100-493: Esperanto ( / ˌ ɛ s p ə ˈ r ɑː n t oʊ / , /- æ n t oʊ / ) is the world's most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language . Created by L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, it is intended to be a universal second language for international communication, or "the international language" ( la Lingvo Internacia ). Zamenhof first described the language in Dr. Esperanto's International Language (Esperanto: Unua Libro ), which he published under
200-511: A fictional language . Planned languages (or engineered languages / engelangs ) are languages that have been purposefully designed; they are the result of deliberate, controlling intervention and are thus of a form of language planning . There are many possible reasons to create a constructed language, such as to ease human communication (see international auxiliary language and code ); to give fiction or an associated constructed setting an added layer of realism; for experimentation in
300-479: A "community of speakers". His original title for the language was simply "the international language" ( la lingvo internacia ), but early speakers grew fond of the name Esperanto, and began to use it as the name for the language just two years after its creation. The name quickly gained prominence, and has been used as an official name ever since. In 1905, Zamenhof published the Fundamento de Esperanto as
400-582: A "natural language" ( Natursprache ) of the senses. Musical languages from the Renaissance were often tied up with mysticism , magic and alchemy , sometimes also referred to as the language of the birds . A non-mystic musical language was Solresol . The 17th century saw the rise of projects for "philosophical" or "a priori" languages, such as: These early taxonomic conlangs produced systems of hierarchical classification that were intended to result in both spoken and written expression. Leibniz had
500-476: A Jewish ophthalmologist from Białystok , then part of the Russian Empire , but now part of Poland . According to Zamenhof, he created the language to reduce the "time and labor we spend in learning foreign tongues", and to foster harmony between people from different countries: "Were there but an international language, all translations would be made into it alone ... and all nations would be united in
600-421: A basic understanding of Esperanto. The language-learning platforms Drops , Memrise and LingQ also have materials for Esperanto. On February 22, 2012, Google Translate added Esperanto as its 64th language. On July 25, 2016, Yandex Translate added Esperanto as a language. With about 361,000 articles, Esperanto Misplaced Pages (Vikipedio) is the 36th-largest Misplaced Pages, as measured by the number of articles, and
700-522: A certain degree isolating in character". Approximately 80% of Esperanto's vocabulary is derived from Romance languages. Typologically , Esperanto has prepositions and a pragmatic word order that by default is subject–verb–object (SVO). Adjectives can be freely placed before or after the nouns they modify, though placing them before the noun is more common. New words are formed through extensive use of affixes and compounds . Esperanto's phonology , grammar , vocabulary , and semantics are based on
800-475: A common brotherhood." His feelings and the situation in Białystok may be gleaned from an extract from his letter to Nikolai Borovko: The place where I was born and spent my childhood gave direction to all my future struggles. In Białystok the inhabitants were divided into four distinct elements: Russians, Poles, Germans, and Jews; each of these spoke their own language and looked on all the others as enemies. In such
900-520: A community of conlangers with its own customs, such as translation challenges and translation relays , and its own terminology. Sarah Higley reports from results of her surveys that the demographics of the Conlang list are primarily men from North America and western Europe, with a smaller number from Oceania, Asia, the Middle East, and South America, with an age range from thirteen to over sixty;
1000-448: A constructed language is that if it was constructed to be a natural language for use by fictional foreigners or aliens, as with Dothraki and High Valyrian in the Game of Thrones series, which was adapted from the A Song of Ice and Fire book series, the language should be easily pronounced by actors, and should fit with and incorporate any fragments of the language already invented by
1100-501: A constructed language is the telescope rule, which claims that it takes less time to first learn a simple constructed language and then a natural language, than to learn only a natural language. Thus, if someone wants to learn English, some suggest learning Basic English first. Constructed languages like Esperanto and Interlingua are in fact often simpler due to the typical lack of irregular verbs and other grammatical quirks. Some studies have found that learning Esperanto helps in learning
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#17327732076211200-549: A definitive guide to the language. Later that year, French Esperantists organized with his participation the first World Esperanto Congress , an ongoing annual conference, in Boulogne-sur-Mer , France. Zamenhof also proposed to the first congress that an independent body of linguistic scholars should steward the future evolution of Esperanto, foreshadowing the founding of the Akademio de Esperanto (in part modeled after
1300-441: A few dorożkas with their horses squeezed in between. Such a sight it was. Later a few blocks were changed from Dzika Street to Dr. Zamenhofa Street and a nice monument was erected there with his name and his invention inscribed on it, to honor his memory. Zamenhof's goal was to create an easy and flexible language that would serve as a universal second language , to foster world peace and international understanding, and to build
