Mother tongue

[davywavy]

I'm not entirely sure why the door caught my eye. Possibly because it was slightly incongruous, stuck between a branch of Boots and a chain Coffee Shop on a North London street. It had a window in it with a card stuck onto it, and in the "Let's look at stuff because London is an interesting place" frame of mind I try to cultivate I went and looked what it said.
"Esperanto lessons given".
Well, I certainly wasn't expecting that.

The thing about London is that you're forever hearing other tongues in their variety of snap crackle pop and dong bleep urgleberry ways spoken around you and it just becomes part of the background. But Esperanto? The thought there might be a need or even a demand for Esperanto lessons took me by surprise. However, ten seconds on the internet told me that there are an estimated 1,000 "native speakers" of Esperanto worldwide.

If you haven't heard of Esperanto, it's an entirely invented language created in the 1880s with that late 19th-century utopian sort of hope that it could be used to bring all peoples and nations together in a common tongue. Obviously that didn't work out but enough people were taken with the idea that it caught on in a small way. Apparently ten million people have at some point or another had a go at learning the language, and I'm one of them. Back when I discovered Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat (Harrison was an Esperanto enthusiast and the language was spoken by everyone in his created universe) I got an Esperanto dictionary out of the library and spent a week trying to cram it into my head before giving up. I can still remember bits of the tongue; possibly the standout is "fivirino" - a word for a woman of loose morals to which there is no male equivalent, which tells you something of the mindset of the time and place it was created.
Anyway, Esperanto certainly caught on more than other created languages such a Volapuk, which a few years ago had only two fluent speakers in the world. They used to get together and sing Volapuk songs round a piano and wonder why they never met any girls, I expect.

I peered through the window in the door; it revealed a long hallway and a flight of stairs, cluttered and untidy. I considered knocking for a moment out of sheer curiousity, but as it turned out, English, thanks to being the language of international business, travel, and especially the internet, has rendered any hypothetical need for an invented universal language obsolete. But still, I mused as I wandered off down the road. It's nice to know that one corner of Finchley will ever be Esperant.

Comments

[hilary chapman (from livejournal.com)]

No need to knock on the door! The Esperanto Association of Britain is offering a free postal or email course in the international language – marked by a network of voluntary tutors. The free course is suitable for those who would like a quick taster, and gives an overview of the language in twelve bite-sized portions. Once the learner has received the first lesson, they simply return their answers. Then the tutor replies with guidance and the next lesson.

For details of the free course, contact: eab@esperanto-gb.org

Esperanto may not be perfect, but I've used it successfully in Africa, South America and Europe, and it does the job.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Okay, I'm impressed. How the devil did you find this post?

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

Did Harrison ever explain why the entire world would bother operating on Esperanto? I mean, props for everyone in Harrison World for bringing down some pretty big barriers and whatnot, y'know, for chipping pieces off the boring and predictable edifice of human parochialism &c. &c., but it's just... such a weird choice.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Because it was the easiest and most efficient language to learn and so when disparate linguistic groups met each other they just adopted it as the most sensible lingua franca.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

So all the Chinese people just figured that its Romance vocabulary flows very nicely off the tongue? Arabic-speakers decided the rich Slavic phonemes were too elegant to give a miss? Esperanto seems great for overcoming barriers in and around Congress Poland -- which is fair enough, that's where it was put together -- but I'm thinking it might lose some of its appeal on the Mekong Delta.

Then again, Europe has had a bit of a tendency to run places in English, French, Spanish, and the like, and then leave those languages hanging around like abandoned raincoats when the people in khakis and white helmets leave. I could see that helping Esperanto along.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

If you haven't read the Stainless Steel Rat and Deathworld books, I can recommend many (if not quite all of them).

[brian_barker (from livejournal.com)]

Talking of the Mekong Delta, the last World Esperanto Conference was in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Esperanto is more widespread than people imagine. It is now in the top 100 languages, out of 6,800 worldwide according to the CIA World Factbook. It is the 29th most used language in Wikipedia, ahead of Danish and Arabic. It is a language choice of, Skype, Firefox, Ubuntu and Facebook. Now that Google translate recently added this international language to its prestigious list of 64 languages it has ceased to be just a hobby.

Native Esperanto speakers, (people who have used the language from birth), include World Chess Champion Susan Polger, Ulrich Brandenberg the new German Ambassador to Russia and Nobel Laureate Daniel Bovet. Financier George Soros learnt Esperanto as a child.

Esperanto is a living language - see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CwJ9I8q-L0&feature=player_embedded#

[(Anonymous)]

When they do the encaenia at college they have to make up Latin for inventions like "nuclear magnetic resonance."

Does the same thing happen with Esperanto, do we know, or does it just use local words like "email," "gymkhana," "budgerigar" etc where it needs to?

H