Hello. This is Susie Esman and Jeff Garland. I'm here, and we are the hosts of the history of curb your enthusiasm podcast. Now, we're going to be rewatching and talking about every single episode, and we're going to break it down and give behind the scenes knowledge that a lot of people don't know. And we're going to be joined by special guests, including Larry David and Cheryl Pines, Richard Lewis, Bob Odenkirk, and so many more. And we're going to have clips, and it's just going to be a lot of fun. So listen to the history of curb your enthusiasm on iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you happen to get your podcasts.

Hey, this is Dana Schwartz. You may know my voice from Noble Blood, Haleywood, or stealing Superman. I'm hosting a new podcast, and we're calling it very special episodes. A very special episode is stranger than fiction.

It sounds like it should be the next season of True Detective. These canadian cops trying to solve this mystery of who spiked the chowder on the Titanic set.

Listen to very special episodes on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to stuff you should know. A production of iHeartradio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. And there's Chuck and Jerry's here, too. And this is stuff you should know. I don't know how to say that in Esperanto, now that I think about it. I really should have looked that up.

I was wondering if you were going to do that.

I can't believe I didn't. I feel kind of jerky. Jerk wady, I guess. I don't know how to say that in Esperano either.

Well, Jerk Wad would be jerk wado.

Yeah, exactly.

Or something like that.

Something similar to that. Yeah. It actually would make sense because Esperano is taking root words, jerk wad, and putting them together and then conjugating them in a very uniform way. We should probably tell everybody what we're talking about here because we just kind of accidentally got into it.

Yeah, it's a language, not just a language.

It's a conlang, a constructed language, which is a language that you sit down and make up. Some people actually do this, and apparently it's addictive when you start, as opposed to, like, I guess, a natural language, one that just kind of develops organically over time as a group of people start talking to one another.

Yeah. Esperanto itself means one who hopes. And that will all make sense once you hear the story, because it's a pretty wonderful story, actually. I didn't know much about it. I just thought it was kind of one of these goofy fringe things. And it is a fringe thing. There are about 1000 people who are native, not just Esperanto speakers, but where their first language that they learned was Esperanto. They are native speakers. Dave Ruse helped us with this, and he dug up George Soros, billionaire. Oh, I don't know. I'm sure people describe him in a lot of ways, depending on who you are, but as the most famous Esperanto speaker. But I did poke around a little bit and found that Tolstoy Jr. Tolkien spoke Esperanto. And Lemire, basically the father of modern cinema. And this will come as a surprise when you see later on what happened. But Joseph Stalin apparently knew how to speak Esperanto.

That is kind of a surprise. The thing I think that differentiates George Soros, though, is he was a native speaker. Like, that was his first language was Esperanto.

Yeah. But I looked over the list of just speakers, notable speakers, and there are a lot of people in the list, but I just hadn't heard of many of them.

Stalin's a big surprise. I'd like to add one more to that list of notable Esperanto speakers, our own Ben Boland, from stuff they don't want you to know.

I thought he spoke Esperanto. That tracks.

He did. I emailed him just to make sure that I wasn't just making something up in my head. And he said, yeah, he used know be into it, and he just kind of fell out of it. And then he emailed me, like, hours later and was like, damn it, josh. Now I'm back into Esperanto. So he's back into it, everybody.

Well, learning Esperanto is about as Ben bowling a thing as I can imagine.

It is, because it's inclusive, it's intelligent, it's curious people, it's witty. It seems to be, like one of the better, most more nice or kind online communities that you'll come across, from what I can tell.

And it's fringe. And that's Ben for sure.

Yeah. And again, that's Ben Boland from stuff they don't want you to know.

That's right. So you said it was a constructed language. I guess we'll talk a little bit about why people would construct a language and a little bit of the history of these languages. There are a lot of reasons for doing that. Most of them are because they want to create a language that's easier to learn. That's simpler. A lot of times there might be religious reasons or philosophical reasons. Some people just do it for fun. A lot of them were designed to be a universal language in Esperanto. Actually, Esperanto ticks a lot of these boxes, as we'll see, but a lot of them are created for like, hey, wouldn't it be better if everybody could speak a language worldwide?

A universal language, a language where, I guess, the whole point of a universal language, and this is definitely the point of Esperanto. The idea is that if you can speak a common language with anybody else on the planet, that should conceivably do away with a lot of different conflicts that probably arise from disputes over language, from differences in language, from an inability to see one another's viewpoint because we're having trouble talking with one another. And that's kind of the basis of a lot of the constructed languages. That idea that if we can all speak a universal language, there'll be a global human family or world, which. That does sound like you'd be up George Soros's alley.

