ESPERANTO MAY BE UNIVERSAL, BUT ITS UNIVERSE IS SMALL

Jes, it's international but la tempo hasn't arrived for esperanto

BY NICHOLAS BRAY

Stafr Reporter

NEWBURY, England "Bona kato, venu, venu," says Helen Fantom, a rosycheeked accountant, calling to her cat in Esperanto. And Vera, the bona kato, or good cat, obligingly venas, or comes.

Vera no doubt is one of the few felines in the world to respond to Esperanto, but then that's to be expected in the Fantom household, one of the few families of native Esperantists in the world.

"Jes. It's natural to address animals in Esperanto," explains lan Fantom, who with his wife taught their three children Gavan, 15 years old, Rolf, 13, and Petra, nine to speak the invented international language of Esperanto before they learned English .

"People say it's not a natural language," Rolf adds. "But it was made for communication, and that's what we use it for."

Global, but Not Prevalent

The problem is, with whom? Far from sweeping the world, as its backers once hoped, Esperanto has never and most likely will never become more than a quirky fad for intellectuals and utopians. There are Esperanto clubs for everytl.!llg from chess and gardening to stamp collecting and nudism. Esperanto congresses in cities such as Vienna and Beijing attract throngs each year.

But the world population of Esperanto speakers is tiny. Estimates range from 50,000 to eight million; based on the memberships of Esperanto associations and clubs, they number a few hundred thousand.

Milo Simojevic, the Yugoslavian born secretary general of the World Esperanto Association, based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, says that Esperanto "is like world peace: it's a nice ideal. But it won't happen any sooner than other nice ideals."

For Esperanto enthusiasts, the rest of the world's near total indifference is a source of constant frustration. Theoretically, today's boom in travel and telecommunications should favor a universal language.

Support Is Waning

But the prospects for Esperanto seem to be growing bleaker. A major support of Esperanto was lost with the fall of communist regimes that liked its internationalist overtones. Polish radio still broadcasts programs in Esperanto, and the Chinese government subsidizes an Esperanto magazine. But sponsorship elsewhere, principally in Eastern Europe, is dwindling as budgettrimming bites.

Moreover, new technologies hold out the prospect of automatic translation and voiceinterpretation via computers in the not toodistant future. Adding insult to injury, Esperanto faces competition from upstart rivals such as Glosa, a synthetic language based on Latin and Greek whose promoters claim it is easier to learn.

An artificial idiom dreamed up just over 100 years ago by Polish ophthalmologist, Lazar Ludwik Zamenhof, Esperanto does have advantages over most national languages. Its grammar is simple, and its proununciation straighfoward. Suffixes such as-o (for nouns), -a (for adjectives) and -e (for adverbs) indentify the grammatical function of individual words.

Take the root "bird". From it, you can get birdo, meaning a bird, birdi (to be a bird), birdeca (birdlike), flugi birde (to fly like a bird) and birdkanto (bird-song), plus a host of other words.

Esperanto "has an agglutinative morphology", says John Wells, a phonetics professor at London University and president of the World Esperanto Association.

"Given any stem you can derive different words and different parts of speech."

In theory, enthuses Jorge Camacho, who teaches Esperanto classes in Madrid, "anyone can be the world's best speker of Esperanto."

Opening his briefcase, he brandishes a lengthy poem titled "Monologo kun Mediteraneo" ("Monologue Beside the Mediterranean"), for which he has just won a prize frorn an Esperanto association. As a Spaniard, he observes, "I could never be a great French author, for example, or a member of the French Academy." As an Esperantist, "Such aspirations are open to anyone."

But as a hodgepodge of English, French and German, with a dash of Latin and Greek thrown in, Esperanto aggravates some purists. Written, it looks like a cross between Romanian and Bulgarian; spoken, it sounds a bit like Spanish, with some odd English and other languages. "I hate it," fumes Wim Meeuws, the multilingual proprietor of a bookshop in Oxford who refuses to stock Esperanto books.

Nonsense, say Esperantists. "It's a beautiful language," insists Toon Witkom, a Dutch software engineer who learned Esperanto a few years ago, when he was working on a project to use it in computerized translation. But even he concedes, "You can easily live without ever coming into contact with Esperanto."

Don't tell that to the Fantoms. At the door of their red brick home here in outhern Anglio Esperanto for Englandvisitors are greeted by a wooden plaque bearing the Esperanto symbol, a green star. Tables, shelves and floors in the living room are cluttered with books and papersGeorge Orwell's "Besto Farmo" ("Animal Farm"), Agatha Christie's "Murdo en la Orienta Ekspreso" ("Murder on the Orient Express") and Hans Christian Andersen's "La Marvirineto " ( "The Little Mermaid" ) . Another room houses tomes that once belonged to Mrs. Fantom's Dutch father and English mother, Esperanto enthusiasts who met at an Esperanto congress in the late 1930s and taught their children the language in secrecy in wartime Amsterdam.

Heedless of the world's lack of interest, the Fantoms speak English at work or with friends, but often lapse into Esperanto at home with each other. Their son Gavan's first word, when he was nearly one year old, was "ne," the Esperanto for "no," his mother recalls.

The Fantom children sometimes had difficulty with English. Rolf recalls having to explain to Petra in Esperanto things tlult othel people such as their paternal grandparents said to her in English. They also suffered occasional ribbing from schoolmates. But they gave as good as they got.

"People sometimes ask, 'How do you say you are an idiot?' and I tell them the Esperanto words for 'I am an idiot'" says better, English or Esperanto, he adds. "I always seem to win. Esperanto is easy to learn and it's neutral. It hasn't got a country, so people can't hate the country, and Esperanto speakers certainly aren't going to invade anyone else's country."

The Fantoms' family vacations revolve around Esperanto. In the past year, they have visited Germany, France and Spain, staying with fellow Esperanto speakers and attending last summer's annual Esperanto congress in Valencia. On weekends, they take part in musical gatherings with other Esperantist families. Mr. Fantom, a balding, bespectacled computer scientist who learned Esperanto as a teenager, plays the piano; Mrs. Fantom sings; Gavan plays the clarinet; Rolf, the violin; and Petra, the cello.

Apart from Esperanto's usefulness for international communication, Mr. Fantom stresses its educational value. Children who start by learning Esperanto find it much easier to pick up other languages, he says.

And Esperanto's logical system of counting, he claims, is helpful for learning math. Unlike English, with its "eleven" or "twelve," or French, in which 95, for example, is "four score and fifteen,'' Mr. Fantom explains, Esperanto uses numbers as building blocks. Eleven, for example, is dek uno, or "ten one." Twelve is dek du, or "ten two." Twenty is dudek, or "two ten," and 22 is dudek du, or "two ten two."

Both Gavan and Rolf, Mr. Fantom proudly notes, are among the top pupils in their classes for both French, German and mathematics. Although Petra hasn't yet started languages at school, she is already showing interest in German.

So what's in store for the future? Will the Fantom children one day teach their own children Esperanto, making them third generation native Esperantists? Their parents would clearly like them to, but they don't want to force the issue.

"It's up to them," says Mr. Fantom. "We're giving them the educational hase. They will have to decide for themselves whether to use it or not, as they fit."