Esperanto Crossword Puzzle for Kids

Esperanto is a constructed auxiliary language. Its creator was L. L. Zamenhof, a Polish eye doctor. He created the language to make international communication easier. His goal was to design Esperanto in such a way that people can learn it much more easily than any other national language.

At first, Zamenhof called the language La Internacia Lingvo, which means "The International Language" in Esperanto. Soon, people began calling it by the simpler name Esperanto, which means "one who hopes". That name comes from Doktoro Esperanto ("A doctor who hopes"), which is what Zamenhof called himself in his first book about Esperanto.

There are people who speak Esperanto in many countries and in all the major continents. No one knows exactly how many people now speak Esperanto in the world. Most sources say that there are between several hundred thousand and two million Esperanto speakers. A few people grew up speaking Esperanto as their first language. There may perhaps be around 2,000 of these people. Therefore, Esperanto is the most-used constructed language in the world.

A person who speaks or supports Esperanto is often called an "Esperantist".

History

L. L. Zamenhof created Esperanto. He grew up in Białystok, a town that was in the Russian Empire, but is now in Poland. People in Białystok spoke many languages. Zamenhof saw conflicts between individual ethnic groups living there (Russians, Poles, Germans and Jews). He thought that lack of a common language caused these conflicts, so he began creating a language people could share and use internationally. He thought this language should be different from national languages. He wanted it to be culturally neutral and easy-to-learn. He thought people should learn it along with national languages and use Esperanto for communication between people with different native languages.

First, Zamenhof thought about bringing Latin back into use. Although he learned it in school, he realized it was too difficult for normal use. He also studied English and understood that languages did not need to conjugate verbs by person or number. Once he saw two Russian words: швейцарская (reception, derived from швейцар - receptionist) and кондитерская (confectionery, derived from кондитер - confectioner). These words with the same ending gave him an idea. He decided that regular prefixes and suffixes could decrease the number of word roots, which one would need for a communication. Zamenhof wanted the root words to be neutral, so he decided to use word roots from Romance and Germanic languages. Those languages were taught in many schools in many places around the world at that time.

Zamenhof did his first project Lingwe uniwersala (Universal Language) in 1878. But his father, a language teacher, regarded his son's work as unrealistic. So, he destroyed the original work. Between 1879 and 1885 Zamenhof studied medicine in Moscow and Warsaw. In these days he again worked on an international language. In 1887 he published his first textbook Международный языкъ ("The International Language"). According to Zamenhof's pen-name Doktoro Esperanto ("Doctor who hopes"), many people started calling the language as Esperanto.

Zamenhof received a lot of enthusiastic letters. In the letters, people wrote their suggestions for changes to the language. He noted all of the suggestions. He published them in the magazine La Esperantisto. In this magazine, Esperanto speakers could vote about the changes. They did not accept them. The magazine had many subscribers in Russia. It was eventually banned (stopped) there because of an article about Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. Publishing of the magazine ended after that. The new magazine Lingvo Internacia replaced it.

In the first years of Esperanto's life, people used it only in written form, but in 1905 they organized the first (1st) World Congress of Esperanto in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France. This was the first notable use of Esperanto in international communication. Because of the success of the congress, it is organized each year (except years of the World Wars) to this day.

Goals of the Esperanto movement

Zamenhof wanted to make an easy language to increase international understanding. He wanted Esperanto to be a universal second language. In other words, although he did not want Esperanto to replace national languages, he wanted a majority of people around the world to speak Esperanto. Many Esperantists initially shared this goal. General Assembly of UNESCO recognized Esperanto in 1954. Since then World Esperanto Association has got official relations with UNESCO. However, Esperanto was never chosen by the United Nations or other international organizations and it has not become a widely accepted second language.

Some Esperanto speakers like Esperanto for reasons other than its use as a universal second language. They like the Esperanto community and culture. Developing the Esperanto culture is a goal for that people.

People who care more about Esperanto's current value than about its potential for universal use are sometimes called raŭmistoj in Esperanto. The ideas of these people can together be called raŭmismo, or "Raumism" in English. The names come from the name of the town of Rauma, in Finland. The International Youth Congress of Esperanto met there in 1980 and made a big statement. They said that making Esperanto a universal second language was not their main goal.

People who have goals for Esperanto that are more similar to Zamenhof's are sometimes called finvenkistoj in Esperanto. The name comes from fina venko, an Esperanto phrase which means "final victory". It refers to a theoretical future in which nearly everyone on Earth speaks Esperanto as a second language.

The Prague Manifesto (1996) states the ideas of the ordinary people of the Esperanto movement and of its main organization, the World Esperanto Association (UEA).

