In the Land of INVENTED LANGUAGES (14 page)

The second word, weiss, can be an adjective meaning “white,” but here it is the first-person-present form of the verb
wissen
—“to know.”
Gelassen
is an adjective meaning “dispassionate,” but also, as in this sentence, the past participle of
lassen
, “to leave.”
Habe
can be “property” or the first-person-present form of
haben
, “to have.”
Den
is a special form of
der
(the), and
ihn
is a special form of
er
(he, it). You need a lot of special knowledge about German to get this translation right.

But for the Esperanto version, you don't need special knowledge, just the meaning of each piece:

“I don't know where I left the stick; have you not seen it?”

Zamenhof doesn't spend much time explaining the rules of word formation. The lost-stick sentence is the only example for which he provides a translation. He provides other demonstration texts without translation, expecting that the reader will be able to puzzle them out and learn by example. He wanted to show that it was possible to begin using the language with barely any explicit study. He suggested that people test the language by writing to a friend in a foreign land, enclosing a small leaflet with the translations of a few roots and affixes, and leaving it up to the recipient to make sense of it. One of his demonstration texts is an example of such a letter. Give it a try.

The translation:

The translation shows that Zamenhof understood what kind of reaction this little experiment was likely to provoke. However, once the recipient had translated this far, another kind of reaction often set in. If you just tried the translation yourself, perhaps you know what I'm talking about. Are you a secret lover of sentence diagramming? A crossword puzzle aficionado? Have you ever read the dictionary for pleasure? Yeah, you know what I'm talking about. If you are a certain type of language-interested person, decoding an Esperanto letter can be an enjoyable little challenge. Much more enjoyable than reading a screed about the language's virtues.

The letter-writing test helped the language to spread. Small clubs of enthusiasts formed. Zamenhof came out with another textbook, a dictionary, and a translation of
Hamlet
, bringing into the world yet another rendering of the melancholy Dane's soliloquy on existence: “
Ču esti aŭ ne esti,—tiel staras nun la demando
.” The first Esperanto magazine,
La Esperantisto
, was published in 1889 in Germany. The movement attracted some prominent supporters, including Tolstoy, who wrote an essay for
La Esperantisto
on “the value of reason in solving religious problems.” When this resulted in a ban of the magazine in Russia, Tolstoy wrote to the authorities, promising not to contribute anything else to it. His
plea couldn't prevent the magazine's downfall, but others were already rising to take its place.

Meanwhile, there was trouble in Volapükland. Volapük was the project of a German priest named Johann Schleyer, who got the idea to create a universal language directly from God during one sleepless night in 1879.

His system had great success in Germany and soon spread as far as the United States and China. By the end of the 1880s there were over two hundred Volapük societies and clubs in the world and twenty-five Volapük journals. Even people who didn't care to learn it at least knew about it. President Grover Cleveland's wife named her dog Volapük. The craze was big enough to be mocked in local papers such as the
Milwaukee Sentinel:

Within a few years, most of the Volapükists had switched to Esperanto.

Those umlauts, the focus of many a Volapük lampoon, no doubt cost Schleyer a good number of English- and French-speaking customers. Not only did they add a threatening air of foreignness to the appearance of a Volapük text (“
If ätävol-la in Yulop, älilädol-la pükik mödis
”—“If you should travel in Europe you will hear many languages”); they also helped disguise the fact that Volapük was for the most part based on English roots.
Pük
(language), for example, comes from “speak,” but it's hard to tell. It's likewise hard to see the “love” in
löf
, the “smile” in
smül
,
the “proof” in
blöf
, or the “explaining” in
seplänön
. The problem went beyond umlauts, though. Schleyer, in trying to adhere to his principles of easy pronunciation (no “th” sound, minimal use of r, one-syllable roots), turned “friend” into
flen
, “knowledge” into
nol
, and “world” into
vol
. (The word
Volapük
is a compound meaning “world language.”)

And for the childish mind the temptations of Volapük are great. If you think the word
pük
is funny, then you will love how it figures into all kinds of other words related to the concept of language:

Because I have one of those childish minds, I can't help throwing in another example here. “To succeed”?
Plöpön
.

Like Esperanto, Volapük had a system of affixes that extended the meaning of a root in a regular way, but when the prefixes and suffixes piled up on the poor little roots, the roots became even harder to pick out.

