Thank you for such an interesting special issue of the newsletter (2007/5-6). I especially appreciated the biographical sketch “Zamenhof Lazaro Ludoviko” by G. Waringhien.

Besides its relating many details of Zamenhof’s life that I had not previously known, I found that, in its description of Zamenhof’s monumental efforts to develop a solid literary basis for the language, both original and translated, it convinced me all the more of a theory I have about why he made certain choices in determining Esperanto’s grammar.

Our language has two notorious complications: the accusative case, and the agreement of nouns and adjectives in case and number. Many critics of Esperanto have centered their attacks on these complications, claiming that they are unnecessary, and that their aims could be accomplished more easily by other means, e.g. simple word order. Usually, Esperantists have explained that these grammatical traits were intended to allow flexibility of word order, to make the language more accessible to the greatest variety of people from differing linguistic backgrounds.

However, I believe that there was an even more important reason for these choices: flexibility of word order for the sake of poetic expression, both original and translated. Knowing the great Slavic love for poetry, and seeing how already, in the first publication of Lingvo Internacia, Zamenhof included both original and translated verse, it is clear that Esperanto’s suitability for poetry was of vital importance to him.

I have come to believe that this is actually a key reason why Esperanto has succeeded to the extent it has, surpassing any other artificial language: its development was not one-sided, i.e. concerned only with business, science or political communication; rather, from the start the language was conceived with a strong artistic element. The fact that Zamenhof worked so hard to prove that “Esperanto can serve as a language for the free expression of all the works of genius of mankind’s literature” and “our language ought to serve not just for documents and contracts, but for life,”¹ proves that he understood how an international language must be able to express itself just as well artistically as practically.

I contrast this with the attitude expressed around certain other artificial languages. Lancelot Hogben, in his draft for Interglossa², focused largely on the need for his international language to be suitable for scientific communication. Significantly, all of his sample translated texts are prose (the possible exception is the inclusion of the 23rd Psalm, which arguably is a poem; yet here it’s translated in a purely prose manner)³. The developers of Interglossa’s successor, Glosa, have even expressed disdain for the consideration of poetry:

Fortunately, Glosa was born out of the mind of Prof. Hogben, a linguist but, also a scientist; and he lived brilliantly in the real universe; which is much more interesting and colorful than some literary world of words.

He, a scientist, discovered his poetry in the real universe. Somebody threw at me Wordsworth’s poem ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud …’

Yes, I agree, it’s beautiful! But a poet sees only a small piece of the real universe; a scientist is able to enjoy infinitely more beauty in any flower.

GLOSA IS THE LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE. IT IS PURE COMMUNICATION.⁴

A major focus of the artificial language Interlingua was its potential for scientific publications. Years ago, while researching artificial languages at a university library, I found that one of their few items in Interlingua was indeed an old collection of scientific papers. It clearly hadn’t been looked at in many years (if at all). Now I more fully appreciate just what Zamenhof accomplished with his determined and continual effort to produce a substantial body of Esperanto literature. Scientific papers often go out of date in just a few years in the light of new research. Great literature, however, both prose and poetry, never goes out of date. Thus Zamenhof made a lasting contribution to the permanence of his language. And while scientific publications are certainly important, focussing on them primarily is ultimately self-defeating in terms of establishing a lasting basis for a language, as so much of the material soon becomes obsolete.

Any language plan that does not allow for artistic expression to be important alongside scientific is incomplete. Zamenhof, trained as a medical doctor, certainly was enough of a scientist to know what was required of a language suitable for scientific communication. Fortunately, he was also a poet, and I’m now more convinced than ever that this was key in his ability to develop a complete and truly successful international language.