January 25, 2024 • 48 mins
One thing you could do is create your own language. Some people do and for lots of different reasons. LL Zamenhof created Esperanto to try to bring about world peace. It worked, but on a less-than-global scale.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you
should know. I don't know how to say that. And Esperanto,
now that I think about it, I really should have
looked that up.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
I was wondering if you were gonna do that.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
I can't believe I didn't. I feel kind of jerky,
jerk woddy. I guess I don't know how to say that.
And Esperano either.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Well, jerkwad would be jerk wado, yeah, exactly, or something like.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
That, something similar to that. Yeah, it actually would make
sense because Esperano is taking root words jerk wad and
putting them together and then conjugating them in a very
uniform way. We should probably tell everybody what we're talking
about here, because we just kind of accidentally got into it.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
Yeah, it's a language, not.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Just a language. It's a con lang, a constructed language,
which is a language that you sit down and make up.
Some people actually do this, and apparently it's addictive when
you start, as opposed to, like I guess, a natural language,
one that just kind of develops organically over time as
a group of people start talking to one another.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Yeah, Esperanto itself means one who hopes, and that will
all make sense once you hear the story, because it's
a pretty wonderful story. Actually, I didn't know much about it.
I just thought it was kind of one of these
goofy fringe things, and it is a fringe thing. They're
about a thousand people who are native, not just Esperanto speakers,
(01:45):
but where their first language that they learned was Esperanto.
They are native speakers. Dave Rus helped us with this,
and he dug up George Soros, billionaire. Oh, I don't know.
People describe him in a lot of ways depending on
who you are, but as the most famous Esperanto speaker.
(02:06):
But I did poke around a little bit and found
that Tolstoy j R. R. Tolkien spoke Esperanto and lemaire,
basically the father of modern cinema. And as this will
become as a surprise when you see later on what happened,
but Joseph Stalin apparently knew how to speak Esperanto.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Huh, that is kind of a surprise. The thing I
think that differentiates George soros so is he was a
native speaker, like that was his first language was Esperanto.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Yeah, but I looked over the list of just speakers, right,
notable speakers, and there are a lot of people in
the list, but I just hadn't heard of many of them.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Stilln' to big surprise, I'd like to add one more
to that list of notable Esperanto speakers, our own ben
bowling from stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
I thought he spoke Esperanto, that tracks he did.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
I emailed them just to make sure that I wasn't
just making something up in my head, and he said, yeah,
he used to, you know, be into it, and he
just kind of fell out of it, and then he
emailed me like hours later, and it was like, damn it, Josh,
now I'm back into Esperano. So he's back into it.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Everybody, Well, learning Esperanto is about as ben bowling a
thing as I can imagine.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
It is, because it's inclusive, it's intelligent, it's curious people,
it's witty. It seems to be like one of the better,
most more nicer kind online communities that you'll come across
from what I can.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
And it's fringe, and that's that's Ben for sure.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Yeah, and again that's Ben Bolan from stuff they don't
want you to know.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
That's right. So you said it was a constructed language.
I guess we'll talk a little bit about why people
would construct a language and a little bit of the
history of these languages. There are a lot of reasons
for doing that. Most of them are because they want
to create a language that's easier to learn, that's simpler.
(04:04):
A lot of times there might be religious reasons or
philosophical reasons. Some people just do it for fun. A
lot of them were designed to be a universal language.
In Esperanto, Actually, Esperanto takes a lot of these boxes,
as we'll see, but a lot of them are created
for like, hey, wouldn't it be better if everybody could
speak a language?
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Yeah? What a universal language? A language where I guess
the whole point of a universal language is there's definitely
the point of Esperanto. The idea is that if you
can speak a common language with anybody else on the planet,
that should conceivably do away with a lot of different
(04:46):
conflicts that probably arise from disputes over language, from differences
in language from an inability to see one another's viewpoint
because we're having trouble talking with one another. And that's
kind of the basis of a lot of the constructed languages,
that idea that if we can all speak a universal language,
there'll be a global human family or world, which that
(05:15):
does sound like you'd be up. George Soros's allly yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
I mean, if you just could create a language that
where all it was was don't shoot and how about
a plate of cookies and a glass of milk?
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Oh yeah, how far we go, it'd be a much
better world.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
So admitted languages of you know, people have always sort
of been doing this here and there, but in the
nineteenth century it seems to have really hit its stride.
There were more than one hundred constructed languages that decade
that century alone, and Esperanto is far and away the
most popular today, although for a long long time it
(05:56):
was a language created by a German priest name Johann
Schlayer called vol Vollapuk.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Yeah, Vallapuk. Apparently God told.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
Him to do it, sure mission from Gad.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
Yeah, what else are you gonna do? You're gonna make
that language? And I'm sure he was like, are you
sure you want to call it vollapuk, And guy was like,
get busy, and he did, and it actually caught on
really well. There seems to have been kind of a
bug in the late nineteenth century, at least in the
West of invented languages, and vollapuke apparently the fit the bill,
(06:31):
and it spread you far and wide. I can't not
say it like that.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
I'm sorry, that's fine.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
They started having like international congresses or conferences of vallapuc.
President Grover Cleveland's wife Francis named their dog Vollapuke. Like
it was. It was a worldwide phenomenon. Even if you
didn't know it or had no interest in learning it,
you knew about it.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Yeah, that's because that dog threw up all over the place. Though.
We had a cat nam Underfoot. Literally, my dad named
this cat underfoot.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
That's a very good name.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
And I'll give you two guesses why.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Because the cat had very long legs, okay, and no
feat to speak of. That's right, it was underfooted.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
So that conference you were talking about for Vatapuke was
eighteen eighty nine, but a couple of years before that,
so it was, you know, cruising and doing pretty well,
but two years before that, Esperanto was created and really
took it over, you know, over the next like thirty
forty years or so.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
I mean, imagine there being a trend today of like
a universal language is catching on, like on TikTok oh God,
like it would just take off. But it's such a
bizarre thing to think of, and this is what people
were into. And this was long before social media, so
it was hard for something to become a global phenomenon.
And yet not one but two universal languages took hold
(07:58):
in the eighteen eighties. Yeah, so Esperano apparently just totally
supplanted vollapuke. But there is a little footnote of it.
Apparently the Danes say what we would say, like, it's
all Greek to me, Like, I don't understand what you're saying.
The Danish expression is it's pure vollapuke.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
That makes sense.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Yeah, it's great. I love that. I love learning Danish expressions.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
I'm going to start saying that. I don't say it's
all Greek to me much anyway, but if that ever
comes up, I'm gonna say it's pure ballapuke.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Yeah, and no offense for a Greek list. There's just
just something someone says here.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
Yeah, I wonder what Greek's think about that.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Actually don't know. I don't know if it's gotten back
to them yet.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
Yeah, So should we talk a little bit about this
the creator of Esperanto? Who was I tried to find
out bad things about this guy, but he seems like
a pretty remarkable, humble, well intentioned fella.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
And I also read that he was one of those
rare people and who would sleep just a couple hours
a night rather than sit around and stare at the wall.
He did interesting things. He was a polyglot, He learned
tons of different languages, He was well read, he was
an optometrist. He did all sorts of stuff. But along
the way, one of the things he did was create Esperanto.
(09:17):
And he had a pretty great, well not great, but
a pretty heavy backstory to it.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
Yeah. His name, we haven't said his name yet. He's
known as l el Zamenhoff or Soamenhoff, but his full
name was Ludwik Leitzer Soamenhoff. Born on December fifteenth, which
is National Samenhoff Day. Oh sure, yeah, in eighteen fifty nine,
(09:42):
born in bi Alishtock, Poland. He was Jewish as was
a lot of belishtock about seventy percent, also some Germans,
some Russians, obviously Poles, and growing up there was pretty
rough because there was a lot of ethnic violence going on.
There were Jews being attacked by Poles, there were Germans
being attacked by Russians. In eighteen eighty one, there was
(10:07):
a false, I guess, accusation that Jews were behind the
assassination of Alexander the Second of Russia, and that started
the Pograms, which were these organized massacres of Polish and
Russian Jewish communities.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
Yeah, because Poland was annexed by Russia from eighteen oh
seven to nineteen twenty one, which is why they would
have cared that was their czar. And apparently it wasn't
the Jews at all or anybody who had anything to
do with Jewishness. It was anti Autocratics, a group of
called the nouradnya volya people's will, and they threw a
(10:45):
bomb and blew him up. And apparently his successor, his son,
Zari Alexander the third, was even worse. But from those
pograms that el Zamenhoff was alive to witness, and even
before that just the ethnic violence that I was endemic
to Biaalistock. That had a really big effect on him,
and that's where he developed this idea that humanity is
(11:09):
way more connected than we realized, that we have all
these false constructs that separate us, that don't have to
separate us, but do time and time again. Language is
one of them. He cited religion as one of them,
and he was very Jewish. He was a very religious
Jewish person, but he still recognized that religion creates conflict
sometimes it has historically, and he felt like you could
(11:33):
kind of you could keep the religion, you could keep
the different nations, you can keep the things that do
divide us, as long as they had something like a
universal language laying over the whole thing that could defuse
the conflicts that grow up from those things that divide us.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
Yeah, which was and he was a kid. I mean,
this is remarkable stuff for a preteen and then teen
nature to sort of understand. So he's clearly a brilliant, empathetic,
passionate human being. I think, as the you know, family
story goes, at least he was ten years old and
he wrote a play called The Tower of Babel colon
(12:16):
the Beilishtock tragedy in five acts as a ten year old.
