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 Volapük’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.
Zamenhof collated his lexicon of nine hundred roots mainly from
Romance languages, German, English, and Russian; conjunctions
and particles he culled from Latin and Greek. When in doubt, he
favored Latin roots: “house” was dom-; “tree,” arb-; “night,” nokt-. To
attain wordhood, a root simply donned a final vowel, a sort of team
jersey identifying it as a specific part of speech. Nokt- with an -o
ending joined the noun team: “night.” With an -a ending it joined
the adjective team: nokta, as in “night-hour”; and with an -e ending,
the adverb team: nokte, meaning “by night,” et cetera. It could even
join the ranks of verbs, as in the compound tranokti (to sleep over).
Like Schleyer, Zamenhof relied on a system of affixes for word
building, though he attributed this element to an epiphany he’d had
about commercial signs: the suffix -skaja was used on both a porter’s
lodge and a candy shop. In Esperanto, for instance, the prefix ek-
(begin, or start), added to the verb lerni (to learn), gives us eklerni,
“to begin to learn,” as in Kiam vi eklernis Esperanton? (When did you
start to learn Esperanto?) Suffixes, like cabooses, also extend the
reach of words: the suffix -aĵo (a thing), added to manĝi (to eat),
gives us manĝaĵo (food); the suffix -ejo, manĝejo (dining hall). Some
affixes, taking noun, adjective, or adverb endings, can become free-
standing words: ilo, a tool or device; or male, “on the contrary.”
Strung together, affixes sometimes offer gains in concision, but at
the same time create clunky polysyllabic words. The early poets in
the language regarded the prefix mal, meaning “the opposite of,” as
the verbal equivalent of ankle-weights, and over time many mal-
words—such as malsanulejo, literally, “a place-for-unwell-people”—
have been bested by lithe competitors, such as hospitalo. Yet many
affix clusters have survived, incurring affection and loyalty precisely
because their Esperantic origins are so obvious.
Despite the prestige of Esperantism in the construction of new
words, Zamenhof placed a premium on the internationalism of his
lexicon. A century and a half before digital algorithms emerged to
assess the internationalism of a word, 18 Zamenhof used his own
multilingualism and a stack of dictionaries to accomplish the task.
To combine words from distinct European languages must have
seemed natural, too, to a speaker of Yiddish. It was not Volapük but
Yiddish, a mongrel of Germanic, Semitic, and Slavic words, on which
Zamenhof modeled his international language. (Apart from the
interrogative Nu and the exclamatory Ho ve!, however, there are few
overt borrowings from Yiddish; some speculate that edzino
—“wife”—derives from the Yiddish rebbetzin, a rabbi’s wife.)
What had happened to Yiddish over a millennium, in mass
migrations of Jews from Western to Eastern Europe and back,
Zamenhof would try to recapitulate within his new, international
language. The percentage of Slavic words in Esperanto and Yiddish
is similar (15 percent). But whereas the ratio of Germanic to
Romance words in Yiddish is more than three to one, this
relationship is reversed in Esperanto. Zamenhof had already spent
several years trying to modernize Yiddish, but with Esperanto, he
found another, better way to recast Yiddish as a modern language. It
was as if he wrapped Yiddish in a chrysalis, where its medieval
German metamorphosed into French modernity. When it emerged, it
would have shed forever its ancient Hebraicism. And as we shall see,
it was Esperanto, rather than his romanized Yiddish, that Zamenhof
would offer up as a modern language for emancipated Jews.
Still, the early practice of cobbling words together instead of
borrowing them inoculated the infant language from the antibodies
of the world’s dominant languages. These days, when so-called
“international” words are invariably drawn from English, the
Akademio de Esperanto has rigorously resisted the anglicization of
Esperanto. The Internet, for example, is not interneto but interreto,
using the Esperanto word for “net” (reto); a computer is a komputilo,
using the Esperantic suffix for a tool or device; a website is a retejo,
a “net-place”; and to browse or surf is retumi, which means “to do
something on the net.” Several words are now in use for a flash
drive: memorbastoneto (memory stick), poŝmemorilo (pocket memory
device), memorstango (memory rod), and most simply, storilo
(storage device). And there is another reason for preferring
Esperantic coinages to international borrowings: such coinages do
for Esperanto what idiomatic phrases do for national languages—
turn a language into a sociolect, which fosters community. No
wonder, then, that Esperantists get a charge out of decoding these
clumsy, agglutinative words, such as polvosuĉilo (a “dust sucker,” aka
vacuum cleaner) or scivolemo (“the inclination to want to know,”
aka curiosity), or akvoprenilo (“a device for taking out water,” aka
hydrant). The bulb that flicks on when an Esperantist encounters or
generates an unfamiliar word yields both light and warmth.
What leaves many novices to Esperanto cold, however, is
Zamenhof’s system of correlatives, also known as tabelvortoj (table