The New Esperanto

Does anyone remember the language Esperanto, invented by a Polish Jew named Zamenhof in the 1870’s based on his idea that if everyone spoke a universal auxiliary language, wars would end (Esperanto means “hope” in, well, in Esperanto)? Various societies over the years tried to adopt Esperanto as their official language, including a proposal in China after 1911 Xinhai Revolution to officially replace Chinese with Esperanto as a way of bringing the country quickly into the 20th century. There have been as many as 2 million Esperanto speakers at a given time.

From Wikipedia:

As a constructed language, Esperanto is not genealogically related to any ethnic language. It has been described as “a language lexically predominantly Romanic, morphologically intensively agglutinative and to a certain degree isolating in character”. The phonology, grammar, vocabulary, and semantics are based on the western Indo-European languages. The phonemic inventory is essentially Slavic, as is much of the semantics, while the vocabulary derives primarily from the Romance languages, with a lesser contribution from Germanic. Pragmatics and other aspects of the language not specified by Zamenhof’s original documents were influenced by the native languages of early speakers, primarily Russian, Polish, German, and French.

As a friend reminded me, the National Lampoon once published a guide to talking dirty in Esperanto, including the universal version of the phrase “Please direct me to the nearest medical facility. My penis has been struck by lightning.”

Although Esperanto never took off, I can tell you that English is becoming the new Esperanto. I travel around the EU a lot, and everywhere you go, you now find people from every other corner of the EU, whether it is Poles waiting tables in London, British lager louts enjoying cheap pints in Estonia, or hefty Germans roasting themselves on Bulgarian beaches like so many Bratwursts. And English is spoken everywhere, though not exactly as we speak it in the U.S., but a modified version that eliminates grammatical particularities that confuse people from other lands.

For example, articles like “the” or “an” are dropped in the interEuropean English, so that a Finn knocking into a Czech at a bar in Riga might say “Sorry, too much beer just now. Need find man toilet.” In fact, last night at a bar a seriously inebriated Estonian at first mistook me for a Finn and hung upon my arm while chattering into my ear in Finnish – oddly I have found that enough beer gives me the illusion that I understand Finnish – but then switched into European English, some story that seemed to be about his training as a Coast Guard diver.

When we produce reports from my private equity fund, usually drafted by non-native English speakers, the task usually falls to me of putting them into “proper English,” as my co-manager calls it. I will then spend an hour adding “the”s where they belong and removing them where they don’t – an original version might read, “Company improved results in 3Q because of the increasing sales.” You do not have to be Maxwell Perkins to fix that one.

Lately, however, it occurred to me that I was involved in an increasingly pointless task, because our reports are also meant to be read mostly by other non-native speakers, and this European form of English might even be easier for them to understand than my prettied up version with all its fancy articles. In fact, I have found myself giving in and speaking this language, just to make life easier – like last night when I extricated myself from the Estonian Coast Guard by saying, “Good luck diving friend, must leave you now. Have great need for urination room.”