My recent visit to Bialystok opened to all sorts of Ludwig Zamenhof histories and artifacts, being the Esperanto founder’s birthplace. Hard to believe that even a hundred years back Bialystok was the enclave of Poles, Belorussians, Lithuanians, Tartars, Jews. The city, at least through the revolution, bore Russian print on announcements and storefronts.
That mishmash, that clash of language and culture propelled Zamenhov to develop Esperanto over the course of many years; and apparently more from frustration and social inequity than any other sentiment.
Several years back the artificial language held my academic curiosity, among others of the likes. But I care for it no longer for what I suspect are similar reasons that it never gained too widespread a prominence.
There isn’t culture nor history to Esperanto save for in and of itself. And that was evidently part of the point: to eradicate those constraints and establish a neutral, unprejudiced lingua franca.
But I crave the history, the culture, the literature and music traditions, and all that pitiful prejudice. I desire all that baggage of any language I choose to adapt.
Widely spoken or not, whether it remains in literature or the hearts of poets, I’m far more intrigued by the non-artificiality of Hebrew, Yiddish, Arabic, French, English, Latin, Hindi, Sanskrit to name a few.
The older, the more cultural byproduct to acquire through the earlier ancestor: provided not the heavy tranformation of something like English (from the Anglo-Saxon/Old Norse into the Medieval Franco-English), but the natural evolution of Greek, Arabic, Old Slavic, Persian, Proto Vulgar Latin, etc. That is to say, we can sufficiently interpret the ancient ancestrors of languges we speak to reconcile the gaps with modest effort.
Tradition brings us the Arabian Nights, the Biblical and Evangelical canons, the Kabbalah and the theological commentaries; the Greek and Latin and Judeo-Arab philosophers, histories, plays and satires; the Eddas, the Scalds, the Sagas and Beowulf; the Ramayana and Mahabharata; Yiddish poetry and theatre; Old-Slavic religious codex; Le Roman de la Rose, La Divina Commedia, Cid, Ariosto, Boccaccio …
I’ll stop before this spawns a lengthy, all-encompassing catalog, for my notion of all-encompassing through my twisted, Western monocular lens. I’ll stop before this turns into a satire.
And Esperanto? One hundred and twenty years of tradition have brought us translations, some original creative works and even music. Though I’ve not personally encountered it in practice save for the Zamenhov museum in Bialystok, which featured, interestingly, not Polish but Esperanto-language descriptions beyond the English.
Questions, comments? Connect.