Esperanto is alive and well in San Diego

“Saluton! Kiel vi fartas?”

This is my friend John Drehner. A regular in this column and a regular sage.

“Come again?” I say.

“I said ‘Greetings! How are you?’”

“In what language?”

“In the language that is going to help the whole world live in peace,” he says. “The only problem is, no one’s heard of it.”

He’s talking about Esperanto, a language which belongs to everybody because it belongs to no nationality. It started with an idealistic Polish eye doctor, Ludwig Lejzer Zamenhov, who created it — mostly while he was a still a kid — and published it in 1887.

And the world still needs it, says John. “At the moment, English is an international language. And yet it’s about the most difficult, hard to pronounce, inconsistent language on the planet.”

And, he points out, it’s by no means a universal language. Fewer than 10 percent of Chinese people speak it. Only 39 percent of French people can even stutter in it. More people speak Spanish.

Drehner believes people need an easy second language that everybody in the world can use, and one for which no one claims special ownership. “Wars come through lack of understanding. And who’s surprised? There are 3500 to 5000 languages in the world. And yet, people can’t even speak to each other! Can’t share a joke.”

But Esperanto is alive and well in San Diego, and especially Santee. (The Grupo Esperanto meets monthly at The Living Room coffee house, 5900 El Cajon Boulevard, College Area.) Their website says it takes only 100 hours to get Esperanto down, compared with 600 hours for “easy” Spanish.

One of USD’s longest-living alums, Alberta Casey, sang in Esperanto for many of her 102 years. She even recorded an LP of Esperanto songs called San Diego Voka (“San Diego Calls.”) To hear her singing familiar songs like “Kredis Mi” (“Yesterday”) or “Ponto Trans Akvo Storma” (“Bridge Over Troubled Water”) is to hear the difference and yet the connection between English and Esperanto.

“The point is, Esperanto is supposed to be a bridge language everyone can share on equal terms. It is kept deliberately simple and logical and easy to pronounce, whether you’re American or Chinese,” says John. “The syntax is systematic. You just get it. So the lower threshold means more people can talk together in a language neither owns but both share imperfectly.”

Esperanto is the survivor of a bunch of idealistically created languages that burst forth around the 1880s with the idea of ending war and creating community across borders and language barriers.

Two world wars failed to kill it, even though speakers were persecuted (all three of Zamenhof’s children died in concentration camps) but today’s supporters fear two things might just finish the job. First, the notion that Esperanto is too Eurocentric for today’s world, and second, that the internet will kill it. “With instant translation on Google,” says Drehner, “you can stay in your silo and let the machines do the reaching out.”

So 134 years after this Polish kid invented the language of hope (“Esperanto” doesn’t need translating) how’s it doing? Honestly, it doesn’t feel as if it’s reaching critical mass. But extinction? No way. “It’s popular in schools, because it teaches kids to learn a foreign language with this easy, open, architecture,” says Drehner. “That encourages them to go on to learn ‘real’ languages.”

How will you know when you’re ready to move on?

“When you can play Scrabble in Esperanto.”