Fellow thinker, referring to those who both speak Esperanto and partake of its interna ideo Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda, World Non-National Esperanto Association. Headquartered in Paris, it is a major organisation in the left-wing, workers' Esperanto movement
SAT-Amikaro Union des Travailleurs Esperantistes de Langue
Fran^aise, Union of Esperantist French-Speaking Workers. Headquartered in Paris, it is the French- speaking wing of SAT TEJO Tutmonda Esperantista Junulara Organizo, World
Esperanto Youth Organisation, headquartered in Rotterdam
UEA Universala Esperanto-Asocio, Universal Esperanto
Association. Headquartered in Rotterdam, it is the leading organisation in the neutral Esperanto move- ment
List of Figures
Comic strip in English, based on a widely used
exploitable (i.e. an image easy to replicate and edit)
and adapted by young Esperanto speakers, joking
about several parent's reactions towards Esperanto
language learning (Source Facebook page Steve the silly
and vagabond linguist, retrieved September 2017) 5
Esperanto-speaking hosts registered on Pasporta Servo.
As one zooms in, the map shows the precise location
of each host. It is worth noting that the geographical
distribution of Pasporta Servo users does not necessarily
correspond to that of Esperanto speakers (Source
Pasporta Servo's website, retrieved October 2021) 72
Postcard, produced by Raphael Tuck & Sons, in 1922,
in the United Kingdom, praising the rapprochement
of peoples through Esperanto. It reads, in Esperanto:
'Friendly Salutations. Oh, Let us sing a song/ About
the language Esperanto/ By writers and poets/ In
poems and odes' (Source Hector Hodler Library, UEA,
Fig. 1.1
Fig. 3.1
Fig. 4.1
Rotterdam) 105
xxiv List of Figures
Fig. 4.2 Postcard related to the First Workers' Esperantist Congress, which would be held in Paris, in 1914, but never took place due to the First World War. The image, by Ludovic-Rodo Pissarro circa 1914, portrays Esperanto guiding the people's fight against capitalism, the latter being depicted as a vulture (Source Department of Planned Languages, Austrian National Library, Vienna) 107
Fig. 6.1 Poster saying, in Esperanto: 'What are you doing to stop this? Esperantists of the world, put your strength against international fascism' (Source Comissariat de Propaganda de la Generalitat de Catalunya, c.1936. Available at the US Library of Congress, Washington D.C.) 152
Fig. 6.2 Poster in French, encouraging workers of the world
to come together and break down the language barriers that keep them apart (Source SAT-Amikaro, c.1955. Available at the archives of SAT-Amikaro, Paris) 153
Fig. 7.1 Meme in Esperanto (based on a scene from the cartoon Family Guy) that jokingly refers to Noah's Ark. This kind of meme is called object labelling exploitable, as the humour comes from the labels added to the image. In this case, the animals to the left stand for Facebook experts, courses on YouTube, Lernu.net, apps, online courses, 'teach yourself' books and Duolingo, whereas Noah points at the hybrid resulting from their crossbreed ('my language skills') and asks 'What is that?' (Source Facebook group Esperantaj Memeoj, retrieved December 2020) 184
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1
In the Beginning Was the Word
In 2003, the renowned linguist Noam Chomsky was invited to give a series of interviews, in English, at Stony Brook University. In the second part of these Stony Brook Interviews, the linguist Mark Aronoff asked Chomsky why, in his opinion, the increasing interest that linguists once had in 'universal languages' had almost vanished between the early twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries. Referring specifically to Esperanto, a constructed language designed to be used for international communication, the defining part of Chomsky's answer was:
So, now it's understood that Esperanto is not a language. It's just parasitic on other languages. Then comes a question, which is not a linguistic question, but a question of practical utility. Is it more efficient to teach people a system which is parasitic on actual languages, and somewhat simplifies, eliminates some of the details of actual historical languages; or is it more efficient just to have then a whole lot of languages? And I think it's now pretty widely accepted that the latter is better and not hard.
Earlier on the same interview, Chomsky had evinced his miscompre- hension of Esperanto by presenting it as a helter-skelter variation of
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Spanish—which is curious, given that the creator of Esperanto was not familiar with Spanish. Most importantly, Chomsky argues that Esperanto could not be characterised as a 'language' because of its limited number of explicit grammar rules, which requires its speakers to constantly fill in Esperanto's gaps with transfers from one's prior knowledge of other languages. Yet, regardless of Esperanto being deemed by formal linguis- tics a 'language' or not, a loosely estimated two million people worldwide ensure Esperanto's continuous use and survival. Among such Esperanto speakers, a dozen of them meet regularly at a small office in the thir- teenth district of Paris, France, in the headquarters of the left-leaning association SAT-Amikaro.
Every Friday evening, SAT-Amikaro holds a babilrondo, a debate circle where people meet for informal conversations in Esperanto about contemporary politics. I first joined these debates in late September 2016, in my first week living in Paris. The topics discussed in previous weeks included the upcoming French elections, nuclear energy, mental health and linguistic discrimination. By contrast, that Friday's debate was open: each participant was supposed to bring a newspaper or magazine article to present and discuss with the group.
That evening, by 6.30 p.m., sixteen Esperanto speakers had arrived and sat around the long table at SAT-Amikaro, chatting, nibbling on snacks and sipping drinks they had brought. Paul,[1] a retired Professor of Medicine, kicked off the debate by presenting a newspaper article from Le Monde diplomatique about recent scholarly research on what motivates people to smoke and to quit smoking. Commenting on the article, he argued that human beings always do the opposite of what they should do and end up sacrificing important things like their own health. Then, Gilbert shared an article he had received by e-mail from the Union des federalistes europeens. As a member of this association, he often received newsletters supporting European federalism and the strength- ening of the European Union. Highlighting the commonalities between
Esperantos international character and European integration, he enthu- siastically claimed that 'were Zamenhof [Esperantos creator] alive today, he would surely support European federalism!'[2] Unbuttoning the collar of his Post Office staff shirt, Gilbert rushed to add that Esperanto could even play a role in the EU, since an international language built with elements of European languages could underplay nationalisms among EU countries. Yet, other participants of the babilrondo did not seem equally supportive of federalism. Valentin, a retired manual labourer in his late sixties, took off his dark green forage cap, put it on the table with a gesture of dismissal and grumbled that 'no matter how much we change the EU, it will still be a result of capitalism trying to co-opt every social relation into a commercial framework'.