Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
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.
I was wondering if you were gonna do that.
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.
Well, jerkwad would be jerk wado, yeah, exactly, or something like.
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.
Yeah, it's a language, not.
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.
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, 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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
I thought he spoke Esperanto, that tracks he did.
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.
Everybody, Well, learning Esperanto is about as ben bowling a thing as I can imagine.
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.
And it's fringe, and that's that's Ben for sure.
Yeah, and again that's Ben Bolan from stuff they don't want you to know.
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. 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?
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 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 does sound like you'd be up. George Soros's allly yeah.
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?
Oh yeah, how far we go, it'd be a much better world.
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 was a language created by a German priest name Johann Schlayer called vol Vollapuk.
Yeah, Vallapuk. Apparently God told.
Him to do it, sure mission from Gad.
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, and it spread you far and wide. I can't not say it like that.
I'm sorry, that's fine.
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.
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.
That's a very good name.
And I'll give you two guesses why.
Because the cat had very long legs, okay, and no feat to speak of. That's right, it was underfooted.
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.
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 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.
That makes sense.
Yeah, it's great. I love that. I love learning Danish expressions.
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.
Yeah, and no offense for a Greek list. There's just just something someone says here.
Yeah, I wonder what Greek's think about that.
Actually don't know. I don't know if it's gotten back to them yet.
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.
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. And he had a pretty great, well not great, but a pretty heavy backstory to it.
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, 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 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.
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 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 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 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.
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 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 kid and a lesson for everybody of all ages. Still.
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. 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 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 is what Esperano came from.
What a setup it is.
It's going pretty well so far. We should release this as this show.
Best setup ever. I'm gonna say it, even though it annoy some people. Should we take a break.
I'm going to say it, even though it annoys everybody. Yes, we should.
All right, we'll be right back, all right, so we're 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
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. And most people were awesome.
You had Jones stunt AMA, Yeah.
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.
But that's just the nature of online interactions the internets. That's silly that they think Jerry doesn't work with us anymore.
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.
Yeah, what a weird thing to be upset about.
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.
Yes, you want me to pick it up because we don't script this stuff.
Why did you ask me that? That's so annoying?
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 to the guests.
Man of his birthday, which a swinging party. That's right for a nineteen year old.
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.
But may I you gotta sing it though?
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.
Nice work can I tell everyone what it means?
Yes, but you have to sing it.
Okay, Let the hatred of the nations fall, fall, fall. The time is already here. All humanity must unite in one family.
Doesn't rhyme? Yeah, So when I'm ready to send him, it didn't rhyme.
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?
Unua libro?
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 think from him, Well when was that sixty sixty six?
Everybody says, but Turner classic movies listed as sixty five, which I find confusing, but everybody else is sixty.
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 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.
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.
That's a much simpler way to say what it says.
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 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 that his pen name. He wrote it as a pen name, doctro esperanto or doctor hopeful is what it.
Loved it.
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.
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 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.
Sure.
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, 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.
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 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.
That isn't don't shoot? How about to play a cookie and some milk?
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 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,
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.
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.
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 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.
Yeah, and you know we did, and we did a whole episode on language acquisition, right.
I'm I'm pretty sure sure we did.
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, 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 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.
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 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.
An adverb again English?
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, that would be as mangas it ends in as yeah.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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 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 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?
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.
Okay, hasn't happened yet, then, is that answer?
I mean, that would be my guess. Yeah, I'm on record.
Okay, I'd love to hear from them too.
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.
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 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.
Right.
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 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.
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 chuck Eto cute because I was younger than the original chi.
Wasn't that a taco bell menu item in the nineties?
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 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.
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.
Yeah, so we mentioned edo id o as a suffix meaning like the small version of something or a baby something.
Uh.
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, 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?
Cooerio cooler? Oh, corey cool? Why do you ask me to pronounce this?
Well?
Because I got it.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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 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 a sharp eye on it.
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 N and then illness is ozo. So the Esperanto translation is time zone illness.
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
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.
Yeah, for sure, I came across something. Did you see what I sent you about English translated into English is kind of hilarious.
Oh no, oh you didn't.
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 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.
I do not understand.
I just I had to mention that. It just cracked me up.
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.
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 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 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.
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, 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.
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 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 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.
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,
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.
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 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.
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 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 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, it's brutal.
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.
That's probably why I learned exactly.
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.
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.
Now.
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, 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.
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. 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.
Heck no, it's more than klingon.
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.
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.
Oh, they said radio again, I know what that means. One other thing before we leave. Do you have anything else?
Yeah? I got it? One and so two things.
Okay, Well you go first, Okay.
Nineteen oh five we mentioned that year earlier. What year was that? Was that? The first year of.
The first Congress, the Universal Congress.
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 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.
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.
Movie I watched a little bit.
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
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.
What a great dissa.
I thought so too. We're checking out five minutes of it.
Yeah, absolutely, that's it. That's it.
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.
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.
I stand by there.
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 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 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.
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.
Agreed.
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.
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