Esperanto (help·info) is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language in the world.^[2]. Its name derives from Doktoro Esperanto, the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof published the first book detailing Esperanto, the Unua Libro, in 1887. The word esperanto means 'one who hopes' in the language itself. Zamenhof's goal was to create an easy and flexible language that would serve as a universal second language to foster peace and international understanding.

Esperanto has had continuous usage by a community estimated at between 100,000 and 2 million speakers for over a century, and approximately one thousand native speakers.^[3] However, no country has adopted the language officially. Today, Esperanto is employed in world travel, correspondence, cultural exchange, conventions, literature, language instruction, television,^[4] and radio broadcasting.^[5] Also, there is an Esperanto Wikipedia that contains over 100,000 articles as of June 2008.

There is evidence that learning Esperanto may provide a good foundation for learning languages in general. Some state education systems offer basic instruction and elective courses in Esperanto.^{[citation needed]} Esperanto is also the language of instruction in one university, the Akademio Internacia de la Sciencoj in San Marino^[6].

Esperanto
Flag of Esperanto:
Created by:	L. L. Zamenhof	1887
Setting and usage:	International auxiliary language
Total speakers:	Native: 200 to 2000 (1996, est.);[1] Fluent speakers: est. 100,000 to 2 million
Category (purpose):	constructed language  International auxiliary language   Esperanto
Category (sources):	Vocabulary from Romance and Germanic languages; phonology from Slavic languages
Regulated by:	Akademio de Esperanto
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	eo
ISO 639-2:	epo
ISO 639-3:	epo
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

[edit] History

Main article: History of Esperanto

The first Esperanto book by L. L. Zamenhof

Esperanto was developed in the late 1870s and early 1880s by Dr. Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof, a Jewish ophthalmologist from Bialystok, a city now in Poland and previously in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but at the time part of the Russian Empire. According to Zamenhof, he created this language to foster harmony between people from different countries. His feelings and the situation in Bialystok may be gleaned from an extract from his famous letter to Nikolai Borovko:^[7]

«The place where I was born and spent my childhood gave direction to all my future struggles. In Bialystok the inhabitants were divided into four distinct elements: Russians, Poles, Germans and Jews; each of these spoke their own language and looked on all the others as enemies. In such a town a sensitive nature feels more acutely than elsewhere the misery caused by language division and sees at every step that the diversity of languages is the first, or at least the most influential, basis for the separation of the human family into groups of enemies. I was brought up as an idealist; I was taught that all people were brothers, while outside in the street at every step I felt that there were no people, only Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews and so on. This was always a great torment to my infant mind, although many people may smile at such an 'anguish for the world' in a child. Since at that time I thought that 'grown-ups' were omnipotent, so I often said to myself that when I grew up I would certainly destroy this evil.»

—L. L. Zamenhof, in a letter to one N. Borovko, ca. 1895

After some ten years of development, which Zamenhof spent translating literature into Esperanto as well as writing original prose and verse, the first book of Esperanto grammar was published in Warsaw in July 1887. The number of speakers grew rapidly over the next few decades, at first primarily in the Russian empire and Eastern Europe, then in Western Europe, the Americas, China, and Japan. In the early years, speakers of Esperanto kept in contact primarily through correspondence and periodicals, but in 1905 the first world congress of Esperanto speakers was held in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France. Since then world congresses have been held in different countries every year, except during the two World Wars. Since the Second World War, they have been attended by an average of over 2,000 and up to 6,000 people.

[edit] Relation to 20th-century totalitarianism

As a potential vehicle for international understanding, Esperanto attracted the suspicion of many totalitarian states. The situation was especially pronounced in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin.

