Languages have evolved over time, but it is rare for one to be created.
Nearly 140 years ago, a Polish linguist did just that. Esperanto was made with the intent to be a universal second language for international communication. It is difficult to measure just how many people speak the language, but it does have speakers across the globe.
In the Pacific Northwest, speakers will gather next month for the 45th anniversary of the Northwest Regional Esperanto Conference in Seattle.
We’re joined by three members of the Esperanto Society of Portland: Izaak Zawyrucha-Moore, Alaine Warfield and Bruce Sherwood. They share why they’ve chosen to learn this language and what it has meant to them.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed using AI and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Geoff Norcross: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Geoff Norcross. Next month in Seattle, there’s a gathering of people from around the Northwest that speak a certain language. You may have not heard it in your life, but you probably have heard of it. And you may not understand it, but you might kind of get it. It might sound kind of familiar to you. The language is Esperanto, which was first proposed in the late 19th century by a Polish physician who thought the world needed a language that could be easily learned and just might unite all of humanity under a common tongue.
The Northwest Regional Esperanto Conference is holding its 45th anniversary gathering in Seattle next month. We have three Esperanto speakers from Oregon on the show today. Izaak Zawyrucha-Moore, Alaine Warfield and Bruce Sherwood join me now. Welcome to all of you to Think Out Loud. It’s great to have you.
Alaine Warfield: Yes, thank you for inviting us.
Izaak Zawyrucha-Moore: Dankon.
Norcross: Dankon? That’s thank you?
Zawyrucha-Moore: Dankon. Yeah.
Norcross: So if you could indulge me a little bit just so we can get the language in our ears before we start talking about it. Would the three of you just kind of talk to each other?
Zawyrucha-Moore: Saluton Alaine kaj Bruce.
Bruce Sherwood: Saluton.
Warfield: Saluton, saluton.
Zawyrucha-Moore: Ĉu vi estas ekscitita, pri la intervjuo.
Sherwood: Ho, jes. Mi ĝojas, ke lastatempe oni parolas pri Esperanto estas bona afero.
Zawyrucha-Moore: Jes.
Warfield: Jes.
Norcross: I think I got what was going on there. I think you’re asking them if they were ready for the interview, if they were doing OK?
Zawyrucha-Moore: Yeah, if they’re excited for it.
Norcross: Well, that’s kind of my point is that I don’t speak Esperanto, but I just kind of feel it. It feels familiar to me. So, Bruce, why don’t I start with you? How would you describe to somebody what Esperanto is?
Sherwood: Well, I think it’s a very interesting language. Zamenhof, the creator, had a really good idea. In the European languages in general, to be fully fluent and expressive requires a very large vocabulary. But Zamenhof created something different. It’s a language where, with a relatively small vocabulary, you can nevertheless be very expressive. The secret to this is that, from a small number of root words, you can assemble words that are made up of these elements. Think of the periodic table of the elements. There’s 100 of these elements, and how many chemicals can you make from those 100? Esperanto is like that. There’s an estimate that knowing somewhere between 500 and 1,000 words or elements that you can put together in various ways is sufficient. And I don’t know of any other language that’s quite like that.
Norcross: Well, by comparison to how many words are in English? Like millions?
What was the idea that Ludwik Zamenhof had when he came up with this?
Sherwood: Well, he was growing up in Bialystock, Poland, which at the time was part of the Russian Empire. And in that town, there were speakers of Russian, Yiddish, Polish, German – I’m probably missing some. And there was tension among the various groups. Zamenhof, as a kid, was uncomfortable with that, and thought maybe if there were a universal language easily learned, these people could talk to each other and get to know each other better. That was what motivated him. And he did a good job.
Norcross: Izaak, how about you? When did you first get exposed to this language and made you think, “I should speak it?”
Zawyrucha-Moore: Actually, from my father, he was a speaker. He passed away when I was 9 years old, and my mother didn’t speak it, so I didn’t get a full being-raised-in-it kind of experience. But I found his books, and I thought it would be interesting. I like languages. And then I found the community, and that’s the best part of it.
Norcross: What was it like learning the language? How hard was it for you?
Zawyrucha-Moore: It’s pretty easy, actually. It’s not without its challenges, as any language, but one can become fluent in it much faster than if you’re trying to say French, German or something like that.
Norcross: And for many other languages, being immersed in it is a really important thing. How do you immerse yourself in Esperanto with the speakers so dispersed around the world?
Zawyrucha-Moore: That’s why we have the conferences like we’re having in Seattle. We had a U.S. national conference in Cleveland this past summer that I attended. I spent two weeks speaking only Esperanto, and it kind of starts to get into your head once you’re speaking it that long. There’s also an active online community. People do voice chats over Zoom, things like that.
Warfield: And we have a local club.
Zawyrucha-Moore: Yeah, and we have a local club.
Norcross: Alaine, when were you first exposed?
