Stuff You Should Know - Esperanto: Tre Mojosa

Episode Date: January 25, 2024

One thing you could do is create your own language. Some people do and for lots of different reasons. LL Zamenhof created Esperanto to try to bring about world peace. It worked, but on a less-than-global scale.   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I don't know how to say that in Esperanto. Now that I think about it, I really should have looked that up. I was wondering if you were going to do that. I can't believe I didn't. I feel kind of jerky, jerkwadi. I guess I don't know how to say that in Esperano either. Well, jerkwad would be jerkwado.

Yeah, exactly. Or something like that. Something similar to that, yeah. It actually would make sense because Esperano is taking root words, jerk, wad, and putting them together and then conjugating them in a very uniform way. We should probably tell everybody

what we're talking about here, because we just kind of accidentally got into it. Yeah, it's a language. Not just a language, it's a conlang, a constructed language, which is a language that you sit down and make up. Some people actually do this, and apparently it's addictive when you start, as opposed to, like, I guess, a natural language, one that just kind of develops organically over time as a group

of people start talking to one another. Yeah, Esperanto itself means one who hopes, and that will all make sense once you hear the story, because it's a pretty wonderful story, actually. I didn't know much about it. I just thought it was kind of one of these goofy fringe things. And it is a fringe thing. There are about 1,000 people who are native, not just Esperanto speakers, but where their first language that they learned was Esperanto,

their native speakers. Dave Rus helped us with this and he dug up George Soros billionaire, oh, I don't know. I'm sure people describe him in a lot of ways, depending on who you are. But as the most famous Esperanto speaker, but I did poke around a little bit and found that Tolstoy, J.R.R. Tolkien spoke Esperanto, and La Mer, basically the father of modern cinema, and as this will become as a surprise when you see later on what happened,

but Joseph Stalin apparently knew how to speak Esperanto. That is kind of a surprise. The thing I think that differentiates George Soros, though, is he was a native speaker. Like that was his first language was Esperanto. Yeah, but I looked over the list of just speakers, notable speakers, and there are a lot of people in the list, but I just hadn't heard of many of them.

Stalin's a big surprise. I'd like to add one more to that list of notable Esperanto speakers, our own Ben Bolin from Stuff They Don't Want You to Know. I thought he spoke Esperanto, that tracks. He did, I emailed him just to make sure that I wasn't just making something up in my head. And he said, yeah, he used to be into it

and he just kind of fell out of it. And then he emailed me like hours later and was like, damn it, Josh, now I'm back into Esperanto. So he's back into it, everybody. Well, learning Esperanto is about has been bold in a thing, is that can imagine? It is because it's inclusive, it's intelligent, it's curious people, it's witty.

It seems to be like one of the better, most more nice or kind online community. people, it's witty. It seems to be like one of the better, most, more nice or kind online communities that you'll come across from what I can tell. And it's fringe and that's Ben. For sure. Yeah, and again, that's Ben Bolin from Stuff They Don't Want You to Know.

That's right. So you said it was a constructed language. I guess we'll talk a little bit about why people would construct a language and a little bit of the history of these languages. There are a lot of reasons for doing that. Most of them are because they want to create a language that's easier to learn, that's simpler. A lot of times there might be religious reasons or philosophical reasons. Some people just do it for fun. A lot of them were designed to be a universal language in Esperanto. Actually, Esperanto ticks a lot of these boxes, as we'll see. But a lot of

them are created for like, hey, wouldn't it be better if everybody could speak a language worldwide? body could speak a language worldwide. Yeah, a universal language, a language where if you, I guess the whole point of a universal language is definitely the point of Esperanto. The idea is that if you can speak a common language with anybody else on the planet, that should conceivably do away with a lot of different conflicts that probably arise from disputes over language, from differences in language, from an inability to see one another's viewpoint because we're having trouble talking with one another. And that's kind of the basis be a global human family or world,

which that does sound like it'd be up George Soros's alley. Yeah, I mean, if you just could create a language that where all it was was don't shoot and how about a plate of cookies and a glass of milk? Oh yeah. How far we go? It'd be a much better world. So invented languages have, you know, people have always sort of been doing this here and

there but in the 19th century it seems to have really hit its stride. There were more than a hundred constructed languages that century alone. And Esperanto is far and away the most popular today, although for a long, long time, it was a language created by a German priest named Johann Schleier called Walopuch. Yeah, Walopuch. Apparently, God told him to do it. Sure, mission from God. Yeah, what else are you going to do? You're going to make that language. And I'm sure he was like, are you sure you want to call it Valapuk?

