 What's up guys, EvilDeer here, and today I'm going to do a response to a very old blog post. Now the reason I'm responding to this blog post, well there's actually a few, but the main one is because I just received a link to it literally like a few days ago. I received links to it before and I responded privately to the person who sent me the link before about my ideas regarding the content of the post, but I decided you know what, I'm gonna make one video, slap it all in there, and then just publicize it, and then if anyone asks me in the future I'll go hey go check out my video. Now this is going to be a long response. Nothing is ever just black and white. Now normally I wouldn't respond to a blog post called Why I Won't Learn Esperanto, French, English, whatever, because you know that's a personal opinion, you don't have to go learn anything, but there is a fair few misrepresentations about Esperanto within this article, so I feel like I'm going to respond to those. Whether you want to learn something or not is up to you, but I can respond to the misrepresentations. Now the guy who wrote this, Donovan, I think that's how you pronounce his name, has actually engaged with me previously on my YouTube channel. There's one of his comments that was more, but I can't find them, maybe they were deleted, whatnot, but anyway it seems like generally not an ass. So that's a good thing. I'm not going to go attack this guy, but I am going to present his biography, mainly because I feel like we have so much in common, it's kind of crazy. The blog post was posted on the website, the Mezzofanti Guild, named Donovan as I said. Now he's from Australia and he's travelled the world for over 14 years. I'm from Australia and I'm excited about that because you know, bloggers and YouTubers from Australia are quite rare and when we bump into each other and discuss a topic that we're both interested in, it's even more rare. We're a massive country with a very small population and it's super rare that I found someone who's a blogger who knows anything about Esperanto in Australia, so this makes it kind of special for me. Anyway, he's travelled for 14 years, don't know if that's consecutive or not, I've done a lot of travelling myself, not 14 years worth. Now he says here, like most people though, I had to study a language in school, five years of Mandarin Chinese. I was the same, I didn't have to study Mandarin Chinese, I had to study Japanese and I did five years in school and I understand where he's coming from. The Australian education system regarding the teaching of languages is atrocious. It is terrible, you basically learn nothing. At least it was during my generation, I'm assuming his generation, maybe it's changed now but back then it was terrible. I did five years of Japanese, didn't learn anything, but I have to kind of admit I was in the class mainly for the girls. It was a confusing time during my youth, you know, my teenage years. There was a lot of testosterone going around, a lot of hormones, whatever, so I didn't learn Japanese. Now he says after school, did my undergraduate degree in theology, it was here that I realised for the first time just how fun and exciting languages actually are. Hey, I agree. After I left school, I joined the army, did six years and that's when I bumped into Arabic. I learned a little bit, didn't find it that interesting. I mention Arabic now because he is actually fluent in Arabic. It was the first language he got fluent in apart from English, so I figured that's a good starting point. Anyway, after that I bumped into Esperanto and that's when I realised that languages can be fun and exciting. So overall, me and this guy are very similar. The only difference is he's a Christian and I'm an atheist. I just need to say I'm not going to respond to every line in his article. For example, the first three paragraphs I feel like are just fluff. It's like how, you know, a YouTuber has 30 seconds off logo spinning around making magical sounds. I feel like the first three paragraphs or so were basically just fluff. They weren't really needed. Okay, so the bloke who created it, Esperanto, Ludwig Zamenhof, developed a political and religious philosophy and then he's bracketed a cultish offshoot of Judaism that looked more like something straight out of the communist manifesto. So obviously this is an opinion piece but I feel like he's bracketed the insult. He's kind of like demonising Esperanto speakers by linking them with things that make it look bad in a sense. So first up, I'm going to break down each part and explain why. So he says a cultish offshoot of Judaism. He's mixed up a few different things here and I'll explain the other things later but I will say this right now. When people call something cultish, they're not saying, hey, that's a secret religious organization most of the time. They're not saying that. They're saying, hey, that's something you shouldn't look into because if you do, you'll get sucked in and that's the end of it. We'll never see you again. You'll end up worshiping something. So he's kind of implying that Esperanto is in some way a cult, which is definitely is not because there's no religious aspect to Esperanto. There is no God to worship. There is no higher being or anything like that. It's literally just a language and then he says it's an offshoot of Judaism. I'll go into this more later. So first up, Zamenhof was Jewish but the vast majority of Esperanto speakers aren't Jewish and probably the majority are maybe Christian but I'm not even sure about that. There's a lot of atheists, a lot of Christians. There's a fair few Muslims as well, but not that many Jews that I know of in the Esperanto community. They do exist, obviously, but not that many. And then he goes, it looked more like something straight out of the communist manifesto. So now he's implying that Esperanto is not only a cult but it's also something that's politically in line with the communist manifesto. I'm going to lead that up to you to judge. Now we'll say one thing. I find this quite strange coming from someone who's learned Arabic because a lot of Arabic speakers are demonized in Western media, even in Chinese media, they're just demonized in general, due to what's happened in the Middle East and due to terrorist attacks around the world. So someone who's gone out of their way, learned Arabic, I believe would be more aware of the hardship that they've been put through by certain members of their own community causing all these issues. So I feel like if you were within that situation, you would feel less inclined yourself to throw these types of insults upon another community, but that's just me. So I'm not going to go demonize every Arabic speaker due to the fact that some Muslims have gone and blown up people, but I feel like he's kind of painting the entire Esperanto speaker community as something cultish and et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, let's go into what I think he's trying to talk about. So there's three aspects to this. Esperanto, the internal idea and homaranismo. So I'll speak about Esperanto in the internal idea first. Esperanto is basically just a language. It was created prior to 1887, but the first book on Esperanto was published by Zