"[15] His feelings and the situation in Białystok may be gleaned from an extract from his letter to Nikolai Borovko:[16] The place where I was born and spent my childhood gave direction to all my future struggles.

He then bought many dozens of them and gave them out to relatives, friends, just anyone he could, to support that magnificent idea for he felt that this would be a common bond to promote relationships with fellow men in the world.

A group of people had organized and sent letters to the government asking to change the name of the street where Dr. Zamenhof lived for many years when he invented Esperanto, from Dzika to Zamenhofa.

I will never forget that rich-poor, sad-glad parade and among all these people stood two fiery red tramway cars waiting on their opposite lanes and also a few dorożkas with their horses squeezed in between.

[20] The autonomous territory of Neutral Moresnet, between what is today Belgium and Germany, had a sizable proportion of Esperanto-speaking citizens among its small, diverse population.

The outbreak of World War I would bring about the end of neutrality, with Moresnet initially left as "an oasis in a desert of destruction" following the German invasion of Belgium.

[27][28] In 1920s Korea, socialist thinkers pushed for the use of Esperanto through a series of columns in The Dong-a Ilbo as resistance to both Japanese occupation as well as a counter to the growing nationalist movement for Korean language standardization.

In his work Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler specifically mentions Esperanto as an example of a language that could be used by an international Jewish conspiracy once they achieved world domination.

[31] The efforts of a minority of German Esperantists to expel their Jewish colleagues and overtly align themselves with the Reich were futile, and Esperanto was legally forbidden in 1935.

[32] In Imperial Japan, the left wing of the Japanese Esperanto movement was forbidden, but its leaders were careful enough not to give the impression to the government that the Esperantists were socialist revolutionaries, which proved a successful strategy.

[54] The League of Nations made attempts to promote the teaching of Esperanto in its member countries, but the resolutions were defeated (mainly by French delegates, who did not feel there was a need for it).

[78][79] About 150,000 users consult the Vikipedio regularly, as attested by Wikipedia's automatically aggregated log-in data, which showed that in October 2019 the website has 117,366 unique individual visitors per month, plus 33,572 who view the site on a mobile device instead.

Beside his native Yiddish and (Belo)Russian, Zamenhof studied German, Hebrew, Latin, English, Spanish, Lithuanian, Italian, French, Aramaic and Volapük, knowing altogether something of 13 different languages, which had an influence on Esperanto's linguistic properties.

[84][85] Esperantist and linguist Ilona Koutny notes that Esperanto's vocabulary, phrase structure, agreement systems, and semantic typology are similar to those of Indo-European languages spoken in Europe.

A more recent "x-convention" has also gained prominence with the advent of computing, utilizing an otherwise absent ⟨x⟩ to produce the digraphs ⟨cx⟩, ⟨gx⟩, ⟨hx⟩, ⟨jx⟩, ⟨sx⟩, and ⟨ux⟩; this has the incidental advantage of alphabetizing correctly in most cases, since the only letter after ⟨x⟩ is ⟨z⟩.

Some compounds and formed words in Esperanto are not entirely straightforward; for example, eldoni, literally "give out", means "publish", paralleling the usage of certain European languages (such as German herausgeben, Dutch uitgeven, Russian издать izdat').

Conversational Esperanto, The International Language, is a free drop-in class that is open to Stanford students and the general public on campus during the academic year.

[119] Esperanto is particularly prevalent in the northern and central countries of Europe; in China, Korea, Japan, and Iran within Asia;[33] in Brazil, and the United States in the Americas;[120] and in Togo in Africa.

Culbert concluded that between one and two million people speak Esperanto at Foreign Service Level 3, "professionally proficient" (able to communicate moderately complex ideas without hesitation, and to follow speeches, radio broadcasts, etc.).

This number, however, was disputed by statistician Sten Johansson, who questioned the reliability of the source data and highlighted a wide margin of error, the latter point with which Nielsen agrees.

Lou Harrison, who incorporated styles and instruments from many world cultures in his music, used Esperanto titles and/or texts in several of his works, most notably La Koro-Sutro (1973).

As part of a passage on what language the salamander-looking creatures with human cognitive ability should learn, it is noted that "...in the Reform schools, Esperanto was taught as the medium of communication."

[144] A few scientists and mathematicians, such as Maurice Fréchet (mathematics), John C. Wells (linguistics), Helmar Frank (pedagogy and cybernetics), and Nobel laureate Reinhard Selten (economics) have published part of their work in Esperanto.

More recently, language-learning apps like Duolingo and Amikumu have helped to increase the amount of fluent speakers of Esperanto, and find others in their area to speak the language with.

Left-wing currents exist in the wider Esperanto world, mostly organized through the Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda founded by French theorist Eugène Lanti.

[166] At the request of ʻAbdu'l-Bahá, Agnes Baldwin Alexander became an early advocate of Esperanto and used it to spread the Baháʼí teachings at meetings and conferences in Japan.

[195][196] These nouns are primarily titles, such as baron/baroness, and kinship terms, such as sinjoro "Mr, sir" vs. sinjorino "Ms, lady" and patro "father" vs. patrino "mother".

[138][191] A reply to that criticism is that the presence of an accusative case allows much freedom in word order, e.g. for emphasis ("Johano batis Petron", John hit Peter; "Petron batis Johano", it is Peter whom John hit), that its absence in the "predicate of the object" avoids ambiguity ("Mi vidis la blankan domon", I saw the white house; "Mi vidis la domon blanka", the house seemed white to me) and that adjective agreement allows, among others, the use of hyperbaton in poetry (as in Latin, cf.

The alphabet was designed with a French typewriter in mind, and although modern computers support Unicode, entering the letters with diacritic marks can be more or less problematic with certain operating systems or hardware.

In his speech at the 1907 World Esperanto Congress in Cambridge he said, "we hope that earlier or later, maybe after many centuries, on a neutral language foundation, understanding one another, the nations will build ... a big family circle.