And God was like, get busy. And he did. And it actually caught on really well. There seems to have been kind of a bug in the late 19th century, at least in the West, of invented languages. And Wallapuke apparently fit the bill and it spread far and wide. I can't not say it like that. I'm sorry. It's fine. They started having like international congresses or conferences of Wallapuke. President Grover Cleveland's wife, Francis, named their dog volapuke like it was it was a

World-wide phenomenon even if you didn't know it or had no interest in learning it you knew about it Yeah, that's cuz that dog threw up all over the place though We had a cat named underfoot literally my dad named this cat underfoot that's a very good name And I'll give you two guesses why. Because the cat had very long legs and no feet to speak of. That's right. It was underfooted. So that conference you were talking about for Valapuk was 1889, but a couple years before that, so it was cruising and doing pretty well. But two years before that Esperanto was created and really took it over, you know, over the next like 30, 40 years or so. I mean, imagine there being a trend today of like a universal language is catching on

like on TikTok. Oh, God. Like it would just take off, but it's such a bizarre thing to think of. And this is what people were into. And this was long before social media. So it was hard for something to become a global phenomenon. And yet not one, but two universal languages took hold in the 1880s. Um, so Esperanto apparently just totally supplanted, um, volapuke, but there is a little footnote of it that apparently the, uh, Apparently the Danes say, what we would say,

like it's all Greek to me, like I don't understand what you're saying. The Danish expression is it's pure volapuke. That makes sense. Yeah, it's great. I love that. I love learning Danish expressions. I'm gonna start saying that.

I don't say it's all Greek to me much anyway, but if that ever comes up, I'm going to say it's beer volapuke. Yeah, and no offense to our Greek listeners, it's just something someone says here. Yeah, I wonder what Greeks think about that actually. I don't know. I don't know if it's gotten back to them yet. Yeah.

So, should we talk a little bit about this, the creator of Esperanto who was, I tried to find out bad things about this guy, but he seems like a pretty remarkable, humble, well-intentioned fella. And I also read that he was one of those rare people who would sleep just a couple hours a night rather than sit around and like stare at the wall. He did interesting things. He was a polyglot. He learned tons of different languages.

He was well-read. He was an optglot. He learned tons of different languages. He was well-read. He was an optometrist. He did all sorts of stuff. But along the way, one of the things he did was create Esperanto. And he had a pretty great, well, not great, but a pretty heavy backstory to it. Yeah. His name, we haven't even said his name yet. He's known as L.L.

Zamenhof or Zamenhof, but his full name was Ludwig Leitzer Zamenhof, born on December 15th, which is national Zamenhof day. Oh, that makes sense, sure. Yeah, in 1859, born in Bialystok, Poland, he was Jewish, as was a lot of Bialystok, Poland. He was Jewish as was a lot of Bialystok, about 70%. Also some Germans, some Russians, obviously Poles. And growing up there was pretty rough

because there was a lot of ethnic violence going on. There were Jews being attacked by Poles. There were Germans being attacked by Russians. In 1881, there was a false, I guess, accusation that Jews were behind the assassination of Alexander II of Russia, and that started the pogroms, which were these organized massacres of Polish and Russian Jewish communities. Yeah, because Poland was annexed by Russia from 1807 to 1921, which is why they would have cared.

That was their czar. And apparently it wasn't the Jews at all or anybody who had anything to do with Jewishness. It was anti-autocratics, a group of called the noradna volya, people's will, and they threw a bomb and blew them up. And apparently his successor, his sons, Zarek Alexander III was even worse. But from those pogroms that LL Zamenhof was alive to witness, and even before that, just the ethnic violence

that was endemic to Bialystok, that had a really big effect on him. And that's where he developed this idea that humanity is way more connected than we realize. That we have all these false constructs that separate us, that don't have to separate us, but do time and time again, language is one of them. He cited religion as one of them. And he was very Jewish. He was a very religious Jewish person, but he still recognized that religion creates

conflict sometimes it has historically. And he felt like you could kind of, you could keep the religion, you could keep the different nations, you can keep the things that do divide us as long as they had something like a universal language laying over the whole thing that could defuse the conflicts that grow up from those things that divide us. Yeah, which was, and he was a kid. I mean, this is remarkable stuff for a preteen and then teenager to sort of understand.

