Esperanto: Tre Mojosa

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With no fees or minimums, banking with Capital One is the easiest decision in the history of decisions. Even easier than deciding to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with no overdraft fees, is it even a decision? That's banking reimagined. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capitalone.com slash bank, Capital One N-A, member FDIC. SPEAKER_09: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. SPEAKER_02: Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is Stuff You Should Know. I don't know how to say that in Esperanto. Now that I think about it, I really should have looked that up. SPEAKER_05: I was wondering if you were going to do that. SPEAKER_02: I can't believe I didn't. I feel kind of jerky. Jerk wadi, I guess. I don't know how to say that in Esperanto either. SPEAKER_05: Well jerk wadi would be jerk wado. SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly. SPEAKER_05: Or something like that. SPEAKER_02: Something similar to that, yeah. SPEAKER_02: It actually would make sense because Esperanto is taking root words, jerk, wad, and putting them together and then conjugating them in a very uniform way. We should probably tell everybody what we're talking about here because we just kind of accidentally got into it. SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it's a language. SPEAKER_02: Not just a language. It's a conlang, a constructed language, which is a language that you sit down and make up. Some people actually do this and apparently it's addictive when you start as opposed to like I guess a natural language, one that just kind of develops organically over time as a group of people start talking to one another. SPEAKER_05: Yeah, Esperanto itself means one who hopes and that will all make sense once you hear the story because it's a pretty wonderful story actually. I didn't know much about it. I just thought it was kind of one of these goofy fringe things. And it is a fringe thing. There are about a thousand people who are native, not just Esperanto speakers, but where their first language that they learned was Esperanto. They are native speakers. SPEAKER_05: Dave Reus helped us with this and he dug up George Soros, billionaire, oh, I don't know. I'm sure people describe him in a lot of ways depending on who you are. SPEAKER_05: But as the most famous Esperanto speaker, but I did poke around a little bit and found that Tolstoy, J.R.R. Tolkien spoke Esperanto and Lumiere, basically the father of modern cinema, and as this will come as a surprise when you see later on what happened, but Joseph Stalin apparently knew how to speak Esperanto. SPEAKER_02: Huh, that is kind of a surprise. The thing I think that differentiates George Soros though is he was a native speaker. Like that was his first language was Esperanto. SPEAKER_05: Yeah, but I looked over the list of just speakers, notable speakers, and there are a lot of people in the list, but I just hadn't heard of many of them. SPEAKER_02: Stalin's a big surprise. I'd like to add one more to that list of notable Esperanto speakers, our own Ben Bolin from Stuff They Don't Want You To Know. I thought he spoke Esperanto. SPEAKER_05: That tracks. SPEAKER_02: He did. I emailed him just to make sure that I wasn't just making something up in my head, and he said, yeah, he used to be into it, and he just kind of fell out of it, and then he emailed me like hours later and was like, damn it, Josh, now I'm back into Esperanto. SPEAKER_02: So he's back into it, everybody. SPEAKER_05: Well, learning Esperanto is about as Ben Bolin a thing as I can imagine. SPEAKER_02: It is because it's inclusive. It's intelligent. It's curious people. It's witty. It seems to be like one of the better, most more nice or kind online communities that you'll come across from what I can tell. SPEAKER_05: And it's fringe, and that's Ben. SPEAKER_02: For sure. Yeah, and again, that's Ben Bolin from Stuff They Don't Want You To Know. SPEAKER_05: That's right. So you said it was a constructed language. I guess we'll talk a little bit about why people would construct a language and a little bit of the history of these languages. SPEAKER_05: There are a lot of reasons for doing that. Most of them are because they want to create a language that's easier to learn, that's simpler. A lot of times there might be religious reasons or philosophical reasons. Some people just do it for fun. A lot of them were designed to be a universal language in Esperanto. Usually Esperanto ticks a lot of these boxes, as we'll see, but a lot of them are created for like, hey, wouldn't it be better if everybody could speak a language worldwide? SPEAKER_02: A universal language, a language where if you – I guess the whole point of a universal language is definitely the point of Esperanto. The idea is that if you can speak a common language with anybody else on the planet, SPEAKER_02: that should conceivably do away with a lot of different conflicts that probably arise from disputes over language, from differences in language, from an inability to see one another's viewpoint because we're having trouble talking with one another. SPEAKER_02: And that's kind of the basis of a lot of the constructed languages, that idea that if we can all speak a universal language, there'll be a global human family or world, which that does sound like it would be up George Soros' alley. SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I mean, if you just could create a language where all it was was don't shoot, and how about a plate of cookies and a glass of milk? SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah. You know how far we'd go? It'd be a much better world. SPEAKER_05: So, invented languages have – you know, people have always sort of been doing this here and there. But in the 19th century, it seems to have really hit its stride. There were more than 100 constructed languages that – not decade, that century alone. And Esperanto is far and away the most popular today, although for a long, long time, it was a language created by a German priest named Johann Schleyer called Wallerpuck. Yeah, Wallerpuck. SPEAKER_02: Apparently God told him to do it? Sure, mission from God. Yeah, what else are you going to do? You're