1400-595: A first language ". A member of the Klingon Language Institute , d'Armond Speers , attempted to raise his son as a native (bilingual with English) Klingon speaker. As soon as a constructed language has a community of fluent speakers, especially if it has numerous native speakers, it begins to evolve and hence loses its constructed status. For example, Modern Hebrew and its pronunciation norms were developed from existing traditions of Hebrew , such as Mishnaic Hebrew and Biblical Hebrew following
1500-422: A general Sephardic pronunciation, rather than engineered from scratch, and has undergone considerable changes since the state of Israel was founded in 1948 (Hetzron 1990:693). However, linguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann argues that Modern Hebrew, which he terms "Israeli", is a Semito-European hybrid based not only on Hebrew but also on Yiddish and other languages spoken by revivalists. Zuckermann therefore endorses
1600-702: A language that could be used by an international Jewish conspiracy once they achieved world domination. Esperantists were killed during the Holocaust , with Zamenhof's family in particular singled out to be killed. The efforts of a minority of German Esperantists to expel their Jewish colleagues and overtly align themselves with the Reich were futile, and Esperanto was legally forbidden in 1935. Esperantists in German concentration camps did, however, teach Esperanto to fellow prisoners, telling guards they were teaching Italian,
1700-499: A linguist who created multiple well-known constructed languages including the Valyrian languages and Dothraki , advocated a similar opinion, saying that "Theoretically, anyone can publish anything using any language I created, and, in my opinion, neither I nor anyone else should be able to do anything about it." However, Peterson also expressed concern that the respective rights-holders—regardless of whether or not their ownership of
1800-709: A middle ground between naïve natural selection and development of language and its explicit construction. The term glossopoeia is also used to mean language construction, particularly construction of artistic languages . Conlang speakers are rare. For example, the Hungarian census of 2011 found 8,397 speakers of Esperanto , and the census of 2001 found 10 of Romanid , two each of Interlingua and Ido and one each of Idiom Neutral and Mundolinco . The Russian census of 2010 found that in Russia there were about 992 speakers of Esperanto (the 120th most common) and nine of
1900-626: A need for it). The Chinese government has used Esperanto since 2001 for an Esperanto version of its China Internet Information Center . China also uses Esperanto in China Radio International , and for the internet magazine El Popola Ĉinio . The Vatican Radio has an Esperanto version of its podcasts and its website. In the summer of 1924, the American Radio Relay League adopted Esperanto as its official international auxiliary language, and hoped that
2000-540: A non-constructed language later (see propaedeutic value of Esperanto). Codes for constructed languages include the ISO 639-2 " art " for conlangs; however, some constructed languages have their own ISO 639 language codes (e.g. " eo " and " epo " for Esperanto , " jbo " for Lojban , " ia " and " ina " for Interlingua , " tlh " for Klingon , " io " and " ido " for Ido , " lfn " for Lingua Franca Nova , and " tok " for Toki Pona ). One constraint on
2100-409: A particular language family) are a posteriori by definition. While most auxiliary languages are a posteriori due to their intended function as a medium of communication, many artistic languages are fully a posteriori in design—many for the purposes of alternate history . In distinguishing whether the language is a priori or a posteriori , the prevalence and distribution of respectable traits
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#17327732076212200-504: A posteriori auxiliary languages. Joachim Faiguet de Villeneuve in the article on Langue wrote a short proposition of a "laconic" or regularized grammar of French . During the 19th century, a bewildering variety of such International Auxiliary Languages (IALs) were proposed, so that Louis Couturat and Léopold Leau in Histoire de la langue universelle (1903) reviewed 38 projects. The first of these that made any international impact
2300-406: A pragmatic return to the aims of the a priori languages, tempered by the requirement of usability of an auxiliary language. Thus far, these modern a priori languages have garnered only small groups of speakers. Robot Interaction Language (2010) is a spoken language that is optimized for communication between machines and humans. The major goals of ROILA are that it should be easily learnable by
2400-482: A priori language based on such a classification of concepts. Under the entry Charactère , D'Alembert critically reviewed the projects of philosophical languages of the preceding century. After the Encyclopédie , projects for a priori languages moved more and more to the lunatic fringe. Individual authors, typically unaware of the history of the idea, continued to propose taxonomic philosophical languages until
2500-510: A priori when considering some linguistic factors, and at the same time a posteriori when considering other factors. An a priori language is any constructed language with some features which are not based on existing languages. Instead these features are invented or elaborated to work differently or to allude to different purposes. Some a priori languages are designed to be international auxiliary languages that remove what could be considered an unfair learning advantage for native speakers of
2600-456: A priori . An a posteriori language (from Latin a posteriori , "from the latter"), according to French linguist Louis Couturat , is any constructed language whose elements are borrowed from or based on existing languages. The term can also be extended to controlled versions of natural languages, and is most commonly used to refer to vocabulary despite other features. Likewise, zonal auxiliary languages (auxiliary languages for speakers of
