Bridge of Words

Meanwhile, in Warsaw, a young man about to father his own language was watching the rise and fall of Volapuk closely. The son of emancipated Jews who retained strong ties to the Jewish community, Ludovik Lazarus Zamenhof hailed from Biaiystok, a "Babel of languages," in which Russians jostled Poles; Poles, Germans; and everyone, Jews, since they made up about 70 percent of the population. Multilingualism was not the preserve of the educated; it was the way one bought eggs, greeted policemen, prayed, and gossiped with coreligionists. At the same time, Zamenhof grew up convinced that linguistic difference lay at the root of interethnic animosity, and before he was out of his teens he had set out to fashion an auxiliary language for peoples crammed together in multiethnic cities, for ethnically diverse nation-states, and for the growing number of organizations designed to modernize commercial relations among countries.

An 1896 letter from Zamenhof to his friend Nikolai Borovko is Esperanto's own Book of Genesis; it tells a story not of making but of unmaking. Like the proverbial Indian wood carver who sculpted elephants by "removing everything that is not elephant," Zamenhof crafted Esperanto by turning language over in his hand and then paring it away to an austere simplicity. In a bid for rigor and economy, he at first tried out a conceptual grid much like that of John Wilkins, denoting concepts by letters and combining them in easily pronounced phonemes. To express the eleven-letter interparoli (to speak one to another), he ventured the two-letter syllable "pa": "Therefore, I simply wrote the mathematical series of the shortest, but easily-pronounced combinations of letters, and to each gave the meaning of a definite word (for example, a, ab, ac, ad,—ba, ca, et cetera)." But unlike Wilkins, Zamenhof tested the scheme on himself and, finding that it made prolific demands on the memory, aborted it.

His watchwords were simplicity and flexibility. He had already rejected the idea of reviving Greek or Latin, convinced that a truly international language had to be neutral, nonethnic, and nonimperial; in other words, a language that did not yet exist. While he was inventing conjugations, he encountered the comparative simplicity of English grammar: "I noticed then that the plenitude of grammatical forms is only a random historical incident, and isn't linguistic necessity."¹⁷ In short order, Zamenhof simplified his grammar-in-progress to a brief document of a few pages. For verbs in the present indicative, he used a single ending: Mi kuras, li kuras— simpler, in fact, than English (I run; he runs)—avoiding Volapuk's overinflection of verbs. There would be no distinction between singular and plural verbs: mi kuras (I run) and ili kuras (they run)— simpler than French (je cours but ils courent). Except in reference to persons, personal pronouns, and professions, there would be no distinction between masculine and feminine subjects.