Despite all this, people were using it. In 1889, the year
La Esperantisto
was first published, the third international Volapük congress was held in Paris, and the proceedings were entirely in Volapük. The language worked well enough.

The downfall of Volapük lay elsewhere. Some of the Vol-apükists, dissatisfied with this or that detail of the language, began to petition Schleyer to make changes. He adamantly refused,
and when the members of the recently formed Volapük Academy proposed reforms and then denied Schleyer the right to veto them, he left in a huff to form his own academy. The reformists, each with his own idea of how to proceed, published their own colorfully named modifications of Volapük—Nal Bino, Balta, Bopal, Spelin, Dil, Orba—and pretty soon a person who wanted to learn Volapük had no idea which version was worth his or her time. Esperanto, with its growing numbers, started to seem like a better investment. The fourth Volapük conference never happened.

In 1905, 688 people from twenty countries convened in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, for the first international Esperanto congress. They wore the symbol of Esperanto, a green five-pointed star, and so were able to identify each other upon arrival at Paris train stations, where they gathered into conspicuous, animated groups for the trip to the coast. Until then, Esperanto had primarily been a tool of written correspondence. Many of them were speaking it for the first time, excited to see it actually working. A reporter from the
New York Herald
noted that “all appeared to converse with great facility.”

As a gesture of respect to the host country, the congress opened with a polite singing (in French) of the distinctly un-Esperanto-like call to violence of “La Marseillaise.” (“To arms, O citizens! / Form up in serried ranks! / March on, march on, / May their impure blood/Flow in our fields!”) An energetic, tearful singing of the Esperanto anthem, “La espero,” followed (“On the foundation of a neutral language / people understanding each other/will agree to form one great family circle”), and then, after greetings from the mayor and the president of the chamber of
commerce, Zamenhof took the stage to wild cheers and applause. He spoke of invisible, powerful spirits in the air and images of a new future, and he ended with a prayer to a “powerful, incarnate mystery” that “peace be restored to the children of mankind.” The audience stood, waving handkerchiefs and shouting, “
Vivu Zamenhof! Vivu Esperanto
!”

Not everyone was pleased. Some of the intellectual French Esperantists, who had reviewed Zamenhof's speech prior to the congress, had urged him to focus on the practical side of the language, its utility in travel and commerce, its potential in the sharing of scientific knowledge. Sentimental and religious overtones would make their cause look foolish, they argued. They wanted to be taken seriously.

They were also becoming restless about language reforms they thought were necessary. Unlike Schleyer, Zamenhof did not de-clare his language his own property, but the property of its users. Zamenhof had welcomed critiques in the beginning, and he even published a reformed version of Esperanto, incorporating the requested changes, in 1894. But this new version was rejected, in a vote, by the growing community of committed Esperantists who were already using the language as it was. They had been inspired by his message of universal peace, and they saw the requests for changes as disrespectful heresy. The lesson of Volapük had also been learned by many of them—once you start with the reforms, it's hard to stop. From then on, Zamenhof refused to impose changes, even, in 1906, when some reformists offered him 250,000 francs to do so.

That same year, when Zamenhof addressed the second international Esperanto congress in Geneva, he angrily rejected the calls to divorce Esperanto from its ideals, saying, “We want nothing to do with that Esperanto which must serve only commercial
ends and practical utility!” The Schism came in 1907, when a delegation of prestigious university professors, including one chemist who would later win the Nobel Prize, chose to back an anonymously submitted proposal for a revised version of Esperanto called Ido (Offspring). While many of the prominent, well-educated, and practical-minded Esperantists joined the Ido faction, the rest rallied around their betrayed hero. More than thirteen hundred unashamed idealists from forty countries showed up at the 1908 congress in Dresden. They wore green stars and waved green flags, attended Esperanto poetry readings and theatrical performances, sang hymns, and by all accounts had a grand time.

The Idists, meanwhile, focused on the much less enjoyable pursuits of being logical and respectable. The official slogan of the first international Ido congress was “We have come here to work, not to amuse ourselves.” But the congress didn't occur until 1921, by which time most of Ido's momentum had been sapped by infighting about further reforms. Most of the original supporters had by then left to work on their own language projects, which they deemed superior.