Historio de la Esperanto-Movado by Nikola Aleksiev

A Bulgarian Esperantist, Nikola Aleksiev, then in his eighties, expressed his ambitious hopes for the language.

This is a remarkable little book written man an elderly man (born 1909) in a distant corner of Europe. Aleksiev was Bulgaria’s leading Esperantist during the socialist years, and before that a left-wing activist in inter-war Bulgaria. After the change in regime in 1989 his mind remained sharp, and his ability to grasp the realities of US domination in his country is clearly illustrated.

The book begins with a historical overview of the Esperanto movement first internationally, and then in his home country of Bulgaria. The book concludes with two essays; first an analysis of language imperialism (particularly English) in Bulgaria, and second a critique of Mark Fettes essay ‘The future of the European Babylon.’ Aleksiev takes issue with Fettes claim that a generation would be required to introduce Esperanto as a lingua franca in Europe, arguing instead that, if the political will were there, teaching Esperanto in schools across Europe could be accomplished within a few years.

Throughout the book is written in clear, easy-to-understand Esperanto, and demonstrates the potential power of the international language.

ALEKSIEV,Nikola Historio de la Esperanto Movoado Pres-Esperanto, Sofia 1992

Pri Nikola Aleksiev el Vikipedio: Nikola Aleksiev, naskiĝis la 29-an de junio 1909; mortis la 19-an de julio 2002, estis bulgara esperantisto kaj honora membro de UEA kaj MEM. Li estis la unua eksterlandano, kiu ricevis honoran membrecon de ĈEA.

Li estis filo de malriĉa ŝuista familio, li estis kunfondinto kaj sekretario Bulgara Laborista Esperanto-Asocio (fondita en 1930).

Kiel ĵurnalisto kunorganizanta strikojn li pasigis 7 jarojn en karceroj de la faŝisma Bulgario. Post la dua mondmilito li ĉefredaktoris la centran organon de bulgaraj sindikatoj Trud (1946-1952) kaj estis membro de Tutmonda Packonsilantaro.

Li apartenis al plej aktivaj esperantistoj en Bulgario. Li estis la prezidanto de la Loka Kongresa Komitato de la 48-a Universala Kongreso de Esperanto en 1963. De 1964 ĝis 1976 Nikola Aleksiev estis prezidanto de Bulgara Esperanto-Asocio. Li dediĉis multajn fortojn al la komunisma Mondpaca Esperantista Movado (MEM), kies prezidanto li estis. Lingvan majstrecon li pruvis en siaj tradukoj (ekz. Apostolo de Libereco pri bulgara nacia heroo Vasil Levski, Mia vivo de Trifon Ĥristovski k.a.)

Zamenhof: the forgotten philosopher

Ludvik Zamenhof's humanism led to a rejection of nationalism.

Ludvik Zamenhof tends to be known, if at all, as the creator of Esperanto. As an ethical and social philosopher, his humanism is little studied outside the Esperanto community. Zamenhof’s thought had biblical origins. He was influenced by the prophet Hillel the Elder, whose Golden Rule, what is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow, was developed by Zamenhof into a rejection of nationalism and religious intolerance. In their place Zamenhof promoted cosmopolitanism and universal human values. Below I provide a translation of a single passage of Zamenhof’s writing.

“I am totally convinced that every nationalism presents only the greatest unhappiness for humanity, and that the aim of every people should be the creation of a harmonious humanity. It’s true that the nationalism of oppressed people – a natural reaction of self defence – is more excusable than the nationalism of oppressors; but, if the nationalism of the strong is ignoble, the nationalism of the weak is imprudent; yet each reinforces the other and presents a vicious circle of unhappiness from which humanity can never escape unless all of us give up our self-love of the group and try instead to establish ourselves on a wholly neutral basis.”

The original Esperanto was:

“Mi estas profunde konvinkita, ke ĉiu nacionalismo prezentas por la homaro nur plej grandan malfeliĉon, kaj ke la celado de ĉiuj homoj devus esti: krei harmonian homaron. Estas vero, ke la nacionalismo de gentoj premataj — kiel natura sindefenda reago — estas multe pli pardoninda, ol la nacionalismo de gentoj premantaj; sed, se la nacionalismo de fortuloj estas nenobla, la nacionalismo de malfortuloj estas neprudenta; ambaŭ naskas kaj subtenas unu la alian, kaj prezentas eraran rondon de malfeliĉoj, el kiuj la homaro neniam eliros, se ĉiu el ni ne oferos sian grupan memamon kaj ne penos stariĝi sur grundo tute neŭtrala.”

Yiddish, Zionism, Esperanto

Zionism, involving the re-birth of Hebrew, has always has been a chauvinistic and nationalist creed, and only gained ephemeral credibility among progressive people on account of the horrors of the holocaust.

Yiddish, the language of the Ashkenazi proletariat of central and eastern Europe, became the language of internationalism. Ludvik Zamenhof, the founder of Esperanto, in fact constructed his first planned language on a modified Yiddish before using Latin languages as the main basis for Esperanto.

The revival of Yiddish and its culture is to be welcomed both inside and outside Jewish communities.

Esperanto and endangered languages

There is no reason whatsoever to think that the promotion of Esperanto preserves other ‘endangered’ languages. How would the use of Esperanto in Scotland preserve Scottish Gaelic, for instance?

Esperanto is a tool, not an end in itself. Nothing is more daft than slogans like ‘Esperanto brings about peace and friendship.’ People who have learnt Esperanto may support peace and friendship, but Esperanto is one tool among several in that cause. It would be mad to claim ‘cotton is the cause of red flags’ simply because you can make a red flag out of cotton material.

The issue for socialism is: if Esperanto is a tool, how can that tool be used in the service of socialism.

Esperanto: a personal experience

Learning Esperanto teaches you a great deal about language and language politics.

Telling people that you're interested in Esperanto immediately evokes a response ranging from ridicule to pity. In fact, my interest in Esperanto surprised even me. It developed purely as a result of my having time on my hands in a Budapest bookshop café one afternoon. I scanned the selection of Teach Yourself language books, and chose the Esperanto one to sit down to read with my coffee.

Despite my politics degree and my two-decade long experience in teaching English as a foreign language, I knew very little about Esperanto. Just after leaving university, I had met Mark Fettes, an academic linguist and fluent Esperantist, at a dinner party, but had thought the whole Esperanto idea a little off centre. My thinking was, to put it simply, that very few people spoke the language, and for that reason very few people saw any point in learning it, and vice versa. So as Esperanto was doomed as a universal lingua franca, why on Earth should one spend time with such a marginal and eccentric project?

My language learning efforts have always been minimal. At school I had learnt French to O level, and in my first year at university I had taken a further course, but I never acquired more than a basic vocabulary which allowed me to ask the way and buy things in the shops. My German, despite some very unsatisfacotry lessons at school, was largely self-taught. Though basic, it was put to good use in visits to the Federal Republic and the then German Democratic Republic. In 1993 I took up an on-going temporary residence in Hungary and struggled with the Magyar tongue, which in terms of its complexity, or difference from the Indo-European languages I had met so far, made it a learner's nightmare. My final dilettante meddling has been with Slovak. The few phrases I have acquired have proved surprisingly useful in Slovakia and other Slav speaking lands, so the minimal investment has paid off.

So what was it about Esperanto, which turned me from a casual inquirer into an advocate, if not a devotee? Certainly, if I hadn't had an intellectual curiosity about language I wouldn't have read on, but there is an aspect of Esperanto which impresses itself on you immediately: you make meteoric progress, at least compared with any other ethnic language you've learnt. The grammar rules are remarkably simple: no irregular verbs; verb forms remain unchanged irrespective of their subject; plural formation is wholly regular. In addition, the vocabulary is easy to pick up for two reasons. First, the vast majority of the words are drawn from the Romance and Germanic languages; so much of vocabulary (e.g. familio, birdo, hundo, simila) is readily digestible for English speakers. Second, more complicated words are formed by putting together the bits of words (morphemes) to derive new lexis; hospital, for instance, is not-healthy-person-place, (malsanulejo). Summing up then, given the simple grammar and vocabulary, you make more progress with the language in a few hours than you would make with an ethnic language in several weeks.

But what really hit me was something else. After about thirty hours work spread over a couple of months, I was more or less able to read the language. True, one word in twenty had me reaching for the dictionary, but if the subject was familiar even that was not the case. The truth was that I was reading in Esperanto more easily than in any other language I had met so far. And if that were the case for me, a native speaker of English, then the same would be true for other speakers of Romance and Germanic languages. Of course there are some people who argue that Esperanto should not be considered a neutral universal language precisely because of its Romano-Germanic roots. But the point should be made in reply that the vast majority of people in the European Union and the Americas speak Romance or Germanic languages, and of course Esperanto's competitor for world language, English, is itself a Romano-Germanic language

English is without doubt the lingua franca of the age; if a Greek meets an Estonian, the chances are that they either can't communicate, or else they speak English. The power of English owes its origin to two centuries of Anglo-Saxon world economic and political dominance: first the British Empire and then the USA. There is nothing intrinsic to English that makes it best suited for the role of World Language. Yet it has become the world's de facto lingua franca, and I have made my career facilitating that role. So English and Esperanto, the Goliath and the David?

