One Who Hopes

A Language lovers, just like music lovers, enjoy a variety. For the latter, there’s Mozart, The Rolling Stones and Beyonce. For the former, there’s English, French, Swahili, Urdu… the list is endless. But what about those poor overworked students who find learning difficult, confusing languages a drudge? Wouldn’t it put a smile on their faces if there were just one simple, the easy-to-learn tongue that would cut their study time by years? Well, of course, it exists. It’s called Esperanto, and it’s been around for more than 120 years. Esperanto is the most widely spoken artificially constructed international language. The name derives from Doktoro Esperanto, the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof first published his Unua Libro in 1887. The phrase itself means ‘one who hopes’. Zamenhof’s goal was to create an easy and flexible language as a universal second language to promote peace and international understanding.

B Zamenhof, after ten years of developing his brain-child from the late 1870s to the early 1880s, had the first Esperanto grammar published in Warsaw in July 1887. The number of speakers grew rapidly over the next few decades, at first primarily in the Russian Empire and Eastern Europe, then in Western Europe and the Americas, China, and Japan. In the early years, speakers of Esperanto kept in contact primarily through correspondence and periodicals, but since 1905 world congresses have been held on five continents every year except during the two World Wars. Latest estimates for the numbers of Esperanto speakers are around 2 million. Put in percentage terms, that’s about 0.03% of the world’s population – no staggering figure, comparatively speaking. One reason is that Esperanto has no official status in any country, but it is an optional subject on the curriculum of several state education systems. It is widely estimated that it can be learned in anywhere between a quarter to a twentieth of the time required for other languages.

C As a constructed language, Esperanto is not genealogically related to any ethnic language. Whilst it is described as ‘a language lexically predominantly Romanic’, the phonology, grammar, vocabulary, and semantics are based on the western Indo-European languages. For those of us who are not naturally predisposed to tucking languages under our belts, it is an easy language to learn. It has 5 vowels and 23 consonants. It has one simple way of conjugating all of its verbs. Words are often made from many other roots, making the number of words which one must memorise much smaller. The language is phonetic, and the rules of pronunciation are very simple so that everyone knows how to pronounce a written word and vice-versa, and word order follows a standard, logical pattern. Through prefixing and suffixing, Esperanto makes it easy to identify words as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, direct objects and so on, by means of easy-to-spot endings. All this makes for easy language learning. What’s more, several research studies demonstrate that studying Esperanto before another foreign language speeds up and improves the learning of the other language. This is presumably because learning subsequent foreign languages is easier than learning one’s first, while the use of a grammatically simple and culturally flexible language like Esperanto softens the blow of learning one’s first foreign language. In one study, a group of European high school students studied Esperanto for one year, then French for three years, and ended up with a significantly better command of French than a control group who had studied French for all four years.

D Needless to say, the language has its critics. Some point to the Eastern European features of the language as being harsh and difficult to pronounce and argue that Esperanto has an artificial feel to it, without the flow of a natural tongue, and that by nature of its artificiality, it is impossible to become emotionally involved with the language. Others cite its lack of cultural history, indigenous literature – “no one has ever written a novel straight into Esperanto” – together with its minimal vocabulary and its inability to express all the necessary philosophical, emotional and psychological concepts.

E The champions of Esperanto – Esperantists – disagree. They claim that it is a language in which a great body of world literature has appeared in translation: in poetry, novels, literary journals, and, to rebut the accusation that it is not a ‘real’ language, point out that it is frequently used at international meetings which draw hundreds and thousands of participants. Moreover, on an international scale, it is most useful – and fair – for neutral communication. That means that communication through Esperanto does not give advantages to the members of any particular people or culture, but provides an ethos of equality of rights, tolerance and true internationalism.

F Esperantists further claim that Esperanto has the potential – was it universally taught for a year or two throughout the world – to empower ordinary people to communicate effectively worldwide on a scale that far exceeds that which is attainable today by only the most linguistically brilliant among us. It offers the opportunity to improve communication in business, diplomacy, scholarship and other fields so that those who speak many different native languages will be able to participate fluently in international conferences and chat comfortably with each other after the formal presentations are made. Nowadays that privilege is often restricted to native speakers of English and those who have special talents and opportunities for learning English as a foreign language.

G What Esperanto does offer in concrete terms is the potential of saving billions of dollars which are now being spent on translators and interpreters, billions which would be freed up to serve the purposes of governments and organisations that spend so much of their resources to change words from one language into the words of others. Take, for example, the enormously costly conferences, meetings and documentation involved in the European Union parliamentary and administrative procedures – all funded, essentially, by taxpayers. And instead of the World Health Organisation, and all NGOs for that matter, devoting enormous sums to provide interpreters and translations, they would be able to devote those huge amounts of money to improve the health of stricken populations throughout the world.

