A Textbook and the Promise of Order
I no longer remember exactly where I first encountered an Esperanto textbook. I was still a student, and the discovery was probably accidental. It may have happened in a bookstore, a library, or among the many books that attracted my attention during those years. What I remember clearly is the curiosity it awakened. At that time, I knew only that Esperanto was a language created by one person, Dr. L. L. Zamenhof, and that it had been intended for communication across national boundaries. That description alone made it unusual. Most languages seemed to belong to nations, regions, or historical communities. Esperanto appeared to belong first to an idea.
Its grammar immediately fascinated me. There were no irregular verbs to memorize and no long lists of exceptions that seemed to contradict the rules introduced only a few pages earlier. Word classes could be recognized through consistent endings, and vocabulary could be expanded by combining roots with prefixes and suffixes. Once a learner understood the structure, many unfamiliar words could be interpreted without consulting a dictionary. The language seemed transparent because its organizing principles were visible rather than hidden beneath centuries of accumulated usage.
For a student attracted to philosophy, systems, and coherent forms of thought, this quality was difficult to resist. Esperanto suggested that language itself could be redesigned according to reason. It seemed to show what might remain if unnecessary irregularities were removed and the basic mechanisms of expression were arranged consistently. Natural languages often intimidate beginners because their rules are never entirely reliable. A learner studies a grammatical pattern only to discover that several common words do not follow it, while spelling preserves sounds that disappeared centuries ago and similar meanings are expressed through unrelated forms because the vocabulary entered the language from different historical sources.
Esperanto promised another kind of experience. It did not demand that learners accept disorder simply because previous generations had inherited it. It offered a clean beginning in which the relationship between rule and usage appeared stable. This was not only convenient but also aesthetically satisfying. The structure itself created a sense of beauty, as if language could become an intelligible architecture rather than a collection of habits that had to be memorized.
Looking back, I can see that my fascination belonged to a wider intellectual atmosphere. Esperanto emerged from the confidence of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when many thinkers believed that education, science, international cooperation, and rational organization could improve human civilization. If political institutions could be redesigned and knowledge could be systematized, perhaps communication itself could also be made fairer and more efficient. There was something admirable in that confidence. A better world might require a better way of speaking to one another, and perhaps that way could be consciously created.
The Ethics of a Shared Second Language
As I learned more, I began to understand that Esperanto was not merely an artificial language invented as a linguistic experiment. It was intended to be an international auxiliary language. The distinction mattered because Esperanto was not supposed to replace Japanese, French, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, or any other language. It was not designed to erase local identities or force all people into a single linguistic culture. Everyone could continue speaking their native language within their families, communities, literature, and national life, while Esperanto would serve as a shared second language.
This idea gave the project an ethical meaning that went beyond grammatical convenience. If everyone learned the same auxiliary language, no one would possess the international language as a natural privilege acquired at birth. Everyone would need to make an effort, but that effort would be more evenly distributed. The language would belong to its users collectively rather than functioning as the cultural extension of one powerful nation.
In the existing world, speakers of a globally dominant language receive an enormous advantage. They can participate in international communication without first spending years mastering a foreign language. They can write, negotiate, argue, and express subtle feelings through the language they learned as children, while others must enter the same space through prolonged study, correction, embarrassment, and repeated practice. This inequality is often treated as natural, although it is better understood as the result of history.
Languages become dominant through political power, military expansion, trade, colonialism, migration, education, media, and technology. Once a language acquires international status, the advantages enjoyed by its native speakers can appear to be simple consequences of practicality. Yet that practicality was produced by institutions and historical conditions. Esperanto offered a different principle: the language used between nations would not be the national possession of any one group, and its purpose would be communication rather than cultural dominance.
This was one reason Esperanto appealed to people concerned about language imperialism. To study it was not necessarily to reject English, French, or any other major language. It was to question the assumption that one linguistic community should receive a permanent advantage over everyone else. I found this ideal compelling because it attempted to preserve diversity while creating a common space. It did not require humanity to abandon its many languages. Instead, it sought to prevent one of them from becoming the unquestioned standard through which all others were judged.
