Richard Bartholdt and A. Christen - Esperanto: Hearings before the Committee on Education
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Richard Bartholdt and A. Christen >> Esperanto: Hearings before the Committee on Education
After a month's study any teacher should be able to teach others and
perfect himself in the process. At that I would teach the language only
to the pupils in their last year of school; many of them could make
immediate use of Esperanto on entering business; most of them would
probably get enough of the language during the last session at school
to engage them to keep up the practice afterwards according to local
opportunities.
Please do not judge of this probability by your experience with other
languages, which most students drop as soon as possible. Their endless
complications make the study and practice irksome and futile, while
Esperanto is positively fascinating.
In my opinion two lessons of 45 minutes a week would amply suffice to
secure practical results never dreamed of in the French, German, or
Spanish classes. After a very short course of study, the boys and girls
would get an opportunity to correspond with scholars of their own age
and station in many lands. There are even now hundreds of school boys
and girls in France, Germany, Austria, Spain, and even in China and
Japan eager for such interchange of thoughts by means of Esperanto.
The hour or hour and a half spent weekly on this subject would be amply
repaid by the increased intelligence and linguistic feeling of the
pupils, and ultimately the subject could be taught with great benefit to
the whole school, doing away with the necessity of ineffectual attempts
at teaching foreign languages to all and sundry, regardless of taste and
capacity.
(6) Perhaps a few remarks may be in place here to substantiate still
more clearly the postulate that Esperanto fulfills absolutely the ideal
requirement of a language that means to be introduced throughout the
world as a secondary or auxiliary language: Facility of acquirement to
all nations.
(a) There is not one difficult sound, such as our th, our obscure
vowels, the French nasals, the German ae, oe, ue, etc. The vowels are a,
e, i, o, and u. Each has but one sound value, and that long and full,
approximately as in the phrase: "Pa may we go, too?"
(b) The tonic accent, an insuperable difficulty in English, on account
of its irregularity and elusiveness, is in Esperanto invariably on the
last vowel but one.
(c) The grammar is reduced to a minimum, the whole mechanism of
Esperanto being compassed within 16 rules which any one can grasp and
assimilate inside one hour.
(d) The vocabulary is extremely small, less than 1,000 roots, mostly
common to every Aryan tongue, being sufficient for all ordinary purposes
of language.
This is due to the marvelously ingenious system of word building, which
enables anyone to derive from a dozen to one hundred and more words from
every root, there being to this derivation no limit but that of common
sense.
Of course, the vocabulary for science and technology is considerably
larger, but equally flexible.
(e) There are no troublesome genders; sex is expressed by the insertion
of "in" before the "o" ending of nouns, and of course only in the case
of animate creation. For instance, "viro" is man, "virino" woman,
"frato" brother, "fratino" sister, "kuzo" male cousin, "kuzino" female
cousin, etc. And here Esperanto has over all other languages not only
the signal advantage that there are no irregularities, but the far
more important advantage that the scheme is applicable to all cases.
For instance, although we have in English from 30 to 40 different
ways of forming the feminine such as father, mother; brother, sister;
uncle, aunt; bull, cow; stallion, mare; fox, vixen; etc., yet in most
cases we possess no decent or sensible way to indicate the sex of the
individuals; as, for instance, in the cases of teacher, doctor, friend,
cousin, neighbor, witness, elephant, camel, goat, typist, stenographer,
companion, president, chairman, etc.
Last, but not least, every word parses itself by its distinctive ending.
(7) The stupendous flexibility of Esperanto will be still better
understood if I state here that it possesses some 30 particles (prefixes
and suffixes), each with a definite meaning and each available whenever
you want to attach that particular meaning to any word.
We have already seen that the suffix "in" expresses the female sex
whenever it may be desirable to give it expression. So "id" denotes
the offspring, "il" the tool or instrument, "isto" the profession,
"ul" the person or individual, "ec" the quality (abstract), "ajx"
the concrete thing, product, or result, "eg" means large, and "et"
small, etc. Now, let us see how this works out in practice. Bovo is
bull; bovino, cow; bovido, calf; bovajxo, beef; bovidino, female
calf. And you may say bovego, boveto, bovinego, bovineto, bovidego,
bovideto, bovidinego, and bovidineto if you wish to add the idea of size
or smallness to the original or to the derived word.