Yeah. I mean, if you just could create a language that. Where all it was was don't shoot. And how about a plate of cookies and a glass of milk?

Oh, yeah.

How far we go.

It'd be a much better world.

So invented languages, people have always sort of been doing this here and there, but in the 19th century, it seems to have really hit its stride. There were more than 100 constructed languages not decade that century alone. And Esperanto is far and away the most popular today, although for a long, long time it was a language created by a german priest named Johann Schleer called Volupuk.

Yeah, Volupuk. Apparently God told him to do it.

Sure. Mission from God.

Yeah. What else are you going to do? You're going to make that language. And I'm sure he was like, are you sure you want to call it Volupuk? And God was like, get busy. And he did. And it actually caught on really well. There seems to have been kind of a bug in the late 19th century, at least in the west, of invented languages, and volupuke apparently fit the bill and it spread far and wide. I can't not say it like that. I'm sorry.

That's fine.

They started having like international congresses or conferences of Volapuke. President Grover Cleveland's wife Francis named their dog Volapuke. It was a worldwide phenomenon and even if you didn't know it or had no interest in learning it, you knew about it.

Yeah. That's because that dog threw up all over the place, though.

That's right.

We had a cat named Underfoot. Literally. My dad named this cat underfoot.

That's a very good name.

And I'll give you two guesses why.

Because the cat had very long legs.

Okay.

And no feet to speak of.

That's right.

It was underfooted.

So that conference you were talking about for Viola Puke was 1889, but a couple of years before that, so it was cruising and doing pretty well. But two years before that, Esperanto was created and really took it over the next, like, 30, 40 years or so.

I mean, imagine there being a trend today of, like, a universal language is catching on, like, on TikTok. Oh, God, it would just take off. But it's such a bizarre thing to think of, and this is what people were into. And this was long before social media, so it was hard for something to become a global phenomenon. And yet not one, but two universal languages took hold in the 1880s.

Yeah.

So Esperano apparently just totally supplanted volupuke, but there is a little footnote of it. Apparently, the Danes say what we would say. Like, it's all greek to me. Like, I don't understand what you're saying. The danish expression is it's pure volup.

That makes sense.

Yeah, it's great. I love that. I love learning danish expressions.

I'm going to start saying that. I don't say it's all greek to me much anyway, but if that ever comes up, I'm going to say it's pure volat.

Yeah. And no offense to our greek listeners, it's just something someone says here.

Yeah. I wonder what Greeks think about that. Actually.

I don't know if it's gotten back to them yet.

Yeah. So should we talk a little bit about the creator of Esperanto, who was. I tried to find out bad things about this guy, but he seems like a pretty remarkable, humble, well intentioned fella.

And I also read that he was one of those rare people who would sleep just a couple hours a night, and rather than sit around and stare at the wall, he did interesting things. He was a polyglot. He learned tons of different languages. He was well read. He was an optometrist. He did all sorts of stuff. But along the way, one of the things he did was create Esperanto. And he had a pretty great. Well, not great, but a pretty heavy backstory to it.

Yeah. His name. We haven't said his name yet. He's known as ll Zamanhoff. Or Samanhoff, but his full name was Ludwig Lightzer Salmanhoff. Born on December 15, which is national salmonhof day.

Oh, that makes sense. Sure.

Yeah. In 1859, born in Bialistok, Poland. He was jewish, as was a lot of bialystock, about 70%. Also some Germans, some Russians, obviously Poles. And growing up there was pretty rough because there was a lot of ethnic violence going on. There were Jews being attacked by Poles. There were Germans being attacked by Russians. In 1881, there was a false, I guess, accusation that Jews were behind the assassination of Alexander II of Russia, and that started the pogroms, which were these organized massacres of polish and russian jewish communities.

Yeah, because Poland was annexed by Russia from 18 seven to 1921, which is why they would have cared. That was their tsar. And apparently it wasn't the Jews at all or anybody who had anything to do with jewishness. It was antiautocratics, a group of called the Noradnia Volya people's will, and they threw a bomb and blew him up. And apparently his successor, his son Alexander II, was even worse. But from those pogroms that ll Zamenhoff was alive to witness, and even before that, just the ethnic violence that was endemic to Bialistok, that had a really big effect on him. And that's where he developed this idea that humanity is way more connected than we realize, that we have all these false constructs that separate us, that don't have to separate us, but do time and time again. Language is one of them. He cited religion as one of them. And he was very jewish. He was a very religious jewish person. But he still recognized that religion creates conflict. Sometimes it has historically. And he felt like you could keep the religion, you could keep the different nations, you can keep the things that do divide us, as long as they had something like a universal language laying over the whole thing, that could diffuse the conflicts that grow up from those things that divide us.

