A few months after I returned from the Havana congress, I was watching the news and a personal-interest segment about dog yoga came on. The footage showed attractive New Yorkers in expensive workout clothes doing yoga with their dogs (or rather, around and over their dogs). The attitude conveyed by the newscasters wasn’t so much “How insane!” as “How cute!” I suddenly found myself yelling at the television, “What kind of world do we live in that has room for dog yoga but not for Esperanto!” My husband turned to me and raised his eyebrows in a way that precisely expressed, “Uh-oh. I think you’re crossing over, dear.”
No, no, I reassured him. No need to fear a lifetime of vacations spent in foreign auditoriums listening to an endless parade of speeches and comments on those speeches. The consciously egalitarian nature of Esperantoland means that everyone gets a chance to take the floor, as many times as desired. The two most commonly spoken phrases in Esperanto must be “Mi opinias…” (In my opinion …) and “Mi proponas…” (I propose …). Sitting through this can be funny, but it’s not much fun. I’ve always hated meetings, and the Esperanto ones kind of perfectly embody many of the reasons why.
Of course there’s more to it than the meetings. There are the sing-alongs and the camping trips and the green-themed Esperanto fashion shows. All of these also not really my thing. However, the youth congresses, which are often sex-booze-and-rock-and-roll debauches (of the friendly, international variety, of course), might have been my thing once upon a postcollege time.
And, if I were still entranced by the backpacking-through-Europe idea (many Esperantists never leave this phase), not being an Esperantist would be almost stupid. The international youth organization maintains a list of Esperantists all over the world who are willing to put up other Esperantists in their homes, feed them, and show them around. You can stay with a painter in Tajikistan, a nudist in Serbia, or a “gay, vegetarian ornithologist” in Belgium. You might like to stay with an “anarchist who likes to go out to bars” in Brazil or a father of five and founder of the “club of light and peace” in Mozambique. On the west coast of Japan you will find “physicists and railroad lovers especially welcome.” A “sports journalist” in Budapest requests, “No hippies, please,” but if that excludes you, you can move on to a small town in Sicily where “rawfoodists and hippies are especially welcome.” Or, if that sounds a little too tame, head to Ukraine, where hosting is provided “only for hippies, punks, freaks, and cannabis smokers.”
Esperantists like to point to this international hosting service as a challenge to those who say Esperanto confers no practical advantages. “See? Here’s a solid, utilitarian reason to learn Esperanto. English is not the only language that pays off in concrete benefits.” But when it comes to concrete benefits, Esperantists do not help their cause by mentioning English.
Claude Piron, a Swiss psychologist and prominent “prestige” Esperantist, emphasizes a different kind of benefit that Esperanto has over English:
A Swede who speaks English with a Korean and a Brazilian feels that he is a Swede who is using English; he does not assume a special identity as “a speaker of English.” On the other hand, a Swede who speaks Esperanto with a Korean and a Brazilian feels that he is an Esperantist and that the other two are also Esperantists, and that the three of them belong to a special cultural group. Even if non-native-speakers speak English very well, they do not feel that this ability bestows an Anglo-Saxon identity on them. But with Esperanto something quite different occurs.
Can the thing that Esperantists share with each other really be called a culture? Professional anthropologists might be insulted by the question. All I know is that if you told me you just saw a nudist, a gay ornithologist, a railroad enthusiast, and a punk can-nabis smoker walking down the street together, I would be waiting for the punch line. But if you then told me they were speaking Esperanto, no punch line would be necessary. It would all make complete and utter sense.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, while the proponents of Ido, Ulla, Ilo, Auli, Ile, Ispirantu, Espido, Esperido, Mundelingva, Mondlingvo, Mondlingu, Europal, Europeo, Uropa, Perfektsprache, Simplo, Geoglot, and the rest of Esperanto’s competitors were advertising the potential practical roles for their languages—science, commerce, diplomacy, and so on—Esperantists were busy creating not a potential but an actual role for their language. While projects like Anglo-Franca, published around the same time as Zamenhof’s first book, were presented through examples like “Me have the honneur to soumett to you’s inspection the prospectus of me’s objets manufactured, which me to you envoy here-indued,” Zamenhof’s book presented Esperanto through poetry and personal letters. Then came the congresses and their associated rituals, the green stars, the hymns, the excursions. Everything that happened at these congresses became loaded with Esperanto-conscious significance. The most routine protocols—the types of things you would have seen at any meeting of an international association during that time—over the years solidified into Esperanto orthodoxy. Because of this, the congresses of today have a distinctly Victorian flavor, from the reading of the greetings (“The Esperanto teachers club of Halifax sends its heartfelt greetings and congratulations on the occasion of the twentieth congress”), to the formal ceremonies (in Havana I attended the “solemn” presentation of the special-issue Zamenhof phone card), to the closing of the congress (with the symbolic flag-passing ceremony from the current year’s host to the next year’s).
The Esperantists worked to create a community and a culture. Yes, they did this somewhat artificially and self-consciously, but it did work (forced tradition + time = real tradition), and it turned out that many people who may not have been inspired to learn a language in order to use it for something would learn a language in order to participate in something.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of Modern Hebrew, or, as some call it, the miracle of Modern Hebrew. Technically, Hebrew is not an invented language. There was no Zamenhof of Hebrew to sit down and draft its rules and vocabulary. But there was an Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who, as one biographer put it, “made it possible for several million people to order groceries, drive cattle, make love, and curse out their neighbors in a language which until his day had been fit only for Talmudic argument and prayer.”
By about A.D. 200, Hebrew had died as a spoken language. It survived as a liturgical language and as a written language for philosophy, poetry, and other elite intellectual pursuits. In 1881, when Ben-Yehuda and his wife, Devora, immigrated to Palestine from Europe, Hebrew also served as a sort of lingua franca of the marketplace for Jews from various language backgrounds, but it was nobody’s mother tongue. In 1882, when Ben-Yehuda’s first child was born, he declared that his household would be Hebrew speaking only, and thus raised the first native Hebrew speaker in over a thousand years. His friends thought the child was sure to be damaged by the experiment. His neighbors thought he was crazy. But three generations later their own great-grandchildren would be living their lives in Hebrew—at home, at school, at the beach, and in the sandwich shops.