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thelinguist.uberflip.com DECEMBER 2016/JANUARY 2017 The Linguist 25 FEATURES decline numerically speaking, Esperanto is still flourishing online, with 230,000 Wikipedia articles and counting. There is even a small world of denaskuloj – native Esperanto speakers from birth. No other language constructed largely by a single individual has ever matched Esperanto in popularity, or seems likely to any time soon. Why Esperanto – and not Lingua Ignota, Volapük, Interlingua, or any of a thousand other constructed languages? As 'conlanger' David Peterson, who invented Dothraki for Game of Thrones, points out in The Art of Language Invention, every consciously created language bears the imprint of its era. Medieval languages for addressing God, like the mystic polymath Hildegard von Bingen's Lingua Ignota, gave way to "philosophical languages" in the 17th and 18th centuries, which sought to encode the structure of all knowledge. (Imagine the Dewey Decimal System as a spoken tongue.) Today the hobbyists of the Language Creation Society, inspired by sci-fi and fantasy but ever more informed about Earth's linguistic diversity, share 'artlangs' online. Esperanto is a product of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an era that saw a rage for constructed languages linked to some kind of cause or hope for social reform. The Eastern European Jewish milieu in which Zamenhof was raised was uniquely hospitable to language planning; he was born just a year after and a few hundred miles away from Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the founder of modern Hebrew. Before the runaway success of Dr Esperanto's International Language, his 1887 opus, now universally known as the Unua Libro ('First Book'), Zamenhof was trying his hand at Zionist activism and Yiddish language reform. For a meagre living, he made eyeglasses for the Warsaw poor. The Unua Libro humbly pitched Esperanto as "an official and commercial dialect", an easy cipher designed to save its speakers time and money. A century before Linux, the language was avowedly open-source: there was a one-year open comment period during which anyone could vote on proposed changes, and Zamenhof declared that "the future of the international language is no longer more in my hands than in the hands of any other friend of this sacred idea". The timing was fortunate, too: Esperanto launched right after the collapse of Volapük, invented in 1879 on divine inspiration by the German Catholic priest Martin Schleyer. Saddled with endless, intricate verb endings, Volapük apparently never transcended its user base of "male, educated, German-speaking Catholics", according to Schor. Esperanto's centre of gravity moved early on to France, but Zamenhof retained at least nominal leadership until his death in 1917, issuing reforms and fighting off a schism with the offshoot language Ido. By then, the Universal Esperanto Association (UEA) and the Akademio de Esperanto were leading the way, managing a perennial rift between those who proclaimed the language's political and ideological neutrality and those who linked it to the interna ideo, "an undefined feeling or hope", in Zamenhof's words, that would eventually lead to "a special and completely defined political-religious program". Core tenets of Zamenhof's little-heeded programme of Hillelism, later called Homaranismo ('Humanity-ism'), were belief in a higher power, individual conscience and moral reciprocity (Rabbi Hillel's 'Golden Rule'). For other, more secular-minded Esperantists, the 'internal idea' was socialism, pacifism or anti-nationalism. Esperanto has always been weak in the United States, though not for lack of trying by its pioneer, the Irish immigrant Richard Geoghegan, a stenographer who, in his spare time, wrote a dictionary and grammar No other language invented largely by a single individual has ever matched Esperanto in popularity FRANJA 'E SPERANTO' 7/8/07. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0; . ZIKO 'E SPERANTO BOOKS AT THE WORLD ESPERANTO CONGRESS, ROTTERDAM2008' CC BY-SA 3.0 WIKIPEDIA