December 31, 2009
The amazing story of how Esperanto came to be
Esther Schor in The New Republic:
To Esperantists, the man who created the language-movement is a household god, a patron saint. As for non-Esperantists who are aware of Zamenhof, he’s too unthreatening nowadays to be derided as a quixotic dreamer. Most regard him with mild condescension as a MittelEuropean, Jewish Geppetto, hammering together his little toy language in the hope that it might someday become real.
But inside this Geppetto was not only the dream of a new language, but also of something far stranger and unimagined: a new people altogether, and neither the Jews nor the Esperantists were the people he envisioned. Project by project, credo by credo, member by member, he tried to build a new people, a Geppetto with the audacity of Frankenstein.
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 05:49 AM | Permalink
Comments
Thanks for pointing us to this fair and well-resaearched article.
The point needs to be made that Esperanto is not just for idealists. Indeed, the language has some remarkable practical benefits.
Personally, I’ve made friends around the world through Esperanto that I would never have been able to communicate with otherwise. And then there’s the Pasporta Servo, which provides free lodging and local information to Esperanto-speaking travellers in over 90 countries. In the past few years I have had guided tours of Berlin and Milan and Douala in Cameroon in the planned language. I have discussed philosophy with a Slovene poet, humour on television with a Bulgarian TV producer. I’ve discussed what life was like in East Berlin before the wall came down, how to cook perfect spaghetti, the advantages and disadvantages of monarchy, and so on.
Posted by: Bill Chapman | Dec 31, 2009 8:51:58 AM
Good luck to Esperanto :)
It's a pity that many people do not know that it has become a living language.
Your readers may be interested in http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8837438938991452670
A glimpse of Esperanto can be seen at http://www.lernu.net
Posted by: Brian Barker | Jan 3, 2010 4:38:15 AM
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