going to make that language. And I'm sure he was like, are you sure you want to call it Wallerpuck? And God was like, get busy. And he did. And it actually caught on really well. There seems to have been kind of a bug in the late 19th century, at least in the west, of invented languages. And Wallerpuck apparently fit the bill, and it spread far and wide. I can't not say it like that. I'm sorry. That's fine. They started having like international congresses or conferences of Wallerpuck. President Grover Cleveland's wife, Frances, named their dog Wallerpuck. Like it was a worldwide phenomenon. Even if you didn't know it or had no interest in learning it, you knew about it. SPEAKER_05: Yeah, that's because that dog threw up all over the place, though. SPEAKER_05: We had a cat named Underfoot, literally. My dad named this cat Underfoot. That's a very good name. And I'll give you two guesses why. SPEAKER_02: Because the cat had very long legs. And no feet to speak of. That's right. It was underfooted. SPEAKER_05: So that conference you were talking about for Wallerpuck was 1889, but a couple of years before that. So it was cruising and doing pretty well. But two years before that, Esperanto was created and really took it over the next 30, 40 years or so. SPEAKER_02: I mean, imagine there being a trend today of like a universal language is catching on, like on TikTok. Oh, God. Like it would just take off, but it's such a bizarre thing to think of. And this is what people were into. And this was long before social media. So it was hard for something to become a global phenomenon. And yet not one, but two universal languages took hold in the 1880s. So Esperanto apparently just totally supplanted Wallerpuck, but there is a little footnote of it. Apparently, the Danes say, what we would say, like it's all Greek to me, like I don't understand what you're saying. The Danish expression is it's pure Wallerpuck. That makes sense. Yeah, it's great. I love that. I love learning Danish expressions. SPEAKER_00: SPEAKER_05: I'm going to start saying that. I don't say it's all Greek to me much anyway, but if that ever comes up, I'm going to say it's pure Wallerpuck. Yeah. SPEAKER_02: And no offense to our Greek listeners. It's just something someone says here. Yeah. I wonder what the Greeks think about that, actually. I don't know. I don't know if it's gotten back to them yet. SPEAKER_05: Yeah. So should we talk a little bit about this, the creator of Esperanto, who was, I tried to find out bad things about this guy, but he seems like a pretty remarkable, humble, well-intentioned fellow. SPEAKER_02: And I also read that he was one of those rare people who would sleep just a couple hours a night and rather than sit around and like stare at the wall, he did interesting things. He was a polyglot. He learned tons of different languages. He was well-read. He was an optometrist. He did all sorts of stuff. But along the way, one of the things he did was create Esperanto. And he had a pretty great, well, not great, but a pretty heavy backstory to it. SPEAKER_05: Yeah. His name, we haven't even said his name yet, he's known as L.L. Zamenhof or Tzamenhof, but his full name was Ludwik Leitzer Tzamenhof, born on December 15th, which is National Tzamenhof Day. Oh, that makes sense. SPEAKER_02: Sure. SPEAKER_05: Yeah. In 1859, born in Bialystok, Poland, he was Jewish, as was a lot of Jews. A lot of Bialystok, about 70 percent. Also some Germans, some Russians, obviously Poles. And growing up there was pretty rough because there was a lot of ethnic violence going on. There were Jews being attacked by Poles. There were Germans being attacked by Russians. In 1881, there was a false, I guess, accusation that Jews were behind the assassination of Alexander II of Russia. SPEAKER_05: And that started the pogroms, which were these organized massacres of Polish and Russian Jewish communities. SPEAKER_02: Yeah, because Poland was annexed by Russia from 1807 to 1921, which is why they would have cared. That was their czar. And apparently it wasn't the Jews at all or anybody who had anything to do with Jewishness. It was anti-autocratic, a group called the Norodnya Volje, People's Will. And they threw a bomb and blew him up. And apparently his successor, his son, Tsar Alexander III, was even worse. But from those pogroms that L.L. Zamenhof was alive to witness, and even before that, just the ethnic violence that was endemic to Bialystok, that had a really big effect on him. And that's where he developed this idea that humanity is way more connected than we realize, that we have all these false constructs that separate us, that don't have to separate us, but do time and time again. Language is one of them. He cited religion as one of them. And he was very Jewish. He was a very religious Jewish person, but he still recognized that religion creates conflict sometimes it has historically. And he felt like you could kind of, you could keep the religion, you could keep the different SPEAKER_02: nations, you can keep the things that do divide us, as long as they had something like a universal language laying over the whole thing that could diffuse the conflicts that grow up from those things that divide us. SPEAKER_05: Yeah, which was, and he was a kid. I mean, this is remarkable stuff for a preteen and then teenager to sort of understand. So he's clearly a brilliant, empathetic, passionate human being. I think as the family story goes, at least, he was 10 years old, and he wrote a play called The Tower of Babel, colon, The Bialystok Tragedy in Five Acts as a 10-year-old. So just this idea of sort of stripping away these divisions and realizing like, hey, we're all human beings. That's the one, like at the root, that's what we are. And we all literally have that in common, yet we divide ourselves. Like it's just a remarkable thing for a kid and a lesson for everybody of all ages still. SPEAKER_02: Yeah. As he was raised, he learned Yiddish, which apparently grew out of a German dialect that's written in Hebrew. I didn't realize that. But it's the universal language of the Ashkenazi Jews, the Jewish people in Central and Eastern Europe. So he already understood what a universal language could do. You could take a Jewish person from Poland and a Jewish person from Czechoslovakia and put them in a