Precerpt from My 20th Language: L5, Esperanto


My sophomore year in high school, the year I began studying French, our world history teacher assigned major reports. We had a choice of topic, and, from the list, I chose Babel. Even in high school, I was already fascinated with languages.

The topic of Babel took me to the topic of what was the original language of humans. Was there an inherent language common to all?

That led me to ask, can there be a language common to all in the present day? And that led me to Esperanto.

 

Babel: The Turning Point in Human Speech

Before Babel, people are said to have shared one common language—a unified system of communication that allowed effortless understanding and cooperation. In that world, words carried no borders; speech flowed freely across generations and regions. Humanity’s linguistic unity mirrored its collective ambition: to build, to create, to reach heaven itself.

Then came Babel, the moment of linguistic divergence. According to the story, human pride in building the great tower provoked divine intervention. The single tongue fractured into many. Suddenly, words that once connected now confused. Builders could no longer coordinate; the project collapsed, and people scattered across the earth.

What followed was the birth of language diversity—hundreds, then thousands of tongues evolving independently. Each carried its own rhythm, worldview, and cultural identity. What was once one voice became a chorus of difference.

From a language‑learning perspective, Babel marks the beginning of our lifelong quest to reconnect through words. Every foreign language studied is an act of reversing Babel—of bridging the gap that opened when humanity’s speech splintered. In learning another tongue, we reclaim a piece of that original unity, not by erasing difference, but by understanding it.

 

The Phrygian Experiment: A Misguided Search for the First Human Language

One of the earliest attempts to discover humanity’s “original language” comes from a story recorded by Herodotus. Psamtik I, a pharaoh of Egypt, ordered an experiment in which two infants were raised without hearing any spoken language. Caretakers fed and tended them but were forbidden to speak. Psamtik believed that whatever word the children eventually uttered would reveal the primordial human tongue.

When the children grew old enough to babble, they reportedly began saying bekos. Because bekos was the Phrygian word for bread, Psamtik concluded that Phrygian must be the first language of humankind.

Today we know that children deprived of language do not spontaneously produce meaningful vocabulary and that the experiment was both unethical and scientifically unsound. But the story illustrates how deeply ancient cultures longed to trace language back to a single origin—and how far they were willing to go to find it.

 

Esperanto: A Designed Bridge Language

Esperanto was created in 1887 by L. L. Zamenhof, a Polish-Jewish physician who believed that many of the world’s conflicts were fueled by linguistic division. Growing up in a city where Poles, Russians, Germans, and Jews lived side by side but rarely understood one another, he imagined a neutral, easy-to-learn second language that anyone could adopt without national or cultural baggage. His goal was not to replace native languages but to give people a shared linguistic space where communication could happen on equal footing.

To make Esperanto accessible, Zamenhof built it from familiar parts: a largely Romance and Germanic vocabulary, a touch of Slavic influence, and an extremely regular grammar with no irregular verbs and predictable word endings. Its affix system allows learners to build new words from known roots, making vocabulary expansion intuitive. Because of this simplicity, Esperanto became the most successful constructed language in history, developing a global community of speakers, writers, teachers, and even a small number of native speakers—children raised in Esperanto-speaking households alongside the local national language.

Esperanto never became the universal tongue Zamenhof hoped for, but it endures as a vibrant international community and a practical experiment in linguistic cooperation. For many learners—including me—it offers not just a language, but a window into how communication might look if it were designed for clarity, fairness, and connection rather than historical accident.

So, during my early years in high school, I found a book for learning Esperanto—I do not remember where I heard about the language—and proceeded to devour it. With experience in Spanish, French, Latin, and English (Romance and Germanic languages, the core upon which Esperanto was built), I found the grammar and vocabulary pretty transparent and easy to remember. The consistency in grammatical expression also made acquisition easy—and quick. It was a fascinating study and probably strengthened some of my language learning skills, or, at least, it gave some more language learning experience, in this case, through self-study.

I eventually stopped looking to actively “speak” Esperanto mainly because there was no one else with whom to speak it. I also became bored. To me, Esperanto seemed too artificial. Easy, yes, but not like a “real” language. The real languages I knew came with complexities and richness due to irregularities. I love that about them. I loved the unpredictability. Esperanto was too predictable for me!

Those predictabilities, however, mean that I can still read Esperanto, even not having seen it for more than 50 years. You could read it, too, if you are a native speaker of English with knowledge of even one Romance language. Try it, and see! Here is a short text on the war in Ukraine; since the context is known and the grammar and vocabulary basically Germanic-Romance by design, every single word in this text should be transparent to everyone with a Germanic-Romance background. It is to me.

Mallonga Teksto pri la Milito en Ukrainio

La milito en Ukrainio komenciĝis en 2022, kiam Rusio lanĉis plenan invadon kontraŭ la lando. La konflikto kaŭzis grandajn homajn suferojn, detruojn de urboj, kaj amasan migradon de civiluloj al pli sekuraj regionoj aŭ al aliaj landoj. Multaj internaciaj organizaĵoj raportis pri humanitaraj bezonoj, kaj pluraj ŝtatoj esprimis subtenon al Ukrainio per diplomatio, helpo, kaj altruditaj sankcioj kontraŭ Rusio.

La situacio restas malstabila, kun daŭraj bataloj en kelkaj regionoj kaj klopodoj de la internacia komunumo por trovi pacan solvon. Raportoj de fidindaj novaĵfontoj estas rekomendindaj por kompreni la plej aktualajn evoluojn.

My favorite word in that text is helpo. (For some reason, it tickles my funny bone.) SVO word order contributes to the clarity of meaning in addition to all those words with Germanic and Romance roots.  (Of course, if your background is Balto-Slavic, Semitic, or Altaic, yes, you will struggle. Esperanto was clearly meant not as a lingua franca for all people but for all people of European descent. It is not surprising, then, that for me, Esperanto fell into my early language learning. I certainly began by collecting a group of European languages.


For more precerpts from My 20th Language, click HERE.

For more posts about language learning, click HERE.


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