Saluton! Greetings!

A new Substack about the Esperanto language – for speakers and non-speakers

Photo by Noah on Unsplash

Welcome to the new Substack about Esperanto!

While the COVID pandemic taught us to keep distance, we invented ways of getting close to others anyway – that elbow greeting was a hit in large parts of the world.

People naturally want to communicate. We want to talk. And we also want to use words, not just elbows. For that reason, thousands of languages have emerged during history, and we really do talk a lot. however, not all of us, with all the others.

Some languages are widespread. English is spoken by 5% of the world population, for instance, which is a lot, but if you know English and want to talk to one of the 95% other people, then what? Should they immediately start learning English, so that you can talk to them?

Other languages are big too: Chinese, Spanish, French, German, and then, a bit peculiarly, also Italian. not that I’m against Italian, not at all, I am myself working on getting better at it – I like that language – but it is peculiar that it is “big”, since it isn’t spoken natively by that many people in the world. Nevertheless, many people want to learn it as a second language.

You can have many good reasons for learning a second language – for being able to check in at a hotel or order food in a restaurant at your favorite tourist destination, for instance. Or maybe you enjoy actually talking to people in the world, about their lives or philosophy, or about some common interest – say, you are a stamp collector and like to go around the world to stamp conferences and talk to people with that same interest.

Now, if you are interested in people and want to talk to them, around the globe, you’ll find that you have to learn quite a lot of languages. And yet, you’ll never really get there – you’ll not become fluent in all the languages needed to all the time, no matter where you go, be able to talk to everybody.

Of course, you’ll buy a small book of phrases, or you’ll use a clever app for your smartphone that can somehow help you translate. But that will only help you create a thin frame for a conversation, and you’ll likely find it complicated, and in the end, demotivating, to not really understand anything yourself, only knowing how to push buttons on the phone or browse around in the small book.

For this, and for many other reasons that I will get into along the way, there are such languages as Esperanto.

Esperanto is, as a basic rule, nobody’s native language. So, everybody you’ll ever meet and talk to in Esperanto, has learned it as a second language, just like you.

It is easy to learn. Most people can learn it in a short time. You don’t need to set aside several years of full-time studies for this – just get started with a bit of time each day, and you will find yourself able to speak Esperanto in a few weeks.

And why is it so simple, when, say, Chinese is so difficult?

Because it was designed to be easy to learn. It has rules, as all languages, but these rules are consistent. So, as soon as you have learned that nouns end in the letter o, and if they are in plural, a j is added in the end, then you can trust that this is how it always is.

Same with other types of words, and even the words themselves have been taken, more or less, from a number of common languages, so that you’ll likely have heard them before and can understand them immediately when you hear or read them, even if you never learned them as such, as part of Esperanto.

Everybody you talk to in Esperanto will of course need to learn it first. And that’s one of the charms about the language: you can rest assured that everyone learning this language is doing so because they genuinely want to talk to people from all over the world. It is inherent in the language and it’s reasons for existing, that it is a language of the world, for people who want to communicate.

That makes a difference when trying to communicate, because both you and the other Esperantist will do your best to make the communication work. That alone makes it much more likely to become a successful talk. And the simplicity of the language help as well.

I will not teach you the language in this article, it is merely here to say hello.

As Substack doesn’t support Esperanto as a language, it will be difficult for anyone looking for pages in Esperanto, or about Esperanto, to find this page – and others, if they exists.

So, please share this page with anyone you think could be interested – put it on your recommendations list, if you have your own Substack, and mention it in posts and Notes, and on other social media, as you think makes sense.

There are a couple of other Esperanto pages on Substack, but with no activity. It goes this way with some topics on Substack, but as other social media have become too narrowly focused on whatever business area they target, there is little support by almost any platform for people to communicate about the non-business topics, such as Esperanto.

Hence, we need to do a bit more work to make it visible there.

What can you expect to find here, on this page?

As I am myself new to Esperanto, I will try to post some of what I learn, at the level I have reached at any time. So, I will write something in Esperanto – and make sure to also write it in English, to make it understandable for others who are still learning.

And I will tell about Esperanto: history, what is happening in the world of Esperanto, and which organizations exist, which books and websites, etc.

If you have some input to this – for instance, if you know about a website or a Substack, or anything else about Esperanto, please tell about it, so we can share it here.

That’s it for now – looking forward to seeing what this can become, and how many of the people on Substack will be interested in it.

No matter if you are almost alone here, or many more will join: I’m happy to see you reading this and will do my best to make it worthwhile to subscribe.