room and they could speak to one another through that second tongue, Yiddish. So he set about kind of trying to modernize Yiddish. SPEAKER_02: Maybe he could spread that. And then he stopped pretty much in his tracks because he realized that what he was trying to do was say, hey, everybody, let's all learn the language of the people you consider criminals and spies. It was like a really hard sell that he just realized wasn't going to go anywhere. So he abandoned trying to sell Yiddish or create a universal language out of Yiddish and just set about creating one from scratch, which is what Esperanto came from. SPEAKER_05: What a setup. It is. SPEAKER_02: It was. It's going pretty well so far. You released this as the show. SPEAKER_05: Best setup ever. I'm going to say it even though it annoys some people. Should we take a break? SPEAKER_02: I'm going to say it even though it annoys everybody. Yes, we should. SPEAKER_05: All right. We'll be right back. SPEAKER_13: As the number one audio company, I heart media gives you access to all every audience, live conversations, trusted influencers, and the insights and data you need to grow. I heart media is your access company. Go to I heart results.com for more. SPEAKER_12: What's up everybody. I'm Dwayne Wade and I've been blessed to have so many titles so far in my life, but now I'm adding podcast hosts with my new podcast called The Y with Dwayne Wade. How did you feel about me in 2006? Well, there wasn't a lot of love there, I'd say. SPEAKER_10: So there was definitely, yeah, there was definitely some, some cold times. SPEAKER_12: As I step into a new phase of my life after basketball, I find myself with new inspirations, new motivations, and new whys. On this show, I will have intimate conversations with some of the biggest names in sports. 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You're already super woman on your own, but imagine how transformative things could be if you allowed yourself the opportunity to embrace sisterhood. Well, over here, we encourage each other. We hold each other accountable. We teach each other and we cast out the spirit of shame. Through honest conversations, sermons, and interviews with other dynamic women, my goal is to empower women around the world to elevate to the best versions of themselves. So girl, get up and listen to the Woman Evolved podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect podcast network. I heart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_05: All right, so we're back. Really quickly, that sort of made me before we left and talked about people being annoyed by asking to take a break. That came to mind because I jumped on Reddit recently on our subreddit and actually started SPEAKER_05: an account because there was so much just sort of bad information. Like Jerry doesn't even work with him anymore and just all these weird things that people sort of assume that were wrong. And I've since learned that that's, and even Redditors kind of said like, that's kind of a thing people like surmise a lot. So I signed up for a few days and answered like, geez, a lot of questions for like a full day and then got right back off. But just wanted people to know if they thought I was some phony that that was really me. SPEAKER_05: And most people were awesome. You had your own stunt AMA. Yeah, sort of. You know what I don't like about AMAs though? Is it just that rapid fire sort of thing? So this was like a slow burn AMA. And it's all still there. A lot of answered questions like with correct information. And like I said, almost everyone is really, really nice. And not everyone is, but that's just the nature of online interactions. SPEAKER_02: The Internet's that's silly that they think Jerry doesn't work with us anymore. She doesn't even exist. SPEAKER_05: Someone was really annoyed though about like every time they ask if it's time to take a break. And I was like, we do that because we don't script this out. And I'm genuinely wondering if it's a good time to take a break. SPEAKER_02: Yeah. What a weird thing to be upset about. It's a conversation. Anyway, thanks to everyone who participated. SPEAKER_05: And you can go there and check it out if you want. Back to Esperanto. Yes. SPEAKER_02: You want me to pick it up? Because we don't script this stuff. SPEAKER_05: Why did you ask me that? That's so annoying. SPEAKER_02: So we said that LL Zamenhof had said, okay, I'm going to start from scratch. I'm going to create a language that doesn't come from anywhere. That's not spoken by anybody. I'm going to make this universal language from scratch. And so his 19th birthday party, he had already done enough that he handed out pocket dictionaries and grammar charts to the guests of his birthday. What a swinging party for a 19 year old. He called the new language Lingvo Internazia or no Internazia because that sees it. SPEAKER_05: SPEAKER_02: Remember? Yeah. Yeah. And he composed a little hymn and I kind of taught myself how to pronounce it even though I'm going to completely screw it up, but may I? SPEAKER_05: You got to sing it though. SPEAKER_02: No. Yeah. No, you don't. You have to say it solemnly like this. Mala miketei de las nazies. Cado cado jam tempesta. La tote homose infamilia co'une gare sodibe. SPEAKER_05: Nice work. Can I tell everyone what it means? SPEAKER_02: Yes, but you have to sing it. Okay. SPEAKER_05: Let the hatred of the nations fall. The time is already here. All humanity must unite in one family. SPEAKER_02: It doesn't rhyme. So when I read it, it just said it didn't rhyme. SPEAKER_05: So he's cruising with this thing. He has this banging 19th birthday party where he's given out this stuff to his friends. I'm sure they're just like, who is this guy even? This is amazing. And in 1887, he self-published a pamphlet, a 42-page pamphlet called, are you going to SPEAKER_05: pronounce this stuff? SPEAKER_02: Unua Libro. Okay. SPEAKER_05: I thought that was right. It means first book. And as you'll see, if you notice some of these words sound like other languages, it's because like other constructed languages, it's usually based on like the words or based on some other words. SPEAKER_05: So when you hear Esperanto, like if you go to watch a scene from the Esperanto William Shatner movie that you can watch on YouTube. Yeah. Incubus. When