Warfield: I was first exposed 40 years ago at the University of Illinois. My physics professor had taught his children from birth to speak Esperanto. I didn’t really do anything about it until 9/11, at which point it seemed like everyone was afraid of foreign people, and there was so much fear and anxiety about the other. This was my small way of bringing a little bit more peace to the world. I wanted to find out about other cultures, directly from the people and directly from the literature.
Norcross: And when you say you learned from your physics professor…
Warfield: Yes. The funny thing was, 40 years later, I was at a conference in North Carolina with members from Canada and the U.S., and somebody else asked me, “Oh, you’re from Portland. Do you know Bruce Sherwood?” I said, “Yes, I know who he is, but why are you asking?” “He lives in Portland.” [Laughter]
So when I got back, I contacted Bruce, who’s sitting right next to me now, and invited him to join our group. So it was a very close circle, but that’s kind of how the Esperanto community works. We’re relatively small, but we’re close and many people know each other.
Norcross: Truly is a small world. What is your understanding of what Esperanto was supposed to achieve?
Zawyrucha-Moore: Zamenhof gave it freely to people, so they were able to put whatever meaning they wanted on it. It was meant to … help me out here, guys.
Sherwood: I think of it as a little bit like the difference between Protestant and Catholic religions, in the following sense: In the Catholic religion, to go to God, you go through the priest. Martin Luther said, “Every man a priest,” and that you could talk to God directly. And in a certain sense, I think Zamenhof had this notion that you ought to be able to communicate with the other directly, without having a translator in between.
Warfield: And also, without having a colonial language. Any time that you’re communicating in a language that one person knows better than the other, there’s always somebody at a disadvantage. But in Esperanto, we all had to learn it. There is no sense of superiority, and that’s one of the things I love about the Esperanto community is we’re so accepting of everyone.
Sherwood: Very well said.
Zawyrucha-Moore: With English as a lingua franca, people who grow up with it natively have an advantage over people that have to learn it as a second language. And that’s true of any language.
Norcross: I know that there are “native speakers” of Esperanto, because I’m not sure I understand that term exactly because there is not a nation that has adopted it as its language. But what is a native speaker of Esperanto?
Zawyrucha-Moore: I’ll give you a scenario. Two people from different nations meet at an international Esperanto conference and they fall in love, and they wanna have a family, and they have children. And the only common language they have between them is Esperanto. So the kids just kind of grow up with that as their common language for the house, and they just learn it from birth. Some people choose to raise theirs, like Bruce did. We actually have a native Esperanto speaker in our community, her name is Lilio Sinnotte. And her parents were very active actually from I think the 1920s through the 1960s in the Esperanto community. So it definitely happens.
Norcross: Bruce, you taught your kids this language?
Sherwood: I have three kids, one of whom does speak Esperanto. The others didn’t really take to it.
Norcross: Does that one who still speaks it have use for it? Do they find that it makes sense in the world?
Sherwood: He enjoys it. We do it with each other, to some extent.
Esperanto can also be a bridge to learning other languages. So I learned Esperanto first, and it was an enormous help when I spent a year on a Fulbright in Italy in physics, in Padua. I learned to speak Italian. When I came back to the U.S., I learned to speak Spanish. And I can also read French and Portuguese. And all of this is founded on the boost that learning Esperanto gave me because it was so clear and simple. It gave me an introduction that really paid off.
Norcross: It’s interesting just listening to you talk earlier. I heard words that just sort of landed because I understand other languages on some level. And in fact, Izaak, a great example of this is the word for thank you, which is:
Zawyrucha-Moore: Dankon.
Norcross: Dankon. Is it by accident that that is so close to the German danke?
Zawyrucha-Moore: No, Zamenhof used a lot of sources from European languages – primarily Latin and French, but there’s some German, Russian, Polish…
Warfield: And English.
Zawyrucha-Moore: And English, yeah.
Norcross: Do you know how he decided what languages he would pull from in deciding the new words?
Zawyrucha-Moore: I think he just picked words that he liked. [Laughter]
Sherwood: He knew a very large number of languages.
Miller: It was as good a reason as any.
Alaine, you mentioned the online community that you have tapped into. Can you talk about advances in technology and what they have meant for this language?
Warfield: Well, when I first learned Esperanto 20 years ago, I learned from books. I didn’t speak Esperanto. I didn’t know anybody, except we did have a small local club. Now, I could pretty much talk to anyone 24 hours a day. I was in a call Sunday with people from Spain, France, the U.S., Italy, Russia, I think. It’s allowed us to instantaneously get together as often as we want. We can have study groups. I co-hosted something about cats about a month ago.
Norcross: What’s the Esperanto word for cat?
Warfield: Kato.
Norcross: Kato, of course.
