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Authors: Ben K. <benk@tilde.team>
Date: 2021-03-18
gemini://warmedal.se/~bjorn/posts/re-esperanto-as-the-language-of-the-eu.gmi
I was quite pleased to see that someone replied to my earlier post about Esperanto for the EU; actually, I was quite hoping I'd see a response of some sort as I felt the topic was interesting enough to warrant it compared to a lot of my other posts.
I learned Esperanto in 2015 on Duolingo at first out of a mild curiosity. My lack of interest in it turned into intense interest *after* I learned it, because I realized that the language itself is just very cool, and I didn't care how many speakers it had. In addition to liking the language very much, I found that it still does have a nice community of speakers. It's actually quite respectable how many Esperanto speakers there are in the world, even though we tend to be scattered around and not concentrated in one place. I guess that sort of makes us like a diaspora, and Esperanto is like many other minority languages that don't enjoy society-wide use or the support of a state.
So really it was not hard for me to find people to use it with, especially online. A lot of people are Internet-only Esperantists. That makes sense because the Internet is a very useful tool for helping us find one another and connect, but some people dislike the new Internet era whereas 100 years ago Esperantists were much more active in person, or if they couldn't meet in person they at least wrote letters. The Internet though helps all kinds of groups and communities come together, even around niche topics where before you couldn't find people in your city interested in the same thing as you.
That being said, I've made friends with Esperanto speakers everywhere I've lived so far. Since I was in Tajikistan at the time I learned it, I made friends ith Esperanto speakers and enthusiasts in Dushanbe. I'm only talking about a handful of people, like 5-10. (Also, I cheated a little bit; some of them I taught Esperanto to myself.) That sounds like a small number, but who wouldn't love to have 5-10 real friends? I mean, if your friend is a good friend, you only need one. Esperanto was a good excuse to help me meet those people, who I probably wouldn't have met otherwise. Even without Esperanto we'd probably still have made good friends, but then we wouldn't have met either.
A couple years later I visited my parents back in California, and while I was there for a month or so I contacted a local Esperanto club in a nearby city and met with them twice. They were wonderful, and we had a good time. The following year when I moved to Iran, I couldn't find any speakers in Mashhad. (There are plenty in the capital, but others are scattered throughout the country, sometimes in remote regions.) I started teaching it again, and after teaching for a year or so a random Esperanto speaker appeared in the wild; he heard about my club at the university and showed up one day to a meeting already fluent in the language. Turns out he is from a village in a region outside the city, and he learned Esperanto online.
I'm just very pleased about the number of cool people I met around the world and through my travels (or their travels) being active in Esperanto. It does take some effort to find people who speak Esperanto; you usually have to find them unless you become known in the community, then sometimes people find you.
I would probably say to someone like ew0k who is considering getting into it, that I understand that feeling of not knowing anyone else who is interested in the language, but in reality there's probably already someone in their own city or a nearby city, or even a club. Online, there's just countlesss resources like all the groups on telegramo.org, the Esperanto subreddit on reddit.com, Esperanto Discord servers, Esperanto Wikipedia, Esperanto on IRC, on XMPP, on Matrix... you name it. They also tend to connect very well on Facebook, so already we're talking several thousands of people if you combine these resources. There is the Android app Amikumu which locates the nearest Esperanto speaker to you (who also is on the app), and lately I've been using an app called "Slowly" which is focused on long-distance letter writing and facilitates language exchange.
As for the amount of time it takes to learn Esperanto, on the plus side it doesn't take as long to learn it as natural languages. So one might feel that one doesn't have time to learn a new language, but I learned Espearnto in just a few months. My interest in the language was intense, so 3-6 months was fast, but I think anyone can get reasonably proficient in the language in just one year, if not highly proficient.
There are a few reasons for why I promote Esperanto. One of them which I already mentioned is the great personal experience I had with it, so that is the social or community reason. Another reason is more technical, which has to do with the language itself. I would support Esperanto as an official language for the EU not because I have friends who speak it or have fun at Esperanto gatherings, which I do, but because it performs optimally as a *tool for communication*. If you take two people in the EU, let's say someone who speaks only Hungarian and someone who speaks only Greek, what would be an effective way to help them communicate?
For starters, the Hungarian learning Greek or the Greek learning Hungarian is possible, but that's quite an arduous path to go down. They could both decide to learn English, or French, or German, but woe unto them! According to studies, people gain about as much proficienty in 150 hours of study of Esperanto as they do in 1500 or 2000 hours of study in some other languages. So really, it's a tool, much like a car gets you somewhere faster than a horse, even though cars aren't natural or traditional.
Regarding the grammar of Esperanto in comparison to other languages, even though Esperanto has its roots in the Indo-European language family, during its construction and evolution something unusual happened to it which is very unlike other languages in that family. That is, Esperanto became hyper-agglunative. What this means is that in Esperanto you form words by combining them with various parts like affixes and other words, but the parts don't change. They don't morph or merge together, but stay regular and are easily interchangeable.
This makes Esperanto a bit like non-IE languages like Finnish and Hungarian, or Turkish, which also feature a high level of agglutination. Sometimes it's even compared to Chinese, and I like to compare it to Persian, which I study at university.
Persian, like Esperanto, evolved out of an ancient inflectional Indo-European language (in Esperanto's case Latin; in Persian's, Old Persian), and over time it lost a lot of inflection (no gender, for example), became more regular and agglunating, was historically adopted for international use, and for some reason ended up developing a similar set of verb tenses and moods. Incidentally, Esperanto was and continues to be significantlly more popular in Iran than any other country in the Middle East.
At the end of the day, I don't entertain any unrealistic fantasy that Esperanto will one day become massively popular or that some country will adopt it. I'm quite content just to be a user of the language, but of course I'm always ready to talk about why I think it's good. I'd still use Linux if it weren't the most popular OS.