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Esperanto: Tre Mojosa · Stuff You Should Know

0:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
0:11
Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
0:13
Speaker 2: Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you
0:16
Speaker 2: should know. I don't know how to say that. And Esperanto,
0:20
Speaker 2: now that I think about it, I really should have
0:21
Speaker 2: looked that up.
0:23
Speaker 1: I was wondering if you were gonna do that.
0:25
Speaker 2: I can't believe I didn't. I feel kind of jerky,
0:29
Speaker 2: jerk woddy. I guess I don't know how to say that.
0:31
Speaker 2: And Esperano either.
0:34
Speaker 1: Well, jerkwad would be jerk wado, yeah, exactly, or something like.
0:38
Speaker 2: That, something similar to that. Yeah, it actually would make
0:41
Speaker 2: sense because Esperano is taking root words jerk wad and
0:49
Speaker 2: putting them together and then conjugating them in a very
0:51
Speaker 2: uniform way. We should probably tell everybody what we're talking
0:54
Speaker 2: about here, because we just kind of accidentally got into it.
0:57
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a language, not.
1:00
Speaker 2: Just a language. It's a con lang, a constructed language,
1:04
Speaker 2: which is a language that you sit down and make up.
1:09
Speaker 2: Some people actually do this, and apparently it's addictive when
1:11
Speaker 2: you start, as opposed to, like I guess, a natural language,
1:16
Speaker 2: one that just kind of develops organically over time as
1:20
Speaker 2: a group of people start talking to one another.
1:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, Esperanto itself means one who hopes, and that will
1:26
Speaker 1: all make sense once you hear the story, because it's
1:28
Speaker 1: a pretty wonderful story. Actually, I didn't know much about it.
1:32
Speaker 1: I just thought it was kind of one of these
1:34
Speaker 1: goofy fringe things, and it is a fringe thing. They're
1:38
Speaker 1: about a thousand people who are native, not just Esperanto speakers,
1:45
Speaker 1: but where their first language that they learned was Esperanto.
1:49
Speaker 1: They are native speakers. Dave Rus helped us with this,
1:53
Speaker 1: and he dug up George Soros, billionaire. Oh, I don't know.
2:00
Speaker 1: People describe him in a lot of ways depending on
2:01
Speaker 1: who you are, but as the most famous Esperanto speaker.
2:06
Speaker 1: But I did poke around a little bit and found
2:08
Speaker 1: that Tolstoy j R. R. Tolkien spoke Esperanto and lemaire,
2:17
Speaker 1: basically the father of modern cinema. And as this will
2:21
Speaker 1: become as a surprise when you see later on what happened,
2:25
Speaker 1: but Joseph Stalin apparently knew how to speak Esperanto.
2:28
Speaker 2: Huh, that is kind of a surprise. The thing I
2:31
Speaker 2: think that differentiates George soros so is he was a
2:33
Speaker 2: native speaker, like that was his first language was Esperanto.
2:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, but I looked over the list of just speakers, right,
2:41
Speaker 1: notable speakers, and there are a lot of people in
2:43
Speaker 1: the list, but I just hadn't heard of many of them.
2:45
Speaker 2: Stilln' to big surprise, I'd like to add one more
2:47
Speaker 2: to that list of notable Esperanto speakers, our own ben
2:50
Speaker 2: bowling from stuff they don't want you to know.
2:53
Speaker 1: I thought he spoke Esperanto, that tracks he did.
2:56
Speaker 2: I emailed them just to make sure that I wasn't
2:58
Speaker 2: just making something up in my head, and he said, yeah,
3:01
Speaker 2: he used to, you know, be into it, and he
3:04
Speaker 2: just kind of fell out of it, and then he
3:05
Speaker 2: emailed me like hours later, and it was like, damn it, Josh,
3:08
Speaker 2: now I'm back into Esperano. So he's back into it.
3:12
Speaker 1: Everybody, Well, learning Esperanto is about as ben bowling a
3:16
Speaker 1: thing as I can imagine.
3:18
Speaker 2: It is, because it's inclusive, it's intelligent, it's curious people,
3:24
Speaker 2: it's witty. It seems to be like one of the better,
3:28
Speaker 2: most more nicer kind online communities that you'll come across
3:34
Speaker 2: from what I can.
3:35
Speaker 1: And it's fringe, and that's that's Ben for sure.
3:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, and again that's Ben Bolan from stuff they don't
3:42
Speaker 2: want you to know.
3:43
Speaker 1: That's right. So you said it was a constructed language.
3:48
Speaker 1: I guess we'll talk a little bit about why people
3:51
Speaker 1: would construct a language and a little bit of the
3:53
Speaker 1: history of these languages. There are a lot of reasons
3:55
Speaker 1: for doing that. Most of them are because they want
4:00
Speaker 1: to create a language that's easier to learn, that's simpler.
4:04
Speaker 1: A lot of times there might be religious reasons or
4:07
Speaker 1: philosophical reasons. Some people just do it for fun. A
4:11
Speaker 1: lot of them were designed to be a universal language.
4:14
Speaker 1: In Esperanto, Actually, Esperanto takes a lot of these boxes,
4:18
Speaker 1: as we'll see, but a lot of them are created
4:20
Speaker 1: for like, hey, wouldn't it be better if everybody could
4:23
Speaker 1: speak a language?
4:25
Speaker 2: Yeah? What a universal language? A language where I guess
4:32
Speaker 2: the whole point of a universal language is there's definitely
4:34
Speaker 2: the point of Esperanto. The idea is that if you
4:37
Speaker 2: can speak a common language with anybody else on the planet,
4:42
Speaker 2: that should conceivably do away with a lot of different
4:46
Speaker 2: conflicts that probably arise from disputes over language, from differences
4:51
Speaker 2: in language from an inability to see one another's viewpoint
4:53
Speaker 2: because we're having trouble talking with one another. And that's
4:58
Speaker 2: kind of the basis of a lot of the constructed languages,
5:02
Speaker 2: that idea that if we can all speak a universal language,
5:04
Speaker 2: there'll be a global human family or world, which that
5:15
Speaker 2: does sound like you'd be up. George Soros's allly yeah.
5:18
Speaker 1: I mean, if you just could create a language that
5:22
Speaker 1: where all it was was don't shoot and how about
5:26
Speaker 1: a plate of cookies and a glass of milk?
5:29
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, how far we go, it'd be a much
5:32
Speaker 2: better world.
5:34
Speaker 1: So admitted languages of you know, people have always sort
5:37
Speaker 1: of been doing this here and there, but in the
5:40
Speaker 1: nineteenth century it seems to have really hit its stride.
5:43
Speaker 1: There were more than one hundred constructed languages that decade
5:49
Speaker 1: that century alone, and Esperanto is far and away the
5:53
Speaker 1: most popular today, although for a long long time it
5:56
Speaker 1: was a language created by a German priest name Johann
6:00
Speaker 1: Schlayer called vol Vollapuk.
6:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, Vallapuk. Apparently God told.
6:07
Speaker 1: Him to do it, sure mission from Gad.
6:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, what else are you gonna do? You're gonna make
6:11
Speaker 2: that language? And I'm sure he was like, are you
6:14
Speaker 2: sure you want to call it vollapuk, And guy was like,
6:16
Speaker 2: get busy, and he did, and it actually caught on
6:20
Speaker 2: really well. There seems to have been kind of a
6:21
Speaker 2: bug in the late nineteenth century, at least in the
6:24
Speaker 2: West of invented languages, and vollapuke apparently the fit the bill,
6:31
Speaker 2: and it spread you far and wide. I can't not
6:33
Speaker 2: say it like that.
6:34
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, that's fine.
6:36
Speaker 2: They started having like international congresses or conferences of vallapuc.
6:42
Speaker 2: President Grover Cleveland's wife Francis named their dog Vollapuke. Like
6:47
Speaker 2: it was. It was a worldwide phenomenon. Even if you
6:50
Speaker 2: didn't know it or had no interest in learning it,
6:52
Speaker 2: you knew about it.
6:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's because that dog threw up all over the place. Though.
6:59
Speaker 1: We had a cat nam Underfoot. Literally, my dad named
7:02
Speaker 1: this cat underfoot.
7:04
Speaker 2: That's a very good name.
7:05
Speaker 1: And I'll give you two guesses why.
7:09
Speaker 2: Because the cat had very long legs, okay, and no
7:14
Speaker 2: feat to speak of. That's right, it was underfooted.
7:18
Speaker 1: So that conference you were talking about for Vatapuke was
7:21
Speaker 1: eighteen eighty nine, but a couple of years before that,
7:24
Speaker 1: so it was, you know, cruising and doing pretty well,
7:26
Speaker 1: but two years before that, Esperanto was created and really
7:31
Speaker 1: took it over, you know, over the next like thirty
7:34
Speaker 1: forty years or so.
7:35
Speaker 2: I mean, imagine there being a trend today of like
7:38
Speaker 2: a universal language is catching on, like on TikTok oh God,
7:43
Speaker 2: like it would just take off. But it's such a
7:45
Speaker 2: bizarre thing to think of, and this is what people
7:47
Speaker 2: were into. And this was long before social media, so
7:49
Speaker 2: it was hard for something to become a global phenomenon.
7:53
Speaker 2: And yet not one but two universal languages took hold
7:58
Speaker 2: in the eighteen eighties. Yeah, so Esperano apparently just totally
8:02
Speaker 2: supplanted vollapuke. But there is a little footnote of it.
8:07
Speaker 2: Apparently the Danes say what we would say, like, it's
8:12
Speaker 2: all Greek to me, Like, I don't understand what you're saying.
8:15
Speaker 2: The Danish expression is it's pure vollapuke.
8:18
Speaker 1: That makes sense.
8:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's great. I love that. I love learning Danish expressions.
8:24
Speaker 1: I'm going to start saying that. I don't say it's
8:26
Speaker 1: all Greek to me much anyway, but if that ever
8:29
Speaker 1: comes up, I'm gonna say it's pure ballapuke.
8:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, and no offense for a Greek list. There's just
8:33
Speaker 2: just something someone says here.
8:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, I wonder what Greek's think about that.
8:37
Speaker 2: Actually don't know. I don't know if it's gotten back
8:40
Speaker 2: to them yet.
8:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, So should we talk a little bit about this
8:45
Speaker 1: the creator of Esperanto? Who was I tried to find
8:48
Speaker 1: out bad things about this guy, but he seems like
8:49
Speaker 1: a pretty remarkable, humble, well intentioned fella.
8:53
Speaker 2: And I also read that he was one of those
8:55
Speaker 2: rare people and who would sleep just a couple hours
8:59
Speaker 2: a night rather than sit around and stare at the wall.
9:03
Speaker 2: He did interesting things. He was a polyglot, He learned
9:05
Speaker 2: tons of different languages, He was well read, he was
9:08
Speaker 2: an optometrist. He did all sorts of stuff. But along
9:11
Speaker 2: the way, one of the things he did was create Esperanto.
9:17
Speaker 2: And he had a pretty great, well not great, but
9:20
Speaker 2: a pretty heavy backstory to it.
9:22
Speaker 1: Yeah. His name, we haven't said his name yet. He's
9:25
Speaker 1: known as l el Zamenhoff or Soamenhoff, but his full
9:30
Speaker 1: name was Ludwik Leitzer Soamenhoff. Born on December fifteenth, which
9:36
Speaker 1: is National Samenhoff Day. Oh sure, yeah, in eighteen fifty nine,
9:42
Speaker 1: born in bi Alishtock, Poland. He was Jewish as was
9:47
Speaker 1: a lot of belishtock about seventy percent, also some Germans,
9:51
Speaker 1: some Russians, obviously Poles, and growing up there was pretty
9:55
Speaker 1: rough because there was a lot of ethnic violence going on.
9:58
Speaker 1: There were Jews being attacked by Poles, there were Germans
10:01
Speaker 1: being attacked by Russians. In eighteen eighty one, there was
10:07
Speaker 1: a false, I guess, accusation that Jews were behind the
10:11
Speaker 1: assassination of Alexander the Second of Russia, and that started
10:16
Speaker 1: the Pograms, which were these organized massacres of Polish and
10:21
Speaker 1: Russian Jewish communities.
10:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, because Poland was annexed by Russia from eighteen oh
10:28
Speaker 2: seven to nineteen twenty one, which is why they would
10:30
Speaker 2: have cared that was their czar. And apparently it wasn't
10:34
Speaker 2: the Jews at all or anybody who had anything to
10:37
Speaker 2: do with Jewishness. It was anti Autocratics, a group of
10:41
Speaker 2: called the nouradnya volya people's will, and they threw a
10:45
Speaker 2: bomb and blew him up. And apparently his successor, his son,
10:48
Speaker 2: Zari Alexander the third, was even worse. But from those
10:52
Speaker 2: pograms that el Zamenhoff was alive to witness, and even
10:58
Speaker 2: before that just the ethnic violence that I was endemic
11:00
Speaker 2: to Biaalistock. That had a really big effect on him,
11:04
Speaker 2: and that's where he developed this idea that humanity is
11:09
Speaker 2: way more connected than we realized, that we have all
11:11
Speaker 2: these false constructs that separate us, that don't have to
11:15
Speaker 2: separate us, but do time and time again. Language is
11:18
Speaker 2: one of them. He cited religion as one of them,
11:20
Speaker 2: and he was very Jewish. He was a very religious
11:23
Speaker 2: Jewish person, but he still recognized that religion creates conflict
11:28
Speaker 2: sometimes it has historically, and he felt like you could
11:33
Speaker 2: kind of you could keep the religion, you could keep
11:37
Speaker 2: the different nations, you can keep the things that do
11:40
Speaker 2: divide us, as long as they had something like a
11:43
Speaker 2: universal language laying over the whole thing that could defuse
11:48
Speaker 2: the conflicts that grow up from those things that divide us.
11:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, which was and he was a kid. I mean,
11:54
Speaker 1: this is remarkable stuff for a preteen and then teen
12:00
Speaker 1: nature to sort of understand. So he's clearly a brilliant, empathetic,
12:05
Speaker 1: passionate human being. I think, as the you know, family
12:09
Speaker 1: story goes, at least he was ten years old and
12:11
Speaker 1: he wrote a play called The Tower of Babel colon
12:16
Speaker 1: the Beilishtock tragedy in five acts as a ten year old.
