alklaku por alilingvaj paĝoj Esperanto Association of Ireland Esperanto-Asocio de Irlando

The language instinct

Ciaran Carson on the dream that linked his father, a Belfast postman, to a 19th century Polish doctor

I am trying to find my father among the 200 people standing on the steps of the Dining Hall of Trinity College Dublin. They are lined up five or six deep, simultaneously close and distant.  At last I make him out, though his face is hardly more than an abstract pattern, an idea of a face, for I am viewing the original photograph on the web, and something has been lost in translation.  These are pixels that were his eyes.  Nevertheless, once identified, his remembered features blossom from the mosaic, and I see him clearly.

The photograph, of the Great Joint Congress of the British and Irish Esperanto Associations, was taken at a quarter to three in the afternoon of Easter Sunday, April 6 1969, and was followed by an ecumenical service.  An inauguration and welcome was held on Good Friday.  On the Saturday were the specialist meetings, films in Esperanto and a buffet dance.  Other events on the Sunday included the annual general meeting of the British Esperanto Association, lectures and an art and entertainment evening.  There were excursions on Easter Monday.

I look at the photograph again, imagining my father participating in these events, conversing with strangers in the instant camaraderie of Esperanto, no doubt spinning yarns to them, or singing to them.  He had quite a reputation as a storyteller, and singer, in three languages: English, his first; Irish, his second; and Esperanto, his third.

As I write, it is April 14 2004, the Wednesday after Easter, and my father would be celebrating his 88th birthday, were he alive.  Ludwig Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto, died precisely a year after my father, William Carson, was born, on April 14 1917: a coincidence that was a source of pride to my father, though he never mentioned that the Titanic, built in our home town of Belfast, had struck the fatal iceberg on April 14 1912.

Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof was born in Bialystok, the first of the eight children of Marcus and Rozalia Zamenhof, on December 15 1859.  Bialystok was then in Polish Lithuania, and part of the Russian empire.  The town was a Babel.  The native upper classes spoke Polish, the lower Lithuanian; a population of Yiddish-speaking Jews had long been established; there was a substantial German mercantile class; the administration and the army were Russian, and the golden domes of a Russian Orthodox church shone in the main square.

By the age of nine Zamenhof knew, in this order, Russian, Polish, Yiddish, German and Lithuanian, as well as some Hebrew and Greek learned from his father, an atheistic Jewish teacher of geography and languages.

From an early age Zamenhof was anguished that men and women everywhere looked much the same, yet spoke differently, and thought themselves to be Poles, or Russians, Germans, Jews, and so on, instead of human beings.  Thinking that grown-ups were omnipotent, he resolved that, when he was grown up, he would abolish this evil; for no one, he said afterwards, can feel the misery of barriers as strongly as a ghetto Jew, and no one can feel the need for a language free from a sense of nationality as strongly as the Jew who is obliged to pray to God in a language long since dead, receives his education and upbringing in the language of a people who reject him, and has fellow-sufferers around the world with whom he cannot communicate.

While still at school Zamenhof began thinking of a universal language, and by 1878 he had invented one.  Five years previously his father had moved with his family to Warsaw, where, to supplement his income as a teacher of German in the Veterinary Institute, he took on extra work as a state censor.  In 1879, when Zamenhof went off to study medicine in Moscow, he left his extensive notes for the new language in his father's care. Immediately recognising the danger of possessing such documents, written in a secret language by a poor Jewish student, his father burned them.

In Moscow, Zamenhof became involved with Zionism, but grew disillusioned with the movement, which he found too exclusivist.  He returned to Warsaw, and to his dream of an international language.  Finding it destroyed, he reconstructed it from memory.  In 1886, the year in which he matriculated in ophthalmology, he became engaged to Klara Zilbernik, the daughter of a prosperous businessman.  For two years Zamenhof had unsuccessfully sought a publisher for a booklet in which he which described the new language.  Klara's father, impressed by the idealism of his future son-in-law, offered to have the book printed at his expense.  This was done; the proofs were held for two months in the censor's office, but fortunately the censor was a friend of Zamenhof's own father, who by now had withdrawn his objections to the project.

On July 14 1887 the censor authorised the booklet and it was published in Russian; editions in Polish, French, German, and English soon followed.  They all contained the same introduction and reading matter in the international language: the Lord's Prayer, a passage from the Bible, a letter, poems, the complete grammar of sixteen rules, and a vocabulary of 900 roots.  The work was signed with the pseudonym "Doktoro Esperanto" - Esperanto meaning "one who hopes" - and the new language, by general usage, became known as Esperanto.