2700-622: A set of rules for explaining language, so that the text of his grammar may be considered a mixture of natural and constructed language. A legend recorded in the seventh-century Irish work Auraicept na n-Éces claims that Fénius Farsaid visited Shinar after the confusion of tongues , and he and his scholars studied the various languages for ten years, taking the best features of each to create in Bérla tóbaide ("the selected language"), which he named Goídelc —the Irish language. This appears to be
2800-511: A significant number of speakers, emerged in 1951, when the International Auxiliary Language Association published its Interlingua–English Dictionary and an accompanying grammar . The success of Esperanto did not stop others from trying to construct new auxiliary languages, such as Leslie Jones' Eurolengo , which mixes elements of English and Spanish. Loglan (1955) and its descendants constitute
2900-410: A similar purpose for his lingua generalis of 1678, aiming at a lexicon of characters upon which the user might perform calculations that would yield true propositions automatically, as a side-effect developing binary calculus . These projects were not only occupied with reducing or modelling grammar, but also with the arrangement of all human knowledge into "characters" or hierarchies, an idea that with
3000-575: A smaller set of words. Esperanto is the most successful constructed international auxiliary language, and the only such language with a sizeable population of native speakers , of which there are perhaps several thousand. Usage estimates are difficult, but two estimates put the number of people who know how to speak Esperanto at around 100,000. Concentration of speakers is highest in Europe, East Asia, and South America. Although no country has adopted Esperanto officially, Esperantujo ("Esperanto-land")
3100-449: A source language that would otherwise exist for a posteriori languages. Others, known as philosophical or taxonomic languages , try to categorize their vocabulary, either to express an underlying philosophy or to make it easier to recognize new vocabulary. Finally, many artistic languages , created for either personal use or for use in a fictional medium, employ consciously constructed grammars and vocabularies, and are best understood as
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3200-476: A town a sensitive nature feels more acutely than elsewhere the misery caused by language division and sees at every step that the diversity of languages is the first, or at least the most influential, basis for the separation of the human family into groups of enemies. I was brought up as an idealist; I was taught that all people were brothers, while outside in the street at every step I felt that there were no people, only Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews, and so on. This
3300-502: A very few basic words such as cent "hundred" and post "after". Constructed language A constructed language (shortened to conlang ) is a language whose phonology , grammar , orthography , and vocabulary , instead of having developed naturally , are consciously devised for some purpose, which may include being devised for a work of fiction . A constructed language may also be referred to as an artificial , planned or invented language , or (in some cases)
3400-547: Is Balaibalan , invented in the 16th century. Kabbalistic grammatical speculation was directed at recovering the original language spoken by Adam and Eve in Paradise , lost in the confusion of tongues . The first Christian project for an ideal language is outlined in Dante Alighieri 's De vulgari eloquentia , where he searches for the ideal Italian vernacular suited for literature. Ramon Llull 's Ars Magna
3500-1284: Is a misuse of terms to say that we have natural language; languages exist through arbitrary institutions and the conventions of peoples. Voices, as the dialecticians say, don't signify naturally, but capriciously. " Furthermore, fictional or experimental languages can be considered naturalistic if they model real world languages. For example, if a naturalistic conlang is derived a posteriori from another language (real or constructed), it should imitate natural processes of phonological , lexical , and grammatical change. In contrast with languages such as Interlingua, naturalistic fictional languages are not usually intended for easy learning or communication. Thus, naturalistic fictional languages tend to be more difficult and complex. While Interlingua has simpler grammar, syntax, and orthography than its source languages (though more complex and irregular than Esperanto or its descendants), naturalistic fictional languages typically mimic behaviors of natural languages like irregular verbs and nouns, and complicated phonological processes. In terms of purpose, most constructed languages can broadly be divided into: The boundaries between these categories are by no means clear. A constructed language could easily fall into more than one of
3600-559: Is a simplification of Latin from which the inflections have been removed. As with Interlingua, some prefer to describe its development as "planning" rather than "constructing". Some speakers of Esperanto and Esperantidos also avoid the term "artificial language" because they deny that there is anything "unnatural" about the use of their language in human communication. By contrast, some philosophers have argued that all human languages are conventional or artificial. François Rabelais 's fictional giant Pantagruel, for instance, said: " It
3700-755: Is also Education@Internet, which has developed from an Esperanto organization; most others are specifically Esperanto organizations. The largest of these, the Universal Esperanto Association , has an official consultative relationship with the United Nations and UNESCO , which recognized Esperanto as a medium for international understanding in 1954. The Universal Esperanto Association collaborated in 2017 with UNESCO to deliver an Esperanto translation of its magazine UNESCO Courier ( Esperanto : Unesko Kuriero en Esperanto ). The World Health Organization offers an Esperanto version of
