La Mondo Ne Havas Atendejon: Esperanto Moves Ahead
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"The world has no waiting room," asserts this Esperanto translation of Dutch playwright Maurits Dekker. Esperanto itself embodies this principle. Far from wavering in the wings, farther still from the failure that some critics declare it, this conlang is riding the Internet to the greatest vitality in its history. And the trend shows no sign of softening.
Running in circles
When I learned Esperanto, it was still largely theory in search of practice. There were Esperanto-speaking families, some of which had produced first-language Esperanto speakers, and a vast international network of Esperantists, but most learners had little chance to use the language in natural contexts. Like the language itself, most opportunities were artificial: publications and functions conceived expressly for using Esperanto.
Five years later I got online, and was gratified to find a host of well-established Esperanto sites. (Esperantists were among the first to appreciate the implications of the Web.) Still, most early online Esperanto text was about Esperanto. Though a necessary first step, such sites hardly fulfil Esperanto's mandate to equip people to communicate whatever they've got on their minds. I quickly got bored with introspective sites and moved on.
Now it's another five years later, and I'm writing a book on First Nations agriculture. The research is arcane, sources are spare, and I'm having to mine remote corners of the Web to find information. Determined to leave no stone unturned, I ran a speculative Esperanto Shadow Net search.
Aªoj estas ?an¯itaj! (Things have changed!)
Bam! Welcome to the future! My queries netted a whole folder of pages. Prodding a little more, I was delighted to discover that today's Internet positively hums with Esperanto content. Interesting content. Valuable content. I haven't yet figured out how to upgrade my browser for Esperanto diacriticals, so standard text, like the title of this section, is strewn with unreadable characters. Pages in Net-friendly non-diacritical Esperanto make skimming easier, but I still convert saved text to standard Esperanto on my desktop, using search-and-replace.
Signs of Esperanto's burgeoning enfranchisement include the proliferation of international Esperanto chats and Euroseek's (partly) Esperanto search interface. Esperanto advertising has also hit the beach, as the site for A.K. Izumibashi, a Japanese sake company, attests. (Fascinating reading, too.) I also found a PSA for a Polish women's shelter. Recipes for such fare as supo el kukurbo (pumpkin soup) are further evidence of Esperanto's escape from the ivory tower. Nor are the young left out, enjoying among other resources the complete text of eight of the fourteen Oz books, available online in Esperanto translation, and a (bluntly candid) dating advice column for high schoolers. As final proof, dreary legal documents are also making their Esperanto debut.
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