12:20
Speaker 1: So just this idea of sort of stripping away these
12:25
Speaker 1: divisions and realizing, like, hey, we're all human beings. That's
12:30
Speaker 1: the one like at the root, that's what we are,
12:33
Speaker 1: and we all literally have that in common, yet we
12:35
Speaker 1: divide ourselves like. It's just a remarkable thing for a
12:38
Speaker 1: kid and a lesson for everybody of all ages. Still.
12:42
Speaker 2: Yeah, as he was raised, he learned Yiddish, which apparently
12:47
Speaker 2: grew out of a German dialect that's written in Hebrew.
12:50
Speaker 2: I didn't realize that, but it's the universal language of
12:54
Speaker 2: the Ashkenazi Jews, the Jewish people in Central and Eastern Europe.
12:58
Speaker 2: So he already understood what a universal language could do.
13:03
Speaker 2: You could take a Jewish person from Poland and a
13:05
Speaker 2: Jewish person from Czechoslovakia and put them in a room
13:09
Speaker 2: and they could speak to one another through that second tongue, Yiddish.
13:13
Speaker 2: So he set about kind of trying to modernize Yiddish,
13:17
Speaker 2: maybe he can spread that, and then he stopped pretty
13:20
Speaker 2: much in his tracks because he realized that what he
13:23
Speaker 2: was trying to do was say, hey, everybody, let's all
13:27
Speaker 2: learn the language of the people you consider criminals and spies.
13:31
Speaker 2: It was like a really hard sell that he just
13:34
Speaker 2: realized wasn't going to go anywhere. So he abandoned trying
13:38
Speaker 2: to sell Yiddish or create a universal language out of
13:41
Speaker 2: Yiddish and just set about creating one from scratch, which
13:44
Speaker 2: is what Esperano came from.
13:48
Speaker 1: What a setup it is.
13:49
Speaker 2: It's going pretty well so far. We should release this
13:52
Speaker 2: as this show.
13:54
Speaker 1: Best setup ever. I'm gonna say it, even though it
13:57
Speaker 1: annoy some people. Should we take a break.
14:00
Speaker 2: I'm going to say it, even though it annoys everybody. Yes,
14:04
Speaker 2: we should.
14:05
Speaker 1: All right, we'll be right back, all right, so we're
14:29
Speaker 1: back really quickly. That sort of made me before we
14:32
Speaker 1: left and talked about people being annoyed by asking to
14:34
Speaker 1: take a break. That came to mind because I jumped
14:38
Speaker 1: on Reddit recently, on our subreddit and actually started an
14:41
Speaker 1: account because there was so much just sort of bad information,
14:45
Speaker 1: like Jerry doesn't even work with him anymore, and just
14:48
Speaker 1: all these weird things that people sort of assume that
14:50
Speaker 1: we're wrong. And I've since learned that that's and even
14:54
Speaker 1: redditors kind of said, like that's kind of a thing.
14:56
Speaker 1: People like surmise a lot. Yeah, so I'd signed up
14:59
Speaker 1: for a few days and answered like geez a lot
15:02
Speaker 1: of questions for like a full day and then got
15:06
Speaker 1: right back off. But just wanted people to know if
15:08
Speaker 1: they thought I was some phony, that that was really me.
15:12
Speaker 1: And most people were awesome.
15:13
Speaker 2: You had Jones stunt AMA, Yeah.
15:15
Speaker 1: Sort of. You know what I don't like about AMAS though?
15:17
Speaker 1: Is it this just that rapid fire sort of thing, right,
15:20
Speaker 1: So this was like a slow burn AMA and it's
15:23
Speaker 1: all still there, a lot of answered questions, like with
15:25
Speaker 1: correct information, and like I said, almost everyone was really
15:28
Speaker 1: really nice, but not everyone is.
15:31
Speaker 2: But that's just the nature of online interactions the internets.
15:35
Speaker 2: That's silly that they think Jerry doesn't work with us anymore.
15:38
Speaker 1: She doesn't exist. Someone was really annoyed though, about like
15:43
Speaker 1: every time they ask if it's time to take a break,
15:46
Speaker 1: and I was like, we do that because we don't
15:48
Speaker 1: script this out and I'm genuinely wondering if it's a
15:50
Speaker 1: good time to take a break.
15:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, what a weird thing to be upset about.
15:54
Speaker 1: It's a conversation anyway, Thanks to everyone who participated, and
15:58
Speaker 1: you can go there and check it out if you
15:59
Speaker 1: want back to esperanto.
16:04
Speaker 2: Yes, you want me to pick it up because we
16:06
Speaker 2: don't script this stuff.
16:09
Speaker 1: Why did you ask me that? That's so annoying?
16:11
Speaker 2: So we said that that l. Zamenhoff had said, Okay,
16:16
Speaker 2: I'm going to start from scratch. I'm going to create
16:18
Speaker 2: a language that doesn't come from anywhere, that's not spoken
16:21
Speaker 2: by anybody. I'm going to make this universal language from scratch.
16:25
Speaker 2: And so his nineteenth birthday party, he had already done
16:29
Speaker 2: enough that he handed out pocket dictionaries and grammar charts
16:32
Speaker 2: to the guests.
16:33
Speaker 1: Man of his birthday, which a swinging party. That's right
16:37
Speaker 1: for a nineteen year old.
16:38
Speaker 2: He called the new language lingo Internacia or no inter
16:42
Speaker 2: Nazia because that sees its remember, yeah, yeah, And he
16:47
Speaker 2: composed a little hymn, and I kind of taught myself
16:51
Speaker 2: how to pronounce it, even though I'm going to completely
16:54
Speaker 2: screw it up.
16:55
Speaker 1: But may I you gotta sing it though?
16:58
Speaker 2: No, yeah, no, you'd don't. You have to say it
17:01
Speaker 2: solemnly like this, Mala mikite de las nazis, cado cado
17:08
Speaker 2: yam tempesta la tote holmose in familia co une gare sodebe.
17:16
Speaker 1: Nice work can I tell everyone what it means?
17:18
Speaker 2: Yes, but you have to sing it.
17:20
Speaker 1: Okay, Let the hatred of the nations fall, fall, fall.
17:25
Speaker 1: The time is already here. All humanity must unite in
17:31
Speaker 1: one family.
17:33
Speaker 2: Doesn't rhyme? Yeah, So when I'm ready to send him,
17:36
Speaker 2: it didn't rhyme.
17:39
Speaker 1: So he's cruising with this thing. He has this banging
17:43
Speaker 1: nineteenth birthday party where he's given out this stuff to
17:47
Speaker 1: his friends. I'm sure they're just like, who is this guy? Even?
17:51
Speaker 1: This is amazing? And in eighteen eighty seven he self
17:55
Speaker 1: published a pamphlet, a forty two page pamphlet called uh
17:58
Speaker 1: are you gonna pronounce this stuff?
18:01
Speaker 2: Unua libro?
18:02
Speaker 1: Okay? I thought that was right. It means first book.
18:05
Speaker 1: And as you'll see, if you notice some of these
18:07
Speaker 1: words sound like other languages, it's because, like other constructed languages,
18:12
Speaker 1: it's usually based on like the words are based on
18:16
Speaker 1: some other words. So when you hear esperanto, like if
18:19
Speaker 1: you go to watch a scene from the Esperanto William
18:22
Speaker 1: Shatner movie that you can watch on YouTube, yeah, I
18:25
Speaker 1: think from him, Well when was that sixty sixty six?
