Esperanto is the most successful and widely spoken constructed language in the world. It was invented by a Polish-Jewish inventor, doctor and writer named Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, although he is usually credited as L.L Zamenhof. Zamenhof has written multiple books about the Esperanto language, including Fundamento de Esperanto and Unua Libro. Esperanto was invented with the intention of being a second language for everyone and to help combat nationalism while encouraging internationalism. Esperanto is thought to be spoken by some 2,000,000 people as a second language in 115 countries, most of them in Central and Eastern Europe, East Asia and Central America.
A constructed (or artificial) language is one that has been artificially designed over time rather than evolving naturally, because of this, constructed languages such as Esperanto are often very regular in their grammar, phonetics and vocabulary as they haven’t been affected by historical changes that occur in most natural languages.
Esperanto has lots of basic grammar rules for, example:
- All nouns end in an o
- All adjectives end in an a
- All adverbs end in an e
- All plurals end in a j
Of course, there are other slightly more complex rules and as a result of the language being based on rules, it is known to be an easy language to learn for Europeans and also non-Europeans. Learning Esperanto can also help you with learning other languages as parts of the language are based on Indo-European languages such as Latin, Germanic and Slavonic languages. Not only that, learning Esperanto gives you the ability to recognize patterns in other languages; help you with the pronunciation of other languages and the knowledge of how to go about learning a language.
Another interesting thing to know about the Esperanto language is that there are 28 letters in the alphabet, 22 of which are the same as in the English alphabet (there is no Q, W, X or Y). However, there are 6 letters that aren’t featured in the English alphabet: Ĉ, Ĝ, Ĥ, Ĵ, Ŝ, Ŭ. This is what the Esperanto alphabet looks like:
Aa | Bb | Cc | Ĉĉ | Dd | Ee | Ff | Gg | Ĝĝ | Hh | Ĥĥ | Ii | Jj | Ĵĵ | Kk | Ll | Mm | Nn | Oo | Pp | Rr | Ss | Ŝŝ | Tt | Uu | Ŭŭ | Vv | Zz
It is always a good idea to learn another language as it can help you make international ties and friendships while also making you more employable also, the history behind languages is something that is greatly interesting and very enjoyable to learn about.