Again: "Lern" is the root for learning. We first get lerni, to learn;
lerna, learned; lerne, learnedly; learno, learning. Next, using a few of
the particles we can make: lernebla, capable of being learned; lernema,
inclined to learn (studious); lerninda, worth learning; lernilo, a
text book (a tool); lernisto (a professional learner), a student;
lernulo, a learned person, a scholar; lerneco, learning in the abstract;
lernajxo, the matter to be learned (concrete), etc. And once more
note that what you can do with one root you can do with every root
in the vocabulary. So that the originally available number of words
is multiplied ten and hundred fold. Which simply means a tremendous
saving of labor in learning words and forms and yet secures a range of
expression and a degree of precision undreamed of in any other language.
(8) On the possible rivals, past, present, or future, to Esperanto see
closing remarks.
(9) To complete what I said on the verb during the hearing I give here
the entire paradigm of the verb in Esperanto.
Paroli, to speak; parolanta, speaking; parolata, spoken.
Present, I speak, etc.: Mi parolas, vi parolas, li parolas, sxi parolas,
ni parolas, vi parolas, ili parolas, oni (one) parolas, gxi (it)
parolas.
There a thus only one ending "as" for the present of every verb and the
same for every person.
In the past the ending is "is": mi parolis, I spoke, etc.
In the future "os" mi parolos, I shall speak, etc. In the conditional
"us": mi parolus, I should speak, etc. In the subjunctive "u": ke
mi parolu, that I may or might speak, the tense being sufficiently
indicated by the antecedent verb.
For the imperative we use the subjunctive without conjunction and
generally without subject.
The participle has a most ingenious flexbility, it having three forms,
anta, inta, onta for the active, and ata, ita, ota for the passive;
parolanta, speaking now; parolinta, having spoken; parolonta, about to
be speaking; parolata, being spoken now; parolita, spoken formerly;
parolota, to be spoken later.
Only practice can reveal the wonderful usefulness of this scheme, again,
of course, applicable to all verbs.
One interesting sequel is, that as every word can be turned into a
noun--if sense demands it--by simply changing the ending into o, we
therefore get: parolanto, the present speaker; parolinto, the past
speaker; parolonto, the future speaker.
Let no one say that such richness and possibility of precision is of
no importance; many a life's jeopardy has turned on less. Nor can it
be said that this unlimited capacity of expression makes the mechanism
of the language cumbersome, for the whole scheme of Esperanto can be
thoroughly mastered in a few hours.
(10) In England Esperanto has been on the school rates for several
years; any technical or continuation school can apply to the board of
education for permission to put Esperanto on its program. In 1909 it was
already thus taught in 33 centers.
The London Chamber of Commerce holds examinations in Esperanto every
year, and has done so since 1907. The United Kingdom Association of
Teachers prepares for the certificate of proficiency in Esperanto.
In the town of Lille, France, Esperanto has been taught in the high
schools for at least nine years; about 1,500 pupils benefiting yearly
from this. The same is true of Rio de Janeiro, in Brasil.
In conclusion, I wish to register my opinion as an unbiased student of
the whole movement for the adoption of an international language that
Esperanto has nothing to fear from any rival scheme--present, past, or
future.
Of upward of 150 different projects that have seen the light since the
seventeenth century, not one was born with a life worth saving but
Esperanto; not one has ever attained one-hundredth part the power and
vogue and vitality that Esperanto has achieved.
One only of all these schemes has ever come prominently before the
public before Esperanto came into the field, Volapuek, and this failed
of its own defects.
One only among some 20 or 30 imitations of Esperanto, namely, Ido,
succeeded for a time in creating a diversion in the Esperanto camp.
If Volapuek died of its defects, it is permissible to say that Ido
never lived on account of its numerous authors' everlasting chase
after theoretical perfection, each one having a different opinion--and
changing the same with every wind--as to what constitutes perfection
in every one of a thousand features of a human language. Accordingly,
the Idoists have altered their mock Esperanto a hundred times in six
years, so that no one has been able to keep track of the changes, and
the adherents of the secession themselves have never been able to learn,
speak, and use the language.
During these six years Esperanto has succeeded in establishing itself
and getting a firm hold in every civilized country from China to Peru
and from Greenland to Zanzibar, because it is a live and growing
language, perfect in so far that it is endowed from the start with all
the power of evolution without the need of any internal changes in its
wonderfully simple structure.
Here are a few quotations from great thinkers as to the need for an
auxiliary language:
The diversity of languages is fatal for genius and progress. If
there were a universal language, we should save a third of life.