Dr Esperanto and Klara Zilbernik were married on August 9 1887, and spent the first few months of their life together promoting Esperanto, putting the booklet describing the new language into envelopes and posting them to foreign newspapers and journals.  William Carson, my father, was born in the "Catholic ghetto" of the Falls Road district of Belfast, the first of the seven children of David and Catherine Carson, on April 14 1916.  For many years our family maintained a rumour verging on belief - which our father did nothing to dispel, and we did not undertake to check - that he had been born on Easter Monday, 1916.

It was a powerfully attractive date for one such as my father, a fervent Irish nationalist of the old school.  On that day, Padraig Pearse had proclaimed an Irish Republic and, with his comrades, had taken up arms against Britain.  Towards the end of my father's life I learned that Easter Monday 1916 fell on April 24.  My father then would have been ten days old.  I never mentioned the discrepancy to him; he had never claimed the date himself, after all.

I discovered this fact in the course of writing a memoir that included a chapter on my teenage passion for collecting stamps, particularly those of the Republic of Ireland, or the Irish Free State - or Àire, the Irish name for the island of Ireland, as it is designated on the stamps.  One of my favourites was the Easter Rising commemorative issue of 1946, commonly known as "The Gunman", which depicts an armed volunteer against a backdrop of the General Post Office in Dublin, the centre of the insurrection.

It was perfectly in keeping with the mythology that my father should have spent all his working life as a postman, beginning as a messenger at the age of14, delivering telegrams to the linen merchants, shipping and insurance agents of downtown Belfast.  It was in the Belfast GPO that he first heard the Irish language being spoken, by two of his colleagues, and fell under its spell, as he recounts in his memoir in that language, Is Cuimhin Liom an t-Am (I Remember the Time).  He was determined to learn Irish, and became fluent in a couple of years.  Willie Carson became Liam Mac Carráin, sometimes known as Liam Carson.

He proceeded to teach Irish in his spare time, and fell in love with one of his pupils, Mary Maginn.  When they married, in 1944, they made a resolution to speak exclusively Irish at home.  It was forbidden to speak English, which my siblings and I picked up off the street.  Since no one else in the neighbourhood spoke Irish, we were regarded with a mixture of terror and pity by other children.  We used Irish as a code to disparage them unbeknownst to them.  Within Ireland there was Northern Ireland; within Northern Ireland, Belfast; within Belfast, the Falls Road; within the Falls Road, the Carson family, or Clann Mhic Carráin, a household with its own laws, customs and language.

In 1937 the Irish Free State, under its new constitution, officially became Àire, and my father, aged 21, encountered Esperanto.  Liam Malone, an Esperantist, came to my father's Irish class.  He kept badgering my father to learn the new language (I translate and paraphrase from my father's memoir), but my father had no initial interest.

However: Malone had lots of pen-pals throughout Europe, one of whom was a Dutchman, Arie Kuipers.  The Dutchman began to express an interest in Irish affairs and asked Malone to teach him Irish through the medium of Esperanto.  Malone was ashamed to admit he was only a beginner at Irish himself, so asked my father if he would teach Irish to the Dutchman.  My father agreed; Malone gave his address to the Dutchman, and the next week my father got a letter, in English, from the Dutchman, saying he hoped my father had English, and if my father would teach him Irish, the Dutchman would teach him Esperanto as a recompense. So they began to write to each other.  In a couple of months my father had learned Esperanto, and Arie Kuipers was making good progress in Irish.  English was soon dispensed with. They corresponded for 50 years.

My father's learning Esperanto in a couple of months is not exceptional. Zamenhof intended his language to be easily learned.  His was not the first artificial language; many others - sometimes of a bewildering complexity, sometimes unpronounceable - preceded Esperanto.

The earliest attempts at a universal language arose from the medieval idea that man might attain to a perfect knowledge of the universe.  The whole sum of things might, it was thought, be brought by division and subdivision within an orderly scheme of classification.  To any conceivable thing or idea capable of being expressed by human speech might therefore be attached a corresponding word, like a label, on a perfectly regular and logical system.  Words would therefore be self-explanatory to any person who had grasped the system, and would serve as an index or key to the things they represented.  Language thus became an analytical tool, a philosophical system.

Say you want to find a book in a library.  You look it up in a catalogue, where you find its reference number - say, PZ0477.f.26D.  If you have learned the system of classification of that library, the reference number would tell you where to find that particular book out of millions; moreover, it would indicate what kind of book it was.  The initial P would at once place the book in a certain main division, and so on with the other numbers, till those at the end of the series would lead you to a particular bookcase, a particular shelf, and finally to the book itself.

