Inventing a language of peace
Photo by Meizhi Lang on Unsplash
When the French used their veto to vote down a resolution at the 1921 Assembly of the League of Nations, did they unwittingly thwart the world’s best chance to foster world peace and international understanding?
It seems unlikely (and it probably is), but the intention of the resolution was for Esperanto, a constructed language developed in the late 1800s, to be adopted for use in all international relations. It was conceived by Ludwik L Zamenhof as a means to foster harmony between different cultures by creating ‘a common brotherhood’.
Zamenhof grew up speaking Yiddish and Russian, later studying German and French as well as the classical languages Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic. He was born in the city of Białystok, in what is now Eastern Poland. A melting pot of Poles, Germans, Russians and Yiddish-speaking Ashkanazi Jews, Zamenhof found that the disconnect between the different language groups created an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust.
He conceived of Esperanto as a universal secondary language that could offer a common means of communication. He believed that this would, in turn, lead to greater understanding and better relations between people of all ethnic backgrounds. It was deliberately designed to be simple to learn, with a vocabulary that drew on a range of existing languages, including English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Latin, Polish, Russian and Yiddish, but using strictly phonetic spelling and simplified grammatical rules.
Unfortunately, despite these utopian ideals for the language, it was met with parochialism at every turn. The French delegate to the League of Nations feared that Esperanto would usurp French as the common language of diplomacy. Later, Hitler and Stalin would see its use as a direct threat to their regimes, persecuting and even murdering Esperanto speakers. All 3 of Zamenhof’s children (who were also Jewish) died in the Holocaust.
Despite all of this, Esperanto still enjoys significant popularity today, with free courses available on online platforms such as Duolingo. Estimates of just how many people speak the language vary significantly, but credible sources put the figure at around 100,000 (other estimates are as high as 2 million).
Who knows, if that League of Nations vote at the end of the First World War had gone the other way, perhaps we might be enjoying a little more harmony in our world than we do today.
