99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-16- A Designed Language

Episode Date: February 18, 2011

The idea is simple and quite beautiful: if we all shared a second, politically neutral language, people of all different nations and cultures could communicate freely and easily, and it would foster international understanding and peace. This is the idea … Continue reading →

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Let me start with this. The invented language of Esperanto has a flag, and it kicks ass. Green field, white canton in the upper left corner with a green 5-pointed star on it. I'd be on board because of the design of the flag alone. Seriously, I could march in the streets behind that flag, but that's not the Esperanto way at all. Esperanto is about hope. It was created in the 1880s by Polish eye-doctor named Lud Saminhof, and he lived in this town Bialystok, where there were Poles, Jews, Germans, and Russians, and they all spoke different languages,

and they all hated each other. So he had this idea that if everybody spoke a common language, they could communicate, they could get to know each other as people, and there wouldn't be any more racism or conflict, which is a beautiful idea. This is Sam Green. My name is Sam Green, I'm the director of Utopia in the Four Movements. One of the four movements of Sam Green's live documentary is about the Zemanhoff's Utopia

of Esperanto. In some ways, the history of Esperanto really mirrors the 20th century in a certain flowering of Utopian energy and ultimate waning of that by the end of this century. Zemmanov's full dream of peace through a shared second language never came to pass. According to estimates, somewhere between 50,000 and 2 million people speak Esperanto. But that shouldn't suggest that Esperanto is a failure. In the history of invented languages, it's the greatest success story ever. Guess number two, Erica Okrent.

My name is Erica Okrent, and I'm the author of In the Land of Invented Languages. Esperanto was a real product of the time. In the end of the 19th century, early 20th century, when nationalism was tearing Europe apart, all these old empires were crumbling, and the lines around which they fractured were linguistic ones. So it made a lot of sense to say, hey, let's find a linguistic solution to our problems. But the mantle of Esperanto as the king of invented languages also had to do with its design as a language.

Well, Esperanto was designed to have as simple as possible a grammar, all nouns and an O, all adjectives and an A. Verb 10 is indicated by regular endings, and it never varies, so there are no irregular verbs. So you learn a finite number of endings and a few root words, and you're up and running. After a few weeks of learning Esperanto, you can start communicating meaningfully with other speakers. But its other strength is that it's not too engineered. Being over designed is a pitfall of many other invented languages. Previous projects tried to be so consistent and regular

and break down the entire world of concepts into their component pieces. Each letter would contain a part of meaning within it. Those kind of languages are impossible to use. Esperanto has this nice, sloppy middle ground. It's a nice balance between systematicity and arbitrary sloppiness. And when it comes to language, we need both of those things. In our natural languages, we need a way to get more specific when we need to, so we have stuff like legal jargon. But it also lets us just sort of talk without necessarily knowing where we're going with it, or knowing exactly what we need.

So for all you language inventors out there, don't make it too perfect. A little fuzziness is key. out there don't make it too perfect. A little fuzziness is key. So is artistic expression. From the beginning, Zelenhof stressed poetry and music in Esperanto, and there are unique aspects to the language that make it especially suited to a kind of poetic wordplay. With endings you can make any word into a verb. So if you have blue-a meaning blue you can also have a verb. The blue-a is blue-ing. So an Esperantist can say La Cielo, Espa's blue-a. The sky is blue. But if you really want to be an Esperantist about it he'll say La Cielo, Blue-a.

The sky is blue-ing. And that's a very Esperanto way of expressing it. Any word can also be an adverb, which is strange, not many languages have this feature. So you don't say, I go to the beach in the summer, you will say, you know, summerally, I go to the beach. Summerally, I go to the beach. If you do not approve of that sense, I don't want to live in your dark and joyless little world. One of the ultimate ironies of Esperanto is that one of its most widespread uses in the US was during the Cold War. The US would do these war games against a fictitious enemy, the maneuver enemy, also known as the aggressor. And they'd have to have the enemy speaking

a different language. And since they didn't want to offend any other country, they couldn't have them speaking Spanish or French. Russian even, they had them speaking Esperanto. Esperanto was used by the US Army, so it wouldn't possibly offend another country and cause some unnecessary conflict. So even in this distinctly American completely twisted context, as Buranto achieved exactly what it was designed to do. 99% Invisible was produced by me Roman Mars with support from Lunar, making a difference with creativity. It's a project of KALW, the American Institute of Architect San Francisco and the Center for Architecture

and Design. To find out more, and see the flag of Esperanto, what you really should do, go to 99%invisible.org. you