(Leibnitz.)
The interrelationships of the peoples are so great that they most
certainly need a universal language. (Montesquieu.)
One of the greatest torments of life is the diversity of language.
(Voltaire.)
What an immeasurable profit it would be for the human race if we were
able to intercommunicate by means of one language. (Volney.)
It seems to me quite possible--probable even--than an artificial
language to be universally used will be greed upon. (Herbert
Spencer.)
The learning of many languages fills the memory with words instead of
facts and thoughts, and this is a vessel which, with every person,
can only contain certain limited amount of records. Therefore the
learning of many languages is injudicious, inasmuch as it arouses
the belief in the possession of dexterity, and, as a matter of
fact, it lends a kind of delusive importance to social intercourse.
It is also injurious in that it opposes the acquirement of solid
knowledge and the intention to win the respect of men in an honest
way. Finally, it is the ax which is laid at the root of a delicate
sense of language in our mother tongue, which thereby is incurably
injured and destroyed. The two nations which have produced the
greatest stylists, the Greeks and the French, learned no foreign
languages; but as human intercourse grows more cosmopolitan, and
as, for instance, a good merchant in London must now be able to
read and write eight languages, the learning of many tongues has
certainly become a necessary evil; but which, when finally carried
to an extreme, will compel mankind to find a remedy, and in some far
off future there will be a new language used at first as a language
of commerce, then as a language of intellectual intercourse, then
for all, as surely as some time or other there will be aviation. Why
else should philology have studied the laws of language for a whole
century and have estimated the necessary, the valuable, and the
successful portion of each separate language? (Nietsche.)
In this connection it may be well to repeat once more that Esperanto is
only an "auxiliary" language. Nobody dreams of it being a "universal
language."
EXAMPLES OF ESPERANTO.
Simpla, fleksebla, belsona, vere internacia en siaj elementoj[1],
la lingvo Esperanto prezentas al la mondo civilizita la sole veran
solvon[2] de lingvo internacia: cxar[3], tre facila por homoj nemulte
instruitaj, Esperanto estas komprenata sen peno de la personoj bone
edukitaj. Mil faktoj atestas la meriton praktikan de la nomita lingvo.
[1] "j" has the sound of English "y", as in boy, and is the sign for
the plural of nouns and adjectives.
[2] "n" is the mark of the accusative or object of the verb.
[3] The diacritic sign ^ occurs on c, g, h, j, s and has the force
of an h after the first and the last--ch, sh. gx is pronounced
like English g in George, which g without sign has the value of g in
good. jx is pronounced like s in pleasure, while j simple has the
sound of y in yes, esp. jes. hx occurs rarely and is doomed to
disappear in favor of k.
Kaj se vi pregxas, vi ne devas esti kiel la hipokrituloj, kiuj volonte
staras kaj pregxas en la lernejoj, kaj apud la anguloj de la stratetoj;
por ke ili estu vidataj de la homoj. Vere, mi diras al vi: Ili ricevis
sian pagon. Sed se vi pregxas, iru en la cxambreton kaj fermu la pordon,
kaj pregxu al via patro en la kasxito, kaj via patro, kiu vidas en la
kasxiton, rekompencos gxin al vi publike. Kaj se vi pregxas, vi ne
devas multe babili, kiel la idolistoj, cxar ili opinias ke gxi estos
akceptata, se ili faras multe da paroloj. Tial vi ne devas simili al
ili. Via patro scias, kion vi bezonas, antaux ol vi petas lin. Tial
vi devas pregxi tiamaniere. Patro nia en la cxielo. Via nomo estu
sanktigata. Via regno venu. Via volo farigxu sur la tero, kiel en la
cxielo. Nian panon cxiutagan donu al ni hodiaux. Kaj pardonu al ni
niajn kulpojn, kiel ni pardonas niajn kulpulojn. Kaj ne konduku nin en
tenton, sed savu nin de la malbono. Cxar via estas la regno, kaj la
forto, kaj la gloro en eterneco. Amen. Cxar se vi pardonos al la homoj
iliajn kulpojn, tiam via cxiela patro pardonos ankaux al vi. Sed se vi
ne pardonos al la homoj iliajn kulpojn, tiam via cxiela patro ankaux ne
pardonos al vi viajn kulpojn. (La Evangelio Sankta Mateo VI, 5-16.)