THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS: Esperanto Spurned

The movement to make Esperanto a world language for auxiliary international purposes received a rebuff from the Commission of International Coöperation, which had been invited to express its opinion on the question by the Assembly of the League of Nations.

The Commission decided to eschew synthetic languages, and to invite the League to favor the selection of a living language as one of the most powerful means for bringing the nations of the world together. English and French must fight it out.

Even Esperanto can be tinged with politics in the strange propagandist twilight that has settled over Europe’s chanceries. There really is ground for the belief that the Germans have been back of the agitation for Esperanto, in a desire to make an indirect attack on French and British influence through the French and English tongues. Also the Soviets recently attempted to compel the Russian Esperantists to use their language to further Bolshevist doctrines.

Esperanto was invented by Dr. L. Zamenhof, a physician of Bielostok, Russia, where the clash of four races (Russians, Germans, Poles, Jews), suggested the necessity for a neutral tongue. Esperanto was first published in 1887, seven years after its predecessor, Volapük, which it has now supplanted.

Dr. Zamenhof’s original idea was to resuscitate a dead language. Then he tried to construct a new tongue on an a priori basis. Finally he fell back on the roots of extant languages, selecting from European sources chiefly. His choice was guided by a desire for internationality, but his results were not satisfactorily impartial.

Zamenhof’s dictionary contained 2,642 Esperanto words. Volapük was more complicated, a single verb being capable of 505,440 different forms.

Idiom Neutral, the most recent attempt at an international tongue (1902), is the simplest language yet devised. It is based on a thoroughly impartial and systematic study of English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Latin.