In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [31]
In the next five years he finished his education and began his practice as an oculist, general medicine having proved to induce debilitating guilt when he couldn't do anything to help a patient. He continued revising and refining his language, and he met his future wife, Klara. She embraced him and his language, and they used it to write love letters to each other.
The official birth of Esperanto occurred in 1887, the year that Zamenhof, using Klara's dowry, self-published a small book titled Lingvo internacia. He modestly declined to attach his own name to it, signing it instead Dr. Esperanto, meaning “one who hopes.” He explained inside that an “international language, like every national one, is the property of society, and the author renounces all personal rights in it for ever.” Ludwik and Klara packaged the books and sent them into an unsympathetic world.
Nothing says success like bitter, angry jealousy in the hearts of your competitors. In this case, the names read like the product of the perverted etymological strategies of the modern-day pharmaceutical industry: Interlingua, Ido, Glosa, Globaqo, Novial, Hom-Idyomo. These are just a few of the many languages proclaimed by their advocates to be simpler, more logical, and more beautiful than Esperanto. But Esperanto can afford to be smug. It's the only one you've heard of.
And this drives the other guys nuts. When I first became curious about the topic of constructed languages, I joined a Listserv called Conlang. The next day my in-box held 287 messages. After a few days of this, I decided I wasn't that interested and unsubscribed. I didn't know that I'd innocently stepped right into the “flame war” that ultimately led to the “great split,” after which things calmed down considerably.
The split was between two groups. The first was composed of people interested in quietly developing and discussing the languages they crafted for science-fictional worlds, what-if-a-language-did-this playfulness, or Tolkienesque fun (the true conlangers). The second was composed of those who wanted to talk about an international auxiliary language for the real world (the auxlangers). The auxlang group included a few devoted Es-perantists and a larger number of supporters of alternate projects. Most of the war was conducted within the auxlang group, as vitriol hurled at Esperanto for its “totally ridiculous spelling system,” “the backward and confusing affix system,” and “the accusative -n abomination.” Additional fighting took place between the various Esperanto competitors—Ido took on Interlingua, and a new version of Novial took on an old version of Novial. The conlangers got fed up with “this stupid argument about something that is never, NEVER, going to happen anyway, FACE IT!!!” and the auxlangers, no doubt tired of being called “deluded lunatics” in the one place it was supposed to be safe to talk about invented languages, agreed to split off and form their own list. The conlangers went back to tame exchanges about tense-aspect marking and vowel harmony, and the auxlangers took it outside.
Every anti-Esperantist auxlanger is convinced that he (no need to fret about gender-neutral pronouns on this one) represents a superior product. Perhaps one of them does. Perhaps all of them do. It doesn't matter. At an Esperanto conference, I witnessed a tired-looking man in a gray T-shirt defiantly introduce himself as an Interlingua supporter. “I think it is a better language,” he announced. “It's clearer, more logical, and more beautiful than Esperanto,” and then, without the slightest trace of irony, “but I have no one to speak it with.”
Esperanto may never have risen to its position of prominence if it hadn't suffered its own great split early on. In the lore of Esperantoland, it