Esperantists share a common clause

By Mary Carey
Staff Writer

Published on February 22, 2008

Jose Antonio Vergara, a Chilean physician, is an internationally known epidemiologist, but he feels more comfortable speaking Esperanto than English, the adopted language of science.

"They have a total command of the language. They look smarter than me," Vergara, whose first language is Spanish, explained about native English-speaking scientists to a small gathering of Esperantists at the China Dynasty on Sunday.

Vergara was in the United States to speak at a symposium on issues including the widening gap between the language of science and the languages of public discourse, government policy and community life at the 2008 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in Boston last week.

He was in Amherst, at the invitation of his fellow Esperantist Steve Brewer, who is director of the Biology Research Center at the University of Massachusetts.

Brewer leads a weekly conversation group at the Blue Wall on campus and maintains a Web site written in Esperanto.

He agrees with Vergara and a growing number of scientists that there are drawbacks to English being the language the science, creating, as it does, an unfair playing field for non-native English speakers, among other concerns.

"We think that any national language could be fairer for everyone else," Vergara said.

In fact, the promotion of a fairer, more democratic system of international communication is among the founding precepts of Esperanto, launched in 1887 by L.L. Zamenhof, an opthamologist from Bialystok, then part of Russia, under the pseudonym "Dr. Esperanto," meaning "one who hopes."

Passionate evangelists of the language's merits, Brewer and Vergara remain hopeful that Esperanto will some day be more fully embraced than it is now.

In the meantime, they like to get together with fellow practitioners from around the world and talk. About a half dozen other Esperantists met them for lunch on Sunday.

Estimates of how many people actually speak Esperanto range from tens of thousands to 2 million. Most people learn it through self-directed study, although it is taught at some colleges.

One of its more famous speakers is William Shatner. Better known as Capt. James Tiberius Kirk of "Star Trek" fame, he learned Esperanto so he could star in the 1965 all-Esperanto horror film "Incubus."

Thanks to its logical design and relatively small vocabulary, it's easier to learn than other languages. Esperantists at the lunch said a person could learn it well enough to get along in two months and be proficient in a year. Knowing French helps, in the view of Sali Lawton, of Westhampton.

Reasons it hasn't caught on include conscious efforts to suppress it, some say.

Hitler mentions Esperanto in "Mein Kampf" as an example of a language an international conspiracy of Jews might use and ordered its speakers sent to concentration camps.

Denouncing it as "the language of spies," Stalin exterminated the entire Esperanto movement while in power. Some speakers were suspected of being Communist sympathizers during the McCarthy era in the United States and the French killed an effort to make it the first language of the League of Nations in the early 20th century.

Brewer says the fact it takes work to learn another language is another reason Esperanto hasn't caught on.

"And everyone prefers their own language," David Coffin, of Arlington, said.

Esperanto and marriage

Allan Boschen, a retired electrical engineer from Windsor, has been teaching Esperanto in Berkshire County since 1964 and is the author of an anthology of Esperanto.

"The objective," he said, "is to demonstrate that Esperanto is a real, living language with a culture and a speaking population around the world."

The anthology includes many pages of photos of Boschen's collection of novels and plays, textbooks, travel brochures and children's books.

Boschen himself has translated "Little Red Hen" - "Rugkokineto" - into Esperanto. "Kok" mean chicken, he explained. "Rug" means red. The "in" of the title means female, "et" means small and the "o" at the end makes it a noun.

Lawton, a retired art teacher, began studying Esperanto when she was 59 years old. She learned of it from Boschen at a Unitarian conference in 1984 and then found a book at the Forbes Library in Northampton written in a comic book format, which appealed to her.

The next year, she studied it at a school in San Francisco and used it during a trip to Europe in 1988 with her late husband.

He never pursued learning Esperanto the way she did, Lawton said. "He was a history teacher and had an unfortunate experience studying French in high school and college."

Brewer's wife, Amherst Select Board member Alisa Brewer, has not demonstrated a keen interest in the language either, he said. There are 16 basic design principles of Esperanto, Brewer noted, and he has heard it said that the 17th rule is "Your wife doesn't like Esperanto."

Even so, enough marriages are formed by people meeting each other at Esperanto conferences that the word "edsperanto" has been coined to mean marriage broker.

Coffin, of Arlington, met his wife Lena, who is from Siberia, at a 2003 conference in Yalta. Esperanto is the primary language they speak at home in Arlington, and the first of three languages, in addition to English and Russian, that their children Ginger and Basil are learning.

Esperanto is supposed to be easy enough for anyone to learn and yet be subtle enough to express all meanings and emotions with complexity.

Vergara offered the example of the word for moon, which in Spanish is feminine, masculine in German and gender neutral in Esperanto, as in English.

"There could be a philosophical discussion between German-speaking people and Spanish-speaking people about the sex of the moon," he said. "We don't have that problem in Esperanto."

Mary Carey can be reached at mary.carey@att.net.