History of Esperanto
Around 1880, while in Moscow and approximately simultaneously with working on Esperanto, Zamenhof made an aborted attempt to standardize Yiddish, based on his native Bialystok (Northeastern) dialect, as a unifying language for the Jews of the Russian Empire.
He even used a Latin alphabet, with the letters ć, h́, ś, ź (the same as in early drafts of Esperanto, later ĉ, ĥ, ŝ, ĵ) and ě for schwa.
He chose to take his vocabulary from Romance and Germanic, the languages that were most widely taught in schools around the world and would therefore be recognisable to the largest number of people.
In its first years Esperanto was used mainly in publications by Zamenhof and early adopters like Antoni Grabowski, in extensive correspondence (mostly now lost), in the magazine La Esperantisto, published from 1889 to 1895 and only occasionally in personal encounters.
In 1894, under pressure from Wilhelm Trompeter, the publisher of the magazine La Esperantisto, and some other leading users, Zamenhof reluctantly put forward a radical reform to be voted on by readers.
At this congress, Zamenhof officially resigned his leadership of the Esperanto movement, as he did not want personal prejudice against himself (or anti-Semitism) to hinder the progress of the language.
The autonomous territory of Neutral Moresnet, between Belgium and Germany, had a sizable proportion of Esperanto-speakers among its small and multiethnic population.
[citation needed] There was also a large Esperanto group led by Anna Tuschinski in the Free City of Danzig.
In 1941, the Soviet Union started performing mass arrests, deportations, and killings of many Esperantists and their relatives for fear of an anti-nationalistic movement, but it was interrupted by the Nazi invasion.
[7] Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf[8] that Esperanto was created as a universal language to unite the Jewish diaspora.
In 2022 an Esperanto club was founded on the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station making Antarctica the last continent with organized Esperantists.
The declaration also permits new concepts to be expressed as the speaker sees fit, but it recommends doing so in accordance with the original style.
The grammatical description in the earliest books was somewhat vague, so a consensus on usage (influenced by Zamenhof's answers to some questions) developed over time within boundaries set by the initial outline (Auld 1988).
Even before the Declaration of Boulogne, the language was remarkably stable; only one set of lexical changes were made in the first year after publication, namely changing "when", "then", "never", "sometimes", "always" from kian, tian, nenian, ian, ĉian to kiam, tiam, neniam etc., to avoid confusion with the accusative forms of kia "what sort of", tia "that sort of", etc.
Thus Esperanto achieved a stability of structure and grammar similar to that which natural languages enjoy by virtue of their native speakers and established bodies of literature.
Modern Esperanto usage may in fact depart from that originally described in the Fundamento, though the differences are largely semantic (involving changed meaning of words) rather than grammatical or phonological.
The traditional usage is Tiu ĉi plaĉas al mi (literally, "this one is pleasing to me"), which reflects the phrasing of most European languages (French celui-ci me plaît, Spanish éste me gusta, Russian это мне нравится [eto mnye nravitsya], German Das gefällt mir, Italian mi piace).
Slang and jargon have developed to some extent, but such features interfere with universal communication – the whole point of Esperanto – and so have generally been avoided.
Its main reforms were in bringing the alphabet, semantics, and some grammatical features into closer alignment with the Romance languages, as well as removal of adjectival agreement and the accusative case except when necessary.
However, most of these projects are specific to individual nationalities (riism from English speakers, for example), and the only changes that have gained acceptance in the Esperanto community have been the minor and gradual bottom-up reforms discussed in the last section.