Yeah, he was a kid. I mean, this is remarkable stuff for a preteen and then teenager to sort of understand. So he's clearly a brilliant, empathetic, passionate human being. I think, as the family story goes, at least he was ten years old, and he wrote a play called the Tower of Babel Colon, the bialistok tragedy in five acts as a ten year old. So just this idea of sort of stripping away these divisions and realizing, like, hey, we're all human beings. That's the one at the root. That's what we are. And we all literally have that in common, yet we divide ourselves. It's just a remarkable thing for a kid and a lesson for everybody of all ages. Still.

Yeah. As he was raised, he learned Yiddish, which apparently grew out of a German Dialect that's written in Hebrew. I didn't realize that. But it's the universal language of the Ashkenazi Jews, the jewish people in central and eastern Europe. So he already understood what a universal language could do. You could take a jewish person from Poland and a jewish person from Czechoslovakia and put them in a room, and they could speak to one another through that second tongue, Yiddish. So he set about kind of trying to modernize Yiddish. Maybe he could spread that. And then he stopped pretty much in his tracks because he realized that what he was trying to do was say, hey, everybody, let's all learn the language of the people you consider criminals and spies. It was like a really hard sell that he just realized wasn't going to go anywhere. So he abandoned trying to sell Yiddish or create a universal language out of Yiddish and just set about creating one from scratch, which is what Esperano came from.

What a setup it is.

It's going pretty well so far. We should release this as the show.

Best setup ever. I'm going to say it even though it annoys some people. Should we take a break?

I'm going to say it even though it annoys everybody. Yes, we should.

All right, we'll be right back.

Today, we are all pioneers standing at the cusp of a bold new frontier, the era of electrification at Lexus. We know this landscape well with a luxurious, all electrified range, including the stunning Es hybrid saloon and the award winning Rx plug in hybrid suv. Start your journey with us today at Lexus, ie Lexus experience. Amazing. Hi, I'm Susie Esman.

And I am Jeff Garland.

Yes, you are. And we are the hosts of the history of Curb your enthusiasm podcast. We're going to watch every single episode. It's 122, including the pilot, and we're going to break them down.

By the way, most of these episodes I have not seen for 20 years.

Yeah, me too. We're going to have guest stars and people that are very important to the show, like Larry David.

I did once try and stop a woman who was about to get hit by a car. I screamed out, watch out. And she said, don't you tell me what to do.

And Cheryl Hines, why can't you just lighten up and have a good time? And Richard Lewis, how am I going.

To tell him I'm going to leave now? Can you do it on the phone? Do you have to do it in person. What's the canceling cable?

You have to go in. He's a human being.

He's helped you.

And then we're going to have behind the scenes information. Tidbits.

Yes, tidbits is a great word, RD.

Anyway, we're both a wealth of knowledge about this show because we've been doing it for 23 years. So subscribe now, and you could listen to the history of Kerber enthusiasm on iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you happen to get your podcasts.

Hey, this is Dana Schwartz. You may know my voice from Noble Blood, Haleywood, or stealing Superman. I'm hosting a new podcast, and we're calling it very special episodes.

One week, we'll be on the case with special agents from NASA as they crack down on Black Market moon rocks. H. Ross pro is on the other side, and he goes, hello, Joe. How can I help you? I said, Mr. Perot, what we need is $5 million to get back a moon rock.

Another week, we'll unravel a 90s Hollywood mystery.

It sounds like it should be the next season of True Detective or something. These canadian cops trying to solve this 25 year old mystery of who spiked the chowder on the Titanic set.

A very special episode is stranger than fiction. It's normal. People plop down in extraordinary circumstances. It's a story where you say, this should be a movie. Listen to very special episodes on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

All right, so we're back really quickly. That sort of made me, before we left and talked about people being annoyed by asking to take a break. That came to mind because I jumped on Reddit recently on our subreddit and actually started an account because there was so much just sort of bad information. Like, Jerry doesn't even work with them anymore and just all these weird things that people sort of assume that we're wrong. And I've since learned that that's. And even redditors kind of said that's kind of a thing people, like, surmise a lot.

Yeah.

So I signed up for a few days and answered a lot of questions for, like, a full day and then got right back off, but just wanted people to know if they thought I was some phony, that that was really me. And most people were awesome.

You Had Your own stunt AMa.