18:29
Speaker 2: Everybody says, but Turner classic movies listed as sixty five,
18:32
Speaker 2: which I find confusing, but everybody else is sixty.
18:34
Speaker 1: Six a side with tcm always. But if you go
18:38
Speaker 1: to and you hear or just you know, I looked
18:40
Speaker 1: up on YouTube, just like Esperanto conversations, or if you
18:43
Speaker 1: bump into Ben Bowlin somewhere in Atlanta, you'll you'll sit
18:47
Speaker 1: there and you'll go, oh wow, that sounds a little
18:49
Speaker 1: bit like Spanish some and maybe it might sound Italian,
18:54
Speaker 1: which Spanish also sounds kind of Italian sometimes, and so
18:57
Speaker 1: a lot of it might sound a little bit familiar,
18:59
Speaker 1: like libro for book, like that makes sense, like the
19:04
Speaker 1: word library. So just pointing out that when you hear
19:08
Speaker 1: Esperanto words and you think it sounds familiar, it's not
19:10
Speaker 1: by accident.
19:11
Speaker 2: Yeah. The reason why, especially if you are a Westerner.
19:15
Speaker 2: Three quarters of the root words he started out with,
19:17
Speaker 2: nine hundred of them, as we'll see, are taken from
19:20
Speaker 2: Romance languages. So it's yeah, if you're an English speaker,
19:23
Speaker 2: it's very easy to pick up.
19:26
Speaker 1: That's a much simpler way to say what it says.
19:28
Speaker 2: So in the in the that first book, unua libro,
19:33
Speaker 2: which I can I can understand what that means just
19:36
Speaker 2: from the little primer, which I have to say, hats
19:39
Speaker 2: off to Dave. He put together a primer for us
19:42
Speaker 2: in this article that like, when you go back and
19:45
Speaker 2: research it more widely, you're like, this is really difficult
19:49
Speaker 2: to like kind of wrangle into one small little ball.
19:53
Speaker 2: And he managed to do that really really well. So
19:55
Speaker 2: way to go, Dave. But that first book, Unuwa Libro,
20:00
Speaker 2: it had some sample translations. It said, here's here's how
20:03
Speaker 2: you say this this stuff. Here's the grammar rules, here's
20:06
Speaker 2: the dictionary, here's how you pronounce it. And he said
20:10
Speaker 2: that his pen name. He wrote it as a pen name,
20:12
Speaker 2: doctro esperanto or doctor hopeful is what it.
20:16
Speaker 1: Loved it.
20:18
Speaker 2: And he called again his language the lingvo inter Nazia,
20:23
Speaker 2: and that's what he thought everybody was going to call it.
20:26
Speaker 2: But instead everybody said, I like this doctor hopeful cat.
20:30
Speaker 2: Let's just call his language.
20:31
Speaker 1: Esperanto, yeah, which is sort of ironic because from the
20:36
Speaker 1: beginning he was a very humble guy and didn't want
20:38
Speaker 1: to be like he didn't name it, you know, Zamenhoffer
20:42
Speaker 1: or whatever, like he didn't want it to be named
20:44
Speaker 1: after him. He didn't want to own it. No, we
20:47
Speaker 1: would call something like this open source today. He didn't
20:49
Speaker 1: want it to be about him, So the fact that
20:51
Speaker 1: he made up a name and that they named it
20:53
Speaker 1: after him anyway is kind of funny. I get the
20:56
Speaker 1: sense that it probably didn't bother him too much because
20:58
Speaker 1: he seemed like a good guy.
20:59
Speaker 2: Sure.
20:59
Speaker 1: But his goal, and we'll talk about sort of the
21:04
Speaker 1: other stuff that came along later, as far as his
21:06
Speaker 1: sort of desire to attach other meaning to it, But
21:10
Speaker 1: his sort of root goal at the beginning was I
21:13
Speaker 1: want a language for the love of whoever you worship
21:17
Speaker 1: that is easier to learn than everything else out there. Yeah,
21:20
Speaker 1: and I want it to be a language, like you mentioned,
21:23
Speaker 1: sort of from the get go that can unite people
21:25
Speaker 1: and promote peace, like two very sort of noble pursuits,
21:29
Speaker 1: I think.
21:29
Speaker 2: So, okay, let's talk about goal one. A language that's
21:32
Speaker 2: for the love of whatever you worship, easier to learn
21:36
Speaker 2: than most of the other languages out there. Right right,
21:39
Speaker 2: Apparently you could learn Esperanto in something like about forty
21:44
Speaker 2: hours of class time, one full week of learning. You'll
21:50
Speaker 2: walk out of there on the end of the day
21:52
Speaker 2: Friday being able to converse basically in Esperanto. Tell people
21:56
Speaker 2: where you live, who you are, what you like, point
21:59
Speaker 2: to class and identify them correctly.
22:02
Speaker 1: That isn't don't shoot? How about to play a cookie
22:05
Speaker 1: and some milk?
22:05
Speaker 2: Exactly? They should teach that first, for sure. Apparently that's
22:10
Speaker 2: I mean, you can just know without even knowing anything
22:12
Speaker 2: about learning languages. That's really a short amount of time.
22:16
Speaker 2: It takes about one hundred to two hundred hours to
22:18
Speaker 2: learn French or German to the same degree. There's another
22:22
Speaker 2: person who estimated that for English speakers it's five times
22:26
Speaker 2: easier to learn Esperano than French or Spanish, ten times
22:30
Speaker 2: easier than Russian, and twenty times easier than Chinese. And
22:33
Speaker 2: again a large part of that is because the root
22:35
Speaker 2: words are taken from Romance languages. So just recognizing generally
22:41
Speaker 2: being able to make a guess in almost every case
22:44
Speaker 2: were what that word means, that's a huge leg up,
22:47
Speaker 2: and that's why it's so much easier in part. But
22:50
Speaker 2: the other part is the grammar that he created is
22:54
Speaker 2: so standard and with such regularity that that that's the
23:00
Speaker 2: part that makes it that much easier to learn, especially
23:02
Speaker 2: for Romance language speakers.
23:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, the hard part about learning a language
23:06
Speaker 1: is usually not memorizing root words and learning basic grammar.
23:11
Speaker 1: It's the irregular verbs. It's all these exceptions to rules.
23:17
Speaker 1: Fritch has more than two thousand irregular verbs. English is
23:23
Speaker 1: notoriously tough to learn as a as a non native speaker.
23:27
Speaker 2: Yeah, think about those, just about irregular verbs real quick, chuck.
23:30
Speaker 2: For the English to be pretty basic stuff. It's conjugated
23:35
Speaker 2: as b being, been, r am is was and were. Now,
23:40
Speaker 2: if you were just approaching those words as a non
23:43
Speaker 2: English speaker to begin with, you wouldn't think was had
23:46
Speaker 2: anything to do with b or r has anything to
23:49
Speaker 2: do with b. And that's that's what causes the confusion.
23:53
Speaker 2: And not just English, but almost any language. Irregular verbs
23:56
Speaker 2: and exceptions to the standard rules.
23:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know we did, and we did a
24:01
Speaker 1: whole episode on language acquisition, right.