The neutrality of Esperanto was never absolute. Much of its vocabulary and grammatical structure came from European languages, and speakers familiar with Romance, Germanic, or Slavic languages could often recognize its roots more easily than those whose linguistic experience came from elsewhere. Even a consciously designed language must begin somewhere, and its creator must select sounds, roots, categories, and grammatical habits from the languages already available. Those choices inevitably reflect a historical environment. Still, the impossibility of perfect neutrality does not cancel the ethical intention. Esperanto asked whether international communication could be organized without simply reproducing the power of the strongest nations, and that question remains relevant even though its proposed answer was never adopted by the world as a whole.
A Community Discovered Through Books
My interest deepened when I learned that Esperanto had attracted writers, intellectuals, educators, and social reformers in many countries. Leo Tolstoy was one of the figures who caught my attention. I had heard that he studied Esperanto, supported its principles, and found it remarkably easy to understand. According to a widely repeated account, only a few hours of study allowed him to grasp enough of the language to begin reading it. Whether one focuses on the exact number of hours or on the larger point, the story captured the appeal of Esperanto: a major writer working in one of the world’s great literary languages had recognized the value of a language designed for ordinary people to learn quickly.
Tolstoy’s interest also gave Esperanto a moral seriousness. His work was concerned not only with literature but also with peace, conscience, social inequality, and the relationship between individuals and institutions. Esperanto appeared compatible with those concerns because it offered a modest but practical vision of communication across national divisions. It was not merely a puzzle for people interested in grammar. It belonged to a larger hope that understanding between peoples might reduce the distance created by politics and power.
In Japan, I was also fascinated to learn that Kenji Miyazawa had studied Esperanto. Miyazawa was a poet and writer whose imagination was deeply connected to regional landscapes, agriculture, Buddhism, science, and the lives of ordinary people. His interest showed that Esperanto did not require someone to turn away from local culture. A person could remain rooted in a particular place and still imagine a language shared beyond it. That combination of local depth and international aspiration was one of the most attractive elements of the Esperanto movement.
As I continued studying, I looked for grammar books, textbooks, and readers. I also subscribed, or at least tried to subscribe, to magazines published by Esperanto organizations in Japan. These publications revealed that Esperanto was not only a design preserved in textbooks. It had a community. People were using it to write articles, exchange letters, translate literature, organize meetings, and maintain relationships across borders. The language had begun as the work of one creator, but it no longer belonged only to him. Its speakers had given it a social life.
This changed my understanding of what a constructed language could become. A language may be designed by an individual, but once people begin using it, it develops experiences that no single person controls. It gathers expressions, disagreements, customs, memories, and styles. It may have been invented, but it can still become lived. Esperanto had already begun to acquire a history of its own, even if that history remained small beside those of the major natural languages.
One of my most memorable encounters with this history occurred while I was doing part-time work at the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka. The museum itself was an appropriate place to think about language because it brought together research on cultures, communities, material life, religion, and the many forms through which human beings create meaning. The head of the museum, Tadao Umesao, was also known as an Esperantist, and discovering his connection with Esperanto made the language feel closer to my own environment.
I remember entering the museum’s internal library and seeing a bookshelf containing books donated by Dr. Umesao. Among them was a significant collection of works written in Esperanto. Until then, Esperanto had existed for me mainly as a linguistic possibility, an ideal to consider, and a movement described in magazines. On those shelves, it became physically present. There were books that had been written, printed, preserved, read, and passed to future readers. The collection represented years of intellectual attention and showed that someone had taken the language seriously enough to make it part of a scholarly life.
That memory stayed with me because it transformed the scale of my interest. A language may be small in the number of its speakers, but it can still occupy a meaningful place in a person’s life. It can shape friendships, research, political commitments, and the way someone imagines the world. Perhaps that was when my affection for Esperanto became more than admiration for its grammar. It became connected with books, places, older intellectuals, and the sense that I had discovered a quiet tradition continuing beside the dominant currents of history.