3800-469: Is contentious. In a 2015 lawsuit, CBS and Paramount Pictures challenged a fan film project called Axanar, stating the project infringed upon their intellectual property, which included the Klingon language , among other creative elements. During the controversy, Marc Okrand, the language's original designer expressed doubt as to whether Paramount's claims of ownership were valid. David J. Peterson ,
3900-522: Is often the key. Grammatical speculation dates from Classical Antiquity ; for instance, it appears in Plato 's Cratylus in Hermogenes's contention that words are not inherently linked to what they refer to; that people apply "a piece of their own voice ... to the thing". Athenaeus tells the story of two figures: Dionysius of Sicily and Alexarchus : "He [Alexarchus] once wrote something ... to
4000-452: Is sometimes cited; this claims that the language one speaks influences the way one thinks. Thus, a "better" language should allow the speaker to think more clearly or intelligently or to encompass more points of view; this was the intention of Suzette Haden Elgin in creating Láadan , a feminist language embodied in her feminist science fiction series Native Tongue . Constructed languages have been included in standardized tests such as
4100-572: Is the largest Misplaced Pages in a constructed language. About 150,000 users consult the Vikipedio regularly, as attested by Misplaced Pages's automatically aggregated log-in data, which showed that in October 2019 the website has 117,366 unique individual visitors per month, plus 33,572 who view the site on a mobile device instead. Esperanto has been described as "a language lexically predominantly Romanic , morphologically intensively agglutinative , and to
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4200-515: Is the most widely spoken constructed language in the world. Although no country has adopted Esperanto officially, Esperantujo ("Esperanto-land") is the name given to the collection of places where it is spoken. Esperanto is the working language of several non-profit international organizations such as the Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda , a left-wing cultural association which had 724 members in over 85 countries in 2006. There
4300-403: Is used as a name for the collection of places where it is spoken. The language has also gained a noticeable presence on the internet, as it became increasingly accessible on platforms such as Duolingo , Misplaced Pages , Amikumu and Google Translate . Esperanto speakers are often called "Esperantists" ( Esperantistoj ). Esperanto was created in the late 1870s and early 1880s by L. L. Zamenhof ,
4400-672: The Hieroglyphica of Horapollo , and first encounters with the Chinese script directed efforts towards a perfect written language. Johannes Trithemius , in Steganographia and Polygraphia , attempted to show how all languages can be reduced to one. In the 17th century, interest in magical languages was continued by the Rosicrucians and alchemists (like John Dee and his Enochian ). Jakob Boehme in 1623 spoke of
4500-596: The Académie Française ), which was established soon thereafter. Since then, world congresses have been held in different countries every year, except during the two World Wars, and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic (when it was moved to an online-only event). Since the Second World War , they have been attended by an average of more than 2,000 people, and up to 6,000 people at the most. Zamenhof wrote that he wanted mankind to "learn and use ... en masse ...
4600-780: The COVID-19 pandemic ( Esperanto : pandemio KOVIM-19 ) occupational safety and health education course. All personal documents sold by the World Service Authority , including the World Passport , are written in Esperanto, together with the official languages of the United Nations : English , French , Spanish , Russian , Arabic , and Chinese . Esperanto has not been a secondary official language of any recognized country. However, it has entered
4700-547: The Enlightenment would ultimately lead to the Encyclopédie . Many of these 17th–18th centuries conlangs were pasigraphies , or purely written languages with no spoken form or a spoken form that would vary greatly according to the native language of the reader. Leibniz and the encyclopedists realized that it is impossible to organize human knowledge unequivocally in a tree diagram, and consequently to construct an
4800-674: The Esperantido Ido . The terms "planned", "constructed", "invented", "fictional", and "artificial" are used differently in some traditions. For example, few speakers of Interlingua consider their language artificial, since they assert that it has no invented content: Interlingua's vocabulary is taken from a small set of natural languages, and its grammar is based closely on these source languages, even including some degree of irregularity; its proponents prefer to describe its vocabulary and grammar as standardized rather than artificial or constructed. Similarly, Latino sine flexione (LsF)
4900-578: The Gulag labour camps. Quite often the accusation was: "You are an active member of an international spy organization which hides itself under the name of 'Association of Soviet Esperantists' on the territory of the Soviet Union." Until the end of the Stalin era, it was dangerous to use Esperanto in the Soviet Union, even though it was never officially forbidden to speak Esperanto. Fascist Italy allowed
5000-488: The Indo-European group . A substantial majority of its vocabulary (approximately 80%) derives from Romance languages , but it also contains elements derived from Germanic , Greek , and Slavic languages. One of the language's most notable features is its extensive system of derivation , where prefixes and suffixes may be freely combined with roots to generate words, making it possible to communicate effectively with
