In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [30]
Zamenhof began to develop his new language in earnest during his teenage years, after his rapidly growing family (he was the eldest of nine) moved to Warsaw, where his father, Marcus, took a position as the official Jewish censor. The job involved vetting all Hebrew publications for any statements that could be construed as insulting to the tsar, an ambiguous task requiring Marcus to gauge the paranoia of a government that was already disinclined toward him and other Jews. He was a strict father, and the pressures of his new responsibilities sometimes made him cruel. Ludwik responded by becoming dutiful and well behaved.
The family spoke Russian and Yiddish at home, but Ludwik was familiar with Hebrew through his father (more as a scholarly language than as a religious one). Young Ludwik picked up Polish on the street and Latin, Greek, French, and German at school. His first attempts at inventing his own language didn't go well. He began by developing a lexicon of one-syllable words, like ha and ka, but found that he couldn't remember the meanings he'd assigned to them. He made things easier on his memory by substituting roots from languages he had studied—such as hom for “man” and am for “love.” However, the universe of things that require a name is large, and as his notebooks filled with his neat and careful script, he again lost his ability to keep track of them. This was a problem he had to solve. A language intended for all mankind wouldn't work unless all mankind could learn it. Ludwik's solution arose from an accidental insight:
I noticed the formation of the (Russian) word shveytsarskaya (porter's lodge) which I had seen many times, and of the word kondityerskaya (confectioners shop). This -skaya interested me and showed that suffixes provide the possibility of making from one word a number of others which don't have to be learned separately. This idea took complete possession of me. I began comparing words and looking for constant, definite relations among them, and every day I threw large series of words out of my dictionary and substituted for them a single suffix defining a certain relationship.
At about the same time, he began to study English in school. For a speaker of Russian, with its complex systems of verb conjugation and noun agreement, its accusative, genitive, locative, and other sundry cases, English must have appeared a dream of simplicity. He felt the freedom of gliding over ice-smooth paradigms—“I had, you had, he had, she had, we had, they had”—and purged his nascent language of unnecessary grammatical markers.
On December 17, 1878, a Proto-Esperanto congress convened. Despite his shyness, Ludwik had convinced some of his schoolmates to involve themselves in his project. They gathered in his cramped apartment to celebrate over cake and take part in that most Esperanto of activities—the singing of hymns. On this day they sang a poem by Ludwik that succinctly captures the sentiment that inspired his diligence:
Malamikete de las nacjes
Kadó, kadó, jam temp està
La tot’ homoze en familije konungiare so debà.
Enmity of nations
Fall, fall, the time has come
May the whole of humanity be united as one.
This poem is an example of early Esperanto. The language was further tweaked and modified when Ludwik was forced to reinvent it from scratch. Before he left for university to study medicine, a colleague of his father's had remarked that Ludwik seemed awfully wrapped up in this language of his. Fearing that it would distract the young man from his studies, Marcus demanded that he leave it behind. The compliant son handed over his lovingly filled notebooks, and some time after he set out for Moscow, his father threw them on the fire. Ludwik