24:04
Speaker 2: I'm I'm pretty sure sure we did.
24:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, because I'm just consistently knocked out that
24:10
Speaker 1: babies into toddlers and so on just just pick up language.
24:15
Speaker 1: It's really remarkable to me still to see that kind
24:19
Speaker 1: of thing. But esperanto, and we're just going to go
24:22
Speaker 1: over some sort of the base rules here, and I
24:24
Speaker 1: think you will find yourself like we did. Just saying,
24:27
Speaker 1: oh my god, that's amazing and it makes so much sense.
24:31
Speaker 1: There are sixteen grammatical rules, there are no irregular verbs,
24:35
Speaker 1: there are no exceptions to rules, and these are just
24:39
Speaker 1: this isn't everything, but these are just a few examples
24:41
Speaker 1: of kind of like how much sense it makes. All
24:44
Speaker 1: nouns are going to end with the letter oh. That's
24:46
Speaker 1: why I said jerk wado at the beginning. Adjectives all
24:50
Speaker 1: all of them end in the letter A. Adverbs all
24:55
Speaker 1: end in the letter E. There are no genders. That's
24:59
Speaker 1: another place where learning a foreign language can be confusing,
25:02
Speaker 1: is you know, the different cases and genders and stuff
25:05
Speaker 1: like that, and having to change things around. Not an esperanto,
25:08
Speaker 1: my friend. And then this is sort of just a
25:10
Speaker 1: fun one. La la is the only word for the right.
25:17
Speaker 2: Not la lay low ill, none of that stuff. L yeah,
25:22
Speaker 2: none of that. It's all la the everything. And then
25:27
Speaker 2: it's up to the conjugation of the verb that that
25:31
Speaker 2: that changes that or the adverb or the adjective or whatever.
25:35
Speaker 2: Because it's standard when you see like an o or
25:38
Speaker 2: an a or an e, you can identify a word
25:40
Speaker 2: in a sentence as a verb and adverb. And now
25:42
Speaker 2: in that kind of thing. So the infinitive form of verbs.
25:46
Speaker 2: And by the way, I had to look most of
25:47
Speaker 2: this up, like I was, like, what's.
25:49
Speaker 1: An adverb again English?
25:51
Speaker 2: An verb is something like above clearly hourly it it.
25:56
Speaker 2: It describes an adjective, a verb, or some other stuff.
26:01
Speaker 2: An infinitive form is like to something to do, like
26:04
Speaker 2: the basic form like to eat. It ends in an eye,
26:08
Speaker 2: so it's mangy okay, okay, present tense like I eat,
26:16
Speaker 2: that would be as mangas it ends in as yeah.
26:21
Speaker 1: And we should point out that it doesn't matter who
26:23
Speaker 1: is eating, if he is eating or I'm eating, or
26:25
Speaker 1: she's eating or they're eating, it's all. It's all the
26:28
Speaker 1: same exactly.
26:29
Speaker 2: There's no irregular verbs. It's beautiful right in past tense
26:35
Speaker 2: instead of something like sing sang song, where it should
26:38
Speaker 2: all just be sing singed, singed. Uh, that's what he does.
26:42
Speaker 2: I know it sounds weird, doesn't it. Well, sure, but
26:46
Speaker 2: that's what he does. In this Everything in past tense
26:48
Speaker 2: ends in ees, so manges, yeah, I ate, you ate,
26:54
Speaker 2: they ate. It's all. It's all mangaz. And then with
26:57
Speaker 2: future it's man Joe's. And then with command you just
27:01
Speaker 2: add a you ooh manjou, and that's it. That's how
27:06
Speaker 2: you conjugate verbs. There's no exceptions to that rule at all.
27:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it's pretty amazing. I guess it just
27:15
Speaker 1: makes sense that because I kind of struggled with why
27:18
Speaker 1: other languages are so irregular. But if it's organic in
27:22
Speaker 1: its growth, then that's just bound to happen. I think
27:25
Speaker 1: it is.
27:25
Speaker 2: I looked up why, and it's actually fascinating. It's because
27:29
Speaker 2: these languages often absorb other people from other language groups,
27:34
Speaker 2: and they bring their words with them, and so languages
27:38
Speaker 2: grow by adopting other words changing, and so rather than
27:42
Speaker 2: completely altering, you know how something that usually ends an
27:47
Speaker 2: ed like sing, instead of just totally altering how it
27:52
Speaker 2: used to be, you just kind of change it to
27:54
Speaker 2: the new form like sang or song. It's that's how
27:58
Speaker 2: irregular verbs come up. Nobody's like, I really want to
28:00
Speaker 2: screw people up in the future. I'm going to add this.
28:03
Speaker 2: It just happens, you know, organically, So when you set
28:06
Speaker 2: about creating a constructed language, you can purposely deliberately avoid
28:12
Speaker 2: any irregular verbs and make it that much easier to learn.
28:15
Speaker 2: My question that came up, Chuck, is how long, yes,
28:19
Speaker 2: I set up, Chuck, how long does it take until
28:22
Speaker 2: a language like Esperanto starts developing irregular verbs?
28:28
Speaker 1: Well, I have a strong feeling and I'd love to
28:31
Speaker 1: hear from some esperantists that they fight that tooth and
28:35
Speaker 1: nail because that defeats the whole purpose and spirit of it.
28:38
Speaker 2: Okay, hasn't happened yet, then, is that answer?
28:41
Speaker 1: I mean, that would be my guess. Yeah, I'm on record.
28:45
Speaker 2: Okay, I'd love to hear from them too.
28:47
Speaker 1: There, but if you haven't noticed that Esperanto and this
28:52
Speaker 1: is a word you might not know, but it's called
28:54
Speaker 1: an agglutenative language, which is the words are formed from
28:58
Speaker 1: combinations of short words basically which English has a lot
29:02
Speaker 1: of those. All language has a lot of those, but
29:05
Speaker 1: Esperanto has all those.
29:07
Speaker 2: Yeah, so you've got your root word and then you
29:10
Speaker 2: have affixes, prefixes and sufffixes and kind of like how
29:14
Speaker 2: you conjugate it with the eye for to eat or
29:18
Speaker 2: an as for you eat. That's that's it, that's the whole,
29:22
Speaker 2: that's the whole grammar. Right. So the reason why he
29:26
Speaker 2: did this again because not just like irregular verbs, but
29:32
Speaker 2: weird words that all describe the same thing is another
29:35
Speaker 2: thing that creeps into language organically. They've used the example
29:40
Speaker 2: of tree. Right. You know what a tree is an
29:42
Speaker 2: English it's one of those plants that's got the wood
29:45
Speaker 2: in the bark and the leaves, and they're tall and everything.
29:47
Speaker 2: Everybody loves to hug them.
29:48
Speaker 1: Right.
29:49
Speaker 2: Uh, tree makes sense. But rather than young tree, we
29:54
Speaker 2: have the word sapling, which combines proto Indo European and
29:57
Speaker 2: proto Germanic words in English. Cute word though, sapling it
30:01
Speaker 2: is because it means young tree. It's the young version
30:04
Speaker 2: of a tree. It's very cute. A bunch of trees
30:07
Speaker 2: is called a forest. That's old French from Latin. And
30:09
Speaker 2: then a botanical garden that has a bunch of trees
30:12
Speaker 2: is arboretum. That's just straight up Latin. All of those
30:15
Speaker 2: are English words sapling, forest, arboretum, and none of them
30:19
Speaker 2: sound like tree. So by creating roots that just describe
30:23
Speaker 2: one thing and then adjusting what they mean by adding
30:26
Speaker 2: a prefix or a suffix, but keeping that root word,
30:29
Speaker 2: he got around that kind of conundrum.
