Bohème Magazine Online

Last month, Bohème introduced you in two articles to the art of constructing artificial languages, not artificial in the sense of being merely an appearance of a real language, but artificial in that they arise not out of nature but out of the imagination and knowledge of their creators.

Of the most well known constructed languages, one could mention the Elvish languages used in the stories of Tolkien and the Klingon language invented by linguist Marc Okrand. While these were invented for use in fiction, another well-known constructed language was invented to be used as an everyday language for speakers in multilingual situations. That language is Esperanto. Spoken by 2 million people worldwide (Source: Ethnologue) with an evolving subculture of its own, Esperanto was first published in 1887 by a Polish oculist named L. L. Zamenhof, who wrote under the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto ("the hoping one"). Zamenhof, growing up and living under the oppression of Tsarism and anti-Semitism, created Esperanto not to replace any other language (as is sometimes claimed), but to serve as an easy, user-friendly neutral second language to facilitate communication between people with different native languages without resorting to languages like English and French which only achieved international status through political, cultural and economic imperialism. As such, Esperanto has been both passionately loved and hated with an equal passion, and has inspired over a century of amateur and professional linguists attempting to improve or replace the language. One could fill volumes with the heated (and often ugly) debates between pro- and anti-Esperanto Internet users. When I first heard of the language as an idealistic ten-year-old, my imagination was captured by the idea of an easy to learn language that could be used between people of different linguistic backgrounds. In fact, as a teenager I used my poorly practiced command of the language to talk with a friend's father who spoke only Hungarian and Esperanto. But what interested me even more, as a child interested in creating languages for imaginary fictional realities, was the artistic side of Esperanto (and the fact that I wasn't the only person who had thought of creating my own language). So rather than join in the technical or political debates, I want to discuss the artistic side of Esperanto by comparing it to Expressionism.

Esperanto, many are surprised to learn, is a literary language, being used to write original poetry, novels and short stories. (For a sample of Esperanto haikus, see last month's issue) The language has even been used in film. Incubus, a 1965 film starring William Shatner, was filmed in Esperanto. The language compliments the Expressionist visual style of the film. One can even find it as an instrument of alternative reality and satire in The Great Dictator. Here it was the official language of Toimania and seen on signs and heard in some words of dialogue. (It was satirical perhaps because Hitler was vehemently against Esperanto, much like he was vehemently against everything else that held ideals of internationalism and peace).

My impression of Esperanto as an "Expressionistic" language formed in the past year. As with any aesthetic view, what follows is a necessarily subjective and personal artistic appreciation of Esperanto, much like subjective estimations such as "French is the most romantic language in the world" or "German sounds authoritarian."

As an example of the look of Esperanto, here is part of the "Tower of Babel" story from the Bible:

The jagged and blunt orthography is one thing that gives one a feeling of the Expressionist culture shock of the language, which is both familiar and exotic; it looks like a Romance language written in a Czech-inspired orthography. While haceks (the symbol over letters like š and č) are common in Czech and other East European languages, Esperanto turns the hacek on its head, giving letters like and . These are used, as far as I know, only in Esperanto and may not even show up correctly on your computer, leading to the even more jarring Internet Esperanto orthography, which uses sx and cx. It is in the orthography that the Expressionism of Esperanto begins, in the blurred line between two worlds (one western, the other eastern) and in the literal turning of a feature of reality on its head.

This theme is continued in the sound of Esperanto, which has a beautifully exotic Slavo-Romance sound to it similar to Romanian. Zamenhof used a wide variety of phonemes (sounds) when creating Esperanto to allow for maximum variety for distinguishing words, thus there are sounds common in Romance languages like Spanish and French flowing into sounds from German and Polish. This gives the language a sound that is hard to place geographically, meaning that it, like Expressionist visual art, transcends confinement to a narrow physical world, instead bringing together the familiar and the unfamiliar in a system that is both realistic and surrealistic. The landscape of Esperanto could be the Balkans or Andalucia or, better yet, a dream world mixture of the two.

The collision and blending of worlds is a theme that permeates Esperanto. The vocabulary is mostly Romance in origin with 25% derived from German, English, Slavic (Russian and Polish) and Greek. This leads to elements being combined together in ways that don't quite seem usual - like domo blanka (meaning "white house," one word Polish [dom] and the other Romance [blanca]). This is much like when Expressionist art shows us that reality is more than the heavily filtered "common sense" harmony we're presented with when our brains are finished trying to make a sanitized and more easily understood wholeness of the world we see.

In a continuing cross-cultural theme, the streamlined and totally regular grammar of Esperanto is said to have been inspired by Turkish. Featuring no irregular verbs, Esperanto grammar works by taking roots (such as "dom-" or "blank-" above) and adding to them regular endings that indicate grammatical information. For example, "blanka" with an -a ending means the adjective, white. If we replace this with an -o we have a noun, "whiteness." Adding -j (pronounced like English /y/) to these final vowels creates plurality, so "white houses" would be "domoj blankaj." Verbal conjugation works in the same way, each tense and mood having its own unique affix which can be easily learnt in less than an hour and which, unlike Spanish, is the same for each person (I, you, he, she, we, etc.). This logic and rationalism in the midst of the more colourful feeling of Esperanto's sound and vocabulary gives another jar to our brains. We like to think of reality as being totally rational and logical, as something that is totally predictable and makes perfect sense, but Esperanto's blend of subjective colour and objective structure makes us question this preconceived notion of reality in the same way as Kafka's perfectly normal and realistic worlds where men transform in to insects. Furthermore, we like for things to be "one or the other" - objective or subjective, but never both at the same time. Is this preference a realistic view of reality, or does our real world combine both at once?

The logic of Esperanto's grammar holds inside its regularity another attack on the Western mind's preconceived idea of what is normal. If I want to say "the white house" in Spanish, I would say "la casa blanca." If I want to say "the white cat" I would say "el gato blanco." This phenomenon of grammatical gender, which doesn't exist in Esperanto, gives Spanish its familiar harmony of word endings: a noun ending in -o is likely to be followed by an adjective ending in -o. Esperanto always uses -o for nouns and always -a for adjectives (and has a definite article that is always "la"). This gives Esperanto phrases an unusual look for Spanish and Italian speakers; the same phrases would be "la domo blanka" and "la kato blanka." This defies reason in their minds, but to a speaker of Chinese (which has neither gender nor functional word endings) this is "nothing but a thing." Like Kafka's metamorphosing humans, Esperanto seems to run contrary to what some of us call reality, but is perfectly realistic and forces us to ask this question: is everything I think is normal and natural truly so?

Indeed, this trait of Expressionism lies in the very heart of what Esperanto is: a naturalistic language (if you heard it you wouldn't know it wasn't natural) that was created by a single man (and therefore "unnatural"). Our dreams are exactly the same: a naturalistic unnatural world that exists in a reality we can't touch. We can't touch them and they often don't seem "sensible" to us, but they exist and they arise out of the workings of a mind that has a sense and logic we sometimes can't make sense of.

So while most of Esperanto's admirers appreciate Esperanto for its practical uses or idealistic aims, I personally enjoy it for the same reason I can enjoy any of humanity's artistic creations. Where others see a tool of international communication, I see art that communicates in its very structure ideas that can elude description in any language.

You can hear an Esperanto programme on the web, from Radio Polonia, by clicking here.

Copyright © 2003 by Eamon Graham. May not be reproduced or used without permission of the author.
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