Esperanto culture

Many people use Esperanto to communicate by mail, email, blogs or chat rooms with Esperantists in other countries. Some travel to other countries to meet and talk in Esperanto with other Esperantists.

There are annual meetings of Esperantists. The largest is the Universala Kongreso de Esperanto ("World Congress of Esperanto"), which is held in a different country each year. In recent years around 2,000 people have attended it, from 60 or more countries. For young people there is Internacia Junulara Kongreso ("International Youth Congress of Esperanto").

A lot of different cultural activities take place during Esperanto meetings: concerts of Esperanto musicians, dramas, discos, presentations of the culture of the host country and culture of the countries of the participants, lectures, language-courses, and so on. At the location of Esperanto meetings there is also a pub, a tearoom, a bookstore, etc. with Esperanto-speaking workers. The number of activities and possibilities depends on the size or on the theme of the meeting.

There are books and magazines written in Esperanto. Much literature has been translated into Esperanto from other languages, including famous works, like the Bible (first time in 1926) and plays by Shakespeare. Works that are less famous have also been translated into Esperanto, and some of these do not have English translations.

Important Esperanto writers are for example: Trevor Steele (Australia), István Nemere (Hungary) and Mao Zifu (China). William Auld was a British writer of poetry in Esperanto and honorary president of the Esperanto PEN Centre (Esperanto part of International PEN). Some people recommended him for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The language

Esperanto uses grammar and words from many natural languages, such as Latin, Russian, and French. Morphemes in Esperanto (the smallest parts of a word that can have a meaning) cannot be changed and people can combine them into many different words. The language has got common attributes with isolating languages (they use word order to change the meaning of a sentence) such as Chinese, while the inner structure of Esperanto words has got common attributes with agglutinative languages (they use affixes to change the meaning of a word), such as Turkish, Swahili and Japanese.

Esperanto's grammar (rules of language) is meant to be simple. The rules in Esperanto never change and can always be applied in the same way

The Esperanto alphabet is based on the Latin script. It has six letters with diacritics: ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ (with circumflex), and ŭ (with breve). The alphabet does not have the letters q, w, x, or y.

R is like r in road but is rolled (trilled, as in Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Russian)

Even though the world uses Unicode, the letters with diacritics (found in the "Latin-Extended A" section of the Unicode Standard) can cause problems with printing and computing, because they are not found on the keyboards we use.

Criticism

Some of the criticism of Esperanto is common for any project of constructed international language: a new language has little chance to replace today's international languages like English, Arabic and others.

The criticism, which is specific for Esperanto, targets various parts of the language itself (the special Esperanto letters, the -n ending, sound of the language, and so on).

Some people say that use of the diacritics (the letters ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, ŭ) make the language less neutral than it would be using only the basic letters of Latin alphabet. No other language uses the letters ĉ, ĥ and ĵ. The letter ĥ is the least used letter in Esperanto and ĵ is not used frequently either, leading people to question how necessary they are.

Critics of Esperanto also say that the same ending of an adjective and a noun (such as "bona lingvo", "bonaj lingvoj", "bonajn lingvojn") is unnecessary. English, for example, does not have the requirement that an adjective and noun must agree in tense, and has no indicator for accusative cases.

They also criticize the fact that most of the words in Esperanto come from Indo-European languages, which makes the language less neutral.

Example of text

Normal sample: Ĉiuj homoj estas denaske liberaj kaj egalaj laŭ digno kaj rajtoj. Ili posedas racion kaj konsciencon, kaj devus konduti unu la alian en spirito de frateco.

Version in h-system: Chiuj homoj estas denaske liberaj kaj egalaj lau digno kaj rajtoj. Ili posedas racion kaj konsciencon, kaj devus konduti unu la alian en spirito de frateco.

Version in x-system: Cxiuj homoj estas denaske liberaj kaj egalaj laux digno kaj rajtoj. Ili posedas racion kaj konsciencon, kaj devus konduti unu la alian en spirito de frateco.

Simple English translation: All people are free and equal in dignity and rights. They are reasonable and moral, and should act kindly to each other.

Metaphoric use of the word "Esperanto"

People sometimes use the word "Esperanto" in a metaphoric way (not in its literal sense). They use it to say that something aims to be international or neutral, or it uses a wide mixture of ideas. They say the programming language Java is "independent of specific computer systems [e.g. Windows, Android] like Esperanto is independent of... nations". Similarly, they call the font Noto "the Esperanto of fonts" because it tries to work well for every culture's writing.

Text adapted from the Simple English Wikipedia article “Esperanto” (revision 10871687, 2026-05-27), authors, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.