So just this idea of sort of stripping away these
divisions and realizing, like, hey, we're all human beings. That's
the one like at the root, that's what we are,
and we all literally have that in common, yet we
divide ourselves like. It's just a remarkable thing for a
(12:38):
kid and a lesson for everybody of all ages. Still.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
Yeah, as he was raised, he learned Yiddish, which apparently
grew out of a German dialect that's written in Hebrew.
I didn't realize that, but it's the universal language of
the Ashkenazi Jews, the Jewish people in Central and Eastern Europe.
So he already understood what a universal language could do.
(13:03):
You could take a Jewish person from Poland and a
Jewish person from Czechoslovakia and put them in a room
and they could speak to one another through that second tongue, Yiddish.
So he set about kind of trying to modernize Yiddish,
maybe he can spread that, and then he stopped pretty
much in his tracks because he realized that what he
(13:23):
was trying to do was say, hey, everybody, let's all
learn the language of the people you consider criminals and spies.
It was like a really hard sell that he just
realized wasn't going to go anywhere. So he abandoned trying
to sell Yiddish or create a universal language out of
Yiddish and just set about creating one from scratch, which
(13:44):
is what Esperano came from.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
What a setup it is.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
It's going pretty well so far. We should release this
as this show.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Best setup ever. I'm gonna say it, even though it
annoy some people. Should we take a break.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
I'm going to say it, even though it annoys everybody. Yes,
we should.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
All right, we'll be right back, all right, so we're
(14:29):
back really quickly. That sort of made me before we
left and talked about people being annoyed by asking to
take a break. That came to mind because I jumped
on Reddit recently, on our subreddit and actually started an
account because there was so much just sort of bad information,
like Jerry doesn't even work with him anymore, and just
all these weird things that people sort of assume that
(14:50):
we're wrong. And I've since learned that that's and even
redditors kind of said, like that's kind of a thing.
People like surmise a lot. Yeah, so I'd signed up
for a few days and answered like geez a lot
of questions for like a full day and then got
right back off. But just wanted people to know if
they thought I was some phony, that that was really me.
(15:12):
And most people were awesome.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
You had Jones stunt AMA, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
Sort of. You know what I don't like about AMAS though?
Is it this just that rapid fire sort of thing, right,
So this was like a slow burn AMA and it's
all still there, a lot of answered questions, like with
correct information, and like I said, almost everyone was really
really nice, but not everyone is.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
But that's just the nature of online interactions the internets.
That's silly that they think Jerry doesn't work with us anymore.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
She doesn't exist. Someone was really annoyed though, about like
every time they ask if it's time to take a break,
and I was like, we do that because we don't
script this out and I'm genuinely wondering if it's a
good time to take a break.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
Yeah, what a weird thing to be upset about.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
It's a conversation anyway, Thanks to everyone who participated, and
you can go there and check it out if you
want back to esperanto.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
Yes, you want me to pick it up because we
don't script this stuff.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
Why did you ask me that? That's so annoying?
Speaker 2 (16:11):
So we said that that l. Zamenhoff had said, Okay,
I'm going to start from scratch. I'm going to create
a language that doesn't come from anywhere, that's not spoken
by anybody. I'm going to make this universal language from scratch.
And so his nineteenth birthday party, he had already done
enough that he handed out pocket dictionaries and grammar charts
(16:32):
to the guests.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
Man of his birthday, which a swinging party. That's right
for a nineteen year old.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
He called the new language lingo Internacia or no inter
Nazia because that sees its remember, yeah, yeah, And he
composed a little hymn, and I kind of taught myself
how to pronounce it, even though I'm going to completely
screw it up.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
But may I you gotta sing it though?
Speaker 2 (16:58):
No, yeah, no, you'd don't. You have to say it
solemnly like this, Mala mikite de las nazis, cado cado
yam tempesta la tote holmose in familia co une gare sodebe.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Nice work can I tell everyone what it means?
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Yes, but you have to sing it.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
Okay, Let the hatred of the nations fall, fall, fall.
The time is already here. All humanity must unite in
one family.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
Doesn't rhyme? Yeah, So when I'm ready to send him,
it didn't rhyme.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
So he's cruising with this thing. He has this banging
nineteenth birthday party where he's given out this stuff to
his friends. I'm sure they're just like, who is this guy? Even?
This is amazing? And in eighteen eighty seven he self
published a pamphlet, a forty two page pamphlet called uh
are you gonna pronounce this stuff?
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Unua libro?
Speaker 1 (18:02):
Okay? I thought that was right. It means first book.
And as you'll see, if you notice some of these
words sound like other languages, it's because, like other constructed languages,
it's usually based on like the words are based on
some other words. So when you hear esperanto, like if
you go to watch a scene from the Esperanto William
Shatner movie that you can watch on YouTube, yeah, I
(18:25):
think from him, Well when was that sixty sixty six?
Speaker 2 (18:29):
Everybody says, but Turner classic movies listed as sixty five,
which I find confusing, but everybody else is sixty.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
Six a side with tcm always. But if you go
to and you hear or just you know, I looked
up on YouTube, just like Esperanto conversations, or if you
bump into Ben Bowlin somewhere in Atlanta, you'll you'll sit
there and you'll go, oh wow, that sounds a little
bit like Spanish some and maybe it might sound Italian,
which Spanish also sounds kind of Italian sometimes, and so
(18:57):
a lot of it might sound a little bit familiar,
like libro for book, like that makes sense, like the
word library. So just pointing out that when you hear
Esperanto words and you think it sounds familiar, it's not
by accident.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
Yeah. The reason why, especially if you are a Westerner.
Three quarters of the root words he started out with,
nine hundred of them, as we'll see, are taken from
Romance languages. So it's yeah, if you're an English speaker,
it's very easy to pick up.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
That's a much simpler way to say what it says.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
So in the in the that first book, unua libro,
which I can I can understand what that means just
from the little primer, which I have to say, hats
off to Dave. He put together a primer for us
in this article that like, when you go back and
research it more widely, you're like, this is really difficult
(19:49):
to like kind of wrangle into one small little ball.
And he managed to do that really really well. So
way to go, Dave. But that first book, Unuwa Libro,
it had some sample translations. It said, here's here's how
you say this this stuff. Here's the grammar rules, here's
the dictionary, here's how you pronounce it. And he said
(20:10):
that his pen name. He wrote it as a pen name,
doctro esperanto or doctor hopeful is what it.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Loved it.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
And he called again his language the lingvo inter Nazia,
and that's what he thought everybody was going to call it.
But instead everybody said, I like this doctor hopeful cat.
Let's just call his language.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Esperanto, yeah, which is sort of ironic because from the
beginning he was a very humble guy and didn't want
to be like he didn't name it, you know, Zamenhoffer
or whatever, like he didn't want it to be named
after him. He didn't want to own it. No, we
would call something like this open source today. He didn't
want it to be about him, So the fact that
(20:51):
he made up a name and that they named it
after him anyway is kind of funny. I get the
sense that it probably didn't bother him too much because
he seemed like a good guy.
Speaker 2 (20:59):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
But his goal, and we'll talk about sort of the
other stuff that came along later, as far as his
sort of desire to attach other meaning to it, But
his sort of root goal at the beginning was I
want a language for the love of whoever you worship
that is easier to learn than everything else out there. Yeah,
(21:20):
and I want it to be a language, like you mentioned,
sort of from the get go that can unite people
and promote peace, like two very sort of noble pursuits,
I think.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
So, okay, let's talk about goal one. A language that's
for the love of whatever you worship, easier to learn
than most of the other languages out there. Right right,
Apparently you could learn Esperanto in something like about forty
hours of class time, one full week of learning. You'll
(21:50):
walk out of there on the end of the day
Friday being able to converse basically in Esperanto. Tell people
where you live, who you are, what you like, point
to class and identify them correctly.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
That isn't don't shoot? How about to play a cookie
and some milk?
Speaker 2 (22:05):
Exactly? They should teach that first, for sure. Apparently that's
I mean, you can just know without even knowing anything
about learning languages. That's really a short amount of time.
It takes about one hundred to two hundred hours to
learn French or German to the same degree. There's another
person who estimated that for English speakers it's five times
(22:26):
easier to learn Esperano than French or Spanish, ten times
easier than Russian, and twenty times easier than Chinese. And
again a large part of that is because the root
words are taken from Romance languages. So just recognizing generally
being able to make a guess in almost every case
were what that word means, that's a huge leg up,
(22:47):
and that's why it's so much easier in part. But
the other part is the grammar that he created is
so standard and with such regularity that that that's the
part that makes it that much easier to learn, especially
for Romance language speakers.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
Yeah, I mean, the hard part about learning a language
is usually not memorizing root words and learning basic grammar.
It's the irregular verbs. It's all these exceptions to rules.
Fritch has more than two thousand irregular verbs. English is
notoriously tough to learn as a as a non native speaker.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
Yeah, think about those, just about irregular verbs real quick, chuck.
For the English to be pretty basic stuff. It's conjugated
as b being, been, r am is was and were. Now,
if you were just approaching those words as a non
English speaker to begin with, you wouldn't think was had
anything to do with b or r has anything to
(23:49):
do with b. And that's that's what causes the confusion.
And not just English, but almost any language. Irregular verbs
and exceptions to the standard rules.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
Yeah, and you know we did, and we did a
whole episode on language acquisition, right.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
I'm I'm pretty sure sure we did.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
Yeah, for sure, because I'm just consistently knocked out that
babies into toddlers and so on just just pick up language.
