Oregon Esperanto speakers share a universal language

The Civics Education Initiative, a statewide program sponsored by the Oregon State Capital Foundation. They help Oregonians learn how our government and democracy work and how you can get involved and make a difference. Grant applications to help nonprofit and educational organizations support civics education programs throughout Oregon are open now through September 30th at Oregoncapitalfoundation.org. This fall, let Curiosity lead you to Newport. The Newport Festival of Arts and Culture brings together music, arts, markets, culinary experiences, and community celebrations on the Oregon Coast. From September through November, take in world-class performances, explore the historic Bayfront, and discover the stories that make Newport unique. Unlock exclusive lodging offers for OPB listeners at Discovernewport.com slash OPB. The Newport Festival of Arts and Culture? where creativity is in the water. This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I'm Jeff 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. Isaac Zerukamore, Elaine Warfield, and Bruce Sherwood. Join me now. Welcome to all of you to think out loud. It's great to have you. Yes. Dank for you inviting us. Duncan. Duncan, yes. Danka? That's thank you? Donka, yeah. Oh, excellent. 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? Saluton, Laine and Bruce. Saluteon, Sluton. Is you excited about the interview? Oh, yes, certainly. I'm joyous that last time we'll talk about Esperant. That's a good affair. Yes. Yes. I think, okay, I think I got what was going on there. I think you were asking them if they were ready for the interview, if they were doing okay. Yeah, if they're excited for you. Okay. 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? Well, I think it's a very interesting language. Zalmanhof, 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 Zalmanhof created something different. It's a language where...

with a relatively small vocabulary, you can nevertheless be very expressive. And the secret to this is that from a small number of root words, you can assemble words that are made up of these elements. It's sort of like, think of the periodic table of the elements. There's a hundred of these elements, and how many chemicals can you make from those hundred? Well, 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 areas of ways is sufficient. And I don't know of any other language. It's quite like that. Well, by comparison to how many words are in English. Yeah, exactly. Like millions? Yeah. Okay. What was the idea that Ludwig Zamanhof had when he came up with this? Well, he was growing up in Bielasak, 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. And Zamanov 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. And that was what motivated him. And he did a job. Yeah, sure. Isaac, how about you? When did you first get exposed to this language and made you think I should speak it? Actually, from my father, he was a speaker. He passed away when I was nine years old, and my mother didn't speak it, so I didn't get like a full being raised in a kind of experience. I found his books, and I, you know, thought it would be interesting. I like languages, and then I found the community, and that's the best part of it. What was it like learning the language? How hard was it for you? It's pretty easy, actually. It's not without its challenges as any language, but you... One can become fluent in it much faster than if you're trying to say French or German or something like that. So, yeah. Yeah. And for many other languages, being immersed in it is a really important thing. Right. How do you immerse yourself in Esperanto with the speakers so dispersed around the world? 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 at that long. There's also an active online community. People do voice chats over Zoom, things like that. And we have a local club. Yeah, and we have a local club. Elaine, when were you first exposed? Well, I was first exposed 40 years ago at the University of Illinois. My physics professor... had taught his children from birth to speak Esperanto. And I didn't really do anything about it until 9-11, at which point seemed like everyone was afraid of foreign people, and there was so much fear and anxiety about the other. And this is my small way of bringing a little bit more peace to the world, but I wanted to find out about other cultures. directly from the people and directly from the literature. And when you say you learn from your physics professor? Yes. And 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. 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. Yeah. Truly is a small world. What is your understanding of what Esperanto was supposed to achieve? Well, I think that it's, you know, Zemnov gave it freely to people, so they were able to put whatever meaning they wanted on it. But it was meant to help me out here, guys. Well, in a sense, it's to... I think of it as a little bit like the difference between Protestant and Catholic religions. In the following sense, that in the Catholic religion, there is someone you, 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 Zamaov had this notion that you ought to be able to communicate with the other directly without having a translator in between. Yeah. And also without having a colonial language or any time that you're communicating in a language that one person knows better than the other, there's always somebody at a disadvantage. Yeah. Very well. In Esperanto, we all had to learn it. And...

There is no sense of superiority. And that's one of the things I love about the Esperanto community is we're so acceptance of everyone. Very well. 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. But so. Yeah. I know that there are, and I put this in quotes, 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? Well, um, Let's, I'll give you a scenario. Two people from different nations meet at an international Esperanto conference and they fall in love. And they want to 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 Liliou Shomet. And her parents were very active actually from, I think, the 1920s through the 1960s in the Esperanto community. So it definitely happens. Bruce, you taught your kids this language? I have three kids, one of whom does speak Esperanto. The others didn't really take to it. Okay. Does that one who still speaks it have use for it? Do they find that it makes sense in the world? He enjoys it. Okay. And we do it with each other to some extent. Yeah. If you're just tuning in. I wanted to make another comment that Esperano can also be a bridge to learning other languages. So I learned Esperanto first, and there was enormous help that when I spent a year out of Fulbright in... Italy, in physics in Padova, I learned to speak Italian. And 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... the boost that Learning Esperanto gave me because it was so clear and simple, and it gave me an introduction that really paid off. Yeah. Well, 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, Isaac, a great example of this is the word for thank you, which is... Dengkong. Dengk. How is, is it by accident that that is so close to the German Danka?

