and its largest organizations had been in Europe,
and in the face of these horrific tragedies, that really
took some time before the language started to revive again.
After the war, the Esperanto community had also faced yet
another schism after Swiss esperantists undermined a planned move of
(35:40):
the u e A headquarters from Geneva to London. A
new organization, the Internacia Esperanto Lego i e L, was
established in London, and most of the national Esperanto organizations
left the u e A and joined it. The two
organizations were merged after the war. The World Esperanto Congress
(36:01):
was convened in nineteen forty seven. That was the first
time that it had been held since nineteen thirty nine.
People started advocating for Esperanto at the United Nations as
a way to encourage and facilitate international communication. In nineteen
fifty four, the General Conference at UNESCO past the Montevideo Resolution,
which supported Esperanto as an international auxiliary language. Poland hosted
(36:26):
the World Esperanto Congress in nineteen fifty nine, which was
the first time that the Congress had been held in
that part of Europe since the World War two years.
The first feature films in Esperanto were produced in the
nineteen sixties. There was and Goroy in nineteen sixty four,
and in Cuba, which is also called Incubus, which starred
William Shatner in nineteen sixty six. He apparently learned his
(36:49):
lines sphonetically. Esperanto's progress was complicated in some parts of
the world during these years. In China, for example, Esperantos
were imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution in the nineteen sixties
and seventies, while the Chinese government simultaneously used the language
for propaganda purposes, even though Zamenhoff had created the language
(37:11):
with the idea that it would bring peace and unity.
In the nineteen sixties, the U. S. Army used it
for war games in which the enemy combatants had their
own uniforms and spoke Esperanto. As part of this, the
army put out a publication called Esperanto the Aggressor Language.
The army eventually dropped this program because it turns out
(37:32):
that even though Esperanto is meant to be easy to learn,
it is still time consuming to learn a whole language
for war games. Esperanto's popularity started to wane a bit
in the latter part of the twentieth century, but since
then the Internet has made it a lot more accessible
to more people. By the early twenty first century, it
was also becoming more popular in parts of the world
(37:53):
whose official languages aren't based in Latin, so places like
China and parts of Africa. The language app Duo lingo
Is showed the first version of its Esperanto course in
I took a tiny number of those while working on
this episode, not enough to hold on any sort of conversation,
but I did do a few. It is clear that
(38:15):
online classes and apps have led more people to learn
at least some Esperanto like Tracy, but exact numbers are
really pretty unclear. Estimates range all the way from one
hundred thousand speakers to a couple of million. The Universal
Esperanto Association has members in more than one d twenty countries.
But it also seems like in some ways the online
(38:37):
spread of the language is both a blessing and a curse.
More people are learning the language, but not necessarily with
the connection to Zamenhoff's ideals of unity and bridge building.
Like back when most people learned Esperanto almost exclusively through
clubs and pen and paper correspondence courses, there were directories
(38:58):
of people who would welcome other Esperantists into their homes.
Those directories still exist, but it's just it's not as
feasible to do something like that when a huge number
of people are learning a language through an app without
necessarily that shared cultural context. The Internet's enthusiasm for Esperanto
also means that resources in Esperanto can weigh out number
(39:21):
resources for other languages that have a lot more speakers.
The Fifth World Esperanto Congress was supposed to be held
in in Montreal, but because of the pandemic, that was
postponed until instead a series of virtual events took place
from June to September. Also December fifteen. L. L. Zamenhoff's
(39:43):
birthday is now Zalmonhoff Day. I enjoyed working on this episode, uh,
even as the tragic parts are really hard to work on. Yeah,
um uh, do you have listener mail in Esperanto for us?
I do this. It's not been Esperanto, but it is
from Caroline. It's about our nineteen eighteen flu episode, and
(40:05):
Caroline says, hello, lovely ladies. I hope you're doing well
and enjoying some lovely spring weather. I'm writing this email
right after the release of the first part of Revisiting
the Flu pandemic. While I understand that there's a lot
to cover there, especially in the overlap of the current pandemic,
I was disappointed, in a little shock that you did
not discuss how both pandemics affect those with chronic illness,
(40:26):
especially in regards to mask mandates. Throughout the episode, I
noted three opportunities for you to do so, where you didn't.
I understand that you had a lot to cover, and
I do not believe this was done maliciously, so I
thought I'd take the time to do so. I could
spend all day discussing how the pandemic has negatively impacted
us with chronic illness, but I wanted to specifically address
mask mandates because this, in my view, is the most
(40:47):
problematic in the social realm. Although I could tell you
did try to be compassionate with this issue, there were
times where it felt like you slipped into stereotyping those
who don't wish to wear masks of selfish ne'er duels,
although there's no denial that this is some the population.
This again completely dismisses situations where people do have very
serious but personal reasons for not wearing a mask. UM.
(41:08):
The remainder of the email talks a lot about Caroline's
own personal medical history, so I'm not going to read
all of it, but thank you for sharing that with me, Caroline. UM. So, first,
I apologize if I made anyone who is chronically ill
or disabled UM feel excluded or talked over or dismissed
(41:29):
in working on that episode. There are some valid reasons
that people have for not wearing masks, and at the
same time, there are also a lot of non disabled
people who are using disability as a shield to do
crap like print out fake Americans with Disabilities Act notices
and like harass store employees and generally make things unsafe
(41:51):
for everyone, and it outrages me, and I didn't feel
like it was something that I could like bring into
the episode without feeling like I was giving uh acceptability
or weight to the people who are doing that. UM.
Because overwhelmingly the disabled and chronically ill people in my
life feel more unsafe because of that type of behavior
(42:16):
of people who are like using disability as a shield
to not wear masks just because they don't want to
do it and want to be jerks to others. UM. Also, Uh,
there is just not a lot of data yet about
disability and chronic illness in the flu pandemic, beyond the
(42:36):
chronic respiratory diseases that came up several times in the episodes,
like tuberculosis. UM. And part of that is because the
nine eighteen flu was happening during the eugenics movement, during
a time when overwhelmingly disabled and chronically ill people were
living in like special homes and special schools or being
(42:59):
cared for at home in a way that they weren't
in the public eye very much. UM also like a
shortcoming within the field of history that's just isn't something
that historians have looked at a whole lot recently, and
the papers that have started to be coming out over
the last decade or so or kind of like, wow,
there's almost nothing about this. UM. The field of disability
(43:20):
studies itself is also really new, so it's like that
field has not had a lot of time to go
back into like the archives, to really pour over that
and create a comprehensive history of how the pandemic affected
people with chronic illnesses and disabilities. So again, UM, I
(43:40):
apologize if there were people. I apologize if the way
I wrote that episode made people feel excluded or anything
like that. I I feel like there's a lot of
complicated stuff with this, So thank you again to Caroline
for sending that note. UM, if you would like to
write to us about the US or any other podcast
(44:01):
or history podcast at i heeart radio dot com. We're
also all over social media at MS in History, and
that's where you'll find our Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest
and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on
the i heeart Radio app and Apple Podcasts and anywhere
else that you get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in
(44:24):
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