It's really remarkable to me still to see that kind
of thing. But esperanto, and we're just going to go
over some sort of the base rules here, and I
think you will find yourself like we did. Just saying,
(24:27):
oh my god, that's amazing and it makes so much sense.
There are sixteen grammatical rules, there are no irregular verbs,
there are no exceptions to rules, and these are just
this isn't everything, but these are just a few examples
of kind of like how much sense it makes. All
nouns are going to end with the letter oh. That's
why I said jerk wado at the beginning. Adjectives all
(24:50):
all of them end in the letter A. Adverbs all
end in the letter E. There are no genders. That's
another place where learning a foreign language can be confusing,
is you know, the different cases and genders and stuff
like that, and having to change things around. Not an esperanto,
my friend. And then this is sort of just a
fun one. La la is the only word for the right.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
Not la lay low ill, none of that stuff. L yeah,
none of that. It's all la the everything. And then
it's up to the conjugation of the verb that that
that changes that or the adverb or the adjective or whatever.
Because it's standard when you see like an o or
(25:38):
an a or an e, you can identify a word
in a sentence as a verb and adverb. And now
in that kind of thing. So the infinitive form of verbs.
And by the way, I had to look most of
this up, like I was, like, what's.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
An adverb again English?
Speaker 2 (25:51):
An verb is something like above clearly hourly it it.
It describes an adjective, a verb, or some other stuff.
An infinitive form is like to something to do, like
the basic form like to eat. It ends in an eye,
so it's mangy okay, okay, present tense like I eat,
(26:16):
that would be as mangas it ends in as yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
And we should point out that it doesn't matter who
is eating, if he is eating or I'm eating, or
she's eating or they're eating, it's all. It's all the
same exactly.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
There's no irregular verbs. It's beautiful right in past tense
instead of something like sing sang song, where it should
all just be sing singed, singed. Uh, that's what he does.
I know it sounds weird, doesn't it. Well, sure, but
that's what he does. In this Everything in past tense
ends in ees, so manges, yeah, I ate, you ate,
(26:54):
they ate. It's all. It's all mangaz. And then with
future it's man Joe's. And then with command you just
add a you ooh manjou, and that's it. That's how
you conjugate verbs. There's no exceptions to that rule at all.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Yeah, I mean it's pretty amazing. I guess it just
makes sense that because I kind of struggled with why
other languages are so irregular. But if it's organic in
its growth, then that's just bound to happen. I think
it is.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
I looked up why, and it's actually fascinating. It's because
these languages often absorb other people from other language groups,
and they bring their words with them, and so languages
grow by adopting other words changing, and so rather than
completely altering, you know how something that usually ends an
(27:47):
ed like sing, instead of just totally altering how it
used to be, you just kind of change it to
the new form like sang or song. It's that's how
irregular verbs come up. Nobody's like, I really want to
screw people up in the future. I'm going to add this.
It just happens, you know, organically, So when you set
about creating a constructed language, you can purposely deliberately avoid
(28:12):
any irregular verbs and make it that much easier to learn.
My question that came up, Chuck, is how long, yes,
I set up, Chuck, how long does it take until
a language like Esperanto starts developing irregular verbs?
Speaker 1 (28:28):
Well, I have a strong feeling and I'd love to
hear from some esperantists that they fight that tooth and
nail because that defeats the whole purpose and spirit of it.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Okay, hasn't happened yet, then, is that answer?
Speaker 1 (28:41):
I mean, that would be my guess. Yeah, I'm on record.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Okay, I'd love to hear from them too.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
There, but if you haven't noticed that Esperanto and this
is a word you might not know, but it's called
an agglutenative language, which is the words are formed from
combinations of short words basically which English has a lot
of those. All language has a lot of those, but
Esperanto has all those.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Yeah, so you've got your root word and then you
have affixes, prefixes and sufffixes and kind of like how
you conjugate it with the eye for to eat or
an as for you eat. That's that's it, that's the whole,
that's the whole grammar. Right. So the reason why he
did this again because not just like irregular verbs, but
(29:32):
weird words that all describe the same thing is another
thing that creeps into language organically. They've used the example
of tree. Right. You know what a tree is an
English it's one of those plants that's got the wood
in the bark and the leaves, and they're tall and everything.
Everybody loves to hug them.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
Right.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Uh, tree makes sense. But rather than young tree, we
have the word sapling, which combines proto Indo European and
proto Germanic words in English. Cute word though, sapling it
is because it means young tree. It's the young version
of a tree. It's very cute. A bunch of trees
is called a forest. That's old French from Latin. And
(30:09):
then a botanical garden that has a bunch of trees
is arboretum. That's just straight up Latin. All of those
are English words sapling, forest, arboretum, and none of them
sound like tree. So by creating roots that just describe
one thing and then adjusting what they mean by adding
a prefix or a suffix, but keeping that root word,
he got around that kind of conundrum.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Yeah. So, for instance, tree and esperanto is arbo. That
young tree, which is a sapling for us is an arbito.
And as we'll see, ido is sort of the suffix
for any kind of baby version of something which is taken,
and a Spanish does that, like there were two Chucks
at my job at a Mexican restaurant, and I was
(30:54):
chuck Eto cute because I was younger than the original chi.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
Wasn't that a taco bell menu item in the nineties?
Speaker 1 (31:01):
Probably so two chuqitos in and another chuquito, three chuquitos.
A young tree instead of a sapling is an arbido.
A lot of trees instead of a forest is an arborrow.
And then that botanical garden instead of an arboretum is
(31:22):
an arboretto. And you might think, well, that sounds a
lot like our arboretum. Well it does, but it also
sounds like arbo, arbido and a barrow exactly right.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
So you see any of those words and you know
it's talking about a tree. And then when you learn
edo means a younger version of it, or r means
the the like a group of whatever you're talking about,
you just learned a ton of grammar just right off
the back. And then also note that all those in
an oh because they're all nouns. And again all nouns
and in oh in Esperanto.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
Yeah, so we mentioned edo id o as a suffix
meaning like the small version of something or a baby something.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
And we also mentioned that there wasn't gender. That there
is but uh not in terms of like you know,
how you will conjugate a sentence. Uh, it's just a suffix.
It's i n o is a female version of something.
You also have a r O, which is a group
like vorto v o r t o is a word,
(32:21):
vortarro is dictionary. Uh, it just makes a lot of sense.
E j o and uh, the ja's a pronounced as
a y. Isn't that right? Uh? E j oh is
a place for something? So k u I r I.
How would you pronounce that?
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Cooerio cooler? Oh, corey cool? Why do you ask me
to pronounce this?
Speaker 1 (32:45):
Well?
Speaker 2 (32:46):
Because I got it.
Speaker 1 (32:47):
A couery is to cook, and then what's kitchen? Cooer
ao right, So you add the e j o So, uh,
that is the place where you would cook.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
That makes sense. Right. That's not to say that Esperando
doesn't have words that you just have to memorize, because
it doesn't quite work. Because, for example, there's a couple
of places where you'll find a lot of books, like
a library or a bookstore. Right, So a library, you'd
think would be called the librereo or place of books,
but actually it's called a biblioteco. A libreo is the bookstore.
(33:23):
So it sounds like just kind of nitpicking. But if
you ever arranged to meet your friend at the libreo
and they don't they think that that's the bookstore, you're
going to be sitting there waiting in the library for
them a long time.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
Yeah, and in fact, you know adding and I find
this like part of the spirit of Esperanto is super cool,
and that they encourage you to create words as long
as they follow the rules and make sense. So to
attack these effixes and suffixes under root words and Dave
uws this, this is so great. Gosh, this just makes
(33:57):
me crazy, how great it is. Hospital. The word hospital
in Esperanto is mal sanu lejo, right, yes, does that
make sense? So m al and Esperanto is opposite of
the s, a n is healthy, The ul means people.
The e jo, remember, as we said, means the place
(34:20):
where something is. And so a hospital directly translated is
not healthy people place, which could be a lot of
places here in the West.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
But so it's kind of like Esperantos like to put
words together like you do in a scrabble game. And
the reason that it's encouraged is because out of the
gate Zamenhoff, like like you said, made this open source
and said, here, take this and just do what you
will with it and make it grow. And that's how
that's why esperano is still around. And one of the
(34:52):
reasons it's the planted vollapuke puk because the guy who
created valla puke, he he was very controlling, kept a
controlling like grip on it, and so that made it
like a dying language right out of the gate, because
you you have to let language grow and become organic
on its own. Apparently he was like, Nope, God told
me to do this, so I really need to keep
(35:14):
a sharp eye on it.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
So I think we should also talk about the word
for jet lag because it's also just super fun. Yeah,
and we could do this all day long, but just
these two examples are really great. Horror zo noso horzonozo
h o r z in o zo exactly how it sounds,
that is, h O r's time zone is z O
(35:37):
N and then illness is ozo. So the Esperanto translation
is time zone illness.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
I love that, and that sounds it's a lot of
This sounds like how it would be transcribed or subtitled
in like China or something from English.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
Yeah, for sure, I came across something. Did you see
what I sent you about English translated into English is
kind of hilarious.