Yeah, sort of. You know what I don't like about AMas, though, is that just that rapid fire sort of thing, right? So this was like a slow burn AMa, ANd it's all StIll there. A lot of answered qUestions, like, with correct information. And like I said, almost EveRyONe is really Nice. But not EveRyoNE is. But that's Just the nature of online interactions.

The Internet. That's SIlly. That they think, Jerry doesn't work with us anymore. She doesn't even exist.

Someone was really annoyed, though, about, like.

Every time they ask if it's time.

To take a break. And I was LIkE, we do THAt BECause we don't script this out. And I'm GENuineLY wondering if it's a good time to take a break.

Yeah. What a weird Thing to be upset ABout.

It's a conversation. Anyway, thanks to everyone who participated. And you can go there and check it out if you want. Back to Esperanto?

Yes. You want me to pick it up? Because we don't script this stuff.

Why did you ASk me that? That's so annoying.

So we said that ll ZAMENHOFF HAD said, okay, I'm going to start from scratch. I'm going to create a language that doesn't come from anywhere, that's not spoken by anybody. I'm going to make this universal language from scratch. And so his 19th birthday party, he had already done enough that he handed out pocket dictionaries and grammar charts to the guests.

Oh, man.

Of his birthday, which.

What a swinging party.

That's right.

For a 19 year old.

He called the new language Lingvo internacia or no, internazia, because that sees it, remember?

Yeah.

And he composed a little hymn, and I kind of taught myself how to pronounce it, even though I'm going to completely screw it up. But may I?

You got to sing it, though.

No.

Yeah.

No, you don't. You have to say it solemnly, like this. Mala mike de las nazius. Cado cado yam tempesta la tote homose infamilia. Ko une gare sodebe.

Nice work. Can I tell everyone what it means?

Yes, but you have to sing it.

Okay. Let the hatred of the nations fall, fall, fall the time is already here all humanity must unite in one family.

It doesn't rhyme. Yeah, someone on Reddit just said it didn't rhyme.

So he's cruising with this thing. He has this banging 19th birthday party where he's giving out this stuff to his friends. I'm sure they're just like, who is this guy? Even. This is amazing. And in 1887, he self published a pamphlet, a 42 page pamphlet called, are you going to pronounce this stuff?

Unua libro.

Okay, I thought that was right. It means first book. And as you'll see, if you notice some of these words sound like other languages. It's because like other constructed languages, it's usually based on the words are based on some other words. So when you hear Esperanto, like, if you go to watch a scene from the Esperanto William Shatner movie that you can watch on YouTube.

Yeah.

When was that? 60, 66.

Everybody says, but Turner classic movies listed as 65, which I find confusing. But everybody else is 66.

I side with TCM always. But if you go to here or just, I looked up on YouTube, just like Esperanto conversations, or if you bump into Ben Boland somewhere in Atlanta.

Right.

You'll sit there and you'll go, oh, wow, that sounds a little bit like Spanish some. And maybe it might sound italian, which Spanish also sounds kind of italian sometimes. And so a lot of it might sound a little bit familiar. Like libro for book. That makes sense, like the word library. So just pointing out that when you hear Esperanto words and you think it sounds familiar, it's not by accident.

Yeah. The reason why, especially if you are a westerner, three quarters of the root words he started out with, 900 of them, as we'll see, are taken from romance languages. So if you're an english speaker, it's very easy to pick up.

That's a much simpler way to say what I said.

So in that first book, unu alibro, which I can understand what that means just from the little primer, which I have to say, hats off to Dave. He put together a primer for us in this article, that when you go back and research it more widely, you're like, this is really difficult to kind of wrangle into one small, little ball. And he managed to do that really well. So way to go, Dave. But that first book, unua libro, it had some sample translations. It said, here's how you say this stuff. Here's the grammar rules, here's the dictionary, here's how you pronounce it. And he said that his pen name, he wrote it as a pen name, doctoro Esperanto, or Dr. Hopeful is what it means. And he called again his language, the lingvo internazia. And that's what he thought everybody was going to call it. But instead, everybody said, I like this Dr. Hopeful cat. Let's just call his language Esperanto.

Yeah. Which is sort of ironic, because from the beginning, he was a very humble guy and didn't want to be like, he didn't name know Zamanhoffer or like, he didn't want it to be named after him. He didn't want to own it. We would call something like this open source today. He didn't want it to be about him. So the fact that he made up a name and that they named it after him anyway is kind of funny. I get the sense that it probably didn't bother him too much because he seemed like a good guy.

Sure.