In Germany, there was additional motivation to persecute Esperanto because Zamenhof was Jewish. In his work, Mein Kampf, Hitler mentioned Esperanto as an example of a language that would be used by an International Jewish Conspiracy once they achieved world domination.^[8] Esperantists were executed during the Holocaust, with Zamenhof's family in particular singled out for execution.^[9]

In the early years of the Soviet Union, Esperanto was given a measure of government support, and an officially recognized Soviet Esperanto Association came into being.^[10] However, in 1937, Stalin reversed this policy. He denounced Esperanto as "the language of spies" and had Esperantists exiled or executed. The use of Esperanto was effectively banned until 1956.^[10]

[edit] Official use

Esperanto has never been an official language of any recognized country. However, there were plans at the beginning of the 20th century to establish Neutral Moresnet as the world's first Esperanto state. In China, there was talk in some circles after the 1911 Xinhai Revolution about officially replacing Chinese with Esperanto as a means to dramatically bring the country into the twentieth century, though this policy proved untenable.^{[citation needed]} In the summer of 1924, the American Radio Relay League adopted Esperanto as its official international auxiliary language, and hoped that the language would be used by radio amateurs in international communications, but its actual use for radio communications was negligible. In addition, the self-proclaimed artificial island micronation of Rose Island used Esperanto as its official language in 1968. Esperanto is the working language of several non-profit international organizations such as the Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda, but most others are specifically Esperanto organizations. The largest of these, the World Esperanto Association, has an official consultative relationship with the United Nations and UNESCO. The U.S. Army has published military phrasebooks in Esperanto,^[11] to be used in wargames by mock enemy forces. Esperanto is also the first language of teaching and administration of the International Academy of Sciences San Marino, which is sometimes called an "Esperanto University".

[edit] Linguistic properties

[edit] Classification

As a constructed language, Esperanto is not genealogically related to any ethnic language. It has been described as "a language lexically predominantly Romanic, morphologically intensively agglutinative, and to a certain degree isolating in character".^[12] The phonology, grammar, vocabulary, and semantics are based on the western Indo-European languages. The phonemic inventory is essentially Slavic, as is much of the semantics, while the vocabulary derives primarily from the Romance languages, with a lesser contribution from the Germanic languages. Pragmatics and other aspects of the language not specified by Zamenhof's original documents were influenced by the native languages of early speakers, primarily Russian, Polish, German, and French.

Typologically, Esperanto has prepositions and a pragmatic word order that by default is Subject Verb Object, but it is not compulsory, so the word order is quite free. Also, the Adjectives can be freely placed before or after the Noun, according to the speaker's wish and origin (statistically, the most used word order is Adjective Noun). New words are formed through extensive prefixing and suffixing.

[edit] Writing system

Main article: Esperanto orthography

Esperanto is written with a modified version of the Latin alphabet, including six letters with diacritics: ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ and ŭ (that is, c, g, h, j, s circumflex, and u breve). The alphabet does not include the letters q, w, x, or y except in unassimilated foreign names.

The 28-letter alphabet is:

All letters are pronounced approximately as in the IPA, with the exception of c and the letters with diacritics:

[edit] Problems in writing diacritic letters, and their solutions

The diacritic letters give problems in print and in computer writing (it is not always possible or easy to set the computer keyboard to write them avoiding copy-paste). This problem is worse for old systems that do not use Unicode (where diacritic letters are included) and cannot display them.

To solve this problem two ASCII-compatible writing conventions are in use. These substitute digraphs for the accented letters. The original "h-convention" (ch, gh, hh, jh, sh, u) is based on English 'ch' and 'sh', while a more recent "x-convention" (cx, gx, hx, jx, sx, ux) is useful for alphabetic word sorting on a computer (cx comes correctly after cu, sx after sv, etc.) as well as for simple conversion back into the standard orthography.

If the system supports Unicode, a more complete and comfortable solution is to use some software that can automatically substitute x- or h-conventions with traditional diacritic letters. One example is Ek! (Esperanta Klavaro) for Microsoft Windows. In the Linux Operating System it is also possible to have a complete localization in Esperanto, like in other national languages.

[edit] Phonology

Main article: Esperanto phonology

(For help with the phonetic symbols, see Help:IPA)

Esperanto has 22 consonants, 5 vowels, and two semivowels, which combine with the vowels to form 6 diphthongs. (The consonant /j/ and semivowel /i̯/ are both written <j>.) Tone is not used to distinguish meanings of words. Stress is always on the penultimate vowel, unless a final vowel o is elided, a practice which occurs mostly in poetry. For example, familio "family" is stressed IPA: [fa.mi.ˈli.o], but when found without the final o, famili’, the stress does not shift: [fa.mi.ˈli].