Speaker 1 (36:03):
Oh no, oh you didn't.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
I found a I don't remember what paper it was,
but as an example, they translated I do not understand
into several languages, and one of them was English. And
if you literally translate I do not understand into English,
it's I may not understand. I think about it like
that's exactly what that means, But it's not at all
(36:26):
what you think of. Like I do not understand sounds right,
even though what you're saying literally is I may not understand,
because do means make I literally.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
I do not understand.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
I just I had to mention that. It just cracked
me up.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
No, that's really funny. All right, So let's take our
second break. I'm not even asking this time, and we'll
come back and talk about where Esperanto went from there
right after this.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
So, Chuck, we talked a lot about how how doctor
Esperanto Zamenhoff the reasons why he created Esperanto, and that
was goal number two was to to create like a
language that united the world, right, easy to learn, united
the world. And he originally based it on something he
(37:37):
called Hillalism, after hillel the Elder, a Jewish stage from
the first century BCE, and Hillelle's teachings can basically be
summed up as the golden rule, like treat others as
you'd like them to treat you. He changed that name
very quickly to homara nismo, which means basically humanitarianism, but
(37:59):
the whole idea was the same. He called it the
internal ideo the internal idea of Esperanto, which is that
it can remove those language barriers, those culture burials, barriers
between people and to by doing so, you make people
recognize that we're all humans.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Yeah, and he I think realized at some point again
that sort of attaching an ism to something maybe might
keep people from wanting to learn it. And I think
they were also Esperantis. Dave said that a lot of
them were French intellectuals that were like, no, no, no,
(38:38):
we don't need to attach this to an ism. So
it officially wasn't attached to an ism. But I do
think the spirit of all that is a big part
of Esperanto still. Yeah, some people who want to learn
it even though it's not an official like ethic.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
Yeah, and so I mean, just right off the bat,
they had the first international or Universal Congress of Esperano
in nineteen oh fives, and in that conference a schism
created or was created in like a whole other language,
like a version of Esperanto called Edo that was even
easier to learn, was introduced, and that group just went
(39:15):
off and did their own thing, which kind of hamstrung
Esperanto as it was really starting to take off. But
Edo you don't hear about any longer. You still hear
about Esperanto. I'm not one hundred percent sure why. Maybe
it is because it had an ethic or a moral
to it in addition to being easy to learn. That's like,
that's my guess. But Zamenhoff died in nineteen seventeen, and
(39:41):
what Sad Dave points out, he lived long enough to
see World War One, which I didn't read anything he
wrote about it directly, but he would have been really
bummed by that, because that is not that's what he
was creating Esperanto to avoid.
Speaker 1 (39:56):
Yeah, absolutely, during his life he was now dominated fourteen
times fourteen never won, unfortunately for the Nobel Peace Prize,
and post World War One, when the League of Nations
was created, to know, to stop something like that from
happening again didn't work. In that very first meeting, there
was a proposal to teach Esperanto in schools to member countries,
(40:19):
which was pretty remarkable. It didn't happen because the French
delegation vetoed that and they said French is already the
universal language, which is so haughty, but that's they literally
kept Esperanto like who knows where it would be now
if they hadn't to stop.
Speaker 2 (40:34):
That same thing with the US at the United Nations
in the forties after the UN was founded, somebody said, hey,
we should all learn Esperanto, and the US said, no,
English is already a universal language. And that actually shows
how language can like enhance the standing of the countries
that speak that language that the rest of the world
sees is basically a universal language and why Esperanto didn't
(40:58):
do that because it didn't come from any country, didn't
come from any ethnic group or any region. It was
a from scratch universal grammar that wouldn't enhance one nation
over others.
Speaker 1 (41:09):
Yeah, not everyone loved it. If you think, like who
maybe wouldn't like it? Who wouldn't like this language created
from a Jewish man Hitler, you would be correct. It's
written about n mind comp he said. Hitler said that
it was a secret Jewish language he used to plot
(41:29):
against Germany. And I don't know if anyone ever went
over to him, probably not and said, DeFi you can
actually it's not secret at all. You can learn it
in fearsick hours conversationally. So I don't know. Hitler being Hitler,
there were and of course you know, I'm sort of
(41:50):
joking about that, but it was no joke at all,
because Hitler and others would round up Esperanto speakers and
jail them or kill them. And in fact Hitler took
his family, his surviving family, that is, to the Warsaw
Ghetto and all three of Zamenhoff's children were killed by Nazis. Yeah,
(42:10):
it's brutal.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
Stalin did the same thing, which I guess is why
it seems at first surprising that he learned Esperanto, but
he called it the language of the spies, so I
guess he was just.
Speaker 1 (42:22):
That's probably why I learned exactly.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
But even if you were a loyal Communist Party member,
you would be killed for knowing Esperanto, which is funny
because it was frequently accused of being a secret Communist
plot itself, so right, that kind of goes to show
you just how nationless Esperanto actually was.
Speaker 1 (42:42):
Yeah. Absolutely, if you get online today, if you're interested
in this and you want to know, like, who's how's
it going today with Esperanto? Who's speaking it? Are people
into it? Yeah? People are into it. There is. It's
not a huge community, but it's a very passionate community
of people all over the world. People like Ben Bowlin,
they find each other online. It's very easy to do that.
Speaker 2 (43:06):
Now.
Speaker 1 (43:06):
Obviously before the Internet, they would they would have local
clubs and stuff like that. They would have pen pals
kind of the way that people would spread any message.
Pre Internet, they were doing that in Esperanto. And there
are you know, there are conferences. I think there's one
the twenty twenty four Universala Congresso is in Tanzania this year,
(43:28):
which is pretty cool, and it sounds just like they
get together, they speak Esperanto. They work hard to keep
this language and this idea alive, which is a very Again,
I think it's still a noble pursuit.
Speaker 2 (43:40):
And Esperanto has its own teaching app, learn new with
an exclavation point at learnu dot net. You can also
pick it up on Duo Linguo and Babble. But I've
looked on Duo Linguo. They have three hundred and eighty
one thousand people signed up to learn Esperanto, which is
more than cling on, more than Navajo, and more than Yiddish.
(44:03):
It's toward the bottom, but it's still not the last one.
Three hundred and eighty thousand people world wide is nothing
to sneeze at.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
Heck no, it's more than klingon.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
There's also a couple of podcasts Radio Esperanto. Radio, by
the way, is the same word in English and Esperanto. Oh,
I already ended within an US persone American in person. Okay,
but you have to probably kind of know already a
little bit of Esperanto.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
Yeah, I meant to check that out. I'm going to
listen to one of those and just see if I
can understand anything like.
Speaker 2 (44:33):
Oh, they said radio again, I know what that means.
One other thing before we leave. Do you have anything else?
Speaker 1 (44:39):
Yeah? I got it? One and so two things.
Speaker 2 (44:41):
Okay, Well you go first, Okay.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
Nineteen oh five we mentioned that year earlier. What year
was that? Was that? The first year of.
Speaker 2 (44:48):
The first Congress, the Universal Congress.
Speaker 1 (44:50):
The first Congress. Well that makes sense then, because that
was the year that the Esperanto flag was debuted. It
is called the Verda stello or the green Star, and
it's it. It's nice. It's a green rectangle. It's got
a little white square in the upper left corner and
a green star inside that white square. And apparently that
(45:10):
was a big part of the branding the color green. LLL.
Early On wanted it to all sort of look the
same and feel the same. So his pamphlets and books
and everything was in green. And I think green's just
a big esper or I'm sorry, verdo is a big
Esperanto color. Yeah, Verda.
Speaker 2 (45:26):
That's that's branding, one oh one, branding, one on one. Okay,
Well I'll say mine, then you can finish with years.
I just wanted to talk about Incubus real quick, that
nineteen sixty five sixty six Shatner.
Speaker 1 (45:37):
Movie I watched a little bit.
Speaker 2 (45:38):
I did too, and it is really hard to follow.
And when you're listening to them speak, you're like, oh,
this is okay. It's esperanto. If you speak Esperanto, it
drives you up the wall because apparently no one in
the film knew Esperanto. I learned their dialogue in two
weeks and there was no one who knew Esperanto on
the set to coach them. So it's just a moment
(45:59):
after moment of bad Esperanto pronunciation. And I saw in
Quartz there was an article that quoted like a film
reviewer from the age who said that Incubus is like
a foreign film from a country that never existed.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
What a great dissa.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
I thought so too. We're checking out five minutes of it.
Speaker 1 (46:20):
Yeah, absolutely, that's it. That's it.
Speaker 2 (46:23):
Okay, Well, if you want to know more about Esperanto, everybody,
go check it out. You do worse than starting No,
actually you couldn't do worse than starting with Incubus, but
start there anyway. And since I said Incubus, it's time
for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (46:40):
I'm gonna call this eight quite right. Hey, guys, listen
to the latest episode. I got a kick out of
Josh saying that people who requit and this is on
dry cleaning, who request a double crease in their pants
ain't quite right.
Speaker 2 (46:53):
I stand by there.
Speaker 1 (46:54):
Yeah, it's like a Southern itsm I guess. I used
to live in Miami. Now I'm back in Maryland, where
I've along go Hagar's town flying box cars. And I
worked as a housekeeper for the opulently wealthy one woman
I could name drop, but I won't requested from her
housekeepers that her bed sheets be ironed, no joke. She
(47:16):
wanted her flat and fitted king sized bed sheets laundered
and ironed every day. Wow, here's the kicker. This woman
almost became my mother in law. But I digress. Definitely
not quite right. Love the show, guys. It's my news source,
my companion, my teacher, and has given an otherwise awkward
(47:36):
me plenty of knowledge to be able to connect with
someone on almost any topic. And that was a lovely
email from the wonderful Ashlan Powers.
Speaker 2 (47:44):
Thanks a lot, Ashlan, that was great. I would divide
you against using us as your news source though, but
other than that, thank you very much.
Speaker 1 (47:51):
Agreed.