30:32
Speaker 1: Yeah. So, for instance, tree and esperanto is arbo. That
30:37
Speaker 1: young tree, which is a sapling for us is an arbito.
30:40
Speaker 1: And as we'll see, ido is sort of the suffix
30:43
Speaker 1: for any kind of baby version of something which is taken,
30:47
Speaker 1: and a Spanish does that, like there were two Chucks
30:51
Speaker 1: at my job at a Mexican restaurant, and I was
30:54
Speaker 1: chuck Eto cute because I was younger than the original chi.
30:57
Speaker 2: Wasn't that a taco bell menu item in the nineties?
31:01
Speaker 1: Probably so two chuqitos in and another chuquito, three chuquitos.
31:10
Speaker 1: A young tree instead of a sapling is an arbido.
31:15
Speaker 1: A lot of trees instead of a forest is an arborrow.
31:19
Speaker 1: And then that botanical garden instead of an arboretum is
31:22
Speaker 1: an arboretto. And you might think, well, that sounds a
31:25
Speaker 1: lot like our arboretum. Well it does, but it also
31:28
Speaker 1: sounds like arbo, arbido and a barrow exactly right.
31:31
Speaker 2: So you see any of those words and you know
31:33
Speaker 2: it's talking about a tree. And then when you learn
31:35
Speaker 2: edo means a younger version of it, or r means
31:39
Speaker 2: the the like a group of whatever you're talking about,
31:42
Speaker 2: you just learned a ton of grammar just right off
31:45
Speaker 2: the back. And then also note that all those in
31:47
Speaker 2: an oh because they're all nouns. And again all nouns
31:50
Speaker 2: and in oh in Esperanto.
31:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, so we mentioned edo id o as a suffix
31:56
Speaker 1: meaning like the small version of something or a baby something.
32:00
Speaker 2: Uh.
32:00
Speaker 1: And we also mentioned that there wasn't gender. That there
32:03
Speaker 1: is but uh not in terms of like you know,
32:07
Speaker 1: how you will conjugate a sentence. Uh, it's just a suffix.
32:11
Speaker 1: It's i n o is a female version of something.
32:15
Speaker 1: You also have a r O, which is a group
32:19
Speaker 1: like vorto v o r t o is a word,
32:21
Speaker 1: vortarro is dictionary. Uh, it just makes a lot of sense.
32:25
Speaker 1: E j o and uh, the ja's a pronounced as
32:29
Speaker 1: a y. Isn't that right? Uh? E j oh is
32:32
Speaker 1: a place for something? So k u I r I.
32:37
Speaker 1: How would you pronounce that?
32:38
Speaker 2: Cooerio cooler? Oh, corey cool? Why do you ask me
32:44
Speaker 2: to pronounce this?
32:45
Speaker 1: Well?
32:46
Speaker 2: Because I got it.
32:47
Speaker 1: A couery is to cook, and then what's kitchen? Cooer
32:53
Speaker 1: ao right, So you add the e j o So, uh,
32:57
Speaker 1: that is the place where you would cook.
32:59
Speaker 2: That makes sense. Right. That's not to say that Esperando
33:02
Speaker 2: doesn't have words that you just have to memorize, because
33:05
Speaker 2: it doesn't quite work. Because, for example, there's a couple
33:09
Speaker 2: of places where you'll find a lot of books, like
33:11
Speaker 2: a library or a bookstore. Right, So a library, you'd
33:15
Speaker 2: think would be called the librereo or place of books,
33:18
Speaker 2: but actually it's called a biblioteco. A libreo is the bookstore.
33:23
Speaker 2: So it sounds like just kind of nitpicking. But if
33:27
Speaker 2: you ever arranged to meet your friend at the libreo
33:29
Speaker 2: and they don't they think that that's the bookstore, you're
33:31
Speaker 2: going to be sitting there waiting in the library for
33:33
Speaker 2: them a long time.
33:36
Speaker 1: Yeah, and in fact, you know adding and I find
33:38
Speaker 1: this like part of the spirit of Esperanto is super cool,
33:41
Speaker 1: and that they encourage you to create words as long
33:45
Speaker 1: as they follow the rules and make sense. So to
33:51
Speaker 1: attack these effixes and suffixes under root words and Dave
33:55
Speaker 1: uws this, this is so great. Gosh, this just makes
33:57
Speaker 1: me crazy, how great it is. Hospital. The word hospital
34:01
Speaker 1: in Esperanto is mal sanu lejo, right, yes, does that
34:07
Speaker 1: make sense? So m al and Esperanto is opposite of
34:12
Speaker 1: the s, a n is healthy, The ul means people.
34:17
Speaker 1: The e jo, remember, as we said, means the place
34:20
Speaker 1: where something is. And so a hospital directly translated is
34:25
Speaker 1: not healthy people place, which could be a lot of
34:29
Speaker 1: places here in the West.
34:30
Speaker 2: But so it's kind of like Esperantos like to put
34:33
Speaker 2: words together like you do in a scrabble game. And
34:37
Speaker 2: the reason that it's encouraged is because out of the
34:39
Speaker 2: gate Zamenhoff, like like you said, made this open source
34:44
Speaker 2: and said, here, take this and just do what you
34:47
Speaker 2: will with it and make it grow. And that's how
34:50
Speaker 2: that's why esperano is still around. And one of the
34:52
Speaker 2: reasons it's the planted vollapuke puk because the guy who
34:57
Speaker 2: created valla puke, he he was very controlling, kept a
35:01
Speaker 2: controlling like grip on it, and so that made it
35:05
Speaker 2: like a dying language right out of the gate, because
35:07
Speaker 2: you you have to let language grow and become organic
35:09
Speaker 2: on its own. Apparently he was like, Nope, God told
35:12
Speaker 2: me to do this, so I really need to keep
35:14
Speaker 2: a sharp eye on it.
35:15
Speaker 1: So I think we should also talk about the word
35:18
Speaker 1: for jet lag because it's also just super fun. Yeah,
35:21
Speaker 1: and we could do this all day long, but just
35:23
Speaker 1: these two examples are really great. Horror zo noso horzonozo
35:29
Speaker 1: h o r z in o zo exactly how it sounds,
35:33
Speaker 1: that is, h O r's time zone is z O
35:37
Speaker 1: N and then illness is ozo. So the Esperanto translation
35:42
Speaker 1: is time zone illness.
35:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
35:45
Speaker 1: I love that, and that sounds it's a lot of
35:47
Speaker 1: This sounds like how it would be transcribed or subtitled
35:53
Speaker 1: in like China or something from English.
35:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure, I came across something. Did you see
35:58
Speaker 2: what I sent you about English translated into English is
36:01
Speaker 2: kind of hilarious.
36:03
Speaker 1: Oh no, oh you didn't.