But his goal, and we'll talk about sort of the other stuff that came along later as far as his sort of desire to attach other meaning to it. But his sort of root goal at the beginning was I want a language for the love of whoever you worship that is easier to learn than everything else out there.

Yeah.

And I want it to be a language like you've mentioned sort of from the get go that can unite people and promote peace. Like two very sort of noble pursuits. I think so.

Okay, let's talk about goal one. A language that's for the love of whatever you worship. Easier to learn than most of the other languages out there, right?

Right.

Apparently you could learn Esperanto in something like about 40 hours of class time. One full week of learning. You'll walk out of there on the end of the day Friday. Being able to converse basically in Esperanto. Tell people where you live, who you are, what you like, point to clouds and identifying them correctly, that is, don't shoot.

How about a plate of cookie and some milk?

Exactly. They should teach that first, for sure.

Yeah.

Apparently you can just know without even knowing anything about learning languages. That's really a short amount of time. It takes about 100 to 200 hours to learn French or German to the same degree. There was another person who estimated that for english speakers it's five times easier to learn Esperano than French or Spanish, ten times easier than Russian and 20 times easier than Chinese. And again, a large part of that is because the root words are taken from romance languages. So just recognizing, generally being able to make a guess in almost every case, what that word means. That's a huge leg up. And that's why it's so much easier in part. But the other part is the grammar that he created is so standard and with such regularity that that's the other part that makes it that much easier to learn. Especially for romance language speakers.

Yeah. I mean, the hard part about learning a language is usually not memorizing root words and learning basic grammar. It's the irregular verbs. It's all these exceptions to rules. French has more than 2000 irregular verbs. English is notoriously tough to learn as a non native speaker.

Yeah. Think about just about irregular verbs real quick, chuck. For the English to be pretty basic stuff, it's conjugated as b being been, are, am, is, was, and were. Now, if you were just approaching those words as a non english speaker to begin with, you wouldn't think was had anything to do with b. Or r has anything to do with b. And that's what causes the confusion in not just English, but almost any language. Irregular verbs and exceptions to the standard rules.

Yeah. And we did a whole episode on language acquisition, right?

I'm pretty sure we did, yeah, for sure.

Because I'm just consistently knocked out that babies into toddlers and so on, just pick up language. It's really remarkable to me still to see that kind of thing, but Esperanto, and we're just going to go over some sort of the base rules here. And I think you will find yourself, like we did, just saying, oh, my God, that's amazing. And it makes so much sense. There are 16 grammatical rules. There are no irregular verbs. There are no exceptions to rules. And this isn't everything, but these are just a few examples of kind of like, how much sense it makes. All nouns are going to end with the letter o. That's why I said jerk watto at the beginning. Adjectives, all of them end in the letter a. Adverbs all end in the letter e. There are no genders. That's another place where learning a foreign language can be confusing, is the different cases and genders and stuff like that and having to change things around. Not an esperanto, my friend. And then this is sort of just a fun one. La is the only word for the right, not la.

Lay low, ill, none of that stuff. L, none of that. It's all la, the everything. And then it's up to the conjugation of the verb that changes that, or the adverb or the adjective or whatever, because it's standard. When you see, like, an o or an a or an e, you can identify a word in a sentence as a verb, an adverb, a noun, that kind of thing. So the infinitive form of verbs. And by the way, I had to look most of this up. I was like, what's an adverb again?

English 101.

An adverb is something like above. Clearly, hourly. It describes an adjective, a verb, or some other stuff. An infinitive form is like to something to do, like the basic form, like to eat. It ends in an I, so it's manji. Okay, present tense, like I eat that would be as manjaz. It ends in a s. Yeah.

And we should point out that it doesn't matter who is eating, if he is eating or I'm eating or she's eating or they're eating. It's all the same.

Exactly. There's no irregular verbs. It's beautiful, right. In past tense, instead of something like sing sang song, where it should all just be sing singed. Singed. That's what he does. I know it sounds weird, doesn't it? Well, sure, but that's what he does in this, everything in past tense ends in es. So Manjez, I ate, you ate, they ate. It's all manjez. And then with future, it's manjos. And then with a command, you just add a u. Manju. And that's it. That's how you conjugate verbs. There's no exceptions to that rule at all.

Yeah. I mean, it's pretty amazing. I guess it just makes sense that because I kind of struggled with why other languages are so irregular, but if it's organic and it's growth, then that's just bound to happen.

