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By Root 545 0

of the twentieth century, while the proponents of Ido, Ulla, Ilo, Auli, Ile, Ispirantu, Espido, Esperido, Mundelingva, Mondlingvo, Mondlingu, Europal, Europeo, Uropa, Perfektsprache, Simplo, Geoglot, and the rest of Esperanto's competitors were advertising the potential practical roles for their languages—science, commerce, diplomacy, and so on—Esperantists were busy creating not a potential but an actual role for their language. While projects like Anglo-Franca, published around the same time as Zamenhof's first book, were presented through examples like “Me have the honneur to soumett to you's inspection the prospectus of me's objets manufactured, which me to you envoy here-indued,” Zamenhof's book presented Esperanto through poetry and personal letters. Then came the congresses and their associated rituals, the green stars, the hymns, the excursions. Everything that happened at these congresses became loaded with Esperanto-conscious significance. The most routine protocols—the types of things you would have seen at any meeting of an international association during that time—over the years solidified into Esperanto orthodoxy. Because of this, the congresses of today have a distinctly Victorian flavor, from the reading of the greetings (“The Esperanto teachers club of Halifax sends its heartfelt greetings and congratulations on the occasion of the twentieth congress”), to the formal ceremonies (in Havana I attended the “solemn” presentation of the special-issue Zamenhof phone card), to the closing of the congress (with the symbolic flag-passing ceremony from the current year's host to the next year's).

The Esperantists worked to create a community and a culture. Yes, they did this somewhat artificially and self-consciously, but it did work (forced tradition + time = real tradition), and it turned out that many people who may not have been inspired to learn a language in order to use it for something would learn a language in order to participate in something.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of Modern Hebrew, or, as some call it, the miracle of Modern Hebrew. Technically, Hebrew is not an invented language. There was no Zamenhof of Hebrew to sit down and draft its rules and vocabulary. But there was an Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who, as one biographer put it, “made it possible for several million people to order groceries, drive cattle, make love, and curse out their neighbors in a language which until his day had been fit only for Talmudic argument and prayer.”

By about A.D. 200, Hebrew had died as a spoken language. It survived as a liturgical language and as a written language for philosophy, poetry, and other elite intellectual pursuits. In 1881, when Ben-Yehuda and his wife, Devora, immigrated to Palestine from Europe, Hebrew also served as a sort of lingua franca of the marketplace for Jews from various language backgrounds, but it was nobody's mother tongue. In 1882, when Ben-Yehuda's first child was born, he declared that his household would be Hebrew speaking only, and thus raised the first native Hebrew speaker in over a thousand years. His friends thought the child was sure to be damaged by the experiment. His neighbors thought he was crazy. But three generations later their own great-grandchildren would be living their lives in Hebrew—at home, at school, at the beach, and in the sandwich shops.

Ben-Yehuda and Zamenhof grew up at the same time under similar circumstances (Ben-Yehuda in Russian-ruled Lithuania, and Zamenhof in Russian-ruled Poland). Both were deeply affected by the results of nationalist sentiment spreading through Europe. Zamenhof saw how it turned man against man and inspired people to violence. Ben-Yehuda saw how it strengthened and legitimized a feeling of common identity. Both saw that a fundamental element of a sense of nationhood was a shared language.

Unlike the Germans, Italians, Greeks, Poles, Hungarians, Ukrainians, and other peoples who asserted themselves as nations during this time by uniting and throwing off, or attempting to throw off, foreign rule, the Jews were a