remake the social order. Not only were monuments, streets, towns,
and playing cards renamed; so were the seasons, the months, and
the days of the week. Those named for kings—the Louises and Lerois
—took the names of Roman liberators. 6
But whereas in France language was coopted for reason and
revolution, German thinkers of the Counter-Enlightenment regarded
language as an inherited armor against reason’s ruthlessness.
Language, since it evolved in tandem with historical, environmental,
and racial factors, was culturally particular. Yet, as Giambattista
Vico had argued in the New Science of 1725, language was also
universal, insofar as it evolved in all cultures according to universal
patterns. Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) believed that
language shaped the entire worldview of particular cultures; while
Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) held language as the means
by which the Volk would shape its destiny. That language and
culture were utterly enmeshed suggested to Humboldt a pair of
looming dangers: language could not only estrange us from one
another; it could also be used to injure people and damage whatever
they held dear. 7
4. A “Vexed Question of Paternity”
The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the rise of
nationalist language movements in Italy, Hungary, and Poland.
Such projects inspired Zamenhof’s sense that language could be
assigned a moral mission, though, as Garvía has noted, his
interethnic purpose was diametrically opposed to nationalism. 8 In
fact, proponents of these movements of national revival viewed the
notion of an international language with suspicion and distaste. As
the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837) put it, a universal
language would be “the most enslaved, impoverished, timid,
monotonous, uniform, arid and ugly language ever … incapable of
beauty of any type, totally uncongenial to imagination.” 9 In France,
Antoine Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836) warned against the desire for
a universal language, conjuring a jejune, homogeneous intellectual
life centered on an ossified authority. 10 Behind all these misgivings
is the menacing specter of a universal language driven by the
exigencies of imperial power.
By the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Napoleon’s
imperial adventure, having laid new networks of communication
and transportation, had given rise to new international bodies and
protocols for international trade and research. The Encyclopédistes’
efforts to make language more effective and efficient now took root
in France and spread to Germany, Scandinavia, and Italy. Not since
the seventeenth century had so much time and energy been spent on
language building. The first scholarly study of invented languages,
published in Paris in 1903, surveys thirty-eight projects, almost all of
them a posteriori “improvements” on existing European languages.
In the spring of 1879, a night of insomnia gave rise to Volapük,
the first invented language to capture the imagination of thousands;
perhaps tens of thousands. Volapük’s inventor, a German Catholic
priest named Johann Martin Schleyer (1831–1912), claimed he’d
received the language in a vision from God. Schleyer’s claim
notwithstanding, the design of Volapük was anything but divine; in
fact, designed for and embraced by an elite, it was effete, feeble,
and very difficult to master. The first problem was phonetic. Aiming
for a universally pronounceable alphabet, Schleyer changed the
letter r to l, ostensibly to benefit the Chinese, yet it soon emerged
that Japanese speakers had problems pronouncing l. Deformations
of familiar phonemes soon became fodder for satire. In 1887, a
skeptical commentator for the New York Times wrote:
It may startle the reader … to learn that he is a melopel
[American] who is perusing his morning pöp [paper]
unaware of the true state of his case.… He may have come
across the Atlantic from Yulop [Europe] or have smuggled
himself and his pigtail into California after a month’s
voyage from Sinän [China].… In any case, his daduk
[education] is sure to be incomplete, since he is not
proficient in Volapük. 11
But Schleyer’s phonetics were only one problem; another was that
his words were inflected with a myriad of endings. With its endlessly
morphing verbs, whose endings indicated tense (including six
conditional tenses), number, mood, voice, and sometimes gender,
Volapük entered the realm of absurdity. That a single verb might
take 505,440 different forms12 became, for Volapük’s detractors,
proof of its lunacy. As the late Donald Harlow, former president of
the Esperanto League of North America, once put it, the problem
with Volapük was that it had “more verb forms than speakers.” 13
Johann Schleyer, the inventor of Volapük
[Österreichische Nationalbibliothek]
As Garvía has shown, Volapük clubs sprang up within a narrow
demographic of male, educated, German-speaking Catholics, and its
membership never diversified. 14 Attaining any fluency in the
language seems to have been optional; German, not Volapük, was
the lingua franca of the congresses of 1884 and 1887. Within a
decade of its inception, the movement foundered while Schleyer
bickered with reformists in his ersatz academy, contesting the notion
that Volapük might be used in commercial settings. 15 The dissonance
between Schleyer’s account of passively receiving the language from
God and his harshly proprietary behavior did not go unremarked. In
1907, the historian W. J. Clark mused on the debacle as a “vexed
question of paternity”: “This child … was it a son domiciled in its
father’s house…? Or a ward in the guardianship of its chief
promoters? Or an orphan foundling, to be boarded out on the
scattered-home system at the public expense? ”16
5. Lingvo Internacia
Meanwhile, in Warsaw, a young man about to father his own
language was watching the rise and fall of Volapük closely. The son
of emancipated Jews who retained strong ties to the Jewish
community, Ludovik Lazarus Zamenhof hailed from Białystok, 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