Esperanto: The Language of Hope
Jul. 24th, 2025 01:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
soc_puppetGot to give this in class after all! Sharing it here as well, because why not.
Esperanto: The Language of Hope
Saluton! Mia nomo estas Soĉan, kaj mi amas Esperanton. Or, in English, Hello! My name is Socchan, and I love the language Esperanto. Esperanto is a constructed language originally created in 1887 by a man named L. L. Zamenhof, designed to be an easy to learn second language. I’ve been studying Esperanto on and off for several years, and today I’m going to tell you why it was created, why learning a new language is beneficial, and why you should consider learning Esperanto specifically.
Let’s start by looking back to Esperanto’s origins. L. L. Zamenhof grew up in a town in Poland, where several different languages were spoken, and many disagreements broke out due to a lack of understanding. Zamenhof thought that, if only they all shared at least one language, perhaps they could communicate better and fewer conflicts would result. Unfortunately, learning a whole new language tends to be an arduous task at best. With this in mind, Zamenhof decided to create his own language: one that would be easy to learn.
Zamenhof’s goal of fostering peace through better communication was and remains a noble one, perpetuated by Esperantists to this day, but there are perks to learning a new language that he didn’t know. As some of you are already aware, learning a new language can have many benefits. Scientific Origin tells us that learning a new language can improve your memory, delay cognitive decline, and promote cultural awareness—the latter of which we’ve been studying the importance of in this very class. Jennifer Smith of Omniglot.com also points out that learning another language can improve your job prospects. Studying a language that’s easy to learn can mean accessing some of those benefits that much sooner.
This makes Esperanto an ideal choice when picking a new language to learn. With his hope of creating a simple, easy to learn language, Zamenhof made Esperanto with only sixteen main grammatical rules, which can be found listed at the Esperanto Society of Chicago’s website. In comparison, the website All English says that English is estimated to have around 3,500 grammatical rules. In another advantage over English, each letter in Esperanto also has only one pronunciation (though some vowels do team up to form dipthongs). On top of that, if you already know a European language, such as English, Esperanto has many cognates. Even better, there are plenty of free resources available to learn Esperanto, a good number of which can be found at Esperanto.net.
Learning Esperanto can connect you to over a hundred thousand speakers around the world, studying a new language can help your brain stay healthy and active, and Esperanto in particular was made to be easy to learn in the hope of fostering peace and communication. For all of these reasons and more, when it comes to picking a new language to learn, it's well worth consideration. Ni lernus Esperanton! Let’s learn Esperanto!
Works Cited
Perry, Cassidy. “15 Cognitive Benefits of Learning a New Language.” https://scientificorigin.com/15-cognitive-benefits-of-learning-a-new-language, accessed July 23, 2025.
Smith, Jennifer. “The benefits of learning a second language.” https://www.omniglot.com/language/articles/benefitsoflearningalanguage.htm, accessed July 23, 2025.
Cid, Emilio. “Learn Esperanto.” https://esperanto.net/en/learn-esperanto/, accessed July 23, 2025.
Zervic, Christopher. “The 16 Rules of Esperanto, compared with English.” https://esperanto-chicago.org/the-16-rules-of-esperanto-compared-with-english/, accessed July 23, 2025.
Ericupsidebrown. “How Many Grammar Rules Are There in the English Language?” https://allenglish.com/how-many-grammar-rules-are-there-in-the-english-language/, accessed July 23, 2025.
Esperanto: The Language of Hope
Saluton! Mia nomo estas Soĉan, kaj mi amas Esperanton. Or, in English, Hello! My name is Socchan, and I love the language Esperanto. Esperanto is a constructed language originally created in 1887 by a man named L. L. Zamenhof, designed to be an easy to learn second language. I’ve been studying Esperanto on and off for several years, and today I’m going to tell you why it was created, why learning a new language is beneficial, and why you should consider learning Esperanto specifically.
Let’s start by looking back to Esperanto’s origins. L. L. Zamenhof grew up in a town in Poland, where several different languages were spoken, and many disagreements broke out due to a lack of understanding. Zamenhof thought that, if only they all shared at least one language, perhaps they could communicate better and fewer conflicts would result. Unfortunately, learning a whole new language tends to be an arduous task at best. With this in mind, Zamenhof decided to create his own language: one that would be easy to learn.
