by Mike Gray
And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. …. And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon all the face of the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel [“confusion”]; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
Whether you consider this passage a charming fairy tale or a literal account, the fact remains that the human race is blessed—or, some would say, afflicted—with over 3,000 languages and dialects.
It’s a sad commentary on human nature that differences in speech have long been an excuse for discrimination. One idealistic man thought he might help cure prejudice through language, as a Wikipedia article explains:
Esperanto was created in the late 1870s and early 1880s by Dr. Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof, a Polish-Jewish ophthalmologist from Bialystok, at the time part of the Russian Empire. According to Zamenhof, he created this language to foster harmony between people from different countries.
But advocates of total government usually frown upon attempts “to foster harmony between people from different countries”:
As a potential vehicle for international understanding, Esperanto attracted the suspicion of many totalitarian states. The situation was especially pronounced in Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin.
In Germany, there was additional motivation to persecute Esperanto because Zamenhof was Jewish. In his work, Mein Kampf, Hitler mentioned Esperanto as an example of a language that would be used by an International Jewish Conspiracy once they achieved world domination. Esperantists were killed during the Holocaust, with Zamenhof’s family in particular singled out for murder.
In the early years of the Soviet Union, Esperanto was given a measure of government support, and an officially recognized Soviet Esperanto Association came into being. However, in 1937, Stalin reversed this policy. He denounced Esperanto as “the language of spies” and had Esperantists exiled or executed. The use of Esperanto was effectively banned until 1956.
After the Spanish Civil War, Francoist Spain persecuted the Anarchists and Catalan nationalists among which Esperanto was extended but in the 1950s, the Esperanto movement was tolerated again.
It’s not surprising that the United Nations (UNESCO) officially recognized it in 1954; so far, though, no sovereign nation claims it as its official language. There has been a feeble push to make Esperanto the lingua franca (there’s a historical relic) of the European Union.
Since human beings prefer to group themselves tribally—that is, ethnically—advocates of Esperanto have a major hurdle to leap in any push to make it universal:
As a constructed language, Esperanto is not genealogically related to any ethnic language. It has been described as “a language lexically predominantly Romanic, morphologically intensively agglutinative, and to a certain degree isolating in character.” The phonology, grammar, vocabulary, and semantics are based on the western Indo-European languages. The phonemic inventory is essentially Slavic, as is much of the semantics, while the vocabulary derives primarily from the Romance languages, with a lesser contribution from the Germanic languages. Pragmatics and other aspects of the language not specified by Zamenhof’s original documents were influenced by the native languages of early speakers, primarily Russian, Polish, German, and French.
Getting more than a few Asians, for instance, comfortable with thinking in Indo-European linguistic patterns just might be impossible—East is East, and West is West, and so on—but Esperanto has made gains in Eastern Asia: China, Korea, Japan, and Asiatic Iran; so the jury’s still out on that one.
It may surprise you to learn that Esperanto has appeared, at least in the background, in several popular movies:
Esperanto has been used in a number of films and novels. Typically, this is done either to add the exotic flavour of a foreign language without representing any particular ethnicity, or to avoid going to the trouble of inventing a new language. The Charlie Chaplin film The Great Dictator (1940) showed Jewish ghetto shop signs in Esperanto, to create the atmosphere of some ‘foreign’ East European country without referencing any particular East European language. Road to Singapore (also 1940) has a song in Esperanto.
Two full-length feature films have been produced with dialogue entirely in Esperanto: Angoroj, in 1964, and Incubus, a 1965 B-movie horror film. Canadian actor William Shatner learned Esperanto to a limited level so that he could star in Incubus, although Esperantists have stated that he speaks the language with a French accent, something he may have picked up while studying at McGill University.
In Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) shop and road signs in Esperanto appear in many background scenes.
…. A number of “mainstream” films in national languages have used Esperanto in some way, such as Gattaca (1997), in which Esperanto can be overheard on the public address system.
…. In the British comedy Red Dwarf, Arnold Rimmer is seen attempting to learn Esperanto in a number of early episodes, including Kryten. In the first season, signs on the titular spacecraft are in both English and Esperanto. Esperanto is used as the universal language in the far future of Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat and Deathworld stories.
…. In the Michael Chabon novel The Yiddish Policeman’s Union the main character lives in the Hotel Zamenhof. All of the signs in the hotel are written in Esperanto.
Some of you may be wondering what a Babel fish is; Wikipedia explicates:
[As one of the species encountered in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy] the Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and is a universal translator which simultaneously translates from one spoken language to another. It takes the brainwaves of the other body and what they are thinking, then transmits the thoughts to the speech centers of the host’s brain, [and] the speech heard by the ear decodes the brainwave matrix. When inserted into the ear, its nutrition processes convert sound waves into brain waves [as excretions], neatly crossing the language divide between any species you should happen to meet whilst traveling in space. Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
As long as English enjoys its international popularity, thanks largely to Americans exporting their pop culture through movies, music, and TV, Esperanto will have to settle for being a contender in any drive to lift the curse—or was that the blessing—of Babel.
In the meantime: ?is revido.
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Resources:
The Wikipedia article on Esperanto; follow the links to other Wikipedia entries.
The Wikipedia article on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Available on Amazon.com:
– Incubus –
– Gattaca –
– Red Dwarf –
– Deathworld –
– The Yiddish Policeman’s Union –
– The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – TV series and movie.