Speaker 2 (47:52):
If you want to be like Ashlin and tell us
a great little anecdote leaving out the names to protect
the not necessarily innocent, but you know, just out of tact,
you can do so via email send it off to
stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (48:10):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you
should know. I don't know how to say that. And Esperanto,
now that I think about it, I really should have
looked that up.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
I was wondering if you were gonna do that.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
I can't believe I didn't. I feel kind of jerky,
jerk woddy. I guess I don't know how to say that.
And Esperano either.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Well, jerkwad would be jerk wado, yeah, exactly, or something like.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
That, something similar to that. Yeah, it actually would make
sense because Esperano is taking root words jerk wad and
putting them together and then conjugating them in a very
uniform way. We should probably tell everybody what we're talking
about here, because we just kind of accidentally got into it.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
Yeah, it's a language, not.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Just a language. It's a con lang, a constructed language,
which is a language that you sit down and make up.
Some people actually do this, and apparently it's addictive when
you start, as opposed to, like I guess, a natural language,
one that just kind of develops organically over time as
a group of people start talking to one another.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Yeah, Esperanto itself means one who hopes, and that will
all make sense once you hear the story, because it's
a pretty wonderful story. Actually, I didn't know much about it.
I just thought it was kind of one of these
goofy fringe things, and it is a fringe thing. They're
about a thousand people who are native, not just Esperanto speakers,
(01:45):
but where their first language that they learned was Esperanto.
They are native speakers. Dave Rus helped us with this,
and he dug up George Soros, billionaire. Oh, I don't know.
People describe him in a lot of ways depending on
who you are, but as the most famous Esperanto speaker.
(02:06):
But I did poke around a little bit and found
that Tolstoy j R. R. Tolkien spoke Esperanto and lemaire,
basically the father of modern cinema. And as this will
become as a surprise when you see later on what happened,
but Joseph Stalin apparently knew how to speak Esperanto.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Huh, that is kind of a surprise. The thing I
think that differentiates George soros so is he was a
native speaker, like that was his first language was Esperanto.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Yeah, but I looked over the list of just speakers, right,
notable speakers, and there are a lot of people in
the list, but I just hadn't heard of many of them.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Stilln' to big surprise, I'd like to add one more
to that list of notable Esperanto speakers, our own ben
bowling from stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
I thought he spoke Esperanto, that tracks he did.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
I emailed them just to make sure that I wasn't
just making something up in my head, and he said, yeah,
he used to, you know, be into it, and he
just kind of fell out of it, and then he
emailed me like hours later, and it was like, damn it, Josh,
now I'm back into Esperano. So he's back into it.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Everybody, Well, learning Esperanto is about as ben bowling a
thing as I can imagine.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
It is, because it's inclusive, it's intelligent, it's curious people,
it's witty. It seems to be like one of the better,
most more nicer kind online communities that you'll come across
from what I can.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
And it's fringe, and that's that's Ben for sure.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Yeah, and again that's Ben Bolan from stuff they don't
want you to know.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
That's right. So you said it was a constructed language.
I guess we'll talk a little bit about why people
would construct a language and a little bit of the
history of these languages. There are a lot of reasons
for doing that. Most of them are because they want
to create a language that's easier to learn, that's simpler.
(04:04):
A lot of times there might be religious reasons or
philosophical reasons. Some people just do it for fun. A
lot of them were designed to be a universal language.
In Esperanto, Actually, Esperanto takes a lot of these boxes,
as we'll see, but a lot of them are created
for like, hey, wouldn't it be better if everybody could
speak a language?
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Yeah? What a universal language? A language where I guess
the whole point of a universal language is there's definitely
the point of Esperanto. The idea is that if you
can speak a common language with anybody else on the planet,
that should conceivably do away with a lot of different
(04:46):
conflicts that probably arise from disputes over language, from differences
in language from an inability to see one another's viewpoint
because we're having trouble talking with one another. And that's
kind of the basis of a lot of the constructed languages,
that idea that if we can all speak a universal language,
there'll be a global human family or world, which that
(05:15):
does sound like you'd be up. George Soros's allly yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
I mean, if you just could create a language that
where all it was was don't shoot and how about
a plate of cookies and a glass of milk?
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Oh yeah, how far we go, it'd be a much
better world.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
So admitted languages of you know, people have always sort
of been doing this here and there, but in the
nineteenth century it seems to have really hit its stride.
There were more than one hundred constructed languages that decade
that century alone, and Esperanto is far and away the
most popular today, although for a long long time it
(05:56):
was a language created by a German priest name Johann
Schlayer called vol Vollapuk.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Yeah, Vallapuk. Apparently God told.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
Him to do it, sure mission from Gad.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
Yeah, what else are you gonna do? You're gonna make
that language? And I'm sure he was like, are you
sure you want to call it vollapuk, And guy was like,
get busy, and he did, and it actually caught on
really well. There seems to have been kind of a
bug in the late nineteenth century, at least in the
West of invented languages, and vollapuke apparently the fit the bill,
(06:31):
and it spread you far and wide. I can't not
say it like that.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
I'm sorry, that's fine.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
They started having like international congresses or conferences of vallapuc.
President Grover Cleveland's wife Francis named their dog Vollapuke. Like
it was. It was a worldwide phenomenon. Even if you
didn't know it or had no interest in learning it,
you knew about it.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Yeah, that's because that dog threw up all over the place. Though.
We had a cat nam Underfoot. Literally, my dad named
this cat underfoot.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
That's a very good name.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
And I'll give you two guesses why.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Because the cat had very long legs, okay, and no
feat to speak of. That's right, it was underfooted.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
So that conference you were talking about for Vatapuke was
eighteen eighty nine, but a couple of years before that,
so it was, you know, cruising and doing pretty well,
but two years before that, Esperanto was created and really
took it over, you know, over the next like thirty
forty years or so.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
I mean, imagine there being a trend today of like
a universal language is catching on, like on TikTok oh God,
like it would just take off. But it's such a
bizarre thing to think of, and this is what people
were into. And this was long before social media, so
it was hard for something to become a global phenomenon.
And yet not one but two universal languages took hold
(07:58):
in the eighteen eighties. Yeah, so Esperano apparently just totally
supplanted vollapuke. But there is a little footnote of it.
Apparently the Danes say what we would say, like, it's
all Greek to me, Like, I don't understand what you're saying.
The Danish expression is it's pure vollapuke.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
That makes sense.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Yeah, it's great. I love that. I love learning Danish expressions.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
I'm going to start saying that. I don't say it's
all Greek to me much anyway, but if that ever
comes up, I'm gonna say it's pure ballapuke.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Yeah, and no offense for a Greek list. There's just
just something someone says here.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
Yeah, I wonder what Greek's think about that.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Actually don't know. I don't know if it's gotten back
to them yet.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
Yeah, So should we talk a little bit about this
the creator of Esperanto? Who was I tried to find
out bad things about this guy, but he seems like
a pretty remarkable, humble, well intentioned fella.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
And I also read that he was one of those
rare people and who would sleep just a couple hours
a night rather than sit around and stare at the wall.
He did interesting things. He was a polyglot, He learned
tons of different languages, He was well read, he was
an optometrist. He did all sorts of stuff. But along
the way, one of the things he did was create Esperanto.
(09:17):
And he had a pretty great, well not great, but
a pretty heavy backstory to it.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
Yeah. His name, we haven't said his name yet. He's
known as l el Zamenhoff or Soamenhoff, but his full
name was Ludwik Leitzer Soamenhoff. Born on December fifteenth, which
is National Samenhoff Day. Oh sure, yeah, in eighteen fifty nine,
(09:42):
born in bi Alishtock, Poland. He was Jewish as was
a lot of belishtock about seventy percent, also some Germans,
some Russians, obviously Poles, and growing up there was pretty
rough because there was a lot of ethnic violence going on.
There were Jews being attacked by Poles, there were Germans
being attacked by Russians. In eighteen eighty one, there was
(10:07):
a false, I guess, accusation that Jews were behind the
assassination of Alexander the Second of Russia, and that started
the Pograms, which were these organized massacres of Polish and
Russian Jewish communities.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
Yeah, because Poland was annexed by Russia from eighteen oh
seven to nineteen twenty one, which is why they would
have cared that was their czar. And apparently it wasn't
the Jews at all or anybody who had anything to
do with Jewishness. It was anti Autocratics, a group of
called the nouradnya volya people's will, and they threw a
(10:45):
bomb and blew him up. And apparently his successor, his son,
Zari Alexander the third, was even worse. But from those
pograms that el Zamenhoff was alive to witness, and even
before that just the ethnic violence that I was endemic
to Biaalistock. That had a really big effect on him,
and that's where he developed this idea that humanity is
(11:09):
way more connected than we realized, that we have all
these false constructs that separate us, that don't have to
separate us, but do time and time again. Language is
one of them. He cited religion as one of them,
and he was very Jewish. He was a very religious
Jewish person, but he still recognized that religion creates conflict
sometimes it has historically, and he felt like you could
(11:33):
kind of you could keep the religion, you could keep
the different nations, you can keep the things that do
divide us, as long as they had something like a
universal language laying over the whole thing that could defuse
the conflicts that grow up from those things that divide us.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
Yeah, which was and he was a kid. I mean,
this is remarkable stuff for a preteen and then teen
nature to sort of understand. So he's clearly a brilliant, empathetic,
passionate human being. I think, as the you know, family
story goes, at least he was ten years old and
he wrote a play called The Tower of Babel colon
(12:16):
the Beilishtock tragedy in five acts as a ten year old.