Warfield: So the technology has really helped. I’m part of the older crowd. And part of why I got into Esperanto was I retired from 40 years as an engineer, and I lost my community. Through Esperanto, I got it back again through all these online chats. But I think the younger people don’t use the video calls as much as they use chats, Discord and other text-based tools.
Norcross: Do we know how many people in the world speak this language? Do we have an estimate?
Sherwood: I’ve seen estimates, but I don’t remember exactly.
Zawyrucha-Moore: It honestly depends on what you consider a speaker. Is it someone who’s just learning or someone who’s fluent? The estimates I think range anywhere from like 100,000 to like 2 million in the world.
Norcross: That’s not a small number. But over 7 billion people on the planet, with so few people speaking this language, what do you think is the point of it?
Zawyrucha-Moore: I think that the point of it is the people. The people that we get to meet, the people that I talked to who don’t know a word of English that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to understand.
Norcross: Bruce, do you think that the idea of having a universal second language is possible?
Sherwood: Yes, absolutely. I’ve benefited a lot from knowing that language. I’ve been in situations in Iran, in South Africa, in Germany, of having adventures with people that I would not have even met otherwise.
Norcross: Can you give me a specific example where you were in one of those countries and your knowledge of Esperanto was helpful?
Sherwood: Let me give you a couple of examples. I went to Tehran, Iran for basically a physics education thing. And there I looked up some Esperantists in the book that the World Organization published of Esperantists around the world. And I managed to have, one evening, dinner with an older couple who were Bahá’ís and Esperantists in Iran, which was awesome.
In Durban, South Africa, I was able to arrange – again, I was there for physics education meeting – dinner with a young guy who’s a graduate student and his two friends who were migrants from the neighboring African countries. And when we spoke Esperanto, I wouldn’t have had a way to make this link up otherwise.
And a particularly interesting one was in Berlin, where my spouse Ruth Chabay and I went for, again, physics conference. Ruth asked me, “Can’t you contact somebody, we can make a connection?” So I found a guy, an Esperantist, who took us around Berlin. This was after the wall had fallen, and he said, “Oh, you should come to a party this evening. There’ll be some Esperantists there.” So we went, and it was extremely interesting because many of the people at the party had grown up in East Germany. And it was really interesting, their take on what was good and what was bad about their own experience. And the fact that there used to be two symphony orchestras in Berlin, and now there could only be one, and what did that mean? And the comedians that made it in East Germany, the funny business wasn’t funny anymore. It was an extremely interesting evening. There’s no way I could have had that evening without Esperanto.
Norcross: It’s like anywhere in the world you go, you might be able to connect with people.
Zawyrucha-Moore: There’s even a service called the Pasporta Servo, where if you’re traveling, people offer up their homes to stay with them. I haven’t used it myself, but I know people that have backpacked around Europe and not paid for a single hostel or hotel.
Norcross: That’s amazing. I remember a friend of mine had this piece of vinyl that was from the 1960s. It was called “Ni Kantu en Esperanto,” “Let Us Sing in Esperanto.” It was all songs in the language. So it has penetrated the broader culture from time to time. Was there ever a golden age of Esperanto, in America anyway, where people really adopted this language?
Sherwood: Early 20th century.
Zawyrucha-Moore: I’ve done some digging in the history of the movement here in Oregon, and there have been people since at least 190-whatever here in Portland. I found an article from 1911 about a major conference being held here in Portland. In The Oregonian, they have an article about it. So definitely the early 20th century.
Warfield: There was a conference in Washington DC about 1907 or so, and Professor Zamenhof had come, and there are all these ladies that wanted to give him hugs and things. [Laughter] They had tour guides that spoke Esperanto. And the policeman that spoke Esperanto, he made the front page of the paper in Washington DC. And when the ship came in, there were 1,000 people that came and greeted him. So it was pretty big back then.
Sherwood: And in fact, the League of Nations seriously considered pushing Esperanto. But the French consulate said that there is already an international language, and it is French, and he killed it. [Laughter] But there really was widespread interest, especially in Europe, but also, interesting, in China and Japan at that time.
Zawyrucha-Moore: And there’s still hundreds of people in the United States that speak Esperanto. We have a national organization called Esperanto USA that organizes the national conference that I went to this summer. I’m actually on the board of directors of that organization. So there’s still a lot of interest in it.
Warfield: Yeah, and we held meetings once a month on Saturdays. If you can put a reference to our website so people can look and find out when the next meeting’s taking place.
Zawyrucha-Moore: Esperantopdx.org.
Norcross: Excellent. Izaak, Alaine, Bruce, dankon. Yes?
All: Dankon! [Laughter]
Norcross: This was a great conversation. Thank you all very much.
Sherwood: Estas plezuro.
Norcross: Izaak Zawyrucha-Moore, Bruce Sherwood and Alaine Warfield are three Esperanto speakers from the Portland area. The 45th annual Northwest Regional Esperanto Conference is next month in Seattle.
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