was that? 66. SPEAKER_02: 66, everybody says, but Turner Classic Movies listed as 65, which I find confusing, but everybody else is 66. SPEAKER_05: Aside with TCM always. But if you go to and you hear or just, you know, I looked up on YouTube just like Esperanto conversations or if you bump into Ben Boleyn somewhere in Atlanta. SPEAKER_05: You'll sit there and you'll go, oh, wow, that sounds a little bit like Spanish some. And maybe it might sound Italian, which Spanish also sounds kind of Italian sometimes. And so a lot of it might sound a little bit familiar, like Libro for book, like that makes sense, like the word library. So just pointing out that when you hear Esperanto words and you think it sounds familiar, it's not by accident. SPEAKER_02: Yeah. The reason why, especially if you are a Westerner, three quarters of the root words, he started out with 900 of them, as we'll see, are taken from Romance languages. So it's if you're an English speaker, it's very easy to pick up. SPEAKER_05: That's a much simpler way to say what that says. SPEAKER_02: So in the in the first book, Unua Libro, which I can I can understand what that means just from the little primer, which I have to say hats off to Dave. He put together a primer for us in this article that like when you go back and research it more widely, you're like, this is really difficult to like kind of wrangle into one SPEAKER_02: small little ball. And he managed to do that really, really well. So way to go, Dave. SPEAKER_02: But that first book, Unua Libro, it had some sample translations that said, here's here's how you say this, this stuff. Here's the grammar rules. Here's the dictionary. Here's how you pronounce it. And he said that the his pen name, he wrote it as a pen name, Doctoro Esperanto, or Dr. Hopeful is what it means. SPEAKER_02: And he called again his language the lingvo internazia. And that's what he thought everybody was going to call it. But instead, everybody said, I like this Dr. Hopeful cat. Let's just call his language Esperanto. SPEAKER_05: Yeah, which is sort of ironic, because from the beginning, he was a very humble guy and didn't want to be like he didn't name it, you know, Zamanhofer or whatever, like he didn't want it to be named after him. He didn't want to own it. SPEAKER_05: We would call something like this open source today. He didn't want it to be about him. So the fact that he made up a name and that they named it after him anyway is kind of funny. I get the sense that it probably didn't bother him too much because he seemed like a good guy. But his goal, and we'll talk about sort of the other stuff that came along later as far as his sort of desire to attach other meaning to it, but his sort of root goal at the beginning was I want a language for the love of whoever you worship that is easier to learn than everything else out there. And I want it to be a language, like you've mentioned, sort of from the get-go that can unite people and promote peace, like two very sort of noble pursuits, I think. SPEAKER_02: So okay, let's talk about goal one, a language that's for the love of whatever you worship, easier to learn than most of the other languages out there, right? SPEAKER_02: Right. Apparently, you could learn Esperanto in something like about 40 hours of class time, one full week of learning. You'll walk out of there on the end of the day Friday being able to converse basically in Esperanto, tell people where you live, who you are, what you like, point to clouds and identify them correctly. SPEAKER_05: That is... No, don't shoot. How about a plate of cookie and some milk? SPEAKER_02: Exactly. They should teach that first, for sure. SPEAKER_05: Yeah. SPEAKER_02: I mean, you can just know without even knowing anything about learning languages, that's really a short amount of time. It takes about 100 to 200 hours to learn French or German to the same degree. There was another person who estimated that for English speakers, it's five times easier to learn Esperanto than French or Spanish, 10 times easier than Russian and 20 times easier than Chinese. And again, a large part of that is because the root words are taken from Romance languages. So just recognizing generally being able to make a guess in almost every case what that word means, that's a huge leg up and that's why it's so much easier in part. But the other part is the grammar that he created is so standard and with such regularity that that's the other part that makes it that much easier to learn, especially for Romance language speakers. SPEAKER_05: Yeah. I mean, the hard part about learning a language is usually not memorizing root words and learning basic grammar. It's the irregular verbs. It's all these exceptions to rules. French has more than 2,000 irregular verbs. English is notoriously tough to learn as a non-native speaker. Yeah, think about this, just about irregular verbs real quick, Chuck. SPEAKER_02: For the English to be, pretty basic stuff, it's conjugated as be, being, been, are, am, is, was, and were. Now, if you were just approaching those words as a non-English speaker to begin with, you wouldn't think was had anything to do with be or are has anything to do with be. That's what causes the confusion in not just English but almost any language, irregular verbs and exceptions to the standard rules. SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and, you know, we did a whole episode on language acquisition, right? SPEAKER_02: I'm pretty sure. I'm sure we did, yeah, for sure. SPEAKER_05: Because I'm just consistently knocked out that babies and to toddlers and so on just SPEAKER_05: pick up language. It's really remarkable to me still to see that kind of thing. But Esperanto, and we're just going to go over some of the sort of the base rules here, and I think you will find yourself like we did just saying, oh my God, that's amazing, and it makes so much sense. There are 16 grammatical rules. There are no irregular verbs. There are no exceptions to rules. SPEAKER_05: And these are just, this isn't everything, but these are just a few examples of kind of like how much sense it makes. All nouns are going to end with the letter O. That's why I said jerk wado at the beginning. SPEAKER_04: SPEAKER_05: Adverbs all, all of them end in the letter A. Adverbs all end