Zamenhof’s goal of fostering peace through better communication was and remains a noble one, perpetuated by Esperantists to this day, but there are perks to learning a new language that he didn’t know. As some of you are already aware, learning a new language can have many benefits. Scientific Origin tells us that learning a new language can improve your memory, delay cognitive decline, and promote cultural awareness—the latter of which we’ve been studying the importance of in this very class. Jennifer Smith of Omniglot.com also points out that learning another language can improve your job prospects. Studying a language that’s easy to learn can mean accessing some of those benefits that much sooner.
This makes Esperanto an ideal choice when picking a new language to learn. With his hope of creating a simple, easy to learn language, Zamenhof made Esperanto with only sixteen main grammatical rules, which can be found listed at the Esperanto Society of Chicago’s website. In comparison, the website All English says that English is estimated to have around 3,500 grammatical rules. In another advantage over English, each letter in Esperanto also has only one pronunciation (though some vowels do team up to form dipthongs). On top of that, if you already know a European language, such as English, Esperanto has many cognates. Even better, there are plenty of free resources available to learn Esperanto, a good number of which can be found at Esperanto.net.
Learning Esperanto can connect you to over a hundred thousand speakers around the world, studying a new language can help your brain stay healthy and active, and Esperanto in particular was made to be easy to learn in the hope of fostering peace and communication. For all of these reasons and more, when it comes to picking a new language to learn, it's well worth consideration. Ni lernus Esperanton! Let’s learn Esperanto!
Works Cited
Perry, Cassidy. “15 Cognitive Benefits of Learning a New Language.” https://scientificorigin.com/15-cognitive-benefits-of-learning-a-new-language, accessed July 23, 2025.
Smith, Jennifer. “The benefits of learning a second language.” https://www.omniglot.com/language/articles/benefitsoflearningalanguage.htm, accessed July 23, 2025.
Cid, Emilio. “Learn Esperanto.” https://esperanto.net/en/learn-esperanto/, accessed July 23, 2025.
Zervic, Christopher. “The 16 Rules of Esperanto, compared with English.” https://esperanto-chicago.org/the-16-rules-of-esperanto-compared-with-english/, accessed July 23, 2025.
Ericupsidebrown. “How Many Grammar Rules Are There in the English Language?” https://allenglish.com/how-many-grammar-rules-are-there-in-the-english-language/, accessed July 23, 2025.
I hope this isn't too late...
Date: 2025-07-24 07:05 pm (UTC)That's really well done! Some tips:
The author for the "Learn Esperanto" piece is Emilio Cid.
For this: "L. L. Zamenhof grew up in a town in Poland", the place Zamenhof grew up in, was a city at that point (it had and has city rights, at least). I'm also not sure if I'd say it was in Poland? It is now, but at that point, it was in the Russian Empire (and also not in the "Poland" that existed back then). That's rather nitpicky, though.
Here: "On top of that, if you already know a European language, such as English, Esperanto has many cognates." Maybe you could mention Romance languages (Spanish, French, etc.), because most of the vocabulary comes from there? Then again, English has heaps of shared vocabulary with those languages, so it's a bit of a moot point.
Those tips aside... it's really well done, especially within the limitations you had (and I can see you had to work with those...)! Showing that you can use Esperanto during the presentation is quite cool, and I absolutely agree on learning more languages. Best of luck with the presentation!
Re: I hope this isn't too late...
Date: 2025-07-24 07:18 pm (UTC)As for European languages, I was also thinking of actual sounds, since especially Ĥ is more common in Eastern European languages than Western European languages. (Might also be the influence of Hebrew, TBH.)
As for Town vs City, I'll get that corrected in this version of the speech at least, in addition to adding that missing author (again, thank you!). (My brain is also insisting that Town vs City is something that's more subjective, but it's easier to change than to argue about it, and I don't feel like looking it up for myself at the moment, so.) As for location, I'll say it's "in what would one day become Poland".
Re: I hope this isn't too late...