When Rational Design Meets Historical Reality
Esperanto was created with ambitions much larger than the interests of individual learners. Its supporters hoped that it might become a practical language for international cooperation, and the idea was discussed during the era of the League of Nations, the international organization established after the First World War. That period seemed to offer a historical opening. If nations were serious about preventing future conflict, perhaps they also needed a common means of communication that did not belong exclusively to one of them.
The proposal matched the spirit of institutional modernism. International bodies, shared standards, public education, and rational administration were expected to reduce misunderstanding and manage conflicts that older political arrangements had failed to control. A neutral auxiliary language appeared to fit naturally within that vision. It could be taught systematically, learned more quickly than most natural languages, and used without granting symbolic ownership to a major power.
Yet Esperanto was not adopted as the universal second language of the League of Nations, and it did not later become a common official language of the United Nations. The historical opportunity passed, and this outcome revealed one of the limits of rational design. A language is not selected in the same way that an engineer selects a material after comparing performance. Humanity did not gather to examine the world’s languages, measure their regularity, and choose the easiest one.
Languages spread through networks of power. They move with governments, armies, schools, ports, commercial institutions, religious missions, scientific publications, entertainment industries, and digital platforms. Their influence grows when people believe that learning them will provide access to employment, education, trade, status, or political participation. English did not become a global language because its spelling was consistent or because its grammar had been designed for international learners. It became global through the history of the British Empire, the economic and political influence of the United States, and its expanding role in science, business, aviation, computing, popular culture, and the internet.
Esperanto entered history with a rational argument, while English entered with institutions, capital, universities, companies, media, and millions of native speakers. This contrast does not prove that Esperanto was misguided. It shows that the most rational system does not automatically become the dominant one. Human societies are not organized only by explicit decisions. They are shaped by accumulated habits and inequalities that become more powerful as they reproduce themselves.
Once a language becomes widely used, its usefulness becomes an argument for its continued dominance. People learn English because other people already use English. Companies operate in English because international employees have invested in learning it. Scientific work is published in English because researchers want to reach the largest possible audience. The system strengthens itself through every new person who joins it.
Esperanto lacked this historical momentum. It had committed speakers, organizations, publications, and international gatherings, but it did not have the institutional force required to make it necessary for ordinary life. Its limited adoption may therefore be understood as a challenge to the modernist belief that a superior design can transform society through its visible reasonableness. People do not necessarily adopt a system because it is simpler or fairer. They often adopt the system that already controls access to the world they need to enter.
When Language Enters the Body
My later experience with languages also made me reconsider the importance of rational grammar. For a beginner, Esperanto has genuine advantages. A regular verb system reduces memorization, consistent pronunciation removes uncertainty, and productive prefixes and suffixes allow learners to expand their vocabulary efficiently. These qualities can make early progress faster and more encouraging because the learner can trust the structure instead of constantly preparing for exceptions.
The early stages of language learning are dominated by conscious effort. A learner must remember rules, compare structures, translate meanings, and monitor pronunciation. A well-designed language reduces the number of obstacles encountered during this stage. It lowers the cost of entry and makes the relationship between study and progress easier to recognize. In that respect, Esperanto fulfills one of its central promises.
Fluency, however, is not simply the ability to apply rules more rapidly. Something more fundamental happens when a language becomes internalized. A fluent speaker does not normally construct each sentence by first consulting a grammatical table in the mind. Words arrive as phrases, rhythms, expectations, and familiar movements. Grammar operates beneath conscious attention, and the speaker feels that one expression sounds natural while another does not, even when the precise rule cannot immediately be explained.
Language becomes embodied. It enters hearing, memory, breathing, timing, and the movement of the mouth. It becomes connected to particular situations, emotions, relationships, and ways of responding. The language is no longer an external system that the person uses. It becomes part of how the person experiences and organizes thought.