5100-847: The Indo-European languages spoken in Europe. Beside his native Yiddish and (Belo)Russian, Zamenhof studied German, Hebrew, Latin, English, Spanish, Lithuanian, Italian, French, Aramaic and Volapük , knowing altogether something of 13 different languages, which had an influence on Esperanto's linguistic properties. Esperantist and linguist Ilona Koutny notes that Esperanto's vocabulary, phrase structure, agreement systems, and semantic typology are similar to those of Indo-European languages spoken in Europe. However, Koutny and Esperantist Humphrey Tonkin also note that Esperanto has features that are atypical of Indo-European languages spoken in Europe, such as its agglutinative morphology. Claude Piron argued that Esperanto word-formation has more in common with that of Chinese than with typical European languages , and that
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#17327732076215200-623: The Montevideo Resolution . However, Esperanto is not one of the six official languages of the UN . The development of Esperanto has continued unabated into the 21st century. The advent of the Internet has had a significant impact on the language, as learning it has become increasingly accessible on platforms such as Duolingo , and as speakers have increasingly networked on platforms such as Amikumu . With up to two million speakers, it
5300-723: The SAT , where they were used to test the applicant's ability to infer and apply grammatical rules. By the same token, a constructed language might also be used to restrict thought, as in George Orwell 's Newspeak , or to simplify thought, as in Toki Pona . However, linguists such as Steven Pinker argue that ideas exist independently of language. For example, in the book The Language Instinct , Pinker states that children spontaneously re-invent slang and even grammar with each generation. These linguists argue that attempts to control
5400-599: The first book of Esperanto grammar was published in Warsaw on July 26, 1887. The number of speakers grew rapidly over the next few decades; at first, primarily in the Russian Empire and Central Europe, then in other parts of Europe, the Americas, China, and Japan. In the early years before the world congresses, speakers of Esperanto kept in contact primarily through correspondence and periodicals. Zamenhof's name for
5500-639: The 1920s as the heyday of the Esperanto movement. During this time, Anarchism as a political movement was very supportive of both anationalism and the Esperanto language. Fran Novljan was one of the chief promoters of Esperanto in the former Kingdom of Yugoslavia . He was among the founders of the Croatian Prosvjetni savez (Educational Alliance), of which he was the first secretary, and organized Esperanto institutions in Zagreb . Novljan collaborated with Esperanto newspapers and magazines, and
5600-558: The 1970s Esperanto was used as the basis for Defense Language Aptitude Tests. Beginning in 1908, there were efforts to establish the world's first Esperanto state in Neutral Moresnet , which at the time was a Belgian – Prussian condominium in central-western Europe. Any such efforts came to an end with the beginning of World War I and the German invasion of Belgium , voiding the treaty which established joint sovereignty over
5700-429: The 1970s through the 1990s, such as Glossopoeic Quarterly , Taboo Jadoo , and The Journal of Planned Languages . The Conlang Mailing List was founded in 1991, and later split off an AUXLANG mailing list dedicated to international auxiliary languages. In the early to mid-1990s a few conlang-related zines were published as email or websites, such as Vortpunoj and Model Languages . The Conlang mailing list has developed
5800-467: The 20th century. A Princess of Mars (1912) by Edgar Rice Burroughs was possibly the first fiction of that century to feature a constructed language. J. R. R. Tolkien developed families of related fictional languages and discussed artistic languages publicly, giving a lecture entitled " A Secret Vice " in 1931 at a congress. (Orwell's Newspeak is considered a satire of an international auxiliary language rather than an artistic language proper.) By
5900-529: The Rings ( Elvish ), Stargate SG-1 , Atlantis: The Lost Empire , Ar Tonelico ( Hymmnos ), Game of Thrones ( Dothraki language and Valyrian languages ), The Expanse , Avatar , Dune , and the Myst series of computer adventure games. The matter of whether or not a constructed language can be owned or protected by intellectual property laws, or if it would even be possible to enforce those laws,
6000-584: The above categories. A logical language created for aesthetic reasons would also be classifiable as an artistic language; one created with philosophical motives could include being used as an auxiliary language. There are no rules, either inherent in the process of language construction or externally imposed, that would limit a constructed language to fitting only one of the above categories. A constructed language can have native speakers if young children learn it from parents who speak it fluently. According to Ethnologue , there are "200–2000 who speak Esperanto as
6100-536: The adjective artificial , as this term may be perceived as pejorative. Outside Esperanto culture , the term language planning means the prescriptions given to a natural language to standardize it; in this regard, even a "natural language" may be artificial in some respects, meaning some of its words have been crafted by conscious decision. Prescriptive grammars , which date to ancient times for classical languages such as Latin and Sanskrit , are rule-based codifications of natural languages, such codifications being
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#17327732076216200-516: The beginning of the first decade of the 21st century, it had become common for science fiction and fantasy works set in other worlds to feature constructed languages, or more commonly, an extremely limited but defined vocabulary which suggests the existence of a complete language, or whatever portions of the language are needed for the story. Constructed languages are a regular part of the genre, appearing in Star Wars , Star Trek , The Lord of