So he's clearly a brilliant, empathetic, passionate human being. I think as the family story goes at least, he was 10 years old and he wrote a play called The Tower of Babel, colon, the Bealish stock tragedy in five acts as a 10 year old. So just this idea of sort of stripping away these divisions and realizing like, hey, we're all human beings. That's the one, like at the root, that's what we are.

And we all literally have that in common, yet we divide ourselves like, it's just a remarkable thing for a kid and a lesson for everybody of all ages still. Yeah. As he was raised, he learned Yiddish, which apparently grew out of a German dialect that's written in Hebrew. I didn't realize that. But it's the universal language of the Ashkenazi Jews, the Jewish people in Central and Eastern Europe.

So he already understood what a universal language could do. You could take a Jewish person from Poland and a Jewish person from Czechoslovakia and put them in a room And they could speak to one another Through that second tongue Yiddish. So we said about kind of trying to modernize Yiddish Maybe yeah spread that and then he stopped pretty much in his tracks because he realized that What he was trying to do was say hey everybody Let's all learn the language

of the people you consider criminals and spies. It was like a really hard sell that he just realized wasn't gonna go anywhere. So he abandoned trying to sell Yiddish or create a universal language out of Yiddish and just set about creating one from scratch, which is what Esperano came from. What a setup. It is, it's what Esperano came from. What a setup.

It is. It's going pretty well so far. We should release this as the show. Best setup ever. I'm going to say it even though it annoys some people. Should we take a break? I'm going to say it even though it annoys everybody. Yes, we should.

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I'm Duane Wei, and I've been blessed to have so many titles so far in my life. But now I'm adding podcast hosts with my new podcast called the why would do anyway How did you feel about me in 2006? Well, there wasn't a lot of love there. I'd say So there was definitely yeah There was definitely some some cold times as I step into a new phase of my life after basketball I find myself with new inspirations, new motivations, and new whys.

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Listen to the Y with Duane Wade on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast or whatever. You can get your podcast. All right, so we're back. Really quickly, that sort of made me, before we left and talked about people being annoyed by asking to take a break, that came to mind because I jumped on Reddit recently on our subreddit and actually started an account because there was so much just sort of bad information. Like Jerry doesn't even work with them anymore. And just all these weird things that people sort of assume that we're wrong.

And I've since learned that that's, and even Redditers kind of said like, and that's kind of a thing people like surmise a lot. So I signed up for a few days and answered like, geez, a lot of questions for like a full day. Yeah. And then got right back off, but just wanted people to know

if they thought I was some phony that that was really me. And most people were awesome. You had your own stunt AMA. Yeah, sorta. You know what I don't like about AMAs though? Is it just that rapid fire sort of thing? Right. So this was like a slow burn AMA.

Gotcha. And it's all still there. A lot of answered questions like with correct information. And like I said, almost everyone is really, really nice, but not everyone is, but that's just the nature of online interactions. It's the internet. That's silly that they think Jerry doesn't work

with us anymore. I know. She doesn't even exist. Someone was really annoyed though about like, every time they ask if it's time to take a break. And I was like, we do that because we don't script this out. And I'm genuinely wondering if it's a good time to take a break. Yeah. What a weird thing to be upset about.

It's a conversation. Anyway, thanks to everyone who participated and you can go there and check it out if you want. Back to Esperanto. Yes. You want me to pick it up? Because we don't script this stuff. Why did you ask me that? That's so annoying. So we said that LL Zamenhof had said, okay, I'm going to start from scratch. I'm going to create a language that doesn't come from anywhere that's not spoken by anybody. I'm going to make this universal language from scratch. And so his 19th birthday party, he had already done enough that he handed out pocket dictionaries and

grammar charts to the guests of his birthday. Oh man. What a swinging party. That's right. For a 19-year-old. He called the new language Lingvo Intranazia,, or no, internazia, because that sees its, remember? Yeah, yeah.

And he composed a little hymn. And I kind of taught myself how to pronounce it, even though I'm going to completely screw it up, but may I? You got to sing it though. No. Yeah. No, you don't. You have to say it solemnly like this.

Malamikete de las nazias. Kadou, kadou, jam tempesta. Latot homose infamilia. Koune gare sodebe. Nice work. Can I tell everyone what it means? Yes, but you have to sing it. Okay. Let the hatred of the nations fall.

Fall! Fall! The time is already here. All humanity must unite in one family. It doesn't rhyme. Yeah. Someone on Reddit just said it didn't rhyme. So he's cruising with this thing. He has this bangin 19th birthday party where he's given out this stuff to his friends. I'm sure they're just like, who is this guy even? This is amazing. And in 1887, he self published a pamphlet, a 42 page pamphlet called, are you going to pronounce this stuff? Unua Libro.

