Exploring Esperanto
I am giving myself a crash course in the world's international language.
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My main interests and hobbies have always involved language. I set out to become a polyglot in high school and have at different times reached an advanced level in Japanese, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese while also studying a number of other languages to an elementary or intermediate level.
One language I always avoided was Esperanto, the world’s most successful constructed language. Esperanto was invented in the late 1800s by a polyglot Polish Jew named L.L. Zamenhof, who set out to invent an easy-to-learn international language that could serve as a shared medium of communication for people of different linguistic backgrounds.
Today, English has largely taken over the role of an international language, but that fact gives native English speakers substantial economic and social advantages. One idea behind Esperanto was for it to be used as a shared second language that put everyone on an equal linguistic footing.
I recently decided to take a closer look at Esperanto. After overcoming an initial feeling of embarrassment — studying an invented language felt “nerdy” and admittedly qualified as procrastination — I was intrigued enough to commit to spending some free time on it for a trial period of a month or so.
Within a week, because of my multilingual background and Esperanto’s relative simplicity, I was able to learn the language’s grammar and a few hundred core vocabulary words, which turned out to be enough for a surprisingly tolerable level of reading and listening comprehension. I’ve decided to continue studying it and to attend one or two Zoom Esperanto events next month.
I’ve learned enough to develop some tentative opinions about the language. Here they are:
(1) Esperanto will probably never be widely adopted, but Esperanto is a useful way to meet friendly people from around the world. Studying it gives you a shared interest and shared communication medium with 1–2 million people, most of whom are open to or actively seeking international connections. An illustration of this is the 47-year-old Pasporta Servo program, in which Esperanto speakers open their homes to other Esperantists who are traveling. There are also regular local, national, and international meetings and conferences for Esperanto speakers.
(2) Studying Esperanto promotes transferable skills that make it easier to understand grammar and learn other languages, especially European languages. This is a primary reason to consider teaching the language in schools. (The same reason is often given for teaching Latin and Ancient Greek, but Esperanto is far easier to learn than these languages and, unlike the classical languages, has a community of speakers.)
(3) Esperanto is, as advertised, relatively easy and fun to learn. There are two reasons for this. First, Esperanto has few of the irregular constructions and quirky rules that characterize national languages. Instead, it is highly regular; to take a few examples, all personal pronouns have just one form (e.g., mi can mean either “I” or “me”), and all present tense verbs end in -as (e.g., Mi estas and Vi estas instead of “I am” and “you are”). Second, Esperanto vocabulary is memorably built on root words that can be creatively combined with predictable prefixes and suffixes to build new words. For example, the root word bona (“good”) can become bonega (“great,” because the -eg- suffix amplifies the root word), boni (“to do good,” because the -i suffix creates a verb in the infinitive form), or boneco (“goodness” or “kindness,” because the -ec- suffix indicates an abstract quality).
Here’s a native Esperanto speaker using the language:
If you would like to learn more about the language, here are a few resources:
Background:
Wikipedia, Esperanto
Learning resources:
Tim Owen and Judith Meyer, Complete Esperanto: Learn to read, write, speak and understand Esperanto
David Richardson, Esperanto: Learning and using the international language
Advanced:
Plena Ilustrita Vortaro de Esperanto, the definitive monolingual Esperanto dictionary
For those who do not know me, I am an attorney and educator in Los Angeles who is committed to lifelong learning and growth. If you’d like to receive my new posts by email, please click the button below to subscribe. Subscriptions are free unless you choose to pay: