Esperando Esperanto

When I was about oh, eight years old, I remember complaining about some grammar rule being stupid. My mom laughed and said, "You should learn Esperanto, then." She explained that it was a created language meant to be simple and easy to learn. I thought that was a neat idea, and forgot all about it for twelve more years.

I must have been about twenty when I finally had a computer with internet access in my apartment. Esperanto was not the first thing I thought to research but somehow, it did surface pretty quickly. I was thrilled by what I found. There was an abundance of information out there, a lot more than I expected. I found Esperanto translations of famous literary works, I found original Esperanto works (tons of poetry) and many websites that offered to teach the language. I quickly signed up with one and was assigned a tutor. The learning was fun and rewarding.

I am very passionate about this topic. When I bring it up, people usually get very defensive and negative. I have heard it all; we, Esperantists, have heard it all before. "It's useless." "Nobody speaks it." "English is the international language." I could go on and on. Now, I do think that Esperanto is unlikely to catch on as an international language ever, for a number of reasons which I will not cover here. I think it is doomed to hobby status for travelers and idealists, but this article is not about the advocacy of a language.

This article is about communication. What makes Esperanto so easy is its agglutinative structure. Words are constructed from roots, prefixes, suffixes and endings. By mixing and matching these, one can easily and rapidly construct words that express a very specific idea that is immediately understood by any other speaker of the language, even if they have never heard the word before. This is extremely liberating. After experiencing the freedom of this language, I realized that for years I had been bending my brain to fit my ideas in the narrow confines of my complex and outdated mother tongue. Language is a tool belt to help share ideas with others. Isn't it nice when that hammer you need is right there instead of having to figure out how to nail down a plank with a saw or a screwdriver?

I speak French and English fluently and use both daily, in my work and personal life alike. Words come to me in either language, whichever corresponds better with the concept I am trying to express, for there are often no precise equivalent in another language, or simply the one more readily available for the snatching at the time. This bilingual speech irritates some (mostly French) purists. I am often scolded, corrected, stared at or made fun of for using two languages in the same sentence. Could I constrain myself to stick with one? Absolutely, but why should I choose the hard way if the easy way does the job, and arguably a better one at that? I understand the importance mastering a language, especially if intending to use it as art in written form. Sometimes, one needs to communicate artfully, but often, one just needs to communicate at all.

Regularly my coworkers make up words. They take a noun, for example, and convert it to the adverb they needed, with a slight frown on their face, suspecting that the result is perhaps not in the dictionary. Their listeners do not react, because they understood perfectly. This happens daily. We all do it, in fact, because it is a natural pathway for the brain. Take bits you know and put them together to build something new that everyone who knows the bits will also decode easily. Isn't that what an efficient language should be like? What they are doing so effortlessly is applying the Esperanto concept to another language, and it amuses me greatly to see it done daily by the biggest of Esperanto detractors.

I love languages and will keep learning more of them, but the foolish idealist in me will always be there lurking, secretly waiting for the rise of Esperanto.