I think it is. I looked up why, and it's actually fascinating. It's because these languages often absorb other people from other language groups, and they bring their words with them. And so languages grow by adopting other words, changing. And so rather than completely altering how something that usually ends in ed, like sing, instead of just totally altering how it used to be, you just kind of change it to the new form, like sang or song. That's how irregular verbs come up. Nobody's like, I really want to screw people up in the future. I'm going to add this. It just happens organically. So when you set about creating a constructed language, you can purposely, deliberately avoid any irregular verbs and make it that much easier to learn. My question that came up, chuck, is how long? Yes, I said up Chuck, how long does it take until a language like Esperanto starts developing irregular verbs?

Well, I have a strong feeling, and I'd love to hear from some Esperantists that they fight that tooth and nail because that defeats the whole purpose and spirit of it.

Okay. Hasn't happened yet, then, is that answer?

I mean, that would be my guess. Yeah, I'm on record.

Okay. I'd love to hear from him, too, though.

But if you haven't noticed that Esperanto, and this is a word you might not know, but it's called an aglutinative language, which is the words are formed from combinations of shorter words, basically, which English has a lot of those. All language has a lot of those. But Esperanto has all those.

Yeah. So you've got your root word, and then you have affixes, prefixes and suffixes and kind of like how you conjugate it with an I for to eat or an as for you eat. That's it. That's the whole grammar. Right. So the reason why he did this again, because not just like irregular verbs, but weird words that all describe the same thing is another thing that creeps into language organically. Dave used the example of tree.

Right, good one. Yeah.

You know what a tree is in English? It's one of those plants that's got the wood and the bark and the leaves and they're tall and everything. Everybody loves to hug them. Right. Tree makes sense. But rather than young tree, we have the word sapling, which combines proto indoeuropean and proto germanic words in English.

Cute word, though.

Sapling it is, because it means a young tree. It's the young version of a tree. It's very cute. A bunch of trees is called a forest that's old French from Latin. And then a botanical garden that has a bunch of trees is an arboretum that's just straight up Latin. All of those are english words, sapling, forest, arboretum. And none of them sound like tree. So by creating roots that just describe one thing and then adjusting what they mean by adding a prefix or a suffix, but keeping that root word, he got around that kind of conundrum.

Yeah. So, for instance, tree in Esperanto is arbo. That young tree, which is a sapling for us, is an arbito. And as we'll see, ido is sort of the suffix for any kind of baby version of something which is taken. I know Spanish does that. Like, there were two chucks at my job at a mexican restaurant, and I was chuckito cute because I was younger than the original chuck.

Wasn't that a taco bell menu item in the 90s?

Probably. So two chuckitos, another chuckito, and another chuckito, three chuckitos. A young tree, instead of a sapling is an arbito. A lot of trees, instead of a forest is an arboro. And then that botanical garden, instead of an arboretum is an arboretto. And you might think, well, that sounds a lot like arboretum. Well, it does, but it also sounds like arbo, arbedo and arboro.

Exactly. Right. So you see any of those words and you know it's talking about a tree. And then when you learn, Edo means the younger version of it or aro means a group of whatever you're talking about. You just learned a ton of grammar just right off the bat. And then also note that all those end in o because they're all nouns. And again, all nouns end in o in Esperanto.

Yeah. So we mentioned Edo. Ido is a suffix meaning like the small version of something or a baby something. And we also mentioned that there wasn't gender. There is, but not in terms of how you will conjugate a sentence. It's just a suffix. It's in. O is a female version of something. You also have A-R-O which is a group like Vorto. Vorto is the word. Vortaro is dictionary. It just makes a lot of sense. E-J-O and the J's are pronounced as a y, isn't that right?

Yes.

E-J-O is a place for something. So, Kuiri, how would you pronounce that?

Kuyer ao. Oh, Kuwari. Why'd you ask me to pronounce this? Well, because I got it now, Kuwiri.

Is to cook, and then what's kitchen?

Kuwiro.

Right. So you add the ejo. So that is the place where you would cook.

Yeah, that makes sense. Right? That's not to say that Esperando doesn't have words that you just have to memorize, because that doesn't quite work. Because, for example, there's a couple of places where you'll find a lot of books, like a library or a bookstore.

Right?

So a library, you'd think, would be called the liberio, or place of books, but actually it's called a bibliotecho. A libereo is the bookstore. So it sounds like just kind of nitpicking, but if you ever arrange to meet your friend at the Liberio and they think that that's the bookstore, you're going to be sitting there waiting in a library for them a long time.

Yeah. In fact, adding, and I find this part of the spirit of Esperanto is super cool in that they encourage you to create words as long as they follow the rules and make sense. So to tack these affixes and suffixes onto root words and debuts. This is so great. Gosh, this just makes me crazy how great it is. Hospital. The word hospital in Esperanto is mal sanu lejo, right?

