Even with the best will in the world, we can’t all learn every language. And even in one language it is nigh on impossible to achieve the fluency of a native speaker. No matter how hard you try, you will always be at a slight disadvantage when you’re speaking to someone in their own language. But imagine if someone could invent a new language. One so simple that we could all learn it and speak it in a few months. It wouldn’t belong to any country or nationality so when we used it to communicate with people we would be talking to them on an equal level, without either of us having to use a word of the others native language. Imagine if people as far apart as Russia and Brazil learnt this language. We could talk to Russians without learning Russian and Brazilians without speaking Portuguese. We could freely exchange our ideas without worrying about grammar and pronunciation….

It sounds Utopian doesn’t it? And I know what you’re thinking: it could never be done. No one could ever invent such a language.

Well, that’s where you’re wrong. Such a language already exists and it’s called Esperanto. Although you’ve probably never heard of it, Esperanto has been around for over a hundred years. It was constructed in the second half of the nineteenth century by a Polish man called Zamenhof. He designed Esperanto to serve as a neutral international language which could be used by people of diverse nationalities to communicate with each other on an equal footing. In fact a lot of other intelligent men had had the same idea and Zamenhof´s language was neither the first or the last artificial language to be created. It is however the only one to have survived over a century of usage, developed a unique culture complete with pop music and poetry and attracted enough speakers to populate a small country. How come? Because Esperanto is so simple!

Esperanto was constructed to be the easiest language in the world. That means there’s no irregular grammar or difficult pronunciation. You don’t have to spend years studying boring rules and exceptions to rules. you can just go out and speak it. And people do. Admittedly not many British people, but in other parts of Europe and beyond Esperanto is pretty popular. Will Esperanto replace English as the worlds international language? Probably not in the near future, but you have to admit, it would be fairer if it did. So, perhaps you should give it a go. Just in case!

If you were intrigued by what you just read and want to know more about Esperanto, here are some more details. One of the things people often ask me when I tell them Esperanto was invented by a Polish man is: does Esperanto sound like Polish then? The answer is no, definitely not. When Zamenhof was creating the vocabulary for Esperanto, he took his inspiration not from Polish but from all the main European languages. He tried to choose words which would be recognisable for as many different nationalities as possible. the meaning of some words is instantly obvious to the English speaker, for example birdo and rivero. Other are pretty clear if you speak French, eg. lito is a bed and pomo is an apple, whilst others are clearly German: tago is day and hundo is dog. Sometimes even though the word itself does not resemble its English counterpart, we can make an educated guess as to its meaning because we have English words that have evolved from the same Latin root.  Book is libro in Esperanto which doesn’t seem immediately obvious. If we give it some thought however we see it must be derived from the same source as our English word library.

If you’re observant you may have noticed that all the Esperanto words I’ve written so far end in o. In fact all Esperanto nouns, or naming words if you prefer, do indeed end in o, which makes them easy to recognise. Furthermore all adjectives or describing words end in a. A few simple examples are bela = beautiful, bona = good and rapida = quick. Adverbs are formed by simply replacing the a ending of adjectives with an e. Hence rapide is quickly, bele is beautifully and so on.

That just leaves us with verbs. All Esperanto verbs are completely regular and don’t change with person. So while in English we would say: I am, you are, he is, in Esperanto it would be simply mi estas, vi estas, li estas. Estas is simply the present tense of to be. In fact the present tense of all verbs is the ending as.

The past tense ends with is, the future with os and the conditional with us. Thus we have mi estas=I am, mi estis=I was, mi estos=I will be and mi estus=I would be. Similarly mi havas=I have, mi havis=I had, mi havos=I will have and mi havus=I would have. It’s a fantastically easy system which can be repeated for every verb in the entire language.

You now already know some of the main principles of Esperanto grammar. What about the vocabulary? Well, you’ll be pleased to know there aren’t actually that many words in Esperanto. When Zamenhof chose the vocabulary, instead of inventing millions of new words, he decided to restrict himself to a few essential ones and create the others out of those. He thus developed a system of affixes.

Don’t panic: affixes aren’t as tricky as they sound. We have lots of them in English too. Take the adjective happy. If we add the affix un to the start of the word, we obtain an entirely new adjective, unhappy. What’s more, unhappy is the exact opposite to happy. Zamenhof took this idea and applied it to Esperanto. One of the most commonly used affixes in Esperanto is mal, which gives the exact opposite of the word to which it is attached, just like un. However, in English this system is not used consistently. Instead of ungood, we have a separate word for the opposite of good: bad. In Esperanto the idea is followed through logically and without exception, so that mal may be used to form the opposite of any word. Hence bona is good, malbona is bad. Varma is warm, malvarma is cold. Dekstra is right, maldekstra is left. The possibilities are endless! Once you have mastered all the main Esperanto affixes you can create a rich vocabulary from a few hundred core words.

All that remains to mention now is the pronunciation. Each letter has one sound only and each word is pronounced exactly as it is spelled. easy peasy! What more can I say?! Go away and try it for yourself. You’ll be surprised!

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