ZAMENHOF - Father of Esperanto by Françoise Niederhausen. Universala Esperanto-Asocio Lazarus Ludovic Zamenhof
Inthe streets of the unhappy town of my birth, savagemen 'with axes and iron bars fell like wild beasts upon
peaceful citizens, whose only crime was that they spoke another language and held another creed than
those savages."The man who Wrote these lines was named Lazarus Ludovic Zamenhof. You may not know his name, but you certainly know his life's work, for Zamenhof was the creator of Esperanto, an international language of communication between peoples. He was born a hundred years ago on December 15, 1859,
in Bialystok, a frontier city near the borders of Lithuania, Poland and Byelorussia, where communities speaking different languages and practising different religions lived together, although not very happily.
Young Zamenhof was deeply affected by He was born a hundred years ago on December 15, 1859,
in Bialystok, a frontier city near the borders of Lithuania, Poland and Byelorussia, where communities speaking different languages and practising different religions lived together, although not very happily.
Young Zamenhof was deeply affected by the prejudices and the antagonisms stirring this minor tower of Babel. Local officials were of the Orthodox faith and spake Russian; the nobility were generally Roman Catholics and spoke Polish; the peasants talked to each other in Lithua nian or Byelorussian, while the Jewish shopkeepers spoke Yiddish and lived in a section apart. Hostile prejudices, diverse languages, customs and religions all pitted the inhabitants of Bialystok against each other. To a sensitive boy belonging to a group which could express itself only in a dead language or in an adopted one, these conflicts seemed very tragic. At a very early age, young Ludovic developed the idea that a common tongue would help to break down at least part of the barriers separating people from one another. This idea haunted him throughout his childhood and adolescence: first in Warsaw where his parents moved in 1873 and where Ludovic attended high school, then in Moscow where he studied medicine, in Vienna where he took a course in opthalmology and in Warsaw again where he set up a practice as an oculist.
Doktoro Esperanto or 'he who hopes'
From his schoolmaster father, he had inherited a gift for languages. He spoke three fluently: Russian, Polish and German, and could read three others freely: Latin, Hebrew and French (to say nothing of Yiddish). He had a more cursory and theoretical know ledge of English, Italian and several other tongues. His knowledge of English and French convinced him that a language could get along without the complicated declensions and conjugations of the Slavonic tongues. A careful study of Russian and German convinced him that a wise choice of suffixes and prefixes could reduce the size of the vocabulary considerably, while French and
German proved the usefulness of the definite article which the Slavonic languages do not have. His work led to the publication in 1887 of a textbook on the "Lingvo Internacia" the international language for which he used the pen-name, Daktoro Esperanto ("he who hopes"). The book, whose publication was financed
by his future father-in-law as a wedding present, explained the main characteristics of the "lingvo": a
vocabulary with its roots drawn mainly from the Romance and Germanic languages; detachable prefixes and suffixes added to these roots and serving for all grammatical distinctions; and a very simple grammar consisting of 16 short rules. The language, moreover, was fully inde pendent and had its own individuality.
In the following years, other textbooks were published as Well as a dictionary and translations into Esperanto. At the same time, the first supporters came on the scene : first in Poland, then in Germany, Bulgaria, Russia, etc. Soon, groups were forming everywhere. In 1894. an important event occurred the support of Leon Tolstoy who wrote in "Posrednik": "After only two hours of study I was able, if not to write Esperanto, at any rate to read it freely." He urged everyone to learn this language "because the sacrifice is so small and the eventual benefits so great that no one should refuse to try it."
A common ground for agreement among men
The movement was growing steadily. In Scandinavia, England, France and elsewhere scholars were becom¬
ing interested in the experiment. In 1905, the first Esperanto Congress was held at Boulogne-sur-Mer in
France. To attend it, Zamenhof and his wife travelled all the way from Warsaw in a third-class railway carriage. Zamenhof was awed and somewhat overwhelmed by his stay in Paris: he was given an official reception at the City Hall and decorated with the Legion of Honour, and he dined on the Eiffel Tower with a group of world famous scholars. But even greater satisfactions were awaiting him at Boulogne. Eight hundred men and women from thirty countries had assembled there and all of them, whether in their official statements or their private conversations, were speaking Esperanto. The "lingvo internacia" had become a reality and no one was more surprised than Zamenhof himself.
The Boulogne congress gave him the opportunity of stressing the moral and social importance of his work:
Esperanto was not an end in itself, but a means of contributing to a better understanding between peoples. It was a step towards the unity of mankind. The following year, he developed this idea at the Esperanto congress in Geneva, stating his conviction that the international language was a means of bringing men
together by breaking down the barriers between them. He exalted the brotherhood of man which seemed to him the only creed acceptable to all peoples and to all faiths.
A 'lingvo internacia'with 80,000 words
He meant to discuss this idea at the tenth Universal Esperanto Congress in Paris when war broke out in 1914. To Zamenhof, this was a terrible blow, but he continued to fight for his ideals. Back in Warsaw in 1915 he drafted a "Letter to Diplomats" in which he emphasized that the main duty of any future peace treaty would be to guarantee to all races and minorities equality and freedom in the countries in which they lived. This was his last public act: he died on April 14, 1917. Zamenhof had foreseen that Esperanto would evolve
and grow like any other living language. From a vocabulary of 904 roots which could be used to form about
10,000 words (1887), it has grown to more than 80,000 words based upon some 7,800 root words. Zamenhof himself contributed greatly to enriching the language, not only by his poems, speeches and articles, but also through his translations into Esperanto of works by Gogol, Shakespeare, Dickens, Molière, Hans Andersen, Goethe, Schiller, Heine and Sholem Aleichem. His version of the Old Testament which he translated in full was published after his death in 1926. Two world wars destroyed many Esperanto libraries and organizations in Europe, but they were unable to stamp out the language and the ideal which inspired Zamenhof. Today, there are several million Esperanto speakers in the world and its literature, both original or translated, amounts to more than 50,000 volumes. There are chairs or. courses in Esperanto in some thirty universities. The language is taught in schools in twenty-two countries, to say nothing of countless evening classes. Twenty radio stations broadcast programmes regularly in the language. "Esperanto," Zamenhof ones said, "knows neither weak nor strong nations, privileged nor inferior peoples... All of us equal on neutral ground, should consider ourselves members of the same human family." To pay tribute tothis great vision, Esperantists from all over the world met in Warsaw last August for their Universal Congress.
Kaj bonvolu legi ankaŭ:
Fonte:O CORREIO DA UNESCO, DEZEMBRO 1959
komenciĝas en Suda Hemisfero, la Somera sezono!