in the letter E. There are no genders. That's another place where learning a foreign language can be confusing is, you know, the different cases and genders and stuff like that and having to change things around. Not in Esperanto, my friend. And then this is sort of just a fun one. La, L-A, is the only word for the. SPEAKER_02: Right, not la, le, lo, il, none of that stuff. El, none of that. It's all la, the, everything. And then it's up to the conjugation of the verb that changes that or the adverb or the adjective or whatever. Because it's standard, when you see like an O or an A or an E, you can identify a word in a sentence as a verb, an adverb, a noun, that kind of thing. SPEAKER_02: So the infinitive form of verbs, and by the way, I had to look most of this up. Like I was like, what's an adverb again? It's been a while since English 101. An adverb is something like above, clearly, hourly. It describes an adjective, a verb, or some other stuff. An infinitive form is like to something, to do, like the basic form, like to eat. It ends in an I, so it's mangi, okay? SPEAKER_02: In tense, like I eat, that would be as manjaz. It ends in a yes. SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and we should point out that it doesn't matter who is eating. If he is eating or I'm eating or she's eating or they're eating, it's all the same. SPEAKER_02: Exactly. There's no irregular verbs. It's beautiful, right? In past tense, instead of something like sing sang song, where it should all just be sing, sing, singed, that's what he does. I know, it sounds weird, doesn't it? SPEAKER_02: Well, sure. SPEAKER_02: But that's what he does in this. Everything in past tense ends in ES, so manjaz. I ate, you ate, they ate, it's all manjaz. And then with future, it's manjos. And then with a command, you just add a u, manju. And that's it. That's how you conjugate verbs. There's no exceptions to that rule at all. SPEAKER_05: Yeah. It's pretty amazing. I guess it just makes sense that, because I kind of struggled with why other languages are so irregular, but if it's organic in its growth, then that's just bound to happen, I think. SPEAKER_02: It is. I looked up why, and it's actually fascinating. It's because these languages often absorb other people from other language groups, and they bring their words with them. And so languages grow by adopting other words changing. And so rather than completely altering how something that usually ends in ED, like sing, instead of just totally altering how it used to be, you just kind of change it to the new form, like sang or sung. That's how irregular verbs come up. Nobody's like, I really want to screw people up in the future. I'm going to add this. It just happens organically. So when you set about creating a constructed language, you can purposely, deliberately avoid any irregular verbs and make it that much easier to learn. My question that came up, Chuck, is how long, yes, I said up, Chuck, how long does it take until a language like Esperanto starts developing irregular verbs? SPEAKER_05: Well, I have a strong feeling, and I'd love to hear from some Esperantists, that they fight that tooth and nail because that defeats the whole purpose and spirit of it. SPEAKER_02: Okay, hasn't happened yet then is that answer. SPEAKER_05: I mean, that would be my guess. Yeah, I'm on record. SPEAKER_02: Okay, I'd love to hear from them too though. SPEAKER_05: But if you haven't noticed that Esperanto, and this is a word you might not know, but it's called an agglutinative language, which is the words are formed from combinations of shorter words basically, which English has a lot of those, all language has a lot of those, but Esperanto has all those. SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so you've got your root word, and then you have affixes, prefixes and suffixes, and kind of like how you conjugate it with the I for to eat or an AS for you eat. That's it, that's the whole grammar, right? So the reason why he did this, again, because not just like irregular verbs, but weird words that all describe the same thing is another thing that creeps into language organically. They've used the example of tree, right? Good one, yeah. SPEAKER_05: You know what a tree is in English? SPEAKER_02: It's one of those plants that's got the wood and the bark and the leaves and they're tall and everything. Everybody loves to hug them, right? SPEAKER_02: Tree makes sense, but rather than young tree, we have the word sapling, which combines proto-Indo-European and proto-Germanic words. In English, sapling it is because it means young tree. It's the young version of a tree, it's very cute. A bunch of trees is called a forest, that's Old French from Latin, and then a botanical garden that has a bunch of trees is an arboretum, that's just straight up Latin. All of those are English words, sapling, forest, arboretum, and none of them sound like tree. So by creating roots that just describe one thing and then adjusting what they mean by adding a prefix or a suffix but keeping that root word, he got around that kind of conundrum. SPEAKER_05: Yeah, so for instance, tree, in Esperanto is arbo. That young tree, which is a sapling for us, is an arbido, and as we'll see, IDO is sort of the suffix for any kind of baby version of something, which is taken, I know Spanish does that. Like there were two chucks at my job at a Mexican restaurant and I was Chuc-ito. Cute. SPEAKER_05: Because I was younger than the original Chuck. Wasn't that a Taco Bell menu item in the 90s? SPEAKER_05: Probably so. Two Chuc-itos and another Chuc-ito, three Chuc-itos. A young tree instead of a sapling is an arbido. SPEAKER_05: A lot of trees instead of a forest is an arbaro, and then that botanical garden instead of an arboretum is an arboreto. And you might think, well, that sounds a lot like arboretum. Well, it does, but it also sounds like arbo, arbido, and arbaro. Exactly, right? SPEAKER_02: So you see any of those words and you know it's talking about a tree, and then when you learn, IDO means the younger version of it, or aro means like a group of whatever you're talking about, you just learned a ton of grammar, just right off the bat. And then also note that all those end in O because they're all nouns. And again, all nouns end in O in Esperanto. SPEAKER_05: Yeah. So we mentioned IDO, I-D-O is a suffix meaning like the small version of something or a baby something. And we also mentioned that there wasn't gender. There is, but not in terms of like, you know, how you will conjugate a sentence. It's just a suffix. It's I-N-O is a female version of something. You also have A-R-O, which is a group like vorto, V-O-R-T-O is a word. It just makes a lot of sense. E-J-O and the J's are pronounced as a Y, isn't that right? E-J-O is a place for something. So K-U-I-R-I, how would you pronounce that? SPEAKER_02: Cuirio. Cuirio. Oh, just the first version. Oh, cory. Why did you ask me to pronounce this? Well because you're in practice. Cuirio, I got it now. SPEAKER_05: Cuirio is to cook and then what's kitchen? Cuirio. Right, so you add the E-J-O, so that is the place where you would cook. SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that makes sense, right? That's not to say that Esperanto doesn't have words that you just have to memorize because that doesn't quite work because for example, there's a couple of places where you'll find a lot of books, like a library or a bookstore. So a library you'd think would be called the libereo or place of books, but actually it's called a biblioteco. A libereo is the bookstore. So, it sounds like just kind of nitpicking, but if you ever arranged to meet your friend at the libereo and they think that that's the bookstore, you're going to be sitting there waiting in the library for them a long time. SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and in fact, you know, adding, and I find this like part of the spirit of Esperanto is super cool in that they encourage you to create words as long as they follow the rules and make sense. So to attack these affixes and suffixes onto root words and devious, this is so great. Gosh, this just makes me crazy how great it is. Hospital, the word hospital in Esperanto is mal sanulejo, right? Yes. Does that make sense? Yep. So mal in Esperanto is opposite of. The san is healthy. The ul means people. The ejo, remember, as we said, means the place where something is. And so a hospital directly translated is not healthy people place, which could be a lot SPEAKER_05: of places here in the U.S. So it's kind of like Esperantists like to put words together like you do in a Scrabble SPEAKER_02: game. And the reason that it's encouraged is because out of the gate, Zamenhof, like you said, made this open source and said, here, take this and just do what you will with it and make it grow. And that's why Esperanto is still around. And one of the reasons it supplanted Volapük because the guy who created Volapük, he was very controlling, kept a controlling grip on it. And so that made it like a dying language right out of the gate because you have to let language grow and become organic on its own. Apparently, he was like, nope, God told me to do this, so I really need to keep a sharp eye on it. So I think we should also talk about the word for jet lag because it's also just super SPEAKER_05: fun. Yeah. SPEAKER_05: And we could do this all day long, but just these two examples are really great. Horzonozo, Horzonozo, H-O-R-Z-O-N-O-Z-O, exactly how it sounds. SPEAKER_05: That is, hor is time, zon is z-o-n, and then illness is ozo. So the Esperanto translation is time zone illness. Yeah, makes a lot of sense. I love that. And that sounds, a lot of this sounds like how it would be transcribed or subtitled in like China or something from English. Yeah, for sure. SPEAKER_02: I came across something. Did you see what I sent you about English translated into English is kind of hilarious? Oh, no. Oh, you didn't? I found a, I don't remember what paper it was, but as an example, they translated, I do not understand, and into several languages and one of them was English. And if you literally translate, I do not understand into English, it's I make not understand. I think about it, like that's exactly what that means, but it's not at all what you think SPEAKER_02: of. Like I do not understand sounds right, even though what you're saying literally is I make not understand. SPEAKER_05: Because do means make? SPEAKER_02: Literally. SPEAKER_05: I do not understand. I just, I had to mention that. SPEAKER_02: It just cracked me up. SPEAKER_05: No, that's really funny. All right, so let's take our second break. I'm not even asking this time. And we'll come back and talk about where Esperanto went from there right after this. SPEAKER_00: Hi, I'm Sarah Jakes Roberts host of Woman Evolved podcast. You may also know me as a pastor, author, wife, mother, businesswoman and leader. Women are shattering glass ceilings that once limited their ability to dream, grow and change the world. Well, as the definition of womanhood continues to advance, so does the woman's need to connect and assess where she fits in this ever changing world around her. No longer do women have to choose between family or career since you can have it all. You're already superwoman on your own. But imagine how transformative things could be if you allowed yourself the opportunity to embrace sisterhood. Well, over here, we encourage each other. We hold each other accountable. We teach each other and we cast out the spirit of shame through honest conversations, sermons and interviews with other dynamic women. My goal is to empower women around the world to elevate to the best versions of themselves. So, girl, get up and listen to the Woman Evolved podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect podcast network. I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_08: Hey, everyone, it's Sophia Bush, host of podcast Work in Progress. I am thrilled to tell you that Work in Progress is back for a third season. My friends, it has never been more important than right now for us to have all of these big conversations. Together, we are going to get educated, a little bit enlightened, and we will definitely be entertained. I started Work in Progress because I'm a curious person and I realized there are so many people I get to speak to that are fascinating and rare. And so I thought, why not take these conversations out into the world? I'm going to be having deep chats with thought leaders, newsmakers, celebrities, entertainers, authors, elected officials and more. You can join us and