Okay. I thought that was right. It means first book. And as you'll see, if you notice some of these words sound like other languages, it's because like other constructed languages, it's usually based on like the words or based on some other words. So when you hear Esperanto, like if you go to watch a scene from the Esperanto William Shatner movie that you can watch on YouTube. Yeah, Incubus. When was that? 66 everybody says but turn on classic movies listed as 65 which I find confusing but everybody else is 66.

Aside with TCM always. But if you go to and you hear or just you know, I looked up on YouTube just like Esperanto conversations or if you bump into Ben Boland somewhere in Atlanta, you'll sit there and you'll go, oh wow, that sounds a little bit like Spanish some. And maybe it might sound Italian, which Spanish also sounds kind of Italian sometimes. And so a lot of it might sound a little bit familiar like like Libro for book. Like that makes sense, like the word library. So just pointing out that when you hear Esperanto words and you think it sounds familiar, it's not by accident. Yeah, the reason why, especially if you are a Westerner, three-quarters of the root words,

he started out with 900 of them as we'll see, are taken romance languages. So it's yeah, if you're an English speaker It's very easy to pick up That's a much simpler way to say what I said So in the in the that first book Unua Libro, which I cannot I can understand what that means just from the little primer Which I have to say hats off to Dave He put together a primer for us in this article that like when you go back and research it more widely, you're like, this is really difficult

to like kind of wrangle into one small little ball. And he managed to do that really, really well. So way to go Dave. But that first book, Uno El Libro, it had some sample translations that said, here's how you say this stuff. Here's the grammar rules. Here's the dictionary. Here's how you pronounce it. And he said that his pen name, he wrote it as a pen name, Doctoro Esperanto, or Doctor Hopeful is what it means. I love it. And he called again his language the lingvo internazia.

And that's what he thought everybody was going to call it. But instead, everybody said, I like this Dr. Hopeful cat. Let's just call his language Esperanto. Yeah, which is sort of ironic because from the beginning he was a very humble guy and didn't want to be like, he didn't name it, you know, Zamanhofer or whatever. Like he didn't want it to be named after him. He didn't want to be like he didn't name it, you know, Zamanhafur or whatever.

Like he didn't want it to be named after him. He didn't want to own it. We would call something like this open source today. He didn't want it to be about him. So the fact that he made up a name and that they named it after him anyway is kind of funny. I get the sense that it probably didn't bother him too much because he seemed like a good guy.

But his goal, and we'll talk about sort of the other stuff that came along later as far as his sort of desire to attach other meaning to it. But his sort of root goal at the beginning was, I want a language for the love of whoever you worship that is easier to learn than everything else out there. And I want it to be a language, like you've mentioned, sort of from the get-go

that can unite people and promote peace, like two very sort of noble pursuits, I think. So, okay, let's talk about goal one, a language that's for the love of whatever you worship, easier to learn than most of the other languages out there, right? Right. Apparently, you could learn Esperanto

in something like about 40 hours of class time. One full week of learning. You'll walk out of there on the end of the day Friday, being able to converse basically in Esperanto, tell people where you live, who you are, what you like, point to clouds and identify them correctly. That is... No, don't shoot.

How about a plate of cookie and some milk? Exactly. They should teach that first, for sure. Yeah. Apparently, that's, I mean, you can just know without even knowing anything about learning languages, that's really a short amount of time. It takes about 100 to 200 hours to learn French or German to the same degree. There was another person who estimated that for English speakers, it's five times easier

to learn Esperanto than French or Spanish, 10 times easier than Russian and 20 times easier than Chinese. And again, a large part of that is because the root words are taken from romance languages. So just recognizing generally being able to make a guess in almost every case, what that word means, that's a huge leg up. And that's why it's so much easier in part. But the other part is the grammar that he created is so standard. And with such regularity, that that's the other part that makes it that much easier to learn, especially for romance language speakers.

Yeah. I mean, the hard part about learning a language is usually not memorizing root words and learning basic grammar. It's the irregular verbs. It's all these exceptions to rules. French has more than 2,000 irregular verbs. English is notoriously tough to learn as a non-native speaker. Yeah, think about this. Just about irregular verbs real quick, Chuck. For the English to be, pretty basic stuff, it's conjugated as B being, been, are, am, is, was, and were.