6300-429: The book's author, and preferably also fit with any personal names of fictional speakers of the language. An a priori (from Latin a priori , "from the former") constructed language is one whose features (including vocabulary, grammar, etc.) are not based on an existing language, and an a posteriori language is the opposite. This categorization, however, is not absolute, as many constructed languages may be called
6400-524: The decision. However, two years later, the League recommended that its member states include Esperanto in their educational curricula. The French government retaliated by banning all instruction in Esperanto in France's schools and universities. The French Ministry of Public Instruction said that "French and English would perish and the literary standard of the world would be debased". Nonetheless, many people see
6500-423: The early 20th century (e.g. Ro ), but most recent engineered languages have had more modest goals; some are limited to a specific field, like mathematical formalism or calculus (e.g. Lincos and programming languages ), others are designed for eliminating syntactical ambiguity (e.g., Loglan and Lojban ) or maximizing conciseness (e.g., Ithkuil ). Already in the Encyclopédie attention began to focus on
6600-402: The education systems of several countries, including Hungary and China. Esperanto was also the first language of teaching and administration of the now-defunct International Academy of Sciences San Marino . The League of Nations made attempts to promote the teaching of Esperanto in its member countries, but the resolutions were defeated (mainly by French delegates, who did not feel there was
6700-443: The fields of linguistics , cognitive science , and machine learning ; for artistic creation ; for fantasy role-playing games ; and for language games . Some people may also make constructed languages as a hobby , or in connection to worldbuilding . The expression planned language is sometimes used to indicate international auxiliary languages and other languages designed for actual use in human communication. Some prefer it to
6800-462: The first mention of the concept of a constructed language in literature. The earliest non-natural languages were considered less "constructed" than "super-natural", mystical, or divinely inspired. The Lingua Ignota , recorded in the 12th century by St. Hildegard of Bingen , is an example, and apparently the first entirely artificial language. It is a form of private mystical cant (see also Enochian ). An important example from Middle-Eastern culture
6900-860: The human user, and optimized for efficient recognition by computer speech recognition algorithms. Artists may use language as a source of creativity in art, poetry, or calligraphy, or as a metaphor to address themes as cultural diversity and the vulnerability of the individual in a globalized world. Some people prefer however to take pleasure in constructing, crafting a language by a conscious decision for reasons of literary enjoyment or aesthetic reasons without any claim of usefulness. Such artistic languages begin to appear in Early Modern literature (in Pantagruel , and in Utopian contexts), but they only seem to gain notability as serious projects beginning in
7000-438: The language learning platform Duolingo launched a free Esperanto course for English speakers On March 25, 2016, when the first Duolingo Esperanto course completed its beta-testing phase, that course had 350,000 people registered to learn Esperanto through the medium of English. By July 2018, the number of learners had risen to 1.36 million. On July 20, 2018, Duolingo changed from recording users cumulatively to reporting only
7100-600: The language of one of Germany's Axis allies . In Imperial Japan , the left wing of the Japanese Esperanto movement was forbidden, but its leaders were careful enough not to give the impression to the government that the Esperantists were socialist revolutionaries, which proved a successful strategy. After the October Revolution of 1917, Esperanto was given a measure of government support by
7200-484: The language was simply Internacia Lingvo ("International Language"). December 15, Zamenhof's birthday, is now regarded as Zamenhof Day or Esperanto Book Day. The autonomous territory of Neutral Moresnet , between what is today Belgium and Germany, had a sizable proportion of Esperanto-speaking citizens among its small, diverse population. There was a proposal to make Esperanto its official language. However, neither Belgium nor Germany had surrendered their claims to
7300-426: The language would be used by radio amateurs in international communications, but its actual use for radio communications was negligible. The United States Army has published military phrase books in Esperanto, to be used from the 1950s until the 1970s in war games by mock enemy forces . A field reference manual, FM 30-101-1 Feb. 1962, contained the grammar, English-Esperanto-English dictionary, and common phrases. In
7400-410: The legal consensus on ownership of languages remains uncertain. The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre claims ownership of Palawa kani , an attempted composite reconstruction of up to a dozen extinct Tasmanian indigenous languages, and has asked Misplaced Pages to remove its page on the project. However, there is no current legal backing for the claim. Various papers on constructed languages were published from
7500-760: The new communist states in the former Russian Empire and later by the Soviet Union government, with the Soviet Esperantist Union being established as an organization that, temporarily, was officially recognized. In his biography on Joseph Stalin , Leon Trotsky mentions that Stalin had studied Esperanto. However, in 1937, at the height of the Great Purge , Stalin completely reversed the Soviet government's policies on Esperanto; many Esperanto speakers were executed, exiled or held in captivity in