listen to Work in Progress on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. SPEAKER_12: What's up, everybody? I'm Dwayne Wade and I've been blessed to have so many titles so far in my life. But now I'm adding podcast host with my new podcast called The Why with Dwayne Wade. How did you feel about me in 2006? Well, there wasn't a lot of love there, I'd say. SPEAKER_10: So there was definitely yeah, there was definitely some some cold times. SPEAKER_12: As I step into a new phase of my life after basketball, I find myself with new inspirations, new motivations and new whys. On this show, I will have intimate conversations with some of the biggest names in sports and music, entertainment and fashion. And we will discuss the whys in their lives. Everybody welcome Rick Ross to the podcast. My God. SPEAKER_01: My brother Melo, Lindsey Bond, Paul Gasol, Pat Riley, Dirk. SPEAKER_12: Welcome. SPEAKER_03: Listen to The Why with Dwayne Wade on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts or whatever you can get your podcast. SPEAKER_12: So, Chuck, we talked a lot about how how Dr. Esperanto, Simon Hoff, the reasons why he created Esperanto. SPEAKER_02: And that was goal number two was to to create like a language that united the world. Right. The only way to learn united the world. And he originally based it on something he called Hillelism after Hillel the elder, a Jewish sage from the first century B.C.E. And Hillel's teachings can basically be summed up as the golden rule, like treat others as you'd like them to treat you. Yeah. He changed that name very quickly to Homer, homoronismo, which means basically humanitarianism. But the whole idea was the same. He called it the interna ideo, the internal idea of Esperanto, which is that it can remove those language barriers, those culture barriers, barriers between people. And to by doing so, you make people recognize that we're all humans. SPEAKER_05: Yeah. And he, I think, realized at some point, again, that sort of attaching an ism to something maybe might keep people from wanting to learn it. And I think there were also Esperantists. Dave said there were a lot of them were French intellectuals that were like, no, no, no, we don't need to attach this to an ism. So it officially wasn't attached to an ism. But I do think the spirit of all that is a big part of Esperanto still. Yeah, definitely. And people who want to learn it, even though it's not an official like ethic. SPEAKER_02: Yeah. And so, I mean, just right off the bat, they had the first international or universal Congress of Esperanto in 1905 in France. And in that conference, a schism created or was created in like a whole other language, like a version of Esperanto called Ido that was even easier to learn was introduced. And that group just went off and did their own thing, which kind of hamstrung Esperanto as it was really starting to take off. But Ido, you don't hear about any longer. You still hear about Esperanto. I'm not 100 percent sure why. Maybe it is because it had an ethic or a moral to it in addition to being easy to learn. That's like, that's my guess. But Zamenhof died in 1917. And what's sad, Dave points out, he lived long enough to see World War I. Yeah. Which he, I didn't read anything he wrote about it directly, but he would have been really bummed by that because that is not, that's what he was creating Esperanto to avoid. Yeah, absolutely. SPEAKER_05: During his life, he was nominated 14 times, 14, never won unfortunately, for the Nobel Peace Prize. And post-World War I, when the League of Nations was created to stop something like that from happening again, didn't work. In that very first meeting, there was a proposal to teach Esperanto in schools to member countries, which was pretty remarkable. It didn't happen because the French delegation vetoed that and they said, French is already the universal language, which is so haughty. SPEAKER_05: But that's, they literally kept Esperanto, like who knows where it would be now if they hadn't stopped that. Same thing with the U.S. at the United Nations in the 40s after the U.N. was founded. SPEAKER_02: Somebody said, hey, we should all learn Esperanto. And the U.S. said, nope, English is already a universal language. And that actually shows how language can like enhance the standing of the countries that speak that language that the rest of the world sees as basically a universal language. And why Esperanto didn't do that. Because it didn't come from any country. It didn't come from any ethnic group or any region. It was a from-scratch universal grammar that wouldn't enhance one nation over others. SPEAKER_05: Yeah, not everyone loved it. If you think, like, who maybe wouldn't like it? Who wouldn't like this language created from a Jewish man? Hitler, you would be correct. It's written about in Mein Kampf. He said, Hitler said that it was a secret Jewish language used to plot against Germany. And I don't know if anyone ever went over to him, probably not, and said, you can actually, it's not secret at all, you can learn it in hours conversationally. So, I don't know. Hitler being Hitler. There were – and of course, you know, I'm sort of joking about that, but it was no joke at all because Hitler and others would round up Esperanto speakers and jail them or kill them. SPEAKER_05: And in fact, Hitler took his family, his surviving family that is, to the Warsaw ghetto and all three of Zamenhof's children were killed by Nazis. It's brutal. SPEAKER_05: Stalin did the same thing, which I guess is why it seems at first surprising that he learned Esperanto, but he called it the language of the spies. So I guess he was just – SPEAKER_02: That's probably why he learned it. Exactly. But even if you were a loyal communist party member, you would be killed for knowing Esperanto, which is funny because it was frequently accused of being a secret communist plot itself. So that kind of goes to show you just how nationless Esperanto actually was. Yeah, absolutely. If you get online today, if you're interested in this and you want to know like who's – how's it going today with Esperanto? SPEAKER_05: Who's speaking it? Are people into it? Yeah, people are into it. There is – it's not a huge community, but it's a very passionate community of people all over the world, people like