Professional translation services rarely include Esperanto, because, despite the best of intentions, Esperanto has taken on the reputation of an “artificial” language. Unscientific estimates of the number of Esperanto speakers in the world today range from above 20,000 to less than 2 million. Esperanto has been around for over 125 years. The brainchild of Dr. L. L. Zamenhof, a Polish optometrist, the idea was not to replace someone’s language, rather to serve as a common second language. People from different cultures speaking different languages, Dr. Zamenhof hoped, could use Esperanto as a common means of communication. Easy to learn After somewhat of a spotty history where some countries on both ends of the political spectrum (the early USSR and Nazi Germany, for example) even banned or persecuted Esperanto speakers, the movement to adopt Esperanto survives, albeit at a lesser level of advocacy. Esperanto advocates point out that Esperanto is many times easier to learn than other languages, because:
- It is phonetic (or, as they would say in Esperanto “fo-net-ik.”) Every letter of its 28-character western alphabet has just one sound. (Compare that with the English spellings and pronunciations of “laughter” and “daughter.”)
- Pronunciation of Esperanto words are always on the penultimate (next-to-last) syllable.
- It has a simplified grammar. Its verbs have only six endings and the endings never change. Forget about special endings depending on person and number.
- Vocabulary building is simpler. For example, Esperanto speakers learn prefixes and suffixes that are standard. One example: “bona” in Esperanto = “good.” Add the prefixes “mal-“ and you have the Esperanto word for “bad,” which is “malbona.”