7600-1126: The number of "active learners" (i.e., those who are studying at the time and have not yet completed the course), which as of October 2022 stands at 299,000 learners. On October 26, 2016, a second Duolingo Esperanto course, for which the language of instruction is Spanish, appeared on the same platform and which as of April 2021 has a further 176,000 students. A third Esperanto course, taught in Brazilian Portuguese, began its beta-testing phase on May 14, 2018, and as of April 2021, 220,000 people are using this course and 155,000 people in May 2022. A fourth Esperanto course, taught in French, began its beta-testing phase in July 2020, and as of March 2021 has 72,500 students and 101,000 students in May 2022. As of October 2018, Lernu! , another online learning platform for Esperanto, has 320,000 registered users, and nearly 75,000 monthly visits. 50,000 users possess at least
7700-437: The number of Esperanto features shared with Slavic languages warrants the identification of a Slavic-derived stratum of language structure that he calls the "Middle Plane". Esperanto typically has 22 to 24 consonants (depending on the phonemic analysis and individual speaker), five vowels, and two semivowels that combine with the vowels to form six diphthongs . (The consonant /j/ and semivowel /i̯/ are both written ⟨j⟩, and
7800-717: The number of women participating has increased over time. More recently founded online communities include the Zompist Bulletin Board (ZBB; since 2001) and the Conlanger Bulletin Board. Discussion on these forums includes presentation of members' conlangs and feedback from other members, discussion of natural languages, whether particular conlang features have natural language precedents, and how interesting features of natural languages can be repurposed for conlangs, posting of interesting short texts as translation challenges, and meta-discussion about
7900-535: The petitions... About the same time, in the middle of the block marched a huge demonstration of people holding posters reading "Learn Esperanto", "Support the Universal language", "Esperanto the language of hope and expectation", "Esperanto the bond for international communication" and so on, and many "Sign the petitions". I will never forget that rich-poor, sad-glad parade and among all these people stood two fiery red tramway cars waiting on their opposite lanes and also
8000-450: The philosophy of conlanging, conlangers' purposes, and whether conlanging is an art or a hobby. Another 2001 survey by Patrick Jarrett showed an average age of 30.65, with the average time since starting to invent languages 11.83 years. A more recent thread on the ZBB showed that many conlangers spend a relatively small amount of time on any one conlang, moving from one project to another; about
8100-439: The proposal with only one voice against, the French delegate, Gabriel Hanotaux . Hanotaux opposed all recognition of Esperanto at the League, from the first resolution on December 18, 1920, and subsequently through all efforts during the next three years. Hanotaux did not approve of how the French language was losing its position as the international language and saw Esperanto as a threat, effectively wielding his veto power to block
8200-524: The proposed language as a living one". The goal for Esperanto to become a global auxiliary language was not Zamenhof's only goal; he also wanted to "enable the learner to make direct use of his knowledge with persons of any nationality, whether the language be universally accepted or not; in other words, the language is to be directly a means of international communication". After some ten years of development, which Zamenhof spent translating literature into Esperanto, as well as writing original prose and verse,
8300-520: The pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto . Early adopters of the language liked the name Esperanto and soon used it to describe his language. The word esperanto translates into English as "one who hopes". Within the range of constructed languages, Esperanto occupies a middle ground between "naturalistic" (imitating existing natural languages) and a priori (where features are not based on existing languages). Esperanto's vocabulary , syntax and semantics derive predominantly from languages of
8400-538: The public authorities in Casandreia ... As for what this letter says, in my opinion not even the Pythian god could make sense of it." While the mechanisms of grammar suggested by classical philosophers were designed to explain existing languages ( Latin , Greek , and Sanskrit ), they were not used to construct new grammars. Roughly contemporary to Plato, in his descriptive grammar of Sanskrit, Pāṇini constructed
8500-463: The range of human thought through the reform of language would fail, as concepts like "freedom" will reappear in new words if the old words vanish. Proponents claim a particular language makes it easier to express and understand concepts in one area, and more difficult in others. An example can be taken from the way various programming languages make it easier to write certain kinds of programs and harder to write others. Another reason cited for using
8600-403: The region, with the latter having adopted a more aggressive stance towards pursuing its claim around the turn of the century, even being accused of sabotage and administrative obstruction to force the issue. The outbreak of World War I would bring about the end of neutrality, with Moresnet initially left as "an oasis in a desert of destruction" following the German invasion of Belgium. The territory
8700-488: The rights is legitimate—would be likely to sue individuals who publish material in said languages, especially if the author might profit from said material. Furthermore, comprehensive learning material for such constructed languages as High Valyrian and Klingon has been published and made freely accessible on the language-learning platform Duolingo —but those courses are licensed by the respective copyright holders. Because only a few such disputes have occurred thus far,