So just this idea of sort of stripping away these
divisions and realizing, like, hey, we're all human beings. That's
the one like at the root, that's what we are,
and we all literally have that in common, yet we
divide ourselves like. It's just a remarkable thing for a
(12:38):
kid and a lesson for everybody of all ages. Still.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
Yeah, as he was raised, he learned Yiddish, which apparently
grew out of a German dialect that's written in Hebrew.
I didn't realize that, but it's the universal language of
the Ashkenazi Jews, the Jewish people in Central and Eastern Europe.
So he already understood what a universal language could do.
(13:03):
You could take a Jewish person from Poland and a
Jewish person from Czechoslovakia and put them in a room
and they could speak to one another through that second tongue, Yiddish.
So he set about kind of trying to modernize Yiddish,
maybe he can spread that, and then he stopped pretty
much in his tracks because he realized that what he
(13:23):
was trying to do was say, hey, everybody, let's all
learn the language of the people you consider criminals and spies.
It was like a really hard sell that he just
realized wasn't going to go anywhere. So he abandoned trying
to sell Yiddish or create a universal language out of
Yiddish and just set about creating one from scratch, which
(13:44):
is what Esperano came from.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
What a setup it is.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
It's going pretty well so far. We should release this
as this show.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Best setup ever. I'm gonna say it, even though it
annoy some people. Should we take a break.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
I'm going to say it, even though it annoys everybody. Yes,
we should.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
All right, we'll be right back, all right, so we're
(14:29):
back really quickly. That sort of made me before we
left and talked about people being annoyed by asking to
take a break. That came to mind because I jumped
on Reddit recently, on our subreddit and actually started an
account because there was so much just sort of bad information,
like Jerry doesn't even work with him anymore, and just
all these weird things that people sort of assume that
(14:50):
we're wrong. And I've since learned that that's and even
redditors kind of said, like that's kind of a thing.
People like surmise a lot. Yeah, so I'd signed up
for a few days and answered like geez a lot
of questions for like a full day and then got
right back off. But just wanted people to know if
they thought I was some phony, that that was really me.
(15:12):
And most people were awesome.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
You had Jones stunt AMA, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
Sort of. You know what I don't like about AMAS though?
Is it this just that rapid fire sort of thing, right,
So this was like a slow burn AMA and it's
all still there, a lot of answered questions, like with
correct information, and like I said, almost everyone was really
really nice, but not everyone is.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
But that's just the nature of online interactions the internets.
That's silly that they think Jerry doesn't work with us anymore.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
She doesn't exist. Someone was really annoyed though, about like
every time they ask if it's time to take a break,
and I was like, we do that because we don't
script this out and I'm genuinely wondering if it's a
good time to take a break.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
Yeah, what a weird thing to be upset about.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
It's a conversation anyway, Thanks to everyone who participated, and
you can go there and check it out if you
want back to esperanto.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
Yes, you want me to pick it up because we
don't script this stuff.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
Why did you ask me that? That's so annoying?
Speaker 2 (16:11):
So we said that that l. Zamenhoff had said, Okay,
I'm going to start from scratch. I'm going to create
a language that doesn't come from anywhere, that's not spoken
by anybody. I'm going to make this universal language from scratch.
And so his nineteenth birthday party, he had already done
enough that he handed out pocket dictionaries and grammar charts
(16:32):
to the guests.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
Man of his birthday, which a swinging party. That's right
for a nineteen year old.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
He called the new language lingo Internacia or no inter
Nazia because that sees its remember, yeah, yeah, And he
composed a little hymn, and I kind of taught myself
how to pronounce it, even though I'm going to completely
screw it up.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
But may I you gotta sing it though?
Speaker 2 (16:58):
No, yeah, no, you'd don't. You have to say it
solemnly like this, Mala mikite de las nazis, cado cado
yam tempesta la tote holmose in familia co une gare sodebe.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Nice work can I tell everyone what it means?
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Yes, but you have to sing it.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
Okay, Let the hatred of the nations fall, fall, fall.
The time is already here. All humanity must unite in
one family.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
Doesn't rhyme? Yeah, So when I'm ready to send him,
it didn't rhyme.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
So he's cruising with this thing. He has this banging
nineteenth birthday party where he's given out this stuff to
his friends. I'm sure they're just like, who is this guy? Even?
This is amazing? And in eighteen eighty seven he self
published a pamphlet, a forty two page pamphlet called uh
are you gonna pronounce this stuff?
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Unua libro?
Speaker 1 (18:02):
Okay? I thought that was right. It means first book.
And as you'll see, if you notice some of these
words sound like other languages, it's because, like other constructed languages,
it's usually based on like the words are based on
some other words. So when you hear esperanto, like if
you go to watch a scene from the Esperanto William
Shatner movie that you can watch on YouTube, yeah, I
(18:25):
think from him, Well when was that sixty sixty six?
Speaker 2 (18:29):
Everybody says, but Turner classic movies listed as sixty five,
which I find confusing, but everybody else is sixty.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
Six a side with tcm always. But if you go
to and you hear or just you know, I looked
up on YouTube, just like Esperanto conversations, or if you
bump into Ben Bowlin somewhere in Atlanta, you'll you'll sit
there and you'll go, oh wow, that sounds a little
bit like Spanish some and maybe it might sound Italian,
which Spanish also sounds kind of Italian sometimes, and so
(18:57):
a lot of it might sound a little bit familiar,
like libro for book, like that makes sense, like the
word library. So just pointing out that when you hear
Esperanto words and you think it sounds familiar, it's not
by accident.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
Yeah. The reason why, especially if you are a Westerner.
Three quarters of the root words he started out with,
nine hundred of them, as we'll see, are taken from
Romance languages. So it's yeah, if you're an English speaker,
it's very easy to pick up.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
That's a much simpler way to say what it says.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
So in the in the that first book, unua libro,
which I can I can understand what that means just
from the little primer, which I have to say, hats
off to Dave. He put together a primer for us
in this article that like, when you go back and
research it more widely, you're like, this is really difficult
(19:49):
to like kind of wrangle into one small little ball.
And he managed to do that really really well. So
way to go, Dave. But that first book, Unuwa Libro,
it had some sample translations. It said, here's here's how
you say this this stuff. Here's the grammar rules, here's
the dictionary, here's how you pronounce it. And he said
(20:10):
that his pen name. He wrote it as a pen name,
doctro esperanto or doctor hopeful is what it.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Loved it.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
And he called again his language the lingvo inter Nazia,
and that's what he thought everybody was going to call it.
But instead everybody said, I like this doctor hopeful cat.
Let's just call his language.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Esperanto, yeah, which is sort of ironic because from the
beginning he was a very humble guy and didn't want
to be like he didn't name it, you know, Zamenhoffer
or whatever, like he didn't want it to be named
after him. He didn't want to own it. No, we
would call something like this open source today. He didn't
want it to be about him, So the fact that
(20:51):
he made up a name and that they named it
after him anyway is kind of funny. I get the
sense that it probably didn't bother him too much because
he seemed like a good guy.
Speaker 2 (20:59):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
But his goal, and we'll talk about sort of the
other stuff that came along later, as far as his
sort of desire to attach other meaning to it, But
his sort of root goal at the beginning was I
want a language for the love of whoever you worship
that is easier to learn than everything else out there. Yeah,
(21:20):
and I want it to be a language, like you mentioned,
sort of from the get go that can unite people
and promote peace, like two very sort of noble pursuits,
I think.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
So, okay, let's talk about goal one. A language that's
for the love of whatever you worship, easier to learn
than most of the other languages out there. Right right,
Apparently you could learn Esperanto in something like about forty
hours of class time, one full week of learning. You'll
(21:50):
walk out of there on the end of the day
Friday being able to converse basically in Esperanto. Tell people
where you live, who you are, what you like, point
to class and identify them correctly.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
That isn't don't shoot? How about to play a cookie
and some milk?
Speaker 2 (22:05):
Exactly? They should teach that first, for sure. Apparently that's
I mean, you can just know without even knowing anything
about learning languages. That's really a short amount of time.
It takes about one hundred to two hundred hours to
learn French or German to the same degree. There's another
person who estimated that for English speakers it's five times
(22:26):
easier to learn Esperano than French or Spanish, ten times
easier than Russian, and twenty times easier than Chinese. And
again a large part of that is because the root
words are taken from Romance languages. So just recognizing generally
being able to make a guess in almost every case
were what that word means, that's a huge leg up,
(22:47):
and that's why it's so much easier in part. But
the other part is the grammar that he created is
so standard and with such regularity that that that's the
part that makes it that much easier to learn, especially
for Romance language speakers.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
Yeah, I mean, the hard part about learning a language
is usually not memorizing root words and learning basic grammar.
It's the irregular verbs. It's all these exceptions to rules.
Fritch has more than two thousand irregular verbs. English is
notoriously tough to learn as a as a non native speaker.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
Yeah, think about those, just about irregular verbs real quick, chuck.
For the English to be pretty basic stuff. It's conjugated
as b being, been, r am is was and were. Now,
if you were just approaching those words as a non
English speaker to begin with, you wouldn't think was had
anything to do with b or r has anything to
(23:49):
do with b. And that's that's what causes the confusion.
And not just English, but almost any language. Irregular verbs
and exceptions to the standard rules.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
Yeah, and you know we did, and we did a
whole episode on language acquisition, right.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
I'm I'm pretty sure sure we did.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
Yeah, for sure, because I'm just consistently knocked out that
babies into toddlers and so on just just pick up language.
It's really remarkable to me still to see that kind
of thing. But esperanto, and we're just going to go
over some sort of the base rules here, and I
think you will find yourself like we did. Just saying,
(24:27):
oh my god, that's amazing and it makes so much sense.
