Professor Borgerhoff Points Out Some of the Merits of the Latest
Invention, Esperanto.
In the preface to his famous dictionary Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote:
“Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs
of ideas.” If that be true, it is not strange that man should so
constantly seek to improve the instrument. We have the selective process
by which worn-out words and idioms are dropped into the limbo of
archaism and new coinages come into use. Then we have the attempts to
supply new languages, ready-made. There was Volapük; and now comes
Esperanto.
Professor J. L. Borgerhoff, of the Western Reserve University, sets
forth in the Atlanta _Constitution_ the claims of Esperanto as a
world-language. After brief reference to former candidate languages, he
says:
The latest attempt, and the one which bids fair to be final, is
Esperanto, so called by its author, Dr. Zamenhof, a Russian physician,
who under this pseudonym published scientific articles before he
became famous as the inventor of an artificial language.
Zamenhof, like his predecessors in the same field, was struck by the
useless wealth of idioms that divide the inhabitants of the earth and
make international relations so difficult, while at the same time they
are a prolific source of misunderstanding and enmity among the
nations.
He was also convinced that the reason why the existing universal
languages had failed in their purpose was that they were too
difficult—almost as difficult as the natural ones. The cause of their
difficulty lay in the grammar, which was too intricate, and in the
vocabulary, which was far too varied. He forthwith composed a grammar
which was simplicity itself; this he did by setting aside all rules
not strictly needed for the construction of a logical sentence and by
eliminating all exceptions. The few remaining grammatical principles
may be learned in half an hour.
His next concern was the vocabulary. What makes the acquisition of a
foreign vocabulary so hard to students is the variety of roots, the
great number of different words. To take an instance from English, to
express the various ideas suggested by the one conception of death, we
have: dead, to die, deadly, and deathly, mortal, to kill, to murder,
to assassinate, to suicide, to commit homicide, etc. What a cumbersome
luxury of roots, and how discouraging to the foreigner who wishes to
learn this language!
Number of Roots Reduced.
And yet English is one of the easiest of all European tongues. How to
reduce this number of roots was the great problem before Zamenhof. He
therefore took one out of a number, and by means of a system of
suffixes and prefixes he made this one root do duty for all the
others.
In this manner the Esperanto dictionary contains only about two
thousand roots, yet they are sufficient to form, by means of
derivation, a vocabulary large enough for all purposes.
But what makes matters simpler still, he chose his two thousand roots
in such a manner that they appear familiar to all educated persons of
European civilization, by selecting first those terms which are
already in universal usage, like sport, toilet, train; then by taking
words common to two or three leading languages, and finally by adding
to these a small number of roots not international, but picked out
judiciously from various idioms, so that any one, be he Slav, Teuton,
or Latin, finds that Esperanto has a familiar appearance.
The suffixes number about thirty and the prefixes half a dozen; they
have well defined meanings, and once they are known any person
provided with a list of the simple roots can compose his own
vocabulary almost _ad libitum_, so that the finest shades of meaning
may be expressed to a nicety.
I should say that the most remarkable feature about Esperanto, and one
which no natural idiom possesses to such a degree, is this power of
forming new words once the key-word is given, and it should be
remembered that in the majority of instances this key-word is already
known.
Simplicity a Striking Feature.
The second striking feature is the simplicity and regularity of the
whole grammatical scheme; thus are placed within easy reach two
essential parts of a language—the vocabulary, and the very simple
device whereby this vocabulary may be made to express all ideas
clearly.
To take again the word “death” as an example: the key-word is “mort”
(which we have in the English mortal). Remembering that in Esperanto
all nouns end in “o,” all adjectives in “a,” adverbs in “e,”
infinitives in “i”; that contraries are formed by prefixing “mal”;
that the prefix “sen” means without; that the suffix “ant” marks the
agent (corresponding to the English “ing”), and that the suffix “ig”
means to cause, we get from the above root: morto, death; morta,
mortal; morti, to die; morte, mortally; mortano, the dying man;
mortanta, dying; mortigi, to cause death, or kill; mortigo, murder;
mortiganto, murderer; mortiga, death-dealing; malmorta, living;
senmorta, Immortal; senmorto, immortality, etc.
The conjugation of verbs, which is the great stumbling-block in the
study of all natural languages, presents no difficulty whatever in
Esperanto. In the first place, there are no irregular verbs; secondly,
there is only one ending for each tense; thirdly, the number of tenses
is reduced to a strict minimum, mainly past, present, future, and
conditionally.
The infinitive of all verbs ends in “t”; the present always in “as”;
the past always in “is”; the conditional always in “us”; these endings
are the same in the singular and the plural.
To sum up, Esperanto is the easiest of all languages; all that is
needed to read and write it is a familiarity with the few grammatical
principles, most of which have been explained above, a knowledge of
the thirty-odd suffixes and the half-dozen prefixes alluded to, and a
dictionary giving the two thousand roots, many of which most of us
know already.
Any one with the merest smattering of Latin and German and a knowledge
of English can write a letter in Esperanto practically from the start;
in fact, a person with a knack for languages can do so without this
previous knowledge if provided with a dictionary.
As for speaking it, that is, of course, a matter of practise. It is
easy enough, yet practise for a couple of months is indispensable to
become fluent. Those interested should form a club and meet for the
purpose of conversing. The pronunciation is as easy as the rest of the
language.
Is this artificial language to come into real use? Professor Borgerhoff
shows us that it is at least spreading rapidly. In June, 1905, there was
only a handful of Esperantists in America. One year later there were
fifty clubs, mostly in colleges. Paris offers about twenty free public
courses. All over Europe the language has hundreds of thousands of
adherents. Three thousand Esperantists, representing fifteen different
countries, attended the congress at Boulogne-sur-Mer, in August, 1905.