36:04
Speaker 2: I found a I don't remember what paper it was,
36:07
Speaker 2: but as an example, they translated I do not understand
36:11
Speaker 2: into several languages, and one of them was English. And
36:15
Speaker 2: if you literally translate I do not understand into English,
36:19
Speaker 2: it's I may not understand. I think about it like
36:23
Speaker 2: that's exactly what that means, But it's not at all
36:26
Speaker 2: what you think of. Like I do not understand sounds right,
36:29
Speaker 2: even though what you're saying literally is I may not understand,
36:33
Speaker 2: because do means make I literally.
36:38
Speaker 1: I do not understand.
36:40
Speaker 2: I just I had to mention that. It just cracked
36:42
Speaker 2: me up.
36:43
Speaker 1: No, that's really funny. All right, So let's take our
36:47
Speaker 1: second break. I'm not even asking this time, and we'll
36:50
Speaker 1: come back and talk about where Esperanto went from there
36:53
Speaker 1: right after this.
37:16
Speaker 2: So, Chuck, we talked a lot about how how doctor
37:22
Speaker 2: Esperanto Zamenhoff the reasons why he created Esperanto, and that
37:27
Speaker 2: was goal number two was to to create like a
37:30
Speaker 2: language that united the world, right, easy to learn, united
37:33
Speaker 2: the world. And he originally based it on something he
37:37
Speaker 2: called Hillalism, after hillel the Elder, a Jewish stage from
37:41
Speaker 2: the first century BCE, and Hillelle's teachings can basically be
37:46
Speaker 2: summed up as the golden rule, like treat others as
37:49
Speaker 2: you'd like them to treat you. He changed that name
37:53
Speaker 2: very quickly to homara nismo, which means basically humanitarianism, but
37:59
Speaker 2: the whole idea was the same. He called it the
38:01
Speaker 2: internal ideo the internal idea of Esperanto, which is that
38:06
Speaker 2: it can remove those language barriers, those culture burials, barriers
38:11
Speaker 2: between people and to by doing so, you make people
38:15
Speaker 2: recognize that we're all humans.
38:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, and he I think realized at some point again
38:21
Speaker 1: that sort of attaching an ism to something maybe might
38:29
Speaker 1: keep people from wanting to learn it. And I think
38:31
Speaker 1: they were also Esperantis. Dave said that a lot of
38:34
Speaker 1: them were French intellectuals that were like, no, no, no,
38:38
Speaker 1: we don't need to attach this to an ism. So
38:41
Speaker 1: it officially wasn't attached to an ism. But I do
38:44
Speaker 1: think the spirit of all that is a big part
38:46
Speaker 1: of Esperanto still. Yeah, some people who want to learn
38:49
Speaker 1: it even though it's not an official like ethic.
38:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so I mean, just right off the bat,
38:54
Speaker 2: they had the first international or Universal Congress of Esperano
38:58
Speaker 2: in nineteen oh fives, and in that conference a schism
39:04
Speaker 2: created or was created in like a whole other language,
39:07
Speaker 2: like a version of Esperanto called Edo that was even
39:10
Speaker 2: easier to learn, was introduced, and that group just went
39:15
Speaker 2: off and did their own thing, which kind of hamstrung
39:17
Speaker 2: Esperanto as it was really starting to take off. But
39:21
Speaker 2: Edo you don't hear about any longer. You still hear
39:23
Speaker 2: about Esperanto. I'm not one hundred percent sure why. Maybe
39:28
Speaker 2: it is because it had an ethic or a moral
39:31
Speaker 2: to it in addition to being easy to learn. That's like,
39:34
Speaker 2: that's my guess. But Zamenhoff died in nineteen seventeen, and
39:41
Speaker 2: what Sad Dave points out, he lived long enough to
39:44
Speaker 2: see World War One, which I didn't read anything he
39:48
Speaker 2: wrote about it directly, but he would have been really
39:50
Speaker 2: bummed by that, because that is not that's what he
39:53
Speaker 2: was creating Esperanto to avoid.
39:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, during his life he was now dominated fourteen
40:01
Speaker 1: times fourteen never won, unfortunately for the Nobel Peace Prize,
40:05
Speaker 1: and post World War One, when the League of Nations
40:08
Speaker 1: was created, to know, to stop something like that from
40:11
Speaker 1: happening again didn't work. In that very first meeting, there
40:15
Speaker 1: was a proposal to teach Esperanto in schools to member countries,
40:19
Speaker 1: which was pretty remarkable. It didn't happen because the French
40:23
Speaker 1: delegation vetoed that and they said French is already the
40:27
Speaker 1: universal language, which is so haughty, but that's they literally
40:32
Speaker 1: kept Esperanto like who knows where it would be now
40:34
Speaker 1: if they hadn't to stop.
40:34
Speaker 2: That same thing with the US at the United Nations
40:37
Speaker 2: in the forties after the UN was founded, somebody said, hey,
40:41
Speaker 2: we should all learn Esperanto, and the US said, no,
40:44
Speaker 2: English is already a universal language. And that actually shows
40:47
Speaker 2: how language can like enhance the standing of the countries
40:50
Speaker 2: that speak that language that the rest of the world
40:53
Speaker 2: sees is basically a universal language and why Esperanto didn't
40:58
Speaker 2: do that because it didn't come from any country, didn't
41:00
Speaker 2: come from any ethnic group or any region. It was
41:02
Speaker 2: a from scratch universal grammar that wouldn't enhance one nation
41:07
Speaker 2: over others.
41:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, not everyone loved it. If you think, like who
41:14
Speaker 1: maybe wouldn't like it? Who wouldn't like this language created
41:19
Speaker 1: from a Jewish man Hitler, you would be correct. It's
41:24
Speaker 1: written about n mind comp he said. Hitler said that
41:27
Speaker 1: it was a secret Jewish language he used to plot
41:29
Speaker 1: against Germany. And I don't know if anyone ever went
41:32
Speaker 1: over to him, probably not and said, DeFi you can
41:36
Speaker 1: actually it's not secret at all. You can learn it
41:38
Speaker 1: in fearsick hours conversationally. So I don't know. Hitler being Hitler,
41:47
Speaker 1: there were and of course you know, I'm sort of
41:50
Speaker 1: joking about that, but it was no joke at all,
41:51
Speaker 1: because Hitler and others would round up Esperanto speakers and
41:58
Speaker 1: jail them or kill them. And in fact Hitler took
42:02
Speaker 1: his family, his surviving family, that is, to the Warsaw
42:05
Speaker 1: Ghetto and all three of Zamenhoff's children were killed by Nazis. Yeah,
42:10
Speaker 1: it's brutal.
42:11
Speaker 2: Stalin did the same thing, which I guess is why
42:14
Speaker 2: it seems at first surprising that he learned Esperanto, but
42:19
Speaker 2: he called it the language of the spies, so I
42:21
Speaker 2: guess he was just.
42:22
Speaker 1: That's probably why I learned exactly.
42:23
Speaker 2: But even if you were a loyal Communist Party member,
42:28
Speaker 2: you would be killed for knowing Esperanto, which is funny
42:32
Speaker 2: because it was frequently accused of being a secret Communist
42:36
Speaker 2: plot itself, so right, that kind of goes to show
42:39
Speaker 2: you just how nationless Esperanto actually was.