There are sixteen grammatical rules, there are no irregular verbs,
there are no exceptions to rules, and these are just
this isn't everything, but these are just a few examples
of kind of like how much sense it makes. All
nouns are going to end with the letter oh. That's
why I said jerk wado at the beginning. Adjectives all
(24:50):
all of them end in the letter A. Adverbs all
end in the letter E. There are no genders. That's
another place where learning a foreign language can be confusing,
is you know, the different cases and genders and stuff
like that, and having to change things around. Not an esperanto,
my friend. And then this is sort of just a
fun one. La la is the only word for the right.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
Not la lay low ill, none of that stuff. L yeah,
none of that. It's all la the everything. And then
it's up to the conjugation of the verb that that
that changes that or the adverb or the adjective or whatever.
Because it's standard when you see like an o or
(25:38):
an a or an e, you can identify a word
in a sentence as a verb and adverb. And now
in that kind of thing. So the infinitive form of verbs.
And by the way, I had to look most of
this up, like I was, like, what's.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
An adverb again English?
Speaker 2 (25:51):
An verb is something like above clearly hourly it it.
It describes an adjective, a verb, or some other stuff.
An infinitive form is like to something to do, like
the basic form like to eat. It ends in an eye,
so it's mangy okay, okay, present tense like I eat,
(26:16):
that would be as mangas it ends in as yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
And we should point out that it doesn't matter who
is eating, if he is eating or I'm eating, or
she's eating or they're eating, it's all. It's all the
same exactly.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
There's no irregular verbs. It's beautiful right in past tense
instead of something like sing sang song, where it should
all just be sing singed, singed. Uh, that's what he does.
I know it sounds weird, doesn't it. Well, sure, but
that's what he does. In this Everything in past tense
ends in ees, so manges, yeah, I ate, you ate,
(26:54):
they ate. It's all. It's all mangaz. And then with
future it's man Joe's. And then with command you just
add a you ooh manjou, and that's it. That's how
you conjugate verbs. There's no exceptions to that rule at all.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Yeah, I mean it's pretty amazing. I guess it just
makes sense that because I kind of struggled with why
other languages are so irregular. But if it's organic in
its growth, then that's just bound to happen. I think
it is.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
I looked up why, and it's actually fascinating. It's because
these languages often absorb other people from other language groups,
and they bring their words with them, and so languages
grow by adopting other words changing, and so rather than
completely altering, you know how something that usually ends an
(27:47):
ed like sing, instead of just totally altering how it
used to be, you just kind of change it to
the new form like sang or song. It's that's how
irregular verbs come up. Nobody's like, I really want to
screw people up in the future. I'm going to add this.
It just happens, you know, organically, So when you set
about creating a constructed language, you can purposely deliberately avoid
(28:12):
any irregular verbs and make it that much easier to learn.
My question that came up, Chuck, is how long, yes,
I set up, Chuck, how long does it take until
a language like Esperanto starts developing irregular verbs?
Speaker 1 (28:28):
Well, I have a strong feeling and I'd love to
hear from some esperantists that they fight that tooth and
nail because that defeats the whole purpose and spirit of it.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Okay, hasn't happened yet, then, is that answer?
Speaker 1 (28:41):
I mean, that would be my guess. Yeah, I'm on record.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Okay, I'd love to hear from them too.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
There, but if you haven't noticed that Esperanto and this
is a word you might not know, but it's called
an agglutenative language, which is the words are formed from
combinations of short words basically which English has a lot
of those. All language has a lot of those, but
Esperanto has all those.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Yeah, so you've got your root word and then you
have affixes, prefixes and sufffixes and kind of like how
you conjugate it with the eye for to eat or
an as for you eat. That's that's it, that's the whole,
that's the whole grammar. Right. So the reason why he
did this again because not just like irregular verbs, but
(29:32):
weird words that all describe the same thing is another
thing that creeps into language organically. They've used the example
of tree. Right. You know what a tree is an
English it's one of those plants that's got the wood
in the bark and the leaves, and they're tall and everything.
Everybody loves to hug them.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
Right.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Uh, tree makes sense. But rather than young tree, we
have the word sapling, which combines proto Indo European and
proto Germanic words in English. Cute word though, sapling it
is because it means young tree. It's the young version
of a tree. It's very cute. A bunch of trees
is called a forest. That's old French from Latin. And
(30:09):
then a botanical garden that has a bunch of trees
is arboretum. That's just straight up Latin. All of those
are English words sapling, forest, arboretum, and none of them
sound like tree. So by creating roots that just describe
one thing and then adjusting what they mean by adding
a prefix or a suffix, but keeping that root word,
he got around that kind of conundrum.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Yeah. So, for instance, tree and esperanto is arbo. That
young tree, which is a sapling for us is an arbito.
And as we'll see, ido is sort of the suffix
for any kind of baby version of something which is taken,
and a Spanish does that, like there were two Chucks
at my job at a Mexican restaurant, and I was
(30:54):
chuck Eto cute because I was younger than the original chi.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
Wasn't that a taco bell menu item in the nineties?
Speaker 1 (31:01):
Probably so two chuqitos in and another chuquito, three chuquitos.
A young tree instead of a sapling is an arbido.
A lot of trees instead of a forest is an arborrow.
And then that botanical garden instead of an arboretum is
(31:22):
an arboretto. And you might think, well, that sounds a
lot like our arboretum. Well it does, but it also
sounds like arbo, arbido and a barrow exactly right.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
So you see any of those words and you know
it's talking about a tree. And then when you learn
edo means a younger version of it, or r means
the the like a group of whatever you're talking about,
you just learned a ton of grammar just right off
the back. And then also note that all those in
an oh because they're all nouns. And again all nouns
and in oh in Esperanto.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
Yeah, so we mentioned edo id o as a suffix
meaning like the small version of something or a baby something.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
And we also mentioned that there wasn't gender. That there
is but uh not in terms of like you know,
how you will conjugate a sentence. Uh, it's just a suffix.
It's i n o is a female version of something.
You also have a r O, which is a group
like vorto v o r t o is a word,
(32:21):
vortarro is dictionary. Uh, it just makes a lot of sense.
E j o and uh, the ja's a pronounced as
a y. Isn't that right? Uh? E j oh is
a place for something? So k u I r I.
How would you pronounce that?
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Cooerio cooler? Oh, corey cool? Why do you ask me
to pronounce this?
Speaker 1 (32:45):
Well?
Speaker 2 (32:46):
Because I got it.
Speaker 1 (32:47):
A couery is to cook, and then what's kitchen? Cooer
ao right, So you add the e j o So, uh,
that is the place where you would cook.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
That makes sense. Right. That's not to say that Esperando
doesn't have words that you just have to memorize, because
it doesn't quite work. Because, for example, there's a couple
of places where you'll find a lot of books, like
a library or a bookstore. Right, So a library, you'd
think would be called the librereo or place of books,
but actually it's called a biblioteco. A libreo is the bookstore.
(33:23):
So it sounds like just kind of nitpicking. But if
you ever arranged to meet your friend at the libreo
and they don't they think that that's the bookstore, you're
going to be sitting there waiting in the library for
them a long time.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
Yeah, and in fact, you know adding and I find
this like part of the spirit of Esperanto is super cool,
and that they encourage you to create words as long
as they follow the rules and make sense. So to
attack these effixes and suffixes under root words and Dave
uws this, this is so great. Gosh, this just makes
(33:57):
me crazy, how great it is. Hospital. The word hospital
in Esperanto is mal sanu lejo, right, yes, does that
make sense? So m al and Esperanto is opposite of
the s, a n is healthy, The ul means people.
The e jo, remember, as we said, means the place
(34:20):
where something is. And so a hospital directly translated is
not healthy people place, which could be a lot of
places here in the West.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
But so it's kind of like Esperantos like to put
words together like you do in a scrabble game. And
the reason that it's encouraged is because out of the
gate Zamenhoff, like like you said, made this open source
and said, here, take this and just do what you
will with it and make it grow. And that's how
that's why esperano is still around. And one of the
(34:52):
reasons it's the planted vollapuke puk because the guy who
created valla puke, he he was very controlling, kept a
controlling like grip on it, and so that made it
like a dying language right out of the gate, because
you you have to let language grow and become organic
on its own. Apparently he was like, Nope, God told
me to do this, so I really need to keep
(35:14):
a sharp eye on it.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
So I think we should also talk about the word
for jet lag because it's also just super fun. Yeah,
and we could do this all day long, but just
these two examples are really great. Horror zo noso horzonozo
h o r z in o zo exactly how it sounds,
that is, h O r's time zone is z O
(35:37):
N and then illness is ozo. So the Esperanto translation
is time zone illness.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
I love that, and that sounds it's a lot of
This sounds like how it would be transcribed or subtitled
in like China or something from English.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
Yeah, for sure, I came across something. Did you see
what I sent you about English translated into English is
kind of hilarious.