No. Zamenhof used a lot of sources from European languages, primarily... Latin and French, but there's some German, Russian, Polish. In English. And English, yeah. Yeah. Do you know how he decided what languages he would pull from and in deciding the new words? I think he just picked words that he liked. He knew a very large number of languages. Yeah, he does. Yeah, okay. It was as good of reason as any. If you're just tuning in, we're talking with three Esperanto speakers who live in Oregon. Elaine Warfield, Bruce Sherwood, and Isaac Zaruka Moore have joined me here in the studio. Elaine, 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? Well, when I first learned Esperanto 20 years ago, I learned from books. And 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. So 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. What's the Esperanto word for cats? Cato. Cato, of course. So, yeah. So the technology has really helped. So I think 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. And 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 and Discord and other text-based tools. Yeah. Do we know how many people in the world speak this language? Do we have an estimate? I've seen estimates, but I don't remember exactly. I think it honestly depends on what you consider a speaker. It's someone who's just learning or someone who's fluent. The estimates, I think, range anywhere from, what, 100,000 to like 2 million in the world. 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? I think that the point of it is the people. The people that we get to meet, the people that I talk to who don't know a word of English that I wouldn't otherwise be able to understand. Bruce, do you think that the idea of having a universal second language is possible?

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. So, yeah. Can you give me a specific example where you were in one of those countries and your knowledge of Esperant? Okay, 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 Esperatus in the book, the World Organization published of Esperantes around the world. And I managed to have one evening dinner with an older couple who were Baha'iasts and Esperatus in Iran, which was awesome. In Durban, South Africa. I was able to arrange, again, I was there for physics education meeting, but I went to dinner with a young guy who was a graduate student and his two friends who were migrants from the... neighboring African countries. And when we spoke Esperado, 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 Chabai and I went for, again, physics conference. I... Ruth asked me, can't you contact somebody that we could make a connection? So I, in fact, found a guy who desperated us who took us around Berlin. This was after the wall had fallen. And he said, oh, you should come to a party this evening. And there'll be some Esperanus there. So we went, and it was extremely interesting because many of the people of 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 now, you know, there used to be two symphony orchestras in Berlin, and now there could only be one, and what did that mean? And the comedians who made it in East Germany the kind of...

Funny business they did wasn't funny anymore. It was extremely interesting evening. There's no way I could have had that evening without Esperano. Wow. It's like anywhere in the world you go, you might be able to connect with people. Absolutely. And there's even a service called the Passporta Servo where if you're traveling, people offer up their homes to stay with them. I... I haven't used it myself, but I know people that have backpacked around Europe and not paid for a single hostel or hotel. That's amazing. You know, I remember a friend of mine had this piece of vinyl that was from the 1960s, I think it was called. It was called New Cantu in Esperanto. It was like Let Us sing in Esperanto. It was all songs in the language. And so it has penetrated the broader culture from time to time. Was there ever like a golden age of Esperanto, in America anyway, where people... Like really adopted this language. Early 20th century. Yeah. I've done some digging into history of the movement here in Oregon. And there have been people since at least 19, oh, whatever, here in Portland. I found an article from 1911 about... a major conference being held here in Portland in the Oregonian. They had an article about it. So, yeah, definitely the early 20th century. There was a conference in Washington, D.C., about 1907 or so. And Professor Zamanhoff had come. And there were all these ladies that wanted to give them hugs and things. They had tour guys that spoke Esperanto. And the policeman that spoke Esperanto. He made the front page of the... paper in Washington, D.C. And, you know, when the ship came in, there were a thousand people that came and greeted him. So it was pretty big back then. And in fact, the League of Nations seriously considered pushing Esperanto. But the French consul said that... There is already an international language, and it is French. And he killed it. But there really was widespread interest, especially in Europe, but also interesting in China and Japan at that time. Yeah. And there's still, you know, 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. There's still a lot of interest in it. We held meetings once a month on Saturdays. at some point, if you can put a reference to our website so people can look and find out when the next meeting is taking place. Esperanto p.dx.org. Excellent. And we will have a link to it on our site. Atopb.org slash think out loud. Isaac, Elaine, Bruce, Dankon. Yes? Duncan. This is a great conversation. Thank you all very much. Me too.

Isaac Zaruka Moore, Bruce Sherwood, and Elaine Warfield are three Esperanto speakers from the Portland area. The 45th annual Northwest Regional Esperanto Conference is next month in Seattle. Tomorrow on the show, 6.5 million people around the country live in areas that are susceptible to landslides, including Oregon and Washington. Researchers from the University of Washington made that finding through a database they created that measures landside susceptibility for more than 100 million homes. We'll talk to one of the scientists. Our production staff includes Mali Afas, Roli Hernandez, Gemma de Carlo, senior producer Alison Frost, and managing producer Shiraz Siddique. Idrisa Guy is our intern for the summer, Naline Silva, and Layla Isbel engineer the show from the Gert Boyle Studio. Our technical director is Stephen Cray, and our executive producer is Sage Van Wing. If you don't want to miss any of our shows, listen wherever you get your podcast. The nightly rebroadcast is at 8. Thank you for listening to Think Out Loud on OPB and KLCC. I'm Jeff Norcross. Think Out Loud is supported by Steve and Jan Oliver, the Rose E. Tucker Carlson Charitable Trust, Michael, Kristen, Andrew Kern, and Anna Sanford, the Jackson Foundation, and the Kevin and Amy Kahnstam Family Fund. So much of what we talk about on this show has to do with what's happening right now. But there's a lot of history behind these conversations. OPB's Salmon Wars podcast will give you insights into some of that history. It tells a story of one Yakima Nation family that's been fighting for salmon in the Columbia River across generations. Find Salmon Wars wherever you listen to podcasts.