42:42
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, if you get online today, if you're interested
42:46
Speaker 1: in this and you want to know, like, who's how's
42:49
Speaker 1: it going today with Esperanto? Who's speaking it? Are people
42:53
Speaker 1: into it? Yeah? People are into it. There is. It's
42:56
Speaker 1: not a huge community, but it's a very passionate community
42:59
Speaker 1: of people all over the world. People like Ben Bowlin,
43:02
Speaker 1: they find each other online. It's very easy to do that.
43:06
Speaker 2: Now.
43:06
Speaker 1: Obviously before the Internet, they would they would have local
43:09
Speaker 1: clubs and stuff like that. They would have pen pals
43:12
Speaker 1: kind of the way that people would spread any message.
43:15
Speaker 1: Pre Internet, they were doing that in Esperanto. And there
43:18
Speaker 1: are you know, there are conferences. I think there's one
43:22
Speaker 1: the twenty twenty four Universala Congresso is in Tanzania this year,
43:28
Speaker 1: which is pretty cool, and it sounds just like they
43:31
Speaker 1: get together, they speak Esperanto. They work hard to keep
43:34
Speaker 1: this language and this idea alive, which is a very Again,
43:38
Speaker 1: I think it's still a noble pursuit.
43:40
Speaker 2: And Esperanto has its own teaching app, learn new with
43:45
Speaker 2: an exclavation point at learnu dot net. You can also
43:50
Speaker 2: pick it up on Duo Linguo and Babble. But I've
43:53
Speaker 2: looked on Duo Linguo. They have three hundred and eighty
43:55
Speaker 2: one thousand people signed up to learn Esperanto, which is
43:59
Speaker 2: more than cling on, more than Navajo, and more than Yiddish.
44:03
Speaker 2: It's toward the bottom, but it's still not the last one.
44:06
Speaker 2: Three hundred and eighty thousand people world wide is nothing
44:08
Speaker 2: to sneeze at.
44:10
Speaker 1: Heck no, it's more than klingon.
44:11
Speaker 2: There's also a couple of podcasts Radio Esperanto. Radio, by
44:14
Speaker 2: the way, is the same word in English and Esperanto. Oh,
44:17
Speaker 2: I already ended within an US persone American in person. Okay,
44:23
Speaker 2: but you have to probably kind of know already a
44:26
Speaker 2: little bit of Esperanto.
44:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, I meant to check that out. I'm going to
44:30
Speaker 1: listen to one of those and just see if I
44:32
Speaker 1: can understand anything like.
44:33
Speaker 2: Oh, they said radio again, I know what that means.
44:36
Speaker 2: One other thing before we leave. Do you have anything else?
44:39
Speaker 1: Yeah? I got it? One and so two things.
44:41
Speaker 2: Okay, Well you go first, Okay.
44:43
Speaker 1: Nineteen oh five we mentioned that year earlier. What year
44:47
Speaker 1: was that? Was that? The first year of.
44:48
Speaker 2: The first Congress, the Universal Congress.
44:50
Speaker 1: The first Congress. Well that makes sense then, because that
44:52
Speaker 1: was the year that the Esperanto flag was debuted. It
44:55
Speaker 1: is called the Verda stello or the green Star, and
44:59
Speaker 1: it's it. It's nice. It's a green rectangle. It's got
45:02
Speaker 1: a little white square in the upper left corner and
45:05
Speaker 1: a green star inside that white square. And apparently that
45:10
Speaker 1: was a big part of the branding the color green. LLL.
45:14
Speaker 1: Early On wanted it to all sort of look the
45:17
Speaker 1: same and feel the same. So his pamphlets and books
45:20
Speaker 1: and everything was in green. And I think green's just
45:22
Speaker 1: a big esper or I'm sorry, verdo is a big
45:24
Speaker 1: Esperanto color. Yeah, Verda.
45:26
Speaker 2: That's that's branding, one oh one, branding, one on one. Okay,
45:30
Speaker 2: Well I'll say mine, then you can finish with years.
45:32
Speaker 2: I just wanted to talk about Incubus real quick, that
45:34
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty five sixty six Shatner.
45:37
Speaker 1: Movie I watched a little bit.
45:38
Speaker 2: I did too, and it is really hard to follow.
45:40
Speaker 2: And when you're listening to them speak, you're like, oh,
45:43
Speaker 2: this is okay. It's esperanto. If you speak Esperanto, it
45:46
Speaker 2: drives you up the wall because apparently no one in
45:49
Speaker 2: the film knew Esperanto. I learned their dialogue in two
45:52
Speaker 2: weeks and there was no one who knew Esperanto on
45:56
Speaker 2: the set to coach them. So it's just a moment
45:59
Speaker 2: after moment of bad Esperanto pronunciation. And I saw in
46:04
Speaker 2: Quartz there was an article that quoted like a film
46:07
Speaker 2: reviewer from the age who said that Incubus is like
46:11
Speaker 2: a foreign film from a country that never existed.
46:14
Speaker 1: What a great dissa.
46:15
Speaker 2: I thought so too. We're checking out five minutes of it.
46:20
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, that's it. That's it.
46:23
Speaker 2: Okay, Well, if you want to know more about Esperanto, everybody,
46:27
Speaker 2: go check it out. You do worse than starting No,
46:30
Speaker 2: actually you couldn't do worse than starting with Incubus, but
46:32
Speaker 2: start there anyway. And since I said Incubus, it's time
46:37
Speaker 2: for listener mail.
46:40
Speaker 1: I'm gonna call this eight quite right. Hey, guys, listen
46:45
Speaker 1: to the latest episode. I got a kick out of
46:46
Speaker 1: Josh saying that people who requit and this is on
46:48
Speaker 1: dry cleaning, who request a double crease in their pants
46:52
Speaker 1: ain't quite right.
46:53
Speaker 2: I stand by there.
46:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like a Southern itsm I guess. I used
46:57
Speaker 1: to live in Miami. Now I'm back in Maryland, where
46:59
Speaker 1: I've along go Hagar's town flying box cars. And I
47:04
Speaker 1: worked as a housekeeper for the opulently wealthy one woman
47:08
Speaker 1: I could name drop, but I won't requested from her
47:11
Speaker 1: housekeepers that her bed sheets be ironed, no joke. She
47:16
Speaker 1: wanted her flat and fitted king sized bed sheets laundered
47:19
Speaker 1: and ironed every day. Wow, here's the kicker. This woman
47:24
Speaker 1: almost became my mother in law. But I digress. Definitely
47:29
Speaker 1: not quite right. Love the show, guys. It's my news source,
47:32
Speaker 1: my companion, my teacher, and has given an otherwise awkward
47:36
Speaker 1: me plenty of knowledge to be able to connect with
47:39
Speaker 1: someone on almost any topic. And that was a lovely
47:42
Speaker 1: email from the wonderful Ashlan Powers.
47:44
Speaker 2: Thanks a lot, Ashlan, that was great. I would divide
47:47
Speaker 2: you against using us as your news source though, but
47:49
Speaker 2: other than that, thank you very much.
47:51
Speaker 1: Agreed.
47:52
Speaker 2: If you want to be like Ashlin and tell us
47:54
Speaker 2: a great little anecdote leaving out the names to protect
47:57
Speaker 2: the not necessarily innocent, but you know, just out of tact,
48:01
Speaker 2: you can do so via email send it off to
48:04
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48:10
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