The Linguist is a languages magazine for professional linguists, translators, interpreters, language professionals, language teachers, trainers, students and academics with articles on translation, interpreting, business, government, technology
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26 The Linguist Vol/55 No/6 2016 www.ciol.org.uk FEATURES of the Aleut language. Carrying the lingvo in the other direction was Vasili Eroshenko, a Ukrainian violinist and anarchist, blind from the age of four, who propagandised for Esperanto in Tokyo and Beijing, where he lived with the famous Chinese writer Lu Xun. Deported on multiple occasions, Eroshenko eventually turned up in the Soviet Union, where he taught Communist operatives and studied the Chukchi of Siberia, publishing the results in an Esperanto Braille journal. (One advantage of an intentional linguistic community is that the ratio of characters to speakers tends to be high.) Eroshenko survived, but thousands of other Esperantists were purged under Stalin: bitter testimony to the strength of the language on the left (though there was also, briefly, a handful of Esperantists aligned with the Nazis). Officially, Esperanto remained a language of non- alignment, but the Cold War split the granda rondo familia in two. For many on the Soviet side, the language became a bridge to the wider world – quite literally for denaskulo investment whiz George Soros, who defected to the West while attending a 1947 Esperanto congress in Bern. Fidel Castro hosted a garden party for Esperantists at the Havana Congress of 1990. In recent decades, estimates Schor, China may have funded Esperanto more generously than any other nation, publishing the glossy periodical El Popola Ĉinio (From the People's China). UEA membership plummeted after 1989, once hard-up "Eastern Europeans had neither the motivation nor the leisure to pursue Esperanto," making way for the full-scale expansion of English across the former Soviet Union. Today, Esperanto is as much a movable feast as a movement, a cheerful diaspora that lives on at characterful classes and congresses where diehards for the interna ideo mingle with fearsome polyglots and hardcore language nerds. A language spoken by a mobile subculture of (mostly) middle-class Westerners may have a better chance at survival than most of the world's natural languages, half of which are endangered and have fewer than 10,000 speakers. The greatest danger Esperanto faces is that a language born out of a hope for universal understanding could end up as just another hobby, cultivated in convention halls. For a would-be international language, the paradoxical strength of Esperanto lies in its particular identity and idealism. Born in an age of nationalisms, it sometimes seems like a language in search of a country. There's no army, but Esperanto has many of the other trappings of a nation state: a flag, an anthem, a literature with its own rigorous poetics, and even places of pilgrimage like Zamenhof's Bialystok and an Esperanto-speaking farm- school in the Brazilian Amazon. In 1996, the UEA pledged itself to support seven core objectives: democracy, global FOLLOWING THE DREAM A sign outside the Malta Esperanto Society (below); and (bottom) Catholic mass given in Esperanto in Cuba education, effective education, multilingualism, language rights, language diversity and human emancipation. Its grammar may have a geeky appeal, but plainly humanism, internationalism and love of language are Esperanto's bedrock. In what may be the most dramatic reinvention of all, Esperanto's granda rondo familia ('great family circle') is returning in a roundabout way to the Jewish roots it once fought to transcend, notably at the first World Esperanto Congress held in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, in 1905. As the dream of becoming the world's language becomes increasingly remote, many Esperantists are embracing the status of "self-elected diasporic minority", proclaiming themselves speakers of a language just as worthy and particular as any other. Bridge of Words is a guide to this modern-day diaspora, from a participant- observer attuned to the Jewish dialectic of universalism and particularism. (Schor is a scholar of Jewish literature at Princeton and the author of a biography of the American poet, and proto-Zionist, Emma Lazarus.) "I'll confess that at Esperanto gatherings, I sometimes feel that I'm among meta-Jews," she writes. "After all, Esperanto was invented by a Jew who renounced peoplehood, but couldn't imagine a world without it." In an age of mass linguistic extinction, Esperanto is an unlikely point of light, a rare example of a language community that relies less on transmission from parents to children than on the passion of self-selecting adults concerned explicitly with communication and justice. If English is an expanding empire, Esperanto is a quirky and fractious co-op, still hanging on a century after its creation. For those who keep faith with Zamenhof's dream, globalisation without empire remains an animating possibility. "Nostalgia for world culture", as the poet Osip Mandelstam called it, is still an idea with a future. This article was first published in the LA Review of Books. MAREK BLAHUŠ 'M ASS IN ESPERANTO DURING THE 95 TH WORLD CONGRESS OF ESPERANTO IN HAVANA' CC BY-SA 3.0; MALTA ESPERANTOSOCIETO'ALTO MALTÉS' 3/5/08 (CC BY 2.0)