Yes.

Does that make sense? So M-A-L in Esperanto is opposite of the S-A-N is healthy. The ul means people. The E-J-O remember, as we said, means the place where something is. And so a hospital, directly translated, is not healthy people place, which could be a lot of places here in the US.

So it's kind of like esperantists like to put words together like you do in a scrabble game. And the reason that it's encouraged is because out of the gate, Zaminhoff, like you said, made this open source and said, here, take this and just do what you will with it and make it grow. And that's why Esperano is still around. And one of the reasons it supplanted Volapuk puke, because the guy who created Volupuk, he was very controlling, kept a controlling grip on it. And so that made it, like, a dying language right out of the gate, because you have to let language grow and become organic on its own, apparently. He was like, nope. God told me to do this, so I really need to keep a sharp eye on it.

So I think we should also talk about the word for jet lag, because it's also just super fun.

Yeah.

And we could do this all day long, but just these two examples are really great. Horzonozo. Horzonozo. H-O-R-Z-O-N-O-Z-O. Exactly how it sounds. That is H-O-R is time zone is Z-O-N and then illness is ozo. So the Esperanto translation is time zone illness.

Yeah. Makes a lot of sense.

I love that. And a lot of this sounds like how it would be transcribed or subtitled in, like, china or something from English.

Yeah, for sure. I came across something. Did you see what I sent you about English translated into English is kind of hilarious. Oh, no, you didn't. I don't remember what paper it was, but as an example, they translated, I do not understand into several languages, and one of them was English. And if you literally translate I do not understand into English, it's I make not understand. Think about it. That's exactly what that means. But that's not at all what you think of. Like, I do not understand sounds right. Even though what you're saying literally is I make not understand.

Because do means make literally, I do not understand.

I had to mention that. It just cracked me up.

No, that's really funny. All right, so let's take our second break. I'm not even asking this time. And we'll come back and talk about where Esperanto went from there right after this.

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So, Chuck, we talked a lot about how Dr. Esperanto Zaimenhoff, the reasons why he created Esperanto, and that was goal number two, was to create, like, a language that united the world. Right. Easy to learn, united the world. And he originally based it on something he called Hillelism, after Hillel the Elder, a jewish sage from the first century BCE. And Hillel's teachings can basically be summed up as the golden rule, like, treat others as you'd like them to treat you. He changed that name very quickly to Homaranismo, which means basically humanitarianism. But the whole idea was the same. He called it the internal idea, the internal idea of Esperanto, which is that it can remove those language barriers, those culture barriers between people. And by doing so, you make people recognize that we're all humans.

Yeah. And he, I think, realized at some point, again, that sort of attaching an ism to something maybe might keep people from wanting to learn it. And I think there were also Esperantists. Dave said a lot of them were french intellectuals that were, no, we don't need to attach this to an ism. So officially, it wasn't attached to an ism. But I do think the spirit of all that is a big part of Esperanto still.

Yeah, definitely.

And people who want to learn it, even though it's not an official, like, ethic.

Yeah. And so, I mean, just right off the bat, they had the first international or universal congress of Esperanto in 1905 in France. And in that conference, a schism created or was created in, like, a whole other language, like a version of Esperanto called Edo that was even easier to learn, was introduced, and that group just went off and did their own thing, which kind of hamstrung Esperanto as it was really starting to take off. But Edo, you don't hear about any longer. You still hear about Esperanto. I'm not 100% sure why. Maybe it is because it had an ethic or a moral to it in addition to being easy to learn. That's my guess. But Zaminhoff died in 1917. And what's sad, Dave points out he lived long enough to see World War I, which I didn't read anything he wrote about it directly, but he would have been really bummed by that because that's what he was creating Esperanto to avoid.

Yeah, absolutely. During his life, he was nominated 14 times. 14. Never won, unfortunately, for the Nobel Peace Prize and post World War I, when the League of Nations was created to stop something like that from happening again. Didn't work. In that very first meeting, there was a proposal to teach Esperanto in schools to member countries, which was pretty remarkable. It didn't happen because the french delegation vetoed that and they said French is already the universal language, which is so haughty, but they literally kept Esperanto, like, who knows where it would be now if they hadn't stopped that same thing.