Now, if you were just approaching those words as a non-English speaker to begin with, you wouldn't think was had anything to do with be, or R has anything to do with be. And that's what causes the confusion in not just English, but almost any language, irregular verbs and exceptions to the standard rules. Yeah. And, you know, we did a whole episode on language acquisition, right? I'm pretty sure. Sure, we did. Yeah, and we did a whole episode on language acquisition, right? I'm pretty sure.

Sure, we did, yeah, for sure. Because I'm just consistently knocked out that babies and to toddlers and so on just pick up language. It's really remarkable to me still to see that kind of thing. But Esperanto, and we're just going to go over some of the sort of the base rules here. And I think you will find yourself like we did, just saying, oh my God, that's amazing. And it makes so much sense. There are 16 grammatical rules. There are no irregular verbs. There are no exceptions to rules. And these are just,

this isn't everything, but these are just a few examples of kind of like how much sense it makes. All nouns are gonna end with the letter O. That's why I said jerk waddo at the beginning. Adjectives, all of them end in the letter A. Adverbs all end in the letter E. There are no genders. That's another place where learning a foreign language

can be confusing is, you know, the different cases and genders. That's another place where learning a foreign language can be confusing is, you know, the different cases and genders and stuff like that and having to change things around. Not an Esperanto, my friend. And then this is sort of just a fun one. La, la, is the only word for thee. Right. Not la, la, lo, ill, none of that stuff. L, none of that. It's all la, lay, low, ill, none of that stuff. L, none of that. It's all la, the, everything.

And then it's up to the conjugation of the verb that changes that, or the adverb, or the adjective, or whatever, because it's standard. When you see like a O or an A or an E, you can identify a word in a sentence as a verb, an adverb, a noun, that kind of thing. But so the infinitive form of verbs, and by the way, I had to look most of this up.

Like I was like, what's an adverb again? English 101. An adverb is something like above, clearly, hourly. It describes an adjective of verb or some other stuff. An infinitive form is like two something, two do, like the basic form, like to eat. It ends in an I, so it's manji, okay? Okay.

Present tense, like I eat, that would be as manjahs, it ends in a yes. Yeah, and we should point out that it doesn't matter who is eating. If he is eating or I'm eating or she's eating or they're eating, it's all the same. Exactly, there's no irregular verbs. It's beautiful, right?

In past tense, instead of something like sing, sang, sung, where it should all just be sing, sing, singed, that's what he does. I know it sounds weird doesn't it well sure but that's what he does in this everything in past tense ends in ES so manges Yeah, I ate you ate they ate it's all it's all manges and then with future It's manjos and then with a command you justjos. And then with a command, you just add a u, u, manju. And that's it. That's how you conjugate verbs.

There's no exceptions to that rule at all. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty amazing. I guess it just makes sense that, because I kind of struggled with why other languages are so irregular, but if it's organic and it's growth, then that's just bound to happen, I think. It is. I looked up why, and it's actually fascinating.

It's because these languages often absorb other people from other language groups, and they bring their words with them. And so languages grow by adopting other words, changing. And so rather than completely altering, you know, how something that usually ends in ED, like sing, instead of just totally altering how it used to be, you just kind of change it to the new form, like sang or sung. It's just, that's how irregular verbs come up.

Nobody's like, I really wanna screw people up in the future. I'm going to add this. It just happens, you know, organically. So when you set about creating a constructed language, you can purposely, deliberately avoid any irregular verbs and make it that much easier to learn. My question that came up, Chuck, is how long, yes, I said up Chuck, how long does it take until a language like Esperanto starts developing irregular verbs? Well, I have a strong feeling and I'd love to hear from some Esperantists that they

fight that tooth and nail because that defeats the whole purpose and spirit of it. Okay, hasn't happened yet then is that answer? I mean, that would be my guess. Yeah, I'm on it. Okay. Hasn't happened yet then, is that answer? I mean, that would be my guess. Yeah, I'm on record. Okay. I'd love to hear from him too though. But if you haven't noticed that Esperanto, and this is a word you might not know, but it's called an agglutinative language, which is the words are formed from combinations

of shorter words basically, which English has a lot of those, all language has a lot of those, but Esperanto has all those. Yeah, so you've got your root word, and then you have affixes, prefixes and suffixes, and kind of like how you conjugate it with the I for to eat or an A-S for you eat. That's it.

That's the whole grammar, right? So the reason why he did this again, because not just like irregular verbs, but weird words that all describe the same thing is another thing that creeps into language organically. They've used the example of tree, right? Good one. Yeah. You know what a tree is in English? It's one of those plants that's got the wood and the

bark and the leaves and they're tall and everything. Everybody loves to hug them, right? Uh-huh. Tree makes sense, but rather than young tree, we have the word sapling, which combines proto-indo-European and proto-Germanic words. In English... Cute word, though. ...sappling it is, because it means young tree. It's the young version of a tree, it's very cute. A bunch of trees is called the forest.

That's old French from Latin. And then a botanical garden that has a bunch of trees is an arboretum, that's just straight up Latin. All of those are English words, sapling forest arboretum, and none of them sound like tree. So by creating roots that just describe one thing and then adjusting what they mean by adding a prefix or a suffix but keeping that root word,

he got around that kind of conundrum. Yeah, so for instance, tree. In Esperanto is arbo. That young tree, which is a sapling for us, is an arbido. And as we'll see, IDO is sort of the suffix for any kind of baby version of something, which is taken, I know, Spanish does that. Like there were two chucks at my job at a Mexican restaurant

and I was Chuckyto. Cute. Because I was younger than the original Chuckyto. Wasn't that a Taco Bell menu item in the 90s? Probably so. Two Chukitos and... Another Chukito. And another Chukito, three Chukitos.

A young tree instead of a sapling is an arbito. A lot of trees instead of a forest is an arboro. And then that botanical garden instead of an arboretum is an arboretto. And you might think, well, that sounds a lot like arboretum. Well, it does, but it also sounds like arbor, arbido, and arbore. Exactly. Right. So you see any of those words and you know it's talking about a tree. And then when you learn, it means the younger version of it or arro means the, the, like a group of whatever you're talking about. You just learned a ton of grammar, just right off the bat.

And then also note that all those end in O because they're all nouns. And again, all nouns end in O in Esperanto. Yeah. So we mentioned Edo, IDO is a suffix meaning like the small version of something or a baby something. And we also mentioned that there wasn't gender, there is, but not in terms of like, how you will conjugate a sentence. It's just a suffix.

It's I-N-O is a female version of something. You also have A-R-O, which is a group like Vorto, V-O-R-T-O is word, Vortaro is dictionary. It just makes a lot of sense. E-J-O and the J's are pronounced as a Y, isn't that right? E-J-O is a place for something. So K-U-I-R-I, how would you pronounce that?

Cool-E-R-A-O. Cool-E. Well, not just the first version. Oh, cool-E, cool-E. Why'd you ask me to pronounce that? Koo-ee-ree-ee-oh. Koo-ee-ee-oh. Koo-ee-ee-oh. Oh, Koo-ee-ee. Why'd you ask me to pronounce this? Well, because Koo-ee-ree. I got it now. The fact is, Koo-ee-ree is to cook and then what's kitchen? Koo-ee-ree-oh.

Right. So, you add the E-J-O, so that is the place where you would cook. Yeah. That makes sense, right? Yeah. That's not to say that Esperanto doesn't have words that you just have to memorize because that doesn't quite work. Cause for example, there's a couple of places

where you'll find a lot of books, like a library or a bookstore. Right. So a library you'd think would be called the Libereo or place of books, but actually it's called the Biblioteco. A Libereo is the bookstore. So it sounds like just kind of nitpicking, but if you ever arranged to meet your friend at the liberillo

and they think that that's the bookstore, you're gonna be sitting there waiting in the library for them a long time. Yeah, in fact, adding and I find this like part of the spirit of Esperanto is super cool and that they encourage you to create words as long as they follow the rules and make sense.

So to attack these affixes and suffixes under root words and Dave used this, this is so great. Gosh, this just makes me crazy how great it is. Hospital, the word hospital in Esperanto is Mal Sanu Lejo, right? Yes. Does that make sense? So, MAL in Esperanto is opposite of the SAN is healthy.

The UL means people, the EJO remember as we said, means the place where something is. And so a hospital directly translated is not healthy people place. Which could be a lot of places here in the US. So it's kind of like Esperantist like to put words together like you do in a Scrabble game. And the reason that it's encouraged is because out of the gate, Zamenhof like you, made this open source and said, here, take this and just do what you will with it

and make it grow. And that's why Esperano is still around. And one of the reasons it supplanted Volapuke, because the guy who created Volapuke, he was very controlling, kept a controlling grip on it. And so that made it like a dying language right out of the gate because you have to let language grow

and become organic on its own. Apparently he was like, nope, God told me to do this so I really need to keep a sharp eye on it. So I think we should also talk about the word for jet lag because it's also just super fun. And we could do this all day long, but just these two examples are really great. Horzo nozo, horzo nozo.

