Kaitlyn Mostoller

An Esperantist Has A Breakdown

In 2013, a close friend of mine, well call her Sarah, emigrated from Australia to the

United States. During the second week of fall quarter, I walked past the principals office and

saw Sarah crying into the sleeve of her jacket and phoning her mother. Sarah was a fantastic

student, so I could not imagine why she was being reprimanded. After she was released, I asked

what had happened. During math class, she banged her hip on a desk accidentally, and let slip a

colorful stream of English curse words that both thoroughly impressed her classmates and

displeased her teacher. Swearing is not tolerated in American public schools, and is seen as

quite rude in American culture (of course, rudeness is most accurately evaluated on a case-by-

case basis and marking any one action as rude in all scenarios is hard to prove). On the other

hand, swearing is not perceived as absolutely negative or offensive in Australian culture and the

Australian education system (Cook). As a result of this cultural difference, Sarah found herself in

detention, simply because she believed that the normality of swearing was a universal trait of

language rather than a culture-specific one. In fact, views on swearing are not even consistent

within the cultures that predominantly speak English. This course, Honors 211, has shaped my

world view similarly, bringing to light cultural differences I was previously unaware of.

Contrasting Sarahs experience, I would not have noticed these differences on my own, likely

due to a lack of experience with other cultures and my own egocentric tendencies. Through this

class Ive been able to expedite the process of understanding other cultures by focusing

specifically on language, which, although we havent directly addressed Esperanto is class, has

revealed so much about Esperanto culture and how I am messing it up.

 Throughout this quarter, Ive realized just how severely my lens of anglocentrism

affects what I say and think. As an Esperantist, this is a terribly embarrassing thing to say. The

Esperanto community has a universally negative opinion on the English language (the most

popular software for learning Esperanto, Duolingo, specifically teaches its pupils to say la angla

ne estas internacia lingvo cxar gxi estas tro malfacilia lerni which translates to English is not

an international language because it is too difficult to learn.) (Johnson: Simple, Logical,

Doomed). I thought I understood this opinion, and respected it by only speaking Esperanto

around other Esperantists. I was wrong. It is still completely possible to act like I am speaking

English despite the Esperanto words that come out of my mouth. Although I may be speaking

Esperanto to another person, I still abide by my Anglo mannerisms, which can cause a good

deal of conversational confusion. For example, I often ask, Kie estas la bancxambro? (Where

is the bathroom?) rather than Kie estas la necesejo? (Where is the toilet?). This habit

conforms to the Anglo norm of euphemizing bodily functions and things related to them. This

norm is not universal (from my personal experience, Czech and Italian Esperanto speakers say

necesejo rather than bancxambro), so when I say Where is the bathroom? I am culturally

isolating my conversation to only be completely understood by English-Esperanto speakers. The

ideology supporting Esperanto is that it functions as a universal language that can be potentially

understood by a person with any native language. One can imagine how upset I was to realize

that I had somehow managed to de-universalize the universal language with a topic as simple

as the location of a restroom.

Additionally, this course has brought to my attention the Natural Semantic

Metalanguage. This completely altered my understanding of what a universal language was,

and why the world needs a universal language. Esperantists are constantly trying to draw upon

concepts that are familiar and easily accessible in their native tongues and fit them into

Esperanto words. So much can be lost in the translation. For example, the Esperanto word for

freedom (English), svooboda (Russian), and wolno (Polish) is libereco. Through this course, it

has come to my attention that these freedom, svoboda, and wolno mean different things, so

the likelihood that Esperantists from different countries know precisely what each other are

referring to when employing the word libereco is actually quite slim. While speaking with other

Esperantists at the 2016 Italian Esperanto Congress, I was often asked to comment on

Americas current political turbulence. As an indigenous person, I felt most comfortable and

most informed speaking about the land use disputes between private companies and Native

American tribes (the most famous case being the Dakota Access Pipeline, but similar cases with

different companies and initiatives can be found across many tribes). While speaking on this

subject, I often referred to the libereco de indigexenoj popoloj (the freedom of indigenous

peoples), where libereco meant a removal of impositions for indigenous people. The need for

libereco, from my American viewpoint, expressed the need to abolish barriers that prevented

tribes from being able to do what they wanted to. In retrospect, libereco might not have

invoked the idea of removal of impositions to a Russian-Esperanto speaker the way it would

have for an English-Esperanto speaker. If the Russian-Esperanto speakers were thinking of

libereco more in terms of svoboda than freedom, it is possible that my argument could have

been more strongly associated with tribal access to land and the physical need for land,

drawing on the link between svodoba and wide open spaces, rather than legal tribal

sovereignty and the need for tribes to be able to make their own decisions for their people
(Wierzbicka). Unfortunately, only hindsight is 20/20, and I can only hope that my fellow

Esperantists could completely understand my anglocentric manner of speaking. I truly wish I

had the opportunity to take this course before being given an international audience on a

subject so important to me.

 Works Cited

Catherine Cook. "Welcome to Australian English, Where Swearing Isn't Swearing." Fully (sic).
Crickey, 25 Sept. 2015. Web. 01 Mar. 2017.

"Johnson: Simple, Logical and Doomed." The Economist. The Economist Newspaper, 26 Sept.
2013. Web. 01 Mar. 2017.

Wierzbicka, Anna. Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words: English, Russian, Polish,
German, and Japanese. New York: Oxford U, 1997. Print.