A world-wide culture has always needed a generally understood vehicle of communication. The forms which this vehicle has taken have varied. During the Roman Empire, Latin and Greek shared that role, the former throughout the Western Empire, the latter serving both as a universal language of culture and as the lingua franca of the Eastern Empire. In the Chinese Empire, numerous widely differing spoken tongues were unified in one written language whose written ideographs provided a common literary language, if not a common speech, throughout most of South East Continental Asia for centuries. Similarly, Latin, Hebrew and Greek have provided a common medium, of communication for religion and science over wide and divergent territories.

Today’s needs, however, are vastly different, and must be met with quite different tools. The spoken word, long overshadowed by its written counterpart, is again reappearing as of prime importance in international communication. The radio, the telephone, television, the talking film, numerous recording apparatus and such devices as the electronic gadgets which permit simultaneous translation, all are based on the directly spoken or reproduced word. And while the word may be spoken by the expert, it is increasingly being heard, understood and acted upon by the layman.

This in itself is a revolution. Hitherto, international communication was largely the preserve of the learned who could either devote years of their lives to learning difficult foreign tongues or to acquiring the mastery of complicated dead languages. Today there is no longer time for such a luxury. Our world requires a medium which is easily learned, easily manipulated and adaptable to a variety of needs, many as yet undreamed of. For example, a half century ago, no one could have even imagined the present day vocabularies of aviation or rocket travel.

Esperanto is ideally suited to these modern needs. Having thrown overboard the unnecessary ballast of grammatical irregularities which burden the ethnic languages, it can be rapidly learned by the ever increasing group of people with no specialized language training who need to use a medium of international communication for their specialized technical requirements. With a basic vocabulary smaller than that of Basic English, Esperanto can assimilate at once the international vocabulary of the technical sciences. It was created from the same international linguistic treasury whence our international scientific vocabulary has sprung — except that Esperanto utilizes this heritage far more systematically.

An additional advantage of Esperanto is to be found in the system of autonomous word formation whereby a person who is acquainted with a minimum of roots and affixes can create his own words which are immediately comprehensible to his hearers or readers. The advantages of such a system for people who must express themselves clearly and at the same time extemporaneously are evident. Increasingly, in our fast moving society, people must learn to “think on their feet.” No ethnic language and no projected interlanguage equals Esperanto in the facilities which Esperanto provides for tailoring your language to your thought while at the same time making one’s nuances of thought understood by the hearer or reader.

In freeing Esperanto on one hand from the vagaries of ethnic grammar and the tyranny of the unabridged dictionary while, on the other, enabling it to assimilate the international vocabulary of science and technology without losing the capacity of independent word formation, Dr. Zamenhof anticipated the particular requirements of today’s needs for a medium of international communication suited to our age. Today a world language must no longer be the tool of a restricted and especially educated minority. Esperanto may well be said to be the ideally suitable language for the post-atomic world of the future which is painfully taking shape within the present.