H-O-R-Z-O-N-O-Z-O, exactly how it sounds. That is H-O-R is time, zone is Z-O-N, and then illness is ozo. So the Esperanto translation is time zone illness. Yeah, makes a lot of sense. I love that. And that sounds, it's a lot of this sounds like how it would be transcribed or subtitled in like China

or something from English. Yeah, for sure. I came across something. Did you see what I sent you about English translated into English is kind of hilarious. Oh No, oh, you didn't I found a I don't remember what paper it was but For as an example they translated I do not understand and into several languages and one of them was English And if you literally translate I do not understand into English. It's I make not understand.

I think about it. Like that's exactly what that means, but it's not at all what you think of. Like I do not understand sounds right, even though what you're saying literally is I make not understand. Because do you means make? I literally. I do not understand. I just, I had to mention mention that it just cracked me up.

No, that's really funny. All right, so let's take our second break. I'm not even asking this time. And we'll come back and talk about where Esperanto went from there, right after this. It's Kate and Oliver Hudson. Host of the new podcast. Well, it's not new. But we are at I Hard No. But it's called Sibling Revolary.

Sibling Revolry. Revelry. That's right. We started this show because we just wanted to hang out together. We decided a couple of years back, you know what? Let's just, no one talks about siblings in that dynamic. The siblings, they know each other better than anybody. Yes.

You know, a lot of the time. And we get inspired by other siblings. I think other siblings make us want to be better siblings. 100%, a thousand percent. How many times shows that we have done? I'm like, I wish we were like that. I'm like, not a great sister. I know, I'm like, I'm terrible.

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Palga Saul, Pat Riley. Dirk, that's awesome. Welcome. Listen to the Y with Duane Wade on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or whatever you can get your podcasts. So Chuck, we talked a lot about how Dr. Esperanto Zamanhoff, the reasons why he created Esperanto, and that was goal number two, was to create like a language that united the world, right? Easy to learn, united the world, right? Easy to learn, united the world. And he originally based it on something he called Hillelism after Hillel the elder, a Jewish sage from the first century BCE.

And Hillel's teachings can basically be summed up as the golden rule, like treat others as you'd like them to treat you. He changed that name very quickly to Humor, Humor and Nismo, which means basically humanitarianism. But the whole idea was the same. He called it the interna idea, the internal idea of Esperanto, which is that it can remove those language barriers, those culture barriers between people. And to by doing so, you make people recognize that we're all humans. Yeah, and he, I think, realized at some point, again, that sort of attaching an ism to something maybe might keep people from wanting to learn it.

And I think there were also Esperantists. Dave said that a lot of them were French intellectuals that were like, no, no, no, no, we don't need to attach this to an ism. So it officially wasn't attached to an ism, but I do think the spirit of all that is a big part of Esperanto still. And people who wanna learn it,

even though it's not an official like ethic. Yeah. And so, I mean, just right off the bat, they had the first international or universal Congress of Esperanto in 1905 in France. And in that conference, a schism was created in like a whole other language, like a version of Esperanto called Edo, that was even easier to learn, was introduced.

And that group just went off and did their own thing, which kind of hamstrung Esperanto as it was really starting to take off. But Edo, you don't hear about it any longer, you still hear about Esperanto. I'm not 100% sure why, maybe it is because it had an ethic or a moral to it in addition to being easy to learn.

That's my guess. But Zamenhof died in 1917. And what's sad Dave points out, he lived long enough to see World War I, which I didn't read anything he wrote about it directly, but he would have been really bummed by that. Cause that is not, that's what he was creating Esperanto to avoid.

Yeah, absolutely. He during his life he was nominated 14 times 14, never won unfortunately for the Nobel Peace Prize and post World War One when the League of Nations was created to you know to stop something like that from happening again didn't work. In that very first meeting there was a proposal to teach Esperanto in schools to member countries, which was pretty remarkable. It didn't happen because the French delegation vetoed that and they said, French is already the universal language, which is so haughty, but they literally kept Esperanto, like who knows where it would be now

if they hadn't stopped that. Same thing with the u.s. At the United Nations in the 40s after the UN was founded somebody said hey We should all learn Esperanto and the u.s. Said nope English is already a universal language And that actually shows how language can like enhance the standing of the countries that speak that language that the rest of the World sees is basically a universal language and why Esperanto Didn't do that because it didn't come from any country. It didn't come from any ethnic group or any region It was a from scratch universal grammar that wouldn't enhance one nation over others

