ESPERANTO IN HAM RADIO

Esperanto is a language that has been created for international communications. As such it is an ideal tool for ham radio operators who get in touch with foreign countries on a daily basis. They are thus pre-destined to learn and use Esperanto. The Esperanto speaking ham radio operators are organized in a club called ILERA.

One of the ILERA activities is to organize skeds and activites on the air. Please do also apply for the Esperanto Award or listen in during the Esperanto Contest if you want to get in touch with Esperantists.

WHAT SHOULD YOU KNOW ABOUT ESPERANTO?

Read on if you are not familiar with Esperanto. The following text is an excerpt from the list of frequently asked questions in the Usenet Newsgroup soc.culture.esperanto:

1. WHAT IS ESPERANTO?

Esperanto is a language designed to facilitate communication between people of different lands and cultures. It was first published in 1887 by Dr. L. L. Zamenhof (1859-1917) under the pseudonym "Dr. Esperanto", meaning "one who hopes", and this is the name that stuck as the name of the language itself.

Esperanto is considerably easier to learn than national languages, since its design is far simpler and more regular. Also, unlike national languages, Esperanto allows communication on an equal footing between people, with neither having the usual cultural advantage favouring a native speaker.

Esperanto's purpose is not to replace any other language, but to supplement them: Esperanto would be used as a neutral language when speaking with someone who doesn't know one's own language. The use of Esperanto would also protect minority languages, which would have a better chance of survival than in a world dominated by a few powerful languages.

2. HOW EASY IS ESPERANTO TO LEARN?

For a native English speaker, we may estimate that Esperanto is about five times as easy to learn as Spanish or French, ten times as easy to learn as Russian, twenty times as easy to learn as Arabic or spoken Chinese, and infinitely easier to learn than Japanese. Many people find that they speak Esperanto better after a few months' study than a language they learned at school for several years.

A knowledge of Esperanto makes it much easier to learn other foreign languages, and there is some evidence that it is actually more efficient to learn Esperanto first, before learning other languages, rather than to study foreign languages directly. For example, one may become more fluent in French by first studying Esperanto for 6 months and then studying French for a year and a half, rather than studying French for two continuous years. The reason may be that Esperanto's regular grammar and word formation and flexible syntax makes it easier to understand other languages' grammar and rules.

3. WHERE DOES ESPERANTO'S VOCABULARY COME FROM?

About 75 % of Esperanto's vocabulary comes from Latin and Romance languages (especially French), about 20 % comes from Germanic languages (German and English), and the rest comes mainly from Slavic languages (Russian and Polish) and Greek (mostly scientific terms).

The words derived from Romance languages were chosen to be as recognizable as possible throughout the world. For example, the word "radio", although technically Romance, is now used internationally. Someone knowing only Russian and looking at a text in Esperanto would immediately recognize perhaps 40 % of the words, without even having studied the language.

Esperanto is phonetic: every word is pronounced exactly as it is spelled. There are no "silent" letters or exceptions.

4. WHAT ABOUT ESPERANTO'S GRAMMAR AND WORD-ORDER?

Even more than its vocabulary, it is Esperanto's grammar and rules which makes it exceptionally easy. Unnecessary complications have been eliminated: there is no grammatical gender, the word order is relatively free, etc. The rules have also been simplified as much as possible: there is only one verb conjugation, all plurals are formed the same way, a prefix can be added to any word to change it to its opposite (good/bad, rich/poor, right/wrong), and so on. Thus, after perhaps 30 minutes' study, one can conjugate any verb in any tense. This is a tremendous simplification compared to national languages.

Esperanto's flexible word-order allows speakers from different language families to use the structures with which they are most familiar and still speak perfectly intelligible and grammatically correct Esperanto. This also makes Esperanto an excellent translator of such different languages as Chinese, Japanese, Latin, English and French.

5. HOW MANY PEOPLE SPEAK ESPERANTO?

This is a very common question, but nobody really knows the answer. The only way to determine accurately the number of people who speak Esperanto would be to conduct a world-wide census, and of course this has never been done.

However, Professor Sidney S. Culbert of the University of Washington, Seattle, USA, has done the most comprehensive survey on language use ever attempted. He has conducted interviews in dozens of countries around the world and tested for "professional proficiency", i.e. much more than just "hello, please, goodbye".

Based on this survey, Prof. Culbert concluded that Esperanto has about two million speakers worldwide. This puts it on a par with "minority" languages such as Lithuanian or Hebrew. For more information on this survey (partly in Esperanto), see _World Almanac and Book of Facts_.

6. HOW CAN I USE ESPERANTO ONCE I'VE LEARNED IT?

Here are some of the many different ways people use Esperanto:

• Esperanto is an ideal second language. Many adults want to learn another language, but don't have the time or energy to learn a national language.
• Correspondence. Write to people in a dozen countries without learning a dozen languages.
• Travel. Esperanto can be used to see the world. There are lists of Esperanto speakers willing to host other Esperantists in their own house or apartment for free.
• International understanding. You can't be friends with people if you can't talk to them! Esperanto helps break down the language barriers between countries.
• Meeting people from other countries, especially at conventions, or when Esperanto speakers from other countries come visiting. (It's also a good way to meet interesting people from your own country!)
• Joining the world. Esperanto is a way to treat everyone on our planet on the basis of complete equality, meeting them half-way. No more trying to communicate "uphill" for one side.
• Literature. The world's masterpieces have been translated to Esperanto, including the Kalevala and works by Garcia Marquez, Saikaku, Shakespeare, Gibran, Brecht, Tagore, Kawabata, Dante, and Mickiewicz. Many works have been translated to Esperanto which are not available in one's own language.
• Hobbies, especially collecting stamps or postcards, or discussing any subject with people in other countries.

Back to IK2RMZ