ESPERANTO

It’s June, the school year is practically over and soon even with the boys I follow at the service where I work we prepare for the summer break..

I often hear them talking to each other and it’s all a “Fra’ (in english Bro’) what do you need? Bro’ I know but I must tell you Bro'”

Then I came back to a game that we used to play with my middle school classmates when, in order not to be understood by “others” (especially teachers), we invented a kind of ciphertext that always consisted in adding a “Bro’” between one syllable and another..

A kind of code where if we had to say “see you later” the phrase was “Bro’-see-Bro’-you-Bro’-la-Bro’-ter-Bro’..'”

At first it was complicated but after a while it was fun and when you could say it quickly it was really incomprehensible!

So I went to look back somewhere in memory the scholar who invented Esperanto (that is, “the one who hopes”) an original and universal language to accompany the native languages, thought and built so that all the people of the world could speak and understand each other, stuff from brainy intellectuals barbosa you say and instead Zamenhof… He was only 19!

Its purpose was to make the different peoples dialogue trying to create between them understanding and peace with a second language simple but expressive, belonging to humanity and not to a people, as well as protecting the so-called idioms “minor” otherwise doomed to extinction by the force of the languages of the strongest nations, capable of imposing cultural subjections..

And it is precisely for this reason that Esperanto has been the protagonist of debates concerning so-called linguistic democracy, because its main characteristic is neutrality, not the imposition as a single language of which it has often been accused.

Zamenhof used his linguistic knowledge to create a language that required the use of economic resources, affordable for everyone, and several studies have shown that it is easy to learn even by self-taught and in adulthood (due to regular forms) and that the children who studied it found themselves facilitated in the study of another foreign language..

Well, why go to all this trouble?

Difficult to distinguish a scholar’s research from the history of his life..

Zamenhof in fact knew well the difficulty of learning a foreign language, he himself used daily Russian and Polish, he knew Hebrew taught by his father and finally studied Greek, Latin, French German and English in high school..

But he explains it much better in his own sentence:

“… on the street and in the courtyard everything at every step made me feel that there were no men, there were only Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews often in conflict with each other… although many will smile of the pain for the world from a child, to me then it seemed that the “great” were omnipotent… when I would have been great then I would have at least tried to change things”

But not everyone took it well..

The father, needless to say, burned all his first notes (of the “proto-Esperanto” nothing remains) because he said it distracted him from medical studies, but he did not give up and in 1878, on his birthday, read to his classmates his first short poem, he graduated from medicine and became an accomplished ophthalmologist..

So the language for the human being was an invention or a discovery? Or a creation?

I’ll think about it during the summer, but in the meantime I can think of another invented language, that of signs, through which deaf people can communicate with gestures..

I’ve learned a few of them and they’re so poetically beautiful that they really take your breath away..

But there is another silent and universal language that unites all human beings, before the cultural influence of the country of origin differentiates them from each other, and it is not much different, just change.. a letter!

It is the language of dreams, made of images only, that we all create from birth, when we are not yet able to speak and that then we find the night when consciousness rests but thought.. never!

I often face them with the guys I see, and some are really able to remain indelible.. for both!
With some you can even smile, thinking about that “invisible” thread so important in this delicate time of year during which we greet..

Well, I’ll see you in September as some dreams are like the first loves:

They never forget

Marco Randisi