Speaker 1 (36:03):
Oh no, oh you didn't.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
I found a I don't remember what paper it was,
but as an example, they translated I do not understand
into several languages, and one of them was English. And
if you literally translate I do not understand into English,
it's I may not understand. I think about it like
that's exactly what that means, But it's not at all
(36:26):
what you think of. Like I do not understand sounds right,
even though what you're saying literally is I may not understand,
because do means make I literally.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
I do not understand.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
I just I had to mention that. It just cracked
me up.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
No, that's really funny. All right, So let's take our
second break. I'm not even asking this time, and we'll
come back and talk about where Esperanto went from there
right after this.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
So, Chuck, we talked a lot about how how doctor
Esperanto Zamenhoff the reasons why he created Esperanto, and that
was goal number two was to to create like a
language that united the world, right, easy to learn, united
the world. And he originally based it on something he
(37:37):
called Hillalism, after hillel the Elder, a Jewish stage from
the first century BCE, and Hillelle's teachings can basically be
summed up as the golden rule, like treat others as
you'd like them to treat you. He changed that name
very quickly to homara nismo, which means basically humanitarianism, but
(37:59):
the whole idea was the same. He called it the
internal ideo the internal idea of Esperanto, which is that
it can remove those language barriers, those culture burials, barriers
between people and to by doing so, you make people
recognize that we're all humans.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Yeah, and he I think realized at some point again
that sort of attaching an ism to something maybe might
keep people from wanting to learn it. And I think
they were also Esperantis. Dave said that a lot of
them were French intellectuals that were like, no, no, no,
(38:38):
we don't need to attach this to an ism. So
it officially wasn't attached to an ism. But I do
think the spirit of all that is a big part
of Esperanto still. Yeah, some people who want to learn
it even though it's not an official like ethic.
Speaker 2 (38:51):
Yeah, and so I mean, just right off the bat,
they had the first international or Universal Congress of Esperano
in nineteen oh fives, and in that conference a schism
created or was created in like a whole other language,
like a version of Esperanto called Edo that was even
easier to learn, was introduced, and that group just went
(39:15):
off and did their own thing, which kind of hamstrung
Esperanto as it was really starting to take off. But
Edo you don't hear about any longer. You still hear
about Esperanto. I'm not one hundred percent sure why. Maybe
it is because it had an ethic or a moral
to it in addition to being easy to learn. That's like,
that's my guess. But Zamenhoff died in nineteen seventeen, and
(39:41):
what Sad Dave points out, he lived long enough to
see World War One, which I didn't read anything he
wrote about it directly, but he would have been really
bummed by that, because that is not that's what he
was creating Esperanto to avoid.
Speaker 1 (39:56):
Yeah, absolutely, during his life he was now dominated fourteen
times fourteen never won, unfortunately for the Nobel Peace Prize,
and post World War One, when the League of Nations
was created, to know, to stop something like that from
happening again didn't work. In that very first meeting, there
was a proposal to teach Esperanto in schools to member countries,
(40:19):
which was pretty remarkable. It didn't happen because the French
delegation vetoed that and they said French is already the
universal language, which is so haughty, but that's they literally
kept Esperanto like who knows where it would be now
if they hadn't to stop.
Speaker 2 (40:34):
That same thing with the US at the United Nations
in the forties after the UN was founded, somebody said, hey,
we should all learn Esperanto, and the US said, no,
English is already a universal language. And that actually shows
how language can like enhance the standing of the countries
that speak that language that the rest of the world
sees is basically a universal language and why Esperanto didn't
(40:58):
do that because it didn't come from any country, didn't
come from any ethnic group or any region. It was
a from scratch universal grammar that wouldn't enhance one nation
over others.
Speaker 1 (41:09):
Yeah, not everyone loved it. If you think, like who
maybe wouldn't like it? Who wouldn't like this language created
from a Jewish man Hitler, you would be correct. It's
written about n mind comp he said. Hitler said that
it was a secret Jewish language he used to plot
(41:29):
against Germany. And I don't know if anyone ever went
over to him, probably not and said, DeFi you can
actually it's not secret at all. You can learn it
in fearsick hours conversationally. So I don't know. Hitler being Hitler,
there were and of course you know, I'm sort of
(41:50):
joking about that, but it was no joke at all,
because Hitler and others would round up Esperanto speakers and
jail them or kill them. And in fact Hitler took
his family, his surviving family, that is, to the Warsaw
Ghetto and all three of Zamenhoff's children were killed by Nazis. Yeah,
(42:10):
it's brutal.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
Stalin did the same thing, which I guess is why
it seems at first surprising that he learned Esperanto, but
he called it the language of the spies, so I
guess he was just.
Speaker 1 (42:22):
That's probably why I learned exactly.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
But even if you were a loyal Communist Party member,
you would be killed for knowing Esperanto, which is funny
because it was frequently accused of being a secret Communist
plot itself, so right, that kind of goes to show
you just how nationless Esperanto actually was.
Speaker 1 (42:42):
Yeah. Absolutely, if you get online today, if you're interested
in this and you want to know, like, who's how's
it going today with Esperanto? Who's speaking it? Are people
into it? Yeah? People are into it. There is. It's
not a huge community, but it's a very passionate community
of people all over the world. People like Ben Bowlin,
they find each other online. It's very easy to do that.
Speaker 2 (43:06):
Now.
Speaker 1 (43:06):
Obviously before the Internet, they would they would have local
clubs and stuff like that. They would have pen pals
kind of the way that people would spread any message.
Pre Internet, they were doing that in Esperanto. And there
are you know, there are conferences. I think there's one
the twenty twenty four Universala Congresso is in Tanzania this year,
(43:28):
which is pretty cool, and it sounds just like they
get together, they speak Esperanto. They work hard to keep
this language and this idea alive, which is a very Again,
I think it's still a noble pursuit.
Speaker 2 (43:40):
And Esperanto has its own teaching app, learn new with
an exclavation point at learnu dot net. You can also
pick it up on Duo Linguo and Babble. But I've
looked on Duo Linguo. They have three hundred and eighty
one thousand people signed up to learn Esperanto, which is
more than cling on, more than Navajo, and more than Yiddish.
(44:03):
It's toward the bottom, but it's still not the last one.
Three hundred and eighty thousand people world wide is nothing
to sneeze at.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
Heck no, it's more than klingon.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
There's also a couple of podcasts Radio Esperanto. Radio, by
the way, is the same word in English and Esperanto. Oh,
I already ended within an US persone American in person. Okay,
but you have to probably kind of know already a
little bit of Esperanto.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
Yeah, I meant to check that out. I'm going to
listen to one of those and just see if I
can understand anything like.
Speaker 2 (44:33):
Oh, they said radio again, I know what that means.
One other thing before we leave. Do you have anything else?
Speaker 1 (44:39):
Yeah? I got it? One and so two things.
Speaker 2 (44:41):
Okay, Well you go first, Okay.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
Nineteen oh five we mentioned that year earlier. What year
was that? Was that? The first year of.
Speaker 2 (44:48):
The first Congress, the Universal Congress.
Speaker 1 (44:50):
The first Congress. Well that makes sense then, because that
was the year that the Esperanto flag was debuted. It
is called the Verda stello or the green Star, and
it's it. It's nice. It's a green rectangle. It's got
a little white square in the upper left corner and
a green star inside that white square. And apparently that
(45:10):
was a big part of the branding the color green. LLL.
Early On wanted it to all sort of look the
same and feel the same. So his pamphlets and books
and everything was in green. And I think green's just
a big esper or I'm sorry, verdo is a big
Esperanto color. Yeah, Verda.
Speaker 2 (45:26):
That's that's branding, one oh one, branding, one on one. Okay,
Well I'll say mine, then you can finish with years.
I just wanted to talk about Incubus real quick, that
nineteen sixty five sixty six Shatner.
Speaker 1 (45:37):
Movie I watched a little bit.
Speaker 2 (45:38):
I did too, and it is really hard to follow.
And when you're listening to them speak, you're like, oh,
this is okay. It's esperanto. If you speak Esperanto, it
drives you up the wall because apparently no one in
the film knew Esperanto. I learned their dialogue in two
weeks and there was no one who knew Esperanto on
the set to coach them. So it's just a moment
(45:59):
after moment of bad Esperanto pronunciation. And I saw in
Quartz there was an article that quoted like a film
reviewer from the age who said that Incubus is like
a foreign film from a country that never existed.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
What a great dissa.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
I thought so too. We're checking out five minutes of it.
Speaker 1 (46:20):
Yeah, absolutely, that's it. That's it.
Speaker 2 (46:23):
Okay, Well, if you want to know more about Esperanto, everybody,
go check it out. You do worse than starting No,
actually you couldn't do worse than starting with Incubus, but
start there anyway. And since I said Incubus, it's time
for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (46:40):
I'm gonna call this eight quite right. Hey, guys, listen
to the latest episode. I got a kick out of
Josh saying that people who requit and this is on
dry cleaning, who request a double crease in their pants
ain't quite right.
Speaker 2 (46:53):
I stand by there.
Speaker 1 (46:54):
Yeah, it's like a Southern itsm I guess. I used
to live in Miami. Now I'm back in Maryland, where
I've along go Hagar's town flying box cars. And I
worked as a housekeeper for the opulently wealthy one woman
I could name drop, but I won't requested from her
housekeepers that her bed sheets be ironed, no joke. She
(47:16):
wanted her flat and fitted king sized bed sheets laundered
and ironed every day. Wow, here's the kicker. This woman
almost became my mother in law. But I digress. Definitely
not quite right. Love the show, guys. It's my news source,
my companion, my teacher, and has given an otherwise awkward
(47:36):
me plenty of knowledge to be able to connect with
someone on almost any topic. And that was a lovely
email from the wonderful Ashlan Powers.
Speaker 2 (47:44):
Thanks a lot, Ashlan, that was great. I would divide
you against using us as your news source though, but
other than that, thank you very much.
Speaker 1 (47:51):
Agreed.
Speaker 2 (47:52):
If you want to be like Ashlin and tell us
a great little anecdote leaving out the names to protect
the not necessarily innocent, but you know, just out of tact,
you can do so via email send it off to
stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (48:10):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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