Yeah, not everyone loved it If you think like who maybe wouldn't like it Who wouldn't like this language created from a Jewish man? Hitler, you would be correct. It's written about in Mein Kampf. He said, Hitler said that it was a secret Jewish language used to plot against Germany. And I don't know if anyone ever went over to him, probably not, and said, DeFua, you can actually, it's not secret at all, you can learn it in fiercic hours, conversationally. And so, I don't know. Hitler being Hitler, there were, and of course, you know, I'm sort of joking about that, but it was no joke at all because Hitler and others would round up Esperanto speakers and jail them or kill them. And in fact, Hitler took his family, his surviving family, that is,

to the Warsaw Ghetto and all three of Zamenhof's children were killed by Nazis. Yeah. It's brutal. Stalin did the same thing, which I guess it's it seems at first surprising that he Learn Esperanto, but he called it the language of the spies. So I guess he was just that's probably why I learned exactly But even if you were a loyal Communist Party member You would be killed for for knowing Esperanto Which is funny because it was frequently accused of being a secret communist plot itself

So right that kind of goes to show you just how nationless Esperanto actually was Yeah, absolutely if you get online today if you're interested in this and you want to know like who's how's it going today? With Esperanto who's speaking it are people into it? Yeah, people are into it there There is, it's not a huge community, but it's a very passionate community of people all over the world, people like Ben Bolin. They find each other online. It's very easy to do that now.

Obviously, before the internet, they would have local clubs and stuff like that. They would have pin pals, kind of the way that people would spread any message pre-internet. they were doing that in Esperanto. And there are, you know, there are conferences. I think there's one, the 2024 Universala Congreso is in Tanzania this year, which is pretty cool. And it sounds just like they get together, they speak Esperanto, they work hard to keep this language and this idea alive, which is a very, again, I think it's still a noble pursuit.

And Esperanto has its own teaching app, Learn New, with an exclamation point at LearnNew.net. You can also pick it up on Duolingo and Babbel, but I looked on Duolingo. They have 381,000 people signed up to learn Esperanto, which is more than Klingon, more than Navajo, and more than Yiddish. It's toward the bottom, but it's still not the last one. 380,000 people worldwide is nothing to sneeze at. Heck no, it's more than Klingon. There's also a couple of podcasts, Radio Esperanto. Radio, by the the way is the same word in English and Esperanto already ended with an out Uso ne persona American in person

Okay, but you have to probably kind of know already a little bit of Esperanto Yeah, I meant to check that out. I'm gonna listen to one of those and just see if I can understand anything Oh, they said radio again. I know what that means. One other thing before we leave, do you have anything else? Yeah, I got one. So two other things. Okay, well, you go first. Okay. 1905, we mentioned that year earlier. What year was that? Was that the first year of? The first Congress, the universal Congress. The first Congress? Well, that makes sense then because that was the year that the Esperanto flag was debuted. It is called the Verda Stello or the green star

And it's it's nice. It's a green rectangle. It's got a little white square in the upper left corner and a green star inside that white square And apparently that was a big part of the branding the color green LL early on wanted it to all sort of look the same and feel the same, so his pamphlets and books and everything was in green. And I think green's just a big Esper, or I'm sorry, Verdo is a big Esperanto color.

Yeah, Verda. That's branding 101. Branding 101. Okay, well I'll say mine, then you can finish with yours. I just wanted to talk about Incubus real quick, that 1965, 66 Shatner movie. I watched a little bit of it. I did too, and it is really hard to follow.

And when you're listening to them speak, you're like, oh, this is okay, it's Esperanto. If you speak Esperanto, it drives you up the wall because apparently no one in the film knew Esperanto. They learned their dialogue in two weeks, and there was no one who knew Esperanto on the set to coach them So it's just moment after moment of bad Esperanto pronunciation And I saw in Quartz there was an article that quoted like a film reviewer from the the age

Who said that? Incubus is like a foreign film from a country that never existed What a great thought so I thought so too. I love that. We're checking out five minutes of it. Yeah, absolutely. That's it? That's it.

Oh, okay. Well, if you want to know more about Esperanto, everybody, go check it out. You do worse than starting... No, actually you couldn't do worse than starting with Incubus, but start there anyway. And since I said Incubus, it's time for listener mail I'm gonna call this Ain't quite right Hey guys listen to the latest episode

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