Blog #8 but really Blog #7 by Class Assignments: On the History of Esperanto, the Greatest Failed Conlang

  

  You may be asking yourself, what is Esperanto exactly? Esperanto, created by L.L. Zamenhoff in 1887, comprised mostly of romance languages with a hint of Germanic, Greek with only a dash of Slavic (less than 1%) and he actually spoke most of these languages rather fluently. Esperanto literally means, "The One who Hopes," this was Zamenhoff. He grew up in a very diverse ghetto fulls of different cultures and ideals. Raised Jewish, his language was often claimed to be part of Jewish conspiracy theories, which would even lead Adolf Hitler to silence and or kill anyone who was practicing it or knew it.

    Originally (and kind of still is) its purpose was to be a unifying language for all peoples to speak. It even has a national anthem and a flag which is actually quite catchy and appealing. As a child, growing up among all these peoples, "I was taught that all people were brothers, while outside in the street at every step I felt that there were no people, only Russians, Germans, Poles, Jews and so on. This was always a great torment to my infant mind...so I often said to myself that when I grew up I would certainly destroy this evil." Zamenhoff certainly was quite progressive for his time, and even gained attention from the League of Nations. Unfortunately, for the language itself, being that it was mostly Romance with sprinkles of neighboring languages, there's no real easy way to teach this to someone whose language has a completely different etymology.

Take many of the Asian languages.

When we see the word "information" in another language, there may be a few new characters that represent the sounds in the word. There might be somethings that look like misspellings. the "tion" may become "cion." But we can tell by the root word, "inform" that this has a romantic (linguistical, not emotional) history to it. The Chinese word for information is 信息 which is pronounced /Sheen-shee/ (or something close to that since I'm not a native speaker." So making Esperanto a world language, it would be unfair to other countries that don't have our etymological histories. This would obviously cause some political and racial tensions and would prevent people from accepting the language as their own.

There are however pockets of people all around the world who have gone through the trouble of learning Esperanto, even becoming professors of it, for the sole purpose of communicating and making friends so they can preach progressive narratives that speak of unity, a sympathetic idea.

Personally, I would not attempt to make Esperanto a world language, but I would advise people to attempt to learn it, or any other language in general since it boosts cognitive functions and can open doors for you.