Okay. Here's Kayla Schierbecker:Spike13 wrote:Eight members browsing... C'mon guys post something!
Me commie amd really can't carry the board all night... Where's Phil? We need help!
What do you think of the comparison between Esperanto and atheism and the ur-SJW elements that may or may not have been at work?...Esperanto came out of the idealistic late 19th century, from a thinker who had previously been attached to another utopian concept of this time—Zionism. Zamenhof, born in 1859, was originally a nationalist who argued that Jews should create a settlement in America. But, frustrated with nascent state-building efforts in Palestine, he began envisioning a larger project that would protect Jews from violence by joining all people together under the beacon of a new neutral language. Publishing his first description of Esperanto in 1887, Zamenhof argued that Jews should adopt a set of humanistic cultural beliefs he dubbed “Hillelism” after the first-century B.C. Rabbi Hillel (he later changed the name to Homaranismo).* These ideals would replace the seemingly outmoded religious traditions that, in his mind, kept the Jews subservient to Russian mainstream culture. Zamenhof hoped an invented tongue—one “unlimitedly rich, flexible, full of every ‘bagatelle’ which gives life to language, beautiful-sounding, and extraordinarily easy”—would connect Jews to the rest of humanity.
It’s perhaps not surprising, given this ambitious and complicated mission, that Zamenhof ran into trouble nearly right off the bat. French intellectuals loved Esperanto—but anti-Semitism was ferocious in the post-Dreyfus era, and when Zamenhof staged a conference in Boulogne, France, in 1906, his local fans concealed his Jewishness from the press. Zamenhof tussled with many of the popularizers of Esperanto, who downplayed the nonlinguistic aspects of his program or made language reforms that he deemed unnecessary. And yet, uncharacteristically for founders of a new nation, linguistic or otherwise, Zamenhof was intent on allowing speakers of Esperanto to make their own choices about what the language should mean, as well as how it should be used: “I am leaving each person to clarify for himself the essence of the idea [of Esperanto], as he wishes,” he said in a 1907 speech.
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During the Cold War, Esperanto was still viewed as a potential threat by many right-wing governments and in the McCarthy-era United States.
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