A talk

The origins of Esperanto can be traced to the situation in the nineteenth century, by which time Latin had lost its position as the universal language of scholarship and wider communication in Europe and the western world. With the growth of national languages throughout Europe, people had begun to be more aware that there was a language problem: people couldn’t understand one another unless they learnt one another’s languages. Foreign languages are hard to learn, and even the best linguists can learn only a handful of the thousands of languages in the world. (Even today, if we consider only those languages with a large enough literate population to have a daily newspaper is published in them, we are faced with somewhere between 50 and 100 such major languages. Probably none of us have mastered more than five or six of them; and most people know fewer.)