Abstract
The world was shrinking in the late 1800s. Growing global contacts, conflicts, and exchanges were eroding societies’ isolation and autonomy. One particularly influential response to the world’s need for improved communication came from L. L. Zamenhof (1859–1917), a Jewish student with strong interests in languages and international peace. He had grown up in Bialystok (then in the Russian Empire), whose population was divided into four mutually hostile communities: Poles, Russians, Germans, and Jews, each with its own language and religious tradition. His experience convinced him of the need for a universal language that would facilitate trade, diplomacy, and cultural exchanges, while reducing misunderstandings and conflicts. Like others with similar ideas, Zamenhof believed that no existing language could become a universal language, both because it would be resisted as foreign (perhaps imperialistic) and because of the practical difficulties of mastering the sounds, grammar, and idioms of the leading international languages. Instead, he argued, the world needed a new, “artificial” language, designed to be politically neutral and, by means of a simplified vocabulary and grammar, to be much easier to learn than any existing language.
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Notes
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© 2013 David Northrup
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Northrup, D. (2013). Cultural Worlds. In: How English Became the Global Language. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303073_5
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