The Daily Collegian

Issue date: 5/8/08 Section: Arts & Living

Media Credit: Andrea Murray/Collegian

It's a late afternoon on Tuesday at the Bluewall Cafe and Steven Brewer, the founding father of the Amherst Esperanto Club, is telling a story about a man he knows through Esperanto, Dave Coffin from Andover, Mass.

Coffin went to an Esperanto conference in Russia where he met a Russian woman and fell in love. They moved back to the U.S., and they have two kids. She speaks Russian to the kids. They all speak Esperanto together as the official house language because that is the only language that Coffin and his wife share in common. The children are learning their English from TV and school.

Esperanto seems to be the new language of love. The group told numerous love stories in which two people who only had Esperanto in common fell in love and never learned each other's native languages.

Dr. L. L. Zamenhof invented Esperanto and published the first book in 1887 under the pseudonym "Dr. Esperanto." The word Esperanto means "one who hopes." The language was created to allow communication between people of different lands and cultures. Interest in the language peaked in the 1970s.

Sometimes criticized for being sexist and sounding too artificial, it currently has not fulfilled its original intent of becoming a universal language. Some have even complained that Esperanto could take away from native languages, but that is not the intent.

"It is important to note that Esperanto is not meant to replace native languages, but it is meant to be every person's first second language," says Julie Winberg, an active member of the club.

Today, there are about 2 million Esperanto speakers, about 1,000 of whom are native speakers. At the University of Massachusetts, a loyal group of followers still practice the language. They meet each week to discuss readings and practice speaking in Esperanto, the most widely used international auxiliary language.

UMass Professor of Biology and Amherst resident Steven Brewer founded the Esperanto group about five years ago. He met other Esperanto speakers, like Sali Lawton of Westhampton, on the Internet. His mother, Lucy Brewer, is another attendee.

The sound is hard to describe, but it's closest to a mix of German and Spanish. Winberg says that people often think that it sounds like whatever languages they know. She once thought that it sounded like Italian but her Italian friends firmly disagreed.

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