Date: 2025-07-24 07:48 pm (UTC)Good to hear I can help with the paper version, at least!
but I can at least turn in the author name a little late! How on earth did you find that? Genuine question, I had a really hard time finding authors on sites for my last speech as well.
I looked in the page source (with CTRL+U on Windows) because I knew that you can sometimes see the date of the article there if it isn't listed... and then I saw "<meta name="author" content="Emilio Cid"/>" in there, which was a quite lucky break!
As for European languages, I was also thinking of actual sounds, since especially Ĥ is more common in Eastern European languages than Western European languages. (Might also be the influence of Hebrew, TBH.)
I'd never really considered it, but now that you say it, "ĥ" indeed seems to be present in most, if not all, Slavic languages, while it's nearly wholly absent from the Romance languages (with Spanish being a rather significant exception), and not present in many Germanic languages. It's a nice perspective change!
(My brain is also insisting that Town vs City is something that's more subjective, but it's easier to change than to argue about it, and I don't feel like looking it up for myself at the moment, so.)
Yeah, it really is more subjective than that... and in 1860, it had 13900 inhabitants, so I'd have called it a town. On the other hand, Białystok did grow explosively after that, and it's undeniably a city by now (with 290,000 inhabitants), and there's the city rights, though their value is dubious... Alright, going to his Wikipedia page and looking at some cited sources, it's called a "city", so that's why I'd argue for going with that.
As for location, I'll say it's "in what would one day become Poland".
Looking further (because I really like doing that!), it was part of Poland before Poland stopped existing in 1795, so I might go with something like "a Polish city (then part of Russia)", to illustrate what kind of different languages might be spoken there.
It is all a bit of nitpicking, so I really don't mind what you do!
Re: I hope this isn't too late...
Date: 2025-07-25 08:34 pm (UTC)Alas, that was due at Midnight on Wednesday, but I wanted to include the author for the sake of my own integrity, so I emailed it to the professor separately.
I looked in the page source
Ah. Hmm. Well, that definitely won't be a solution all the time, then; plus, I'm pretty sure I'll end up stuck in a loop if it only lists one author. "Is this the author of the words on this specific page, or does the webmaster refer to themself as the author? Would that be listed somewhere else? Oh, but I do need to include an author here; is it okay if I'm not quite sure?" Etc etc etc 😑 Dammit, anxiety brain! Ah, well, at least that's one more tool in my arsenal.
Yeah, I live in what we around these parts would call a city, but anyone from Chicago or Dallas or Los Angeles for example might call a quaint little town. I was also thinking of the definition of novel vs novella, and how I've seen different word counts for either of them, and so forth. I figured it might be the same with town vs city.
Anyway, at this point I'm mostly just fine tuning the final product in this post, since I've already sent in what I can. I tend to do that with my fics as well, for weeks after I post, so it's really nothing new 😂
no subject
Date: 2025-07-26 08:12 am (UTC)Ah well, at least I've been able to help out with something....
page source
I can understand that anxiety... For what it's worth, I've checked another page, and that had another author, so I'm quite sure the author you listed was the actual one in this case (and that might give you another tool to check who's been writing these pages).
Yeah, I live in what we around these parts would call a city, but anyone from Chicago or Dallas or Los Angeles for example might call a quaint little town. I was also thinking of the definition of novel vs novella, and how I've seen different word counts for either of them, and so forth. I figured it might be the same with town vs city.
And what defines a city is far more contentious (and country-specific) than what makes a novella, too! Looking at a map of Iowa... I think I might well call your home place a city (though I note that I have a higher population threshold for cities in the U.S. than I'd do in my own country). In any case, Chicago, Dallas, and Los Angeles are at the top end of cities, so that's hardly an unbiased perspective. By that argument, I'd say that Białystok would have been a city back then, since the population ratio with Warsaw was less than that of your city to New York probably is... but I don't know if I'd find 13,000 people enough for a city. Let me just so it's complicated, so I don't keep on rambling!
Anyway, at this point I'm mostly just fine tuning the final product in this post, since I've already sent in what I can. I tend to do that with my fics as well, for weeks after I post, so it's really nothing new 😂
Oh, so I've been helping you with editing! That's always a good thing!
no subject
Date: 2025-07-25 06:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-25 08:35 pm (UTC)