8800-498: The stress on the second i , but when the word is used without the final o ( famili’ ), the stress remains on the second i : [fa.mi.ˈli] . The 23 consonants are: There is some degree of allophony: A large number of consonant clusters can occur, up to three in initial position (as in stranga , "strange") and five in medial position (as in ekssklavo , "former slave"). Final clusters are uncommon except in unassimilated names, poetic elision of final o , and
8900-563: The suspicion of many states. Repression was especially pronounced in Nazi Germany , Francoist Spain up until the 1950s, and the Soviet Union under Stalin , from 1937 to 1956. In Nazi Germany, there was a motivation to ban Esperanto because Zamenhof was Jewish, and due to the internationalist nature of Esperanto, which was perceived as "Bolshevist". In his work, Mein Kampf , Adolf Hitler specifically mentioned Esperanto as an example of
9000-504: The territory. The Treaty of Versailles subsequently awarded the disputed territory to Belgium, effective January 10, 1920. The self-proclaimed micronation of Rose Island , on an artificial island near Italy in the Adriatic Sea , used Esperanto as its official language in 1968. Another micronation, the extant Republic of Molossia , near Dayton, Nevada , uses Esperanto as an official language alongside English. On May 28, 2015,
9100-652: The translation of the Hebrew Bible into what he calls "Israeli". Esperanto as a living spoken language has evolved significantly from the prescriptive blueprint published in 1887, so that modern editions of the Fundamenta Krestomatio , a 1903 collection of early texts in the language, require many footnotes on the syntactic and lexical differences between early and modern Esperanto. Proponents of constructed languages often have many reasons for using them. The famous but disputed Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
9200-399: The uncommon consonant /dz/ is written with the digraph ⟨dz⟩, which is the only consonant that does not have its own letter.) Tone is not used to distinguish meanings of words. Stress is always on the second-to-last vowel in proper Esperanto words, unless a final vowel o is elided , a phenomenon mostly occurring in poetry. For example, familio "family" is [fa.mi.ˈli.o] , with
9300-573: The use of Esperanto, finding its phonology similar to that of Italian and publishing some tourist material in the language. During and after the Spanish Civil War , Francoist Spain suppressed anarchists , socialists and Catalan nationalists for many years, among whom the use of Esperanto was extensive, but in the 1950s the Esperanto movement was again tolerated. In 1954, the United Nations — through UNESCO — granted official support to Esperanto as an international auxiliary language in
9400-426: The world. A group of people had organized and sent letters to the government asking to change the name of the street where Dr. Zamenhof lived for many years when he invented Esperanto, from Dzika to Zamenhofa. They were told that a petition with a large number of signatures would be needed. That took time so they organized demonstrations carrying large posters encouraging people to learn the universal language and to sign
9500-464: Was Volapük , proposed in 1879 by Johann Martin Schleyer ; within a decade, 283 Volapükist clubs were counted all over the globe. However, disagreements between Schleyer and some prominent users of the language led to schism, and by the mid-1890s it fell into obscurity, making way for Esperanto , proposed in 1887 by L. L. Zamenhof , and its descendants . Interlingua , the most recent auxlang to gain
9600-578: Was a project of a perfect language with which the infidels could be convinced of the truth of the Christian faith. It was basically an application of combinatorics on a given set of concepts. During the Renaissance , Lullian and Kabbalistic ideas were drawn upon in a magical context, resulting in cryptographic applications. Renaissance interest in Ancient Egypt , notably the discovery of
9700-406: Was always a great torment to my infant mind, although many people may smile at such an 'anguish for the world' in a child. Since at that time I thought that 'grown-ups' were omnipotent, I often said to myself that when I grew up I would certainly destroy this evil. It was invented in 1887 and designed so that anyone could learn it in a few short months. Dr. Zamenhof lived on Dzika Street, No. 9, which
9800-623: Was formally annexed by Prussia in 1915, though without international recognition. After the war, a great opportunity for Esperanto seemingly presented itself, when the Iranian delegation to the League of Nations proposed that the language be adopted for use in international relations following a report by a Japanese delegate to the League named Nitobe Inazō , in the context of the 13th World Congress of Esperanto, held in Prague . Ten delegates accepted
9900-402: Was just around the corner from the street on which we lived. Brother Afrum was so impressed with that idea that he learned Esperanto in a very short time at home from a little book. He then bought many dozens of them and gave them out to relatives, friends, just anyone he could, to support that magnificent idea for he felt that this would be a common bond to promote relationships with fellow men in
10000-699: Was the author of the Esperanto textbook Internacia lingvo esperanto i Esperanto en tridek lecionoj . In 1920s Korea , socialist thinkers pushed for the use of Esperanto through a series of columns in The Dong-a Ilbo as resistance to both Japanese occupation as well as a counter to the growing nationalist movement for Korean language standardization. This lasted until the Mukden Incident in 1931, when changing colonial policy led to an outright ban on Esperanto education in Korea . Esperanto attracted
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