Esperanto Day

What the day is

Esperanto Day is observed on December 15, the birthday of L. L. Zamenhof, who was born in 1859 and published the language in 1887.

Origin and background

Zamenhof was an ophthalmologist, and he grew up in Bialystok, a town whose population was divided between Polish, Yiddish, German and Russian speakers. He concluded that a great deal of the hostility between those communities came down to their having no shared language, and he set out to supply one that belonged to nobody.

He published under the pen name Doktoro Esperanto, meaning one who hopes, and the pseudonym became the name of the language.

The design is unusually disciplined. The grammar runs to a short set of rules with no exceptions, no irregular verbs and no grammatical gender. Nouns end in o, adjectives in a, adverbs in e, so part of speech is visible on sight. Words are built by assembly rather than memorized separately, with a prefix that reverses meaning doing an enormous amount of work: the word for bad is simply the word for good with that prefix attached. Marking the object of a sentence with a suffix leaves word order largely free.

Its history took a darker turn than its founder intended. Esperantists were persecuted under both Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, the movement being treated as suspiciously internationalist in both. Zamenhof was Jewish, and his three children were murdered in the Holocaust.

The language survived all of it. Estimates of speakers vary widely, but roughly a thousand people are native speakers, having been raised in it by parents who met through the movement, which is a strange distinction for an invented language.

How to take part

• Try a free course. Most people find the first weeks startlingly quick compared with a natural language.
• Learn the reversing prefix first. It roughly doubles your usable vocabulary immediately.
• Read about Zamenhof's Bialystok, which explains the entire project.
• Look into the Esperantist hospitality network, which lets speakers stay with each other worldwide.
• Listen to spoken Esperanto before judging it. It sounds far less artificial aloud.