From this perspective, the irregularity of natural languages changes its meaning. To a beginner, an irregular verb is a problem. To a native or deeply fluent speaker, it is simply the verb. Russian and Japanese may appear extremely difficult to learners whose first languages are very different, yet Russian and Japanese children speak them without experiencing their languages as intellectual puzzles. They absorb patterns through thousands of ordinary encounters, and what appears complex from outside becomes natural from within.
This does not mean that all languages require the same amount of time to learn or that formal complexity has no effect on education. A writing system with thousands of characters clearly creates a different learning burden from an alphabet with a few dozen symbols. A highly irregular spelling system demands more memorization than a phonetic one. The important distinction lies between acquisition and internalization. A simpler system can reduce the effort required to reach the early and intermediate stages, but once a language has been fully absorbed, the speaker is no longer continually paying the cost of each irregularity.
This may explain why rational design, although valuable, cannot by itself guarantee that a language will become socially alive. People do not live inside grammar books. They live inside relationships, memories, institutions, jokes, songs, arguments, work, affection, and repeated daily situations. A language becomes second nature when it is attached to these experiences, not merely when its rules can be explained efficiently.
Irregularity also carries history. A spelling that no longer matches pronunciation may preserve an older form of the word. An unusual conjugation may be the remnant of a pattern that once applied more broadly. Borrowed vocabulary can reveal centuries of contact among communities. What looks like a flaw in design may be evidence of time, and natural languages are filled with traces of people who migrated, conquered, traded, converted, intermarried, resisted, and adapted. Esperanto’s rationality remains admirable, but natural languages show that a language is more than an instrument designed to carry information. It is also a deposit of human experience.
The Necessary Argument with Complexity
Recognizing the historical value of irregularity does not mean that complexity should always be preserved. Languages require organization. A society cannot educate millions of people without some agreement about spelling, grammar, and vocabulary. Governments need stable terminology, while science and law depend on shared definitions. Publishing requires conventions, and technology needs forms that can be processed consistently. Standardization is not the enemy of linguistic life. It is one of the conditions that allows language to function beyond small local communities.
The difficulty is deciding which forms of complexity are useful and which merely impose unnecessary burdens. Japanese Kanji offers an especially interesting example. From a strictly rational perspective, the writing system appears extremely demanding. Students must learn a large number of characters, multiple readings, and combinations whose pronunciation cannot always be predicted from their parts. This requires years of education, and even native speakers encounter characters they do not know how to read or write. A reformer might reasonably ask whether the language would become more accessible if it relied entirely on a simpler phonetic script.
Yet Kanji also performs important work within Japanese. Because the language contains many homophones, characters help distinguish words that sound identical. They make semantic units visible and allow readers to identify meanings rapidly. They can also connect words through shared conceptual elements, even when their pronunciations differ. A page written entirely in Hiragana is not necessarily easier for an experienced Japanese reader because the absence of Kanji can make word boundaries and meanings harder to recognize.
This is why the debate cannot be settled by counting the number of symbols. A linguistic feature must be judged within the whole system in which it operates. Kanji is burdensome, but it is also functional. Its complexity is not entirely accidental or useless. Over centuries, Japanese developed around the interaction of Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana, and later the Roman alphabet, with each form acquiring a particular role.
The same principle applies more broadly. Rationalization can solve problems, but it can also create new ones. Removing an irregularity may reduce memorization while weakening a distinction that speakers find useful. Simplifying vocabulary may improve accessibility while reducing connections to older texts. This does not mean that reforms should be avoided. Languages have always changed, sometimes through deliberate policy and sometimes through ordinary usage. Spelling systems are revised, new terms are standardized, educational methods improve, and harmful conventions can be challenged.
The point is that design must remain attentive to use. A language is not a machine whose parts can be replaced independently. Its elements work together within habits that speakers have developed over long periods. Esperanto expresses the desire for a language whose structure can be understood as a whole, while natural languages remind us that understanding a system is not the same as living within it.
Both perspectives are necessary. Rationality helps us identify needless difficulty and inherited inequality. Historical sensitivity helps us recognize that not everything complex is meaningless. A language must be organized enough to be taught, shared, and extended, but it must also retain enough continuity to remain the language its speakers recognize as their own.