With the US at the United nations in the 40s, after the UN was founded. Somebody said, hey, we should all learn Esperanto. And the US said, no, English is already a universal language. And that actually shows how language can enhance the standing of the countries that speak that language, that the rest of the world sees as basically a universal language. And why Esperanto didn't do that, because it didn't come from any country, it didn't come from any ethnic group or any region. It was from scratch. Universal grammar. That wouldn't enhance one nation over others.

Yeah. Not everyone loved it. If you think, like, who maybe wouldn't like it? Who wouldn't like this language created from a jewish man? Hitler? You would be correct. It's written about in mind Kamp. He said, hitler said that it was a secret jewish language used to plot against Germany. And I don't know if anyone ever went over to him. Probably not and can actually. It's not secret at all. You can learn it in Fertzek hours, conversationally. So I don't know, Hitler being Hitler and of know, I'm sort of joking about that, but it was no joke at all, because Hitler and others would round up Esperanto speakers and jail them or kill them. And in fact, Hitler took his family, his surviving family, that is, to the Warsaw ghetto. And all three of Zamenhoff's children were killed by Nazis. Yeah, it's brutal.

Stalin did the same thing, which I guess is why it seems at first surprising that he learned Esperanto, but he called it the language of the spies. So I guess he was just.

That's probably why he learned.

Exactly. But even if you were a loyal communist party member, you would be killed for knowing Esperanto, which is funny, because it was frequently accused of being a secret communist plot. So that kind of goes to show you just how nationless Esperanto actually was.

Yeah, absolutely. If you get online today, if you're interested in this and you want to know how's it going today with Esperanto? Who's speaking it? Are people into it? Yeah, people are into. It's. It's not a huge community, but it's a very passionate community of people all over the world, people like Ben Boland. They find each other online. It's very easy to do that now. Obviously, before the Internet, they would have local clubs and stuff like that. They would have pen pals, kind of the way that people would spread any message pre Internet, they were doing that in Esperanto. And there are conferences. I think there's one. The 2024 Universala congresso is in Tanzania this year, which is pretty cool. And it sounds just like they get together, they speak Esperanto. They work hard to keep this language and this idea alive, which is, again, I think it's still a noble pursuit.

And Esperanto has its own teaching app, Learnu, with an exclamation point@learnu.net. You can also pick it up on Duolingu and Babel. But I looked on Duolingo. They have 381,000 people signed up to learn Esperanto, which is more than Klingon, more than Navajo, and more than Yiddish. It's toward the bottom, but it's still not the last. 1380,000 people worldwide is nothing to sneeze at.

Heck no, it's more than Klingon.

There's also a couple of podcasts. Radio. Esperanto radio, by the way, is the same word in English. And Esperanto, oh, already ended with an usone persone. American in person. But you have to probably kind of know already a little bit of Esperanto.

Yeah, I meant to check that out. I'm going to listen to one of those and just see if I can understand any, like, oh, they said radio again.

I know what that means. One other thing before we leave. Do you have anything else?

Yeah, I got one. So two other things.

Okay, well, you go first.

Okay. 19 five. We mentioned that year earlier. What year was that?

Was that the first year of the first congress? The Universal Congress.

The first congress. Well, that makes sense then, because that was the year that the Esperanto flag was debuted. It is called the Verda Stello, or the green star. And it's nice. It's a green rectangle. It's got a little white square in the upper left corner and a green star inside that white square. And apparently that was a big part of the branding, the color green. Ll early on wanted it to all sort of look the same and feel the same. So his pamphlets and books and everything was in green. And I think green is just a big. I'm sorry, Verdo is a big Esperanto color.

Yeah, Verda, that's branding 101.

Branding 101.

Okay, well, I'll say mine, then. You can finish with yours. I just wanted to talk about incubus real quick. That 1965 66 Shatner movie.

I watched a little bit.

I did, too, and it is really hard to follow. And when you're listening to them speak, you're like, oh, this is okay, it's Esperanto. If you speak Esperanto, it drives you up the wall. Because apparently no one in the film knew Esperanto. They learned their dialog in two weeks, and there was no one who knew Esperanto on the set to coach them. So it's just moment after moment of bad Esperanto pronunciation. And I saw in Quartz, there was an article that quoted, like, a film reviewer from the age who said that Incubus is like a foreign film from a country that never existed.

What a great description.

I thought so, too. Worth checking out five minutes of it.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's it.

That's it.

Okay, well, if you want to know more about Esperanto, everybody go check it out. You do worse than starting. No, actually, you couldn't do worse than starting with Incubus, but start there anyway. And since I said incubus, it's time for listener mail.

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It sounds like it should be the next season of true Detectives, these canadian cops trying to solve this mystery of who spiked the chowder on the Titanic set.

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