Ben Bowlin. They find each other online. It's very easy to do that now. Obviously, before the internet, they would have local clubs and stuff like that. They would have pen pals, kind of the way that people would spread any message pre-internet. They were doing that in Esperanto. And there are, you know, there are conferences. I think there's one, the 2024 Universala Congreso is in Tanzania this year, which is pretty cool. SPEAKER_05: And it sounds just like they get together, they speak Esperanto, they work hard to keep this language and this idea alive, which is a very – again, I think it's still a noble pursuit. And Esperanto has its own teaching app, Learnu, with an exclamation point, at learnu.net. You can also pick it up on Duolingo and Babbel, but I looked on Duolingo. SPEAKER_02: They have 381,000 people signed up to learn Esperanto, which is more than Klingon, more than Navajo, and more than Yiddish. It's toward the bottom, but it's still not the last one. 380,000 people worldwide is nothing to sneeze at. SPEAKER_02: Heck no, it's more than Klingon. There's also a couple of podcasts, Radio Esperanto – radio, by the way, is the same word in English and Esperanto. Oh, already ended with an L. SPEAKER_05: SPEAKER_02: Usone, personae, American in person. But you have to probably kind of know already a little bit of Esperanto. Yeah, I meant to check that out. I'm going to listen to one of those and just see if I can understand anything. SPEAKER_05: You'll be like, oh, they said radio again. I know what that means. SPEAKER_02: One other thing before we leave. Do you have anything else? Yeah, I got one, so two other things, I guess. SPEAKER_05: Okay, well, you go first. SPEAKER_02: Okay. 1905, we mentioned that year earlier. What year was that? Was that the first year of – SPEAKER_05: The first Congress, the Universal Congress. SPEAKER_02: The first Congress? Well, that makes sense then, because that was the year that the Esperanto flag was debuted. SPEAKER_05: It is called the Verda Stello, or the Green Star, and it's nice. It's a green rectangle. It's got a little white square in the upper left corner and a green star inside that white square. And apparently that was a big part of the branding, the color green. LL early on wanted it to all sort of look the same and feel the same, so his pamphlets and books and everything was in green. And I think green is just a big – or I'm sorry, verda was a big Esperanto color. Verda. That's branding 101. SPEAKER_02: SPEAKER_05: Branding 101. Okay, well, I'll say mine, then you can finish with yours. SPEAKER_02: I just wanted to talk about Incubus real quick, that 1965, 1966 Shatner movie. I watched a little bit of it. SPEAKER_05: I did too, and it is really hard to follow. And when you're listening to them speak, you're like, oh, this is – okay, it's Esperanto. SPEAKER_02: If you speak Esperanto, it drives you up the wall, because apparently no one in the film knew Esperanto. They learned their dialogue in two weeks, and there was no one who knew Esperanto on the set to coach them. So it's just moment after moment of bad Esperanto pronunciation. And I saw in Quartz there was an article that quoted like a film reviewer from The Age who said that Incubus is like a foreign film from a country that never existed. What a great description. I thought so too. Worth checking out five minutes of it. SPEAKER_00: SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely. SPEAKER_05: That's it? SPEAKER_02: That's it. Oh, okay. Well, if you want to know more about Esperanto, everybody, go check it out. You do worse than starting – no, actually, you couldn't do worse than starting with Incubus, but start there anyway. And since I said Incubus, it's time for listener mail. SPEAKER_05: I'm going to call this Ain't Quite Right. Hey, guys, listening to the latest episode, I got a kick out of Josh saying that people who request – and this is on dry cleaning – who request a double crease in their pants ain't quite right. I stand by that. Yeah, it's like a Southernism, I guess. I used to live in Miami. Now I'm back in Maryland where I belong. Go Hagerstown flying boxcars. And I worked as a housekeeper for the opulently wealthy. One woman – I could name drop, but I won't – requested from her housekeepers that her bedsheets be ironed. No joke. She wanted her flat and fitted king-sized bedsheets laundered and ironed every day. Wow. SPEAKER_05: Here's the kicker. This woman almost became my mother-in-law, but I digress. Definitely not quite right. Love the show, guys. It's my news source, my companion, my teacher, and has given an otherwise awkward me plenty of knowledge to be able to connect with someone on almost any topic. And that was a lovely email from the wonderful Ashlyn Powers. Thanks a lot, Ashlyn. SPEAKER_02: That was great. I would advise you against using us as your news source, though. But other than that, thank you very much. Agreed. SPEAKER_05: If you want to be like Ashlyn and tell us a great little anecdote, leaving out the names to protect the not necessarily innocent, but, you know, just out of tact, you can do so via email. SPEAKER_02: Send it off to stuffpodcasts at iHeartRadio.com. SPEAKER_09: Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. SPEAKER_07: And wherever you get your podcasts, saveGeorgeBailey.com. Subscribe now. SPEAKER_12: I'm Dwayne Wade, and I've been blessed to have so many titles so far in my life. But now I'm adding podcast hosts with my new podcast called The Why With Dwayne Wade. On this show, I will have intimate conversations with some of the biggest names in sports, in music, in entertainment, in fashion, and we will discuss the whys in their lives. Listen to The Why With Dwayne Wade on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you can get your podcasts. SPEAKER_06: Hey there, I'm Maya Shunker, and I'm a scientist who studies human behavior. Many of us have experienced a moment in our lives that changes everything, a moment that instantly divides our life into a before and an after. On my podcast, A Slight Change of Plans, I talk to people about how they've navigated exactly these moments. Because as we all know, the only constant is change. So let's make the most of it. Listen to A Slight Change of Plans on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.