Well, I know as a teacher of English that it takes a Frenchman or a German more than a few months to learn to read English, but I also now know that it takes only that long to learn to read Esperanto. In other words I know that for many purposes English as a lingua franca is quite simply an inefficient fraud kept in place by a self-fulfilling momentum facilitated by history and US political and economic power. Indeed, the reasons why English is dominant, and not say French or Spanish, is widely known; the fact that English is also inefficient, as a lingua franca can only become apparent from knowledge of Esperanto.

I don't want to make the case that Esperanto is kept on the sidelines solely out of fear of the American jackboot. Esperanto remains peripheral rather for the same reasons that Britain decides to continue driving on the left-hand side of the road. Sure, there is a benefit to driving on the right: lower car prices and fewer fatal misunderstandings, but the cost of change is just too great, and the effects too disturbing to too many people. The same reasoning also prevents us adopting a decimal clock.

Esperanto is an efficient tool of communication, but my interest and support for it derives from more than a mere love of a potentially efficient tool. Esperanto has a political history which is both elaborate and colourful. And more than that, it has been entwined over the years with social values which I believe are politically worthwhile.

Dr Ludvik Zamenhof, after more than a decade of preparatory work, published the fundamental grammar and vocabulary of Esperanto in 1887. He saw Esperanto as a solution to the language problem which was so evident in his home town of Bialystok in what is now Poland, but was then part of the Russian Empire. The town was linguistically ghettoised into Russian, Polish, German and Yiddish speaking communities. Zamenhof's solution was simple: invent a neutral, logical and easy to learn language as a lingua franca, and even if you haven't got heaven on earth at least you can have people talking to one another.

Well the idea took off, even if it didn't convince a majority anywhere; and by the early Twentieth Century the number of people who knew Esperanto could be counted in the tens of thousands. What Zamenhof did was to project the cosmopolitan ideal into language. This was not the idea of nationalism (us and our culture above them and theirs), not the now sometimes fashionable idea of multiculturalism (equal respect for each culture and its practices irrespective of its content), but instead the idea of going beyond ethnic and national identities to forge a future based on human understanding and rationalism. How old fashioned such modern thought sounds today, when the only supranational culture is MacDonald's and Coca-Cola.

So Esperanto fitted in to my cosmopolitanism and rationalism. And precisely because of those qualities it found favour with the political left over the twentieth century. The now Paris based organisation SAT (Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda), founded in Prague in 1921, has promoted Esperanto in the ranks of the left for nearly a century. So for me Esperanto nicely resonated with two highly attractive ideologies: liberalism and socialism.

So is that all? Esperanto as a tool of potential efficiency and as a historical comfort blanket for my politics. Well there is a third thing: the language itself.

Esperanto does a strange thing to your brain; its precision and concision simplify the mental leap from the word on the page to the thoughts in the head. Think of an adjective meaning "worth seeing" in English and it's hard, but Esperanto through bringing together two word bits (morphemes) does the task, vidinda (stress on the penultimate syllable). Now think of a noun for a person who is about to fall. In Esperanto we have one word for this falonto. How easy is it to say in English the adjective-noun construction vidinda falonto?

Perhaps, the aesthetic attraction of Esperanto is reserved for the initiated, but I have found it; and I'm sure many who shun political and social statements have nonetheless quietly enjoyed the language merely as a language. So, my conclusion for the language is to see Esperanto as a tool that works, as good politics and as art. So given its virtues, does Esperanto have a successful future?

Well if you judge Esperanto in terms of its success so far in becoming world lingua franca it has been a complete failure. Nobody in the next few years can easily see Esperanto playing a key role in solving any language inter-ethnic problem in the world. In fact, if we look at the claim of Esperanto as becoming the future universal second language of the world, then, in those terms, Esperanto has not even chalked up a one percent success rate. Put bluntly, it has totally failed.

Yet look at the same situation the other way round. Has Esperanto enabled tens of thousands of people to communicate with each other who otherwise wouldn't have been able to? And hasn't it enabled them to communicate on a more neutral basis than would be possible with any ethnic language? If you can agree with me that Esperanto is a noble project, and that greater knowledge and use of the language is worthwhile, then I suggest you invest some time in it. Who knows, you might actually enjoy it!