ESPERANTO

These pages, as our faithful readers know, and to the irritation of some, believe that visual communication is superior to the lingual.  See NATIONAL WORDS.  And we’re always looking for support in this belief;  here is an example of that support.

Joan Acocella writes in her New Yorker article Return to Babble, about a new book about the language of Esperanto.  The book is titled “Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language” and it is by Esther Schor.

Esperanto was created in around 1890 to foster world peace.  It was created by Ludovik Zamenhof, who was Jewish.  Zamenhof became disillusioned with Zionism as well as with any movements defined by ethnic or national identity.

Narrow tribal definitions, in Zamenhof’s opinion, is what was holding back humanity by triggering wars, invasion and deportation.  So his theory was, let’s create a new language that is universally devoid of all cultural baggage.  Let’s create a language that is easy to learn, easily modified, and therefore easily understood by all.

At the link above, you can read about how the language was constructed, and the fate of it, which, as you might surmise, was not bright.

At that link, you can also read about the attempts of others to get past the limitations of words.  For instance, Schor’s book states that Francis Bacon proposed that we employ something similar to Chinese ideograms, which would bypass words all together.

Who would have thought that one byproduct of digital inter-connectivity would be the failure of our language.  Yet that is exactly what is happening.  The balkanization of the definitions of our words, and by extension what we consider to be true, is at the core of what is transpiring right now.

So not a bad time to reconsider a new language, like Esperanto.  But I would put my faith in something more visual, like Bacon’s concept.  In this manner, at least we would be drawing something in order to communicate.