I, a wide variety of ideologies found Esperanto consonant with their
goals: theosophists and spiritists; women’s suffragists and scouts;
vegetarians and pacifists; and youthful “seekers” of various stripes. 87
What these groups had in common was not a particular ideology,
but rather the understanding that ideology was more central to
Esperanto than the language itself. Not one of them was invested in
linguistic reform, the issue that had doomed Volapük, and which, in
1907, seemed poised to ruin Esperanto as well.
6. Idiots
During the Geneva Congress, Javal and Charles Lemaire, editor of
the Esperanto magazine Belga Sonorilo (Belgian Bell) secretly offered
Zamenhof the handsome sum of 250,000 francs to devote himself to
a comprehensive reform of the language. 88 Javal had long felt that
diacritical marks, or supersigns, were an unnecessary encumbrance,
particularly for the visually impaired. And he found a particularly
Jewish phrase with which to goad Zamenhof into reform:
In my opinion it is a great misfortune that your reforms of
1894 were not adopted at that time, and, even at the risk
of displeasing you, I shall say that it was your fault, tua
maxima culpa, that it happened. Put that on the top line of
the al chet [confessional] so that you can beat your chest
next Yom Kippur. 89
The offer was arguably more an emolument than a bribe; as a
practical matter, the money would have freed Zamenhof from his
medical practice for a year or more to revise the language. But even
though he hoped, eventually, that “final” reforms would be put in
place, Zamenhof felt he was being bought, and turned down the
offer.
In early 1907, Zamenhof found himself on the threshold of the
event he both yearned for and feared: a prestigious body of
academicians were about to take up the fate of Esperanto. From the
Exposition Universelle of 1900 had emerged a new academy called
the Délégation pour l’Adoption d’une Langue Auxiliaire
Internationale (Delegation for the Adoption of an International
Auxiliary Language). At the helm was the Leibnizian philosopher-
mathematician Louis Couturat, who with Léopold Leau had
coauthored the first history of universal languages (1903). Couturat’s
scholarship had convinced him that Esperanto was currently the
most promising entry in the field, but that it would need some key
revisions if it were to meet the delegation’s three requirements:
internationalism, monosemy (the avoidance of identically spelled
words), and the “principle of reversibility,” which sociologist Peter
Forster explains as follows:
[Couturat] pointed out that … there were no fixed rules
about how to derive verbs, for instance from nouns.…
Thus kroni means “to crown,” but does krono mean “crown”
or “the act of crowning,” “coronation”? 90
In a rational grammar, Couturat argued, one could derive nouns
from verbs and vice versa, without difficulty. But if Esperanto lacked
the “principle of reversibility,” it had something better—a proven
track record of sustained use—and it emerged from the delegation’s
discussions as the leading entry.
The delegation set up a committee comprising a dozen luminaries,
among them the chemist Wilhelm Ostwald (the committee chair); the
linguist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay; the philologist Otto Jespersen;
Boirac, rector of the Université de Grenoble; two anglophone men of
letters—George Harvey, editor of the North American Review; and W.
T. Stead, publisher of the Review of Reviews; Italian mathematician
Giuseppe Peano; Couturat, Leau, and others. 91 From the start, the
delegation’s procedures were compromised: many of the more
illustrious delegates did not appear for the Paris meetings, and some
didn’t even bother to send deputies. Inventors of languages were not
to represent their own languages, a rule that Zamenhof observed
and Peano ignored. In his stead, Zamenhof sent Beaufront, despite
Beaufront’s public contempt for Homaranismo. Though relations
between them were shaky, Zamenhof had two good reasons to send
him to Paris. First, Beaufront was deeply conservative vis-à-vis
reform of the language; second, he would ensure that the delegation,
whatever its suggestions, would yield to the will and authority of the
Esperantists. Or so Zamenhof thought.
In May, the committee received a new entry, anonymously
submitted over the name “Ido,” the Esperanto word for “offspring.”
Indeed, the new entry resembled Esperanto, but an Esperanto
purged of adjectival agreement, accusative endings, supersigns, and
correlatives. 92 And there was another, signal change: anyone
familiar with the delegation’s three criteria would have quickly
realized that Ido was Esperanto redesigned to satisfy Couturat’s
requirement of reversibility.
Beaufront publicly expressed his satisfaction that a rationalized,
“improved” Esperanto was now available, and assured the
delegation that the Esperantists would endorse it. While Ido, as the
language came to be called, looked different, sounded different, was
different from Esperanto, it was far less different than some of the
more extreme reforms that Zamenhof himself had proposed. Like
those who alter their surnames to assimilate, Ido had turned its back
on its father’s interethnic matrix—Slavic, Germanic, Jewish—to
adopt (primarily) French word endings. That the delegation
officially regarded the new proposal as “simplified” Esperanto was
just fine with Beaufront, since it buttressed his assertion that the
Esperantists would endorse the changes. And once Ido became the
darling of the delegation, the Frenchification of Esperanto would be
complete.
Louis de Beaufront, Esperanto’s “Judas”
[Österreichische Nationalbibliothek]
In a letter to Zamenhof, Beaufront made it plain that Ido was the
favorite, which would inevitably mean the demise of Esperanto.
Back in Warsaw, Zamenhof was insulted, outraged, and bewildered.
To Sebert he fumed:
I know nothing about the person of “Ido” and have never
seen his grammar.… The behavior of M. De Beaufront
seems to me very suspicious; to show my trust in him, I
chose him as my representative before the delegation, and
he, not asking me at all, suddenly and too startlingly went
over to the reformers and wrote a letter to me, saying that
Esperanto must certainly die, that, after five years, only
the memory of Esperanto will remain. 93
Between October 1907 and January of 1908, Zamenhof took
every conceivable stance concerning the delegation. Tight-lipped
and circumspect, he told the committee that he had received the Ido
project and would consult with the Esperantists. To the Esperantists,
he sometimes endorsed the delegation’s authority but more often
demanded that the delegation defer to the Esperantists—but to
whom exactly? On this point he wavered, demanding variously that
it be accountable to himself, to the Esperanto Language Committee,
and to the next Universal Congress. Sometimes he denounced the