Just so a word in a philosophical language.  In 1668 John Wilkins, Bishop of Chester and first secretary of the Royal Society, described by John Aubrey as "a very ingeniose man with a very mechanical head" published An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, in which he divided the universe into 40 categories or classes, subdivisible in turn into species.  To each class he assigned a monosyllable of two letters; to each difference, a consonant; to each species, a vowel.  For example, de means element; deb, the first of the elements, fire; deba, a portion of the element of fire, a flame.  Thus every letter of a word was meaningful, within the context of the vast library of the universe.

Not surprisingly, Wilkins's language attracted the attention of that most bookish of writers, Jorge Luis Borges, who dedicated an essay to the subject; surprisingly, he did not mention the musical language invented by Jean FranÀois Sudre in 1817.

Sudre had been struck by the fact that the notes of the scale were known with a definite syllabic value, namely, do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si, all over the civilised world.  With these seven syllables only, he proceeded to make up his vocabulary, according to principles of philosophical classification.  Initial do indicated a class of key, that of Man, moral and physical; dodo gave a sub-class, religion; dododo a third sub-division, and so on.

The other major classifications were re, clothing, household, family; mi, human actions, bad qualities; fa, country, agriculture, war, sea, travel (fafa stood for sickness and medicine); sol, arts, sciences; la, industry, commerce; and si, society, government, finance, police.  With words of five syllables, a fairly comprehensive dictionary could be made: arithmetic tells us that we could have seven monosyllabic words, 49 of two syllables, 336 of three; as for longer words, Sudre was satisfied with 2, 268 of four syllables, 9,072 of five.  By shifting the accent from one syllable to another, he formed within a single stem the verb, the noun of the thing, the noun of the person, and the adverb corresponding to a given idea.

Sudre called his language SolrÀsol, and thought its resources practically unlimited, not least because such a system lends itself to all possible forms of graphic, phonetic, and optical expression.  If the seven notes of the musical scale are pronounced in the ordinary way, you can speak the language like any other; but you can also sing it, or play it on an instrument; with bells and horns, you can communicate to a ship in distress; substitute the seven colours of the rainbow for the seven notes of the scale, and you have an optical language, to be spoken by means of flags, lanterns or rockets.

Enthusiasts of Sudre's language thought that elaborate works of oratory might be produced by means of son et lumiÀre, or poems in the form of banquets, for the system could as easily appeal to the gustatory senses.  It was undeniable that SolrÀsol was admirably suited to stenography, for the seven simple signs could be reduced further, to d, r, m, f, so, l, s.  In short, it was truly universal in its application. It was favourably reported on by committees of the French Institute, and received enthusiastic endorsements from eminent artists and scientists, including Jules Verne and Victor Hugo.

Languages such as Wilkins's and Sudre's, in which words are generated by formulae, without taking any account of existing languages and their structure, are known as a priori languages.  Directly opposed to these is the other main group of artificial languages, called a posteriori.  These are based on the principle of borrowing from existing languages: their artificiality consists of choice of words and in regularisation and simplification of vocabulary and grammar; they avoid, as far as possible, elements of arbitrary invention.

Zamenhof's is essentially an a posteriori language, built around a common stock of root-words of European origin, though it might be argued that his system of prefixes and suffixes, his solution to the problem of attaching a multiplicity of words to the multiplicity of things in the world, is a priori.

According to his own account, it came about like this: "One day, when I was in the sixth or seventh class at school, I happened to notice the sign svejcarskaja (porter's lodge - place of the porter) and then I noticed the sign konditorskaja (confectioner's shop - place of sweets).  This -skaja caught my attention and showed me that by means of suffixes one word can be made into other words which need not be separately learnt. This thought took hold of me, and suddenly I felt my feet on firm ground.  A ray of light fell upon those huge, terrifying dictionaries, and they began to dwindle rapidly before my eyes."

It has also been said that Zamenhof's Jewishness and his knowledge of Hebrew is inseparable from his invention of Esperanto, for a logical economy of root consonants is common to both languages.  Thus, in Hebrew , the root SFR is used for sefer (book), sifrah (library), and sifrut (literature), and so on.  To take an example from Esperanto, the root san generates sano (health), sana (healthy), sanulo (healthy person), malsano (ill-health), sanigi (to cure), and so on. Whatever the case, Zamenhof's list of prefixes is an interesting reflection of his priorities, or how he saw the world, thus: bo/ relative by marriage; dis/ separation, dispersal; ek/ commencement, suddenness; eks/ former; ge/ both sexes together; mal/ opposite; mis/ wrongly; pra/ primordiality, remoteness of relationship; re/ return, repetition.  The list of some 30 official suffixes, not to mention the many technical suffixes referring to science and medicine, is too long to give here.

