Apr 14, 17 / Tau 20, 01 21:00 UTC
Today marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Lázaro Zamenhof, creator of the International Esperanto Language ¶
ECHOES FOR THE PAST
Let me introduce myself, because the Esperanto language is one of my creations. I am Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, and I frequently appear in print media such as L. L. Zamenhof. I was born in the Polish city of Białystok, then occupied by the Russian Empire, on December 15, 1859. As a young man I spoke without difficulty in Russian, Polish, German and Yiddish. Later I learned Latin, Hebrew, French, Greek and English. I also had some basic knowledge of Spanish, Italian and other languages.
I lived my childhood in my native Białystok, a city inhabited by Poles, Jews, Russians, Germans and Lithuanians, where I saw among these communities a lack of harmony and communication due to the diversity of languages. This led me to seek a solution to the problem, and so I invented Esperanto, a medium that served as an AUXILIARY language.
I studied in Białystok, Warsaw, Moscow and Vienna, having qualified as a doctor and ophthalmologist. During those years I developed Esperanto, although at age 17 I had already made known to my family my first work on the grammatical foundations of this language. In 1887, with the help of my father-in-law, I published a pamphlet which presented the foundations of the new language, "Lingvo Internacia. Antaŭparolo kaj plena lernolibro" - International Language. Preface and full textbook - I used the pseudonym of Doktoro Esperanto - the doctor who has hope. Esperanto became the term to name the new International Language. This my first work later received the name of Unua Libro, or First Book.
My last day in the world was in Warsaw on April 14, 1917. I sadly knew that Esperantists because they were Esperantists were persecuted and executed in the gas chambers by the dictator Adolf Hitler's police. Another dictator, Joseph Stalin, sent other Esperantists to die in the Siberian snows. The Soviet monster thought that Esperanto was a bourgeois language. A contemporary of the latter, radical anti-communist American Senator Joseph McCarthy called Esperanto "something pro-communist" and harassed Esperantic citizens. It's funny how a language can make people with such different ideologies see it as something abnormal.
I have also seen with satisfaction how the International Language is better known and employed thanks to the existence of new resources such as the Internet. By placing the word esperanto in search engines, it gives you a result of more than 40 000 000 sites, of course, not all the names have to do with this language, sometimes they are of commerce or private entities, I suppose that its owners had to choose Another name for your business.
How many Esperantists are there in the world? Interesting question, and very difficult to answer. It's something equivalent to asking you: How many people like to use a bicycle in the world? There is no answer. But some dare to say that there are between 100 000 and 2 000 000 Esperantists. Can be. It is even said that there are also between 1000 and 10 000 people who have Esperanto as their mother tongue, because their parents speak Esperanto. It is also possible. I invite you to make a calculation. Suppose that the chess players hold a World Congress of Chess Players. How many chess players who take this hobby seriously would be present in that Congress? Give me one clue: let one of every 100 chess players attend, or one in 500, or one in every 1000, or one in 10,000. Well, the most recent international congresses of Esperantists have gathered between 2000 and 4000 people, each paying their own expenses ...
