Choose Your Own Adventure!!-Anya Slepyan

Prompt 1: Can I just write something about Esperanto because it is my favorite? Yes, I can. Explain what Esperanto is and why it’s probably one of the best ideas that anyone ever came up with.

Prompt 2: As juniors in high school, we are all acutely aware of the important role that standardized tests (ACT, SAT, PSAT, and AP Tests) play in our future. These tests, designed by the satanic organization College Board, will most likely have a large impact in deciding where we go to college, how many scholarships we get, etc. Do you think these tests represent fair measures of intelligence? Should they weigh so heavily on our future? Does College Board’s monopoly on these tests give it undue power over our lives? Does it have the right to do so? (Basically just rant about College Board if you’d like to.)

Prompt 3: Doing things that you’re bad at is good for you. By going outside of your comfort zone and attempting things for which you have no natural affinity, you learn valuable lessons about the world and about yourself. What is one thing you have done or attempted to do that you just weren’t good at? How did that experience influence your outlook on yourself? On others?

              I’m responding to prompt one, because it my absolute favorite topic to geek out about! I’ll begin with a brief history of Esperanto; In 1887, a polish eye-doctor by the name of Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof published a book which outlined the preliminary grammar and vocabulary of an artificial language of his own creation. The language came to be called “Esperanto,” which means “one who hopes” in the language. Zamenhof had grown up near Bialystok, Poland, which was an area of remarkable diversity. His village was made up of many different ethnicities and religions, including Russians, Poles, Germans, and Jews. However, ethnic diversity in the broader village did not translate to peaceful or tolerant interaction among groups. Discord and violence were common, a trend that was facilitated, Zamenhof noted, by the strained communication among the groups due to language barriers. Thus Zamenhof theorized that the true cause of war, violence, discord, and discrimination among human species was the miscommunication caused by language barriers.

            This, according to Zamenhof, was a problem with a relatively simple solution. While a universal language was not a new idea, Zamenhof’s method of achieving it was novel in both its ingenuity and practicality. Zamenhof created Esperanto, a synthetic language, while studying in Austria. The fact that Esperanto was artificial is significant for two reasons. Firstly, because it had been manufactured, the language had no grammatical irregularities and a heavily simplified, yet expressive, sentence structure. This made the language incredibly easy to learn, especially compared to such weighty and irregular languages as English, Latin, French, and Russian. Secondly, because the language was artificial, it gave no preference to any group or nationality. One of the major roadblocks to adopting a universal language was the reluctance of countries to favor the language of a rival country over their own. (Can you imagine a British ruler abandoning English for the language of their bitter rival, France?) But because Esperanto did not belong to any one group to begin with, it could much more easily belong to everyone.

            Thanks to these unique qualities, Esperanto quickly grew from one man’s wacky idea to a fully developed language spoken in dozens of countries. The first International Esperanto Convention was held in 1905, and one has been held annually ever since (with the exception of the years of the two World Wars). Unfortunately for the Esperantists (as Esperanto-speakers were called), the twentieth century was an especially good one for mass dictatorship and totalitarianism in Europe. Not surprisingly, leaders such as Hitler and Stalin saw the Esperantist’s ideals of peace, diversity, humanitarianism, and the “universal brotherhood of man” as a threat to their regimes, which lead to the widespread persecution of European Esperantists.

            So where does that leave us today? Although Esperanto has never quite regained the popularity of the inter-war period, it has far from died out. Thanks to modern technology (***the internet***), people all over the world are able to learn Esperanto for free, in a matter of years! International conferences, for youth and adults, still happen annually, and are well attended by people from all over the world. And I believe that it may still grow more popular. Although the idealistic goals of uniting the brotherhood of man through a common language are pretty much over, Esperanto could still serve a great international purpose. Right now, English is the international language of commerce, pretty much by default. This gives English-speaking countries a huge advantage economically, as well as undue cultural and political leverage (soft power). This is also incredibly impractical because the highly irregular grammatical structure of English makes it very difficult to master for non-native speakers. Esperanto would be an ideal solution as a common second language because it is so easy to learn, and so universally accessible. If everyone spoke Esperanto as a universal second language, it would effectively level the economic playing field among countries, as well as facilitate international communication and cooperation among individual citizens. So we should all start learning Esperanto right now, okay?