To give some examples, ar represents a collective, or group: arb/aro, forest; hom/aro, mankind.  The suffix em is a disposition or tendency: kompren/ema, understanding; parol/ema, talkative; mort/ema, mortal.  Sometimes a suffix can apply to several related categories, as in aĵo, (i) a concrete manifestation of an abstraction: nov/aĵo, a novelty; (ii) the external manifestation of an activity: seg/aĵo, sawdust; (iii) a characteristic piece of behaviour: infan/aĵo, a childish act; (iv) the flesh of an animal: bov/aĵo, beef.  Once the system is learned, one can generate any amount of words from the comparatively small stock of roots.  I never properly learned Esperanto.  I could not entirely subscribe to my father's espousal of it as a weapon against the growing domination of English, and a shield for minority languages, particularly Irish. I felt uncomfortable with its dream of universal brotherhood.

Until I first left home at 18 or 19 to take a summer job in a canning factory in England, I had barely spoken a word of English to my father.  Now, emboldened by exile, I began to write to him in English, the language in which I was most fluent by now, for my Irish was largely arrested at the stage of domestic conversation.  In these Anglophone letters home I would argue with him against Esperanto, contending, for example, that it was not a fit vehicle for writing poetry, to which I was beginning to aspire.  I said I loved natural languages, and the well-worn words in them, as a sculptor might love an irregular piece of wood with its individual grain, its knots and bumps and knobbles.  Esperanto by comparison seemed bland and plastic, with no weight of history behind its meanings.

Looking back, it seems to me that my understanding of Esperanto was somewhat one-dimensional.  I had not considered, for example, the poetic potentiality of those prefixes and suffixes, or Esperanto's natural tendency towards poetic compounds, as exemplified in the following haiku by the contemporary Japanese poet Miyamoto Masao:

Marhorizonto majpluve nun nebulas, nur mut' - marondo.

(sea-horizon / like May-rain now mists / only muteness - sea-wave)

Moreover, it was undeniable that the language, as a means of communication between strangers, was singularly effective.  My father's postal round, or "walk" was in downtown Belfast for most of his career.  He habitually wore the little green star stickpin that was the emblem of Esperanto speakers; habitually, he would be recognised as a fellow by other Esperantists, and a conversation would ensue.

Among the most notable of these encounters was his meeting a Chinese man.  They corresponded for some years.  The Chinese man sent my father Mao's Little Red Book in Esperanto; my father sent him an Esperanto New Testament.  A piece appeared in the local paper describing the relationship, headlined Belfast Postman Knows the Thoughts of Chairman Mao, and a few days later - this was in the days of the cold war - our house was stoned by local anti-Communist vigilantes.

On another occasion, my father met the captain of a Russian warship, who invited him and my younger brothers Brendan and Liam on board his ship, moored in Belfast Harbour, for high tea and a guided tour of the gun emplacements.

As for Arie Kuipers, he became a kind of uncle to us, particularly to my sister CaitlÀn, to whom he would send birthday cards written in the Irish he had learned from my father.  For many years my father dreamed of going to Holland to meet his old pen-pal; but he never did, and they never met face to face.  I have before me a letter from Arie Kuipers to my father, given to me a few days ago by Caitlán.  It is dated March 10 1987, and Arie and my father have been writing to each other for 50 years:

Kara Amiko Liam!  Kiel belan surprizan mi ricevis de vi la 3-an de ĉi-tiu monato, du tagojn post mia 84-a naskiĝtago!  Mi ne scias, kiel danki vin, escepte per miaj preĝoj por vi kaj via tuta familio...

My dear friend Liam!  What a beautiful surprise I received from you on the 3rd of this month, two days after my 84th birthday!  I do not know how to thank you, except through my prayers for you, and all your family . . .

At the end of the letter my father has written, in Esperanto and Irish, "Arie died on the 19th May 1987.  This is his last letter to me. May God grant him eternal rest in Paradise!"

A few days later, I receive, from John Murray of the Irish Esperanto Association, a better copy of the web photograph of the Great Congress that includes my father, standing on the steps of the Dining Hall at Trinity College.  I am reminded that I, too, was once in the same dining hall, invited there for dinner before giving a poetry reading in December 2003.

I scan the photograph with the magnifier provided by Adobe Acrobat, looking for my father.  I home in on the left-hand pillar of the portico, where I was sure he was standing.  My heart jumps.  This person is not my father; I had been misled by the blur of pixels. Eventually I do find him, looking younger than I remember him; but then, he is only 53, two years younger than I am now.  My father died on March 24 1999, 10 days before Easter Sunday.

At the Trinity reading, I was conferred with honorary membership of the Irish Translators' and Interpreters' Association for my translation of Dante's Inferno: a poem written not in Latin, the Esperanto of its day, but in Dante's Florentine vernacular.  I was sorry my father could not have been there.  I think he would have been pleased, even though my translation is into English.

Saturday May 1, 2004
The Guardian

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