Roberto ía - Esperanto and Its Rivals: The Struggle for an International Language

Esperanto and Its Rivals

The Struggle tor an International Language

Roberto Garvia

Esperanto and Its Rivals

HANEY FOUNDATION SERIES

A volume in the Haney Foundation Series, established in 1961 with the generous support of Dr. John Louis Haney

ESPERANTO AND ITS RIVALS

The Struggle for an International Language

Roberto Garvfa

PENN

U N IVERSITY O F PENNSYLVANIA PRESS PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2015 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 13579 10 8642

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Garvfa Soto, Roberto, author.

Esperanto and its rivals : the struggle for an international language / Roberto Garvia.

pages cm — (Haney foundation series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8122-4710-7

1. Language, Universal—History—19th century. 2. Language, Universal —History—20th century. 3. Languages, Artificial — History—19th century. 4. Languages, Artificial — History— 20th century. 5. Esperanto—History. 6. Volapuk—History. 7. Ido—History. I. Title. II. Series: Haney foundation series. PM8008.G37 2015 499'.99—dc23

2014040819

Der Weg der neuern Bildung geht Von Humanitat Durch Nationalitat Zur Bestialitat

—Franz Grillparzer (1849)

I cannot take very seriously the arguments of those who assert that an international auxiliary language might be suitable for business affairs and perhaps for natural science, but could not possibly serve as an adequate means of communication in personal affairs, for discussions in the social sciences and the humanities, let alone for fiction or drama. I have found that most of those who make these assertions have no practical experience with such a language.

—Rudolf Carnap (1963)

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CONTENTS

Introduction 1

Chapter 1. The Emergence of Linguistic Conscience 7

PART I. VOLAPUK

Chapter 2. A Language in Search of a Problem 21

Chapter 3. Who Were the Volapukists? 25 Chapter 4. "Pandemonium in the Tower of Babel":

The Language Critics 34

Chapter 5. "Strangled in the House of Its Friends": Volapuk's Demise 44

Chapter 6. "My Troubled Child": The Artist and the Kulturkampf 51

PART II. ESPERANTO

Chapter 7. "The Purpose of My Whole Life": Zamenhof and Esperanto 59

Chapter 8. "Let Us Work and Have Hope!": Language and Democracy 65

Chapter 9. "The Menacing Thunderstorm of Reforms":

First Esperantists and First Crises 71

Chapter 10. The French Resurgence 77

Chapter 11. "Bringing Together the Whole Human Race":

Esperanto's Inner Idea 84

PART III. THE ESPERANTO CLUSTER: SAME LANGUAGE, DIFFERENT COMMUNITIES

Chapter 12. The Demographics of Esperantujo 95

Chapter 13. Pacifists, Taylorists, and Feminists 103

Chapter 14. "Hidden-World Seekers": Esperanto in New Wave

and Old Religions 112

Chapter 15. Freethinkers, Socialists, and Herderians 120 PART IV. IDO AND ITS SATELLITES

Chapter 16. "One Ideal International Language": Ido 131

Chapter 17. "Linguistic Cannibalism" 144

Conclusion 153

Notes 169

Bibliography 199

Index 219

Acknowledgments 227

Introduction

In 1928, the young Eric Blair, later known as George Orwell, moved to Paris to begin his career as a writer and to improve his French. He first set up quarters at the home of his bohemian aunt Nellie Limouzin and her lover, Eugene Adam. Better known in revolutionary circles as Lanti, the man who is against everything, Adam was a radical Esperantist. He was the founder of Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda, an international—or, more accurately, a non-national—working-class organization that combined class struggle with the advancement of Esperanto as the language of the coming proletar- ian revolution. Adam refused to speak French at home. Since Esperanto was the home language, Orwell soon had to find different lodgings in order to refine his French.¹

This was not Orwell's last exposure to Esperanto. During the Spanish Civil War, when he volunteered to fight against General Franco's pro-fascist forces, Esperanto was widely used in newspapers and on radio stations and even by the Catalan government to inform International Brigades about the war.² Nor was Esperanto Orwell's last encounter with international language projects. From 1942 to 1944, while working for the Eastern Service of the BBC, Or- well broadcast news commentaries in Basic English, an artificial language fashioned by the linguist and philosopher C. K. Odgen.

Given his long acquaintance with artificial languages, it is not surprising to find in Orwell's fiction the most notorious, effective, and popular use of an invented language. In Nineteen Eighty-Four (published in 1949), Orwell introduced us to Newspeak. Deliberately designed for totalitarian domi- nance, Newspeak "was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc [English socialism], but to make all other modes of thought impossible."³

Orwell's portrayal of an artificial language as a potent tool of political submission was certainly not the kind of speculation that many Esperantists and Basic English adherents might have expected from a former supporter of artificial languages. In any case, by the time Orwell published his dys- topic novel, Basic English and Esperanto were not the only artificial languages on the market. Ido, created in 1907 by the philosopher Louis Couturat, still had some supporters, as well as Occidental and Novial, devised in 1922 and 1928 by Edgar de Wahl and the linguist Otto Jespersen, respectively. Volapuk, an artificial language created in 1879, still lingered in the memory of many Europeans, too. And shortly after Nineteen Eighty-Four went to press, yet more artificial languages appeared. Interlingua was sponsored by the Inter- national Auxiliary Language Association and supported by the philanthropist Alice Vanderbilt Morris.

Although today it is barely remembered, a spirited, intense "battle of artificial languages," as contemporaries called it, figured prominently in the intellectual landscape from the late 1800s to the outbreak of