3 With the Holocaust, this situation was aggravated due to Zamenhofs Jewish origin. Hitler himself alludes to it (1939: 240), depicting the language as part of a world domination plan designed by the Jews. As pointed out by Humphrey Tonkin (2011: 162), 'Hitler was not entirely
I usually have an idea based on what we sold in previous years, but it also varies a lot [...]. It's always like a wheel of fortune, we never know what
I was facing a similar issue. When I helped Andrei in Rotterdam, we were helping make the Esperanto association function as a hub from which many kinds of movement began to gain relevance for Esperanto speakers, as books, leaflets, magazines, people, ideas and information, among other things, were being set in motion. While I tried to make sense of this circulation, draw networks and identify mediators and technologies, Andrei and I were not only mapping out connections. Rather, we were ourselves connecting actors by making things circulate. In this way, my methodological endeavour of tracing the use of Esperanto turned out to mean playing a central role in the continuous building of this speech community across national borders.
[1] All the personal names in this book are pseudonyms in order to preserve the identity of my interlocutors. These pseudonyms are based on popular names according to my interlocutors' nationality, age and sex. The exceptions are historical and public figures, to which I refer by name and surname.
[2] Unless otherwise indicated, the conversations referred to concern linguistic exchanges origi- nally carried out in Esperanto translated into English by myself. Throughout the book, direct transcriptions and quotes that were originally in a language other than Esperanto will be indicated.
[3] Esperanto has been comprehensively presented in both descriptive and prescriptive grammars. For my purposes here, I only approach its core linguistic features, partly based on Wells (2006).
[4] Such claims of internationality are frequently questioned by those who argue that Esperanto is not equidistant from all existing languages (Van Parijs 2011: 40—42) and that its European typology makes it less accessible to speakers of non-European languages (see Parkvall 2010). It is worth keeping in mind that Esperanto was created in a specific place and time and Zamenhof had more access to European languages than to any others, which accounts for the European weight in Esperanto's phonology, grammar and vocabulary.
[5] The 'from-birth person', as in de 'from', nask 'birth', u/ 'person', o noun'.
[6] Sign languages are excluded from this principle.
[7] Such an approach was suggested by Helge Jordheim's discussion (2014) on synchronisation and the multiplicity of regimes of temporal reasoning, and was further developed by the same author's latest work (2018).
[8] His name was Eugene Adam, and Lanti (a variation of l'anti, the against-person, in French) his pseudonym (Lins 2016: 168).
[9] The hostility Esperanto suffered from totalitarian and dictatorial regimes went beyond the European continent. Esperantists were seen as subversive even in China, Korea, Taiwan, Japan and Brazil (Lins 2016: 44-46, 72-73, 144-145; Fians 2017: 38-39). It is interesting to note that, in Korea, the teaching of Esperanto and of the Korean language was forbidden by the Japanese government in the same year, 1937.
wrong when, in Mein Kampf, he described Esperanto as a language of Jews and communists', since 'the number of Jews and leftists associated with it, particularly in the inter-war years, was disproportionately high'.
[11] In the 1920s and 1930s, SAT's membership was largely affected by a dispute between SAT and the Sovetlanda Esperantista Unio (SEU, Soviet Esperantist Union) (SAT 1953; Lins 2016). Similarly, the neutral movement saw a split between UEA and the Internacia Esperanto-Ligo (IEL, International Esperanto League) in 1936, though IEL reunited with UEA eleven years later.
[12] Regarding East Asia, Ulrich Lins (2008) and Ian Rapley (2013a) illustrate how the possibility of engaging with cross-border networks and the idea of resisting colonisation through moderni- sation were key for the promotion of Esperanto in China and Japan. At present, connections with internationalism elicit some resistance to this language in certain Middle Eastern and North African countries where Esperanto is seen as a Western import and, therefore, as something undesired.
[13] For instance, France can be translated as either Francujo or Francio, and England as Anglujo or Anglio.
[14] Hence, Franco, a Frenchman, and Francujo, a container for the French people. Zamenhof suggested -i- in his 1894 language reform proposal as an alternative, to avoid determinist overtones of a country being a container for a specific people or ethnic group (Forster 1982: 136).
[14] In other regions of France, it is common for local Esperanto associations to invest in the teaching of Esperanto in elementary schools within the scope of the extracurricular activities proposed by the projects NAP and TAP (NouvelleslTemps d'Activites Periscolaires). Similarly, such Esperanto associations often support initiatives to promote regional languages, such as Breton in Bretagne and Occitan in the south of France.
[14] Marianne Cramer conducted a historical analysis of the left-wing, workers' Esperanto move- ment 'without being an Esperantist' (2005: 6)—meaning, in this case, without mastering the language. As a result, she was not able to access most of the Esperanto language primary sources and had to rely on the help of French Esperantists to translate documents.
[15] I use national Other with capital O to underline the 'different' features at once abstract and relational that are said to characterise Esperantists from distinct national, linguistic and cultural backgrounds.
[16] In commenting on how constructed languages such as Esperanto work to create new worlds, Monica Heller states: 'either we think we will solve human problems by finding a way to communicate clearly across difference, or we think we will do so by embracing the incommen- surability of difference. Sometimes, we think both are true at once' (2017: 13). This applies to how the cosmopolitan sociabilities at stake sometimes blend the principles outlined in the previous section.
[17] Regarding varieties of Esperanto according to the influence of people's mother tongues, it is also relevant to consider such influence in cases of children who learn Esperanto from birth (Corsetti et al. 2004; Lindstedt 2006, 2010; Fiedler 2012: 73-76) and in stress patterns in spoken Esperanto (Abrahamsen 2015).
[18] This issue gained visibility in recent years with languages constructed for artistic purposes, such as Marc Okrand's Klingon (Star Trek) and Paul Frommers Na'vi (Avatar), whose speakers recognise the language creators as ultimate authorities and the only people authorised to coin new words in these languages (Schreyer 2015, and personal communication).
[19] Over its history, similarly to what happened to Volapuk, Esperanto emerged as a fertile ground for language reformers (Garvfa 2015). In 1894, Zamenhof faced the first proposal of spelling reform. It, however, was later dismissed by a vote from the subscribers of the periodical La Esperantisto. Also noteworthy is the -ata/-ita debate (summarised in De Hoog et al. 1961), on verb tenses and forms of the past participle, where the Akademio played a decisive role.
[20] This advice comes from Claude Piron (1989), to whom Esperantos internationality depended on the language being understood by Esperanto speakers from culturally and geographically distant places, such as China and Japan. Along surprisingly similar lines, also Max Weber (1949: 58—59) prompted social scientists to write for a 'Chinese reader'—meaning someone less prone to share the commonsense assumptions of Western scholars.