seventeen are native speakers of either English or French; no
wonder the academy carefully monitors linguistic diversity among
its membership. The term is nine years, renewable; every three
years, one-third of the members are up for election. As Tonkin puts
it, “Some of the members have been asleep for years; staying awake
is … not an absolute requirement of membership.”
The format is simple: the academy publicly tackles a series of
written questions submitted by the general membership. *John C.
Wells, a British phoneticist and author of the leading English-
Esperanto dictionary, presides. He reads the first question aloud,
then passes the hand-held microphone to whichever academician
reaches for it first.
“What is Esperanto for ‘cluster bomb?’” The questioner uses the
English term. A matronly Italian takes the mike. “Grapola bombo,”
she suggests, Esperantizing the Italian expression bomba a grappola.
“No!” says another member, grabbing for the mike, “Bombetaro”—
approval by acclaim for the latter. It is more … Esperantist.
“Which is the ‘first floor,’ the ground floor or the one above?”
“We’re not here to legislate among cultures,” comes the reply. “Use
the term you’d use in your own country.”
“Should we say ‘Birmo’ or ‘Mianmaro’?” Tonkin says, “These are
political decisions, not academic ones; to stick with Burma is a
critique of the regime.” A question on the proper name for
Mozambique snags a curt reply from Wells: “There’s a published
list.”
“Which is the correct adverbial form: ‘Sponte’? ‘Spontane’?
‘Spontanee’?” Alas, Esperanto never did solve the problem of
irreversibility that drove the Idists away. Wells takes a straw polclass="underline"
spontane, hands down. When someone suggests that the Academy
consult the frequency of uses on the Web, the Israeli physicist Amri
Wandel protests, “That’s not reliable. I’ve written about this …
about nanplaneto vs. nanoplaneto.” Heads bob knowingly; those who
haven’t already read it take down the reference.
Wells flips to the next question. “Why is the sexist ‘shminkistino’
the preferred term? Not all makeup artists are women, right?” It’s a
rhetorical question; point taken.
“Which is better: ‘Bluaj okuloj’? ‘Bluokuleco’?” Blue eyes, or blue-
eyedness? It’s a question only an Esperantist could understand—or
need answered.
“How do we properly refer to the parts of a person’s name:
‘Familiana nomo’? ‘Persona nomo’?” “In some cultures,” says Tonkin,
“the word ‘name’ only refers to a family name; and there are other
terms and usages.” He does not say “Christian name,” as the English
usually do. “We’re not here to make the world easier; we make
easier the complication of the world.” Wavelets of laughter. “Do as
you like.”
Most questions are lexical, but late in the session comes a
grammatical question: “What about this trend of creating new verbs
from participles?” The academicians sigh audibly, as over a teenager
who has once again forgotten to take out the garbage. In fact, it
once was a youth issue: a trend that began among Esperanto-
speaking teens in the 1980s has finally filtered into the Esperanto
mainstream. While Americans are now scandalously verbing every
noun in sight, Esperantists have, since 1887, been licensed to verb
almost any root. Instead of Mi ludas gitaron (I play the guitar), I can
simply add a verb ending to the root “gitar-” and say, Mi gitaras. But
now, something more extreme is happening: people are taking
participles, adjectives already spawned by verbs, and using them as
secondary verbs. “For example,” says one academician, “they’ve
been saying bezonatas, from the participle bezonata (needed), as in
Ĉio bezonatas samtempe—‘everything is being needed at the same
time.’” More examples are thrown into the fray as the volume of the
chatter onstage rises, until Wells wrests away the mike and says, a
little impatiently, “You have a choice. You always have a choice.”
Do as you like. You have a choice. They may be the Academy, but
they’re not the boss of us.
When the session draws to a close, people file out in knots of two
and three, seeking out a bit of shade to continue debating about
participles. In my mind’s eye, I see the delegates of 1905 doing much
the same, before recessing to the cafés of Boulogne.
6. Adrian
“Strangulo”—“weirdo”—says Adrian, the retired public health
professor I’d met in Iznik. Adrian’s right; the young Japanese man
who unicycles past our table in the beer garden, arms outstretched
for balance, is a weirdo. I’d seen him the night before, playing the
accordion on the esplanade in front of the polytechnic. Earlier
today, clad in a green T-shirt and a white hachimaki headband, he
pedaled his unicycle past the entrance to the libroservo (bookstore)
as I entered. I was there to drop some złotys on books: anthologies
of Hungarian poetry, back copies of Beletra Almanako, a history of
Esperanto in Africa, Raymond Schwartz’s novel Kiel akvo de l’rivero
(Like River Water), the satirical magazine La Kancer-Kliniko (The
Cancer Clinic), and the best-selling Kulturo de Amo, a sex guide in
Hungarian and Esperanto, illustrated with exquisite stippled pencil
drawings. It’s been in print continuously since the seventies, the
passionate couple still locked in their forty-year-old embrace,
wearing mullet hairdos. While I stand paging through it, a plump
French woman in Birkenstocks says over my shoulder, “Buy it now!
You’ll see, it always sells out.” This was not the only erotica in the
libroservo. There are erotic poems by one “Peter Peneter” (the
pseudonym of Kálmán Kalocsay), and the popular ABC de Amo (ABC
of Love), a Danish best-seller of 1958.
Some weeks ago, Adrian emailed that he had applied too late for
lodging in Białystok; now, he wrote, there were no rooms left in the
bargain hotels and he wasn’t in the market for luxury. “I’ll find
something; I’ve never yet spent a night under a bridge.” By the time
I catch up with him at the opening ceremony, he’s rented a room for
twelve euros a night in the priory of an onion-domed Orthodox
church on the outskirts of town. Apart from the Doberman in the
courtyard, he says, it’s perfect: quiet, clean, and comfortable. He’s
left his B&B in Maastricht in the care of “la lesbaninoj”—a Bulgarian
lesbian couple who get free lodging in exchange for housework—but
takes all calls for the business on his smartphone. After he answers
“Hal ooo,” it’s hard to predict what language he’ll speak next: Dutch;
his fluent, colloquial English; his excellent French; or his functional
German, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, or Italian. He also knows
enough of ten other languages to speak to cabbies. “Come to
Maastricht and I’ll give you the five-country tour,” he offers broadly;
“We start in Holland, lunch in Belgium, drive through France, a stop