The Language History Chose
I never became fluent in Esperanto. I continued to remember it, return to it occasionally, and study it through online materials. At times, I used Duolingo or looked again at its grammar and vocabulary. The fascination never disappeared completely, but Esperanto remained primarily an object of intellectual affection rather than the language through which my daily work and thinking developed.
The irony is that English eventually occupied the place I once imagined for Esperanto. English possesses many of the characteristics that Esperanto was designed to avoid. Its spelling is inconsistent, its vocabulary comes from several linguistic traditions, and its grammar contains exceptions produced by centuries of historical change. From a modern rationalist perspective, it is far from an ideal design.
Yet English became the language through which much of my knowledge work, writing, professional communication, and intellectual exchange now takes place. It functions not as a system I consciously decode but as a medium through which ideas are formed, refined, and communicated. This is where the distinction between design and internalization becomes decisive. A language may be irregular when examined from outside, but once it has been fully absorbed through sustained use, those irregularities no longer determine its expressive capacity. They become part of the language’s familiar structure.
English did not become globally influential because it was the most rationally organized language. It became influential through history, institutions, education, commerce, science, technology, and the expanding networks in which people needed to participate. Its position is practical but not neutral. English has become the closest thing humanity currently has to a global operational language, used across business, research, diplomacy, aviation, software development, and much of the internet. It allows people from different linguistic backgrounds to communicate through a shared medium without waiting for a more deliberately designed alternative.
That usefulness is undeniable, but it reflects the very inequality Esperanto sought to address. Native speakers of English enter international communication with advantages that others must acquire through education and sustained effort. Their ordinary forms of expression are more likely to be treated as standard, while other forms are marked as accented, regional, or foreign. The global role of English does not mean that it was selected because it was the fairest or most logical language. It means that history gave it the institutional reach that Esperanto never obtained.
Esperanto therefore continues to matter, even without becoming humanity’s universal second language. Its importance is not measured only by the number of people who speak it. It remains an ethical counterexample to the assumption that linguistic power must simply follow political and economic power. It reminds us that the present order was not inevitable and that international communication could have been imagined as a shared educational responsibility rather than an extension of national privilege.
The rise of artificial intelligence gives this old question an unexpected new form. We now communicate not only with other people through natural language but also with machines. Generative systems receive instructions through prompts, examples, questions, and conversation. Natural language has begun to function as an interface through which human intentions are translated into computational action.
This makes it possible to imagine another historical world. If Esperanto had become humanity’s common auxiliary language, perhaps its regular grammar and systematic vocabulary would now be used in international computing, technical education, and prompt engineering. People from different countries might communicate with intelligent systems through a language that none of them possessed as a birthright. That world never emerged. Artificial intelligence developed within the languages history had already made powerful, especially English.
Perhaps this outcome reveals something important. A language does not become intellectually powerful merely because it is rationally designed. It becomes powerful when people use it long enough, deeply enough, and across enough areas of life that it can carry complex thought without conscious mediation. English now performs that role for many people despite the shortcomings that a language designer might immediately recognize. Its irregularity has not prevented it from becoming a medium of science, philosophy, technology, literature, and global collaboration. Once internalized, its historical complexity does not limit intellectual expression. It becomes part of the medium through which expression occurs.
I remain fond of Esperanto because my affection is connected with the student who opened a textbook and discovered that grammar could be beautiful. It is connected with Tolstoy and Miyazawa, with Esperanto magazines in Japan, and with the books I saw in the museum library donated by Tadao Umesao. It is also connected with a hope that now feels both youthful and enduring: the hope that communication might be organized without simply accepting the privileges created by power.
Esperanto was the language we might have shared, while English became the language history placed at the center of global intellectual life. Between them remains a question that has not disappeared: should human communication simply follow the structures we inherit, or can we continue imagining forms that are fairer, clearer, and more consciously shared?
Image: Wikipedia
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