LONG-TERM FORECAST: HOT AND DRY

A Melting land ice in the Arctic is set to cause a global rise in sea levels, leading to disastrous effects for both man and wildlife. Many species worldwide are threatened with extinction, and low-lying islands and landmasses will disappear entirely. But the havoc wreaked by the effect of greenhouse gases won’t be confined to just too much water, but the absence of it, as well. In other words, desertification. A decrease in the total amount of rainfall in arid and semi-arid areas could increase the total area of drylands worldwide, and thus the total amount of land potentially at risk from desertification.

B Desertification is officially recognised as land degradation in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas resulting from various factors including climatic variations and human activities. This degradation of formerly productive land is a complex process. It involves multiple causes, and it proceeds at varying rates in different climates. Desertification may intensify a general climatic trend, or initiate a change in local climate, both leading towards greater aridity. The more arid conditions associated with desertification accelerate the depletion of vegetation and soils. Land degradation occurs all over the world, but it is only referred to as desertification when it takes place in drylands. This is because these areas are especially prone to more permanent damage as different areas of degraded land spread and merge together to form desert-like conditions.

C Global warming brought about by increasing greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere is expected to increase the variability of weather conditions and extreme events. Many dryland areas face increasingly low and erratic rainfalls, coupled with soil erosion by wind and the drying-up of water resources through increased regional temperatures. Deforestation can also reduce rainfall in certain areas, increasing the threat of desertification. It is not yet possible, despite sophisticated technology, to identify with an acceptable degree of reliability those parts of the Earth where desertification will occur. Existing drylands, which cover over 40% of the total land area of the world, most significantly in Africa and Asia, will probably be most at risk from climate change. These areas already experience low rainfall, and any that falls is usually in the form of short, erratic, high-intensity storms. In addition, such areas also suffer from land degradation due to over-cultivation, overgrazing, deforestation and poor irrigation practices.

D It is a misconception that droughts cause desertification. Droughts are common in arid and semi-arid lands. Well-managed lands can recover from drought when the rains return. Continued land abuse during droughts, however, increases land degradation. Nor does desertification occur in linear, easily definable patterns. Deserts advance erratically, forming patches on their borders. Areas far from natural deserts can degrade quickly to barren soil, rock, or sand through poor land management. The presence of a nearby desert has no direct relationship to desertification. Unfortunately, an area undergoing desertification is brought to public attention only after the process is well underway. Often little or no data are available to indicate the previous state of the ecosystem or the rate of degradation. Scientists still question whether desertification, as a process of global change, is permanent or how and when it can be halted or reversed.

E But desertification will not be limited to the drylands of Africa and Asia. According to the environmental organisation Greenpeace, the Mediterranean will suffer substantially, too. If current trends in emissions of greenhouse gases continue, global temperatures are expected to rise faster over the next century than over any time during the last 10,000 years. Significant uncertainties surround predictions of regional climate changes, but it is likely that the Mediterranean region will also warm significantly, increasing the frequency and severity of droughts across the region. As the world warms, global sea levels will rise as oceans expand and glaciers melt. Around much of the Mediterranean basin, sea levels could rise by close to 1m by 2100. As a result, some low-lying coastal areas would be lost through flooding or erosion, while rivers and coastal aquifers would become saltier. The worst affected areas will be the Nile Delta, Venice in Italy and Thessaloniki in Greece, two major cities where local subsidence means that sea levels could rise by at least one-and-a-half times as much as elsewhere.

F The consequences of all this say Greenpeace, are far-reaching, and the picture is a gloomy one. Livestock production would suffer due to a deterioration in the quality of rangeland. Yields of grains and other crops could decrease substantially across the Mediterranean region due to increased frequency of drought. Crop production would be further threatened by increases in competition for water and the prevalence of pests and diseases and land loss through desertification and sea-level rise. The combination of heat and pollution would lead to an upsurge in respiratory illness among urban populations, while extreme weather events could increase death and injury rates. Water shortages and damaged infrastructure would increase the risk of cholera and dysentery, while higher temperatures would increase the incidence of infectious diseases, such as malaria and dengue fever. Serious social disruption could occur as millions are forced from their homelands as a result of desertification, poor harvests and sea-level rise, while international disputes over shared water resources could turn into conflict.

G Future climate change could critically undermine efforts for sustainable development in the Mediterranean region through its impacts on the environment and social and economic well-being. While in many respects climate change exacerbates existing problems instead of creating new ones, the sheer magnitude of the potential problem means it cannot be ignored. There is some scope for adaptation, but the fact that many measures would be beneficial irrespective of climate change suggests that radical changes in our policies and practices will be needed. It is also vital that developed countries meet their obligations to assist adaptation in developing countries through access to know-how and financial assistance. Ultimately, however, the long-term sustainability of the Mediterranean region requires keeping climate change within tolerable bounds. Current understanding of safe limits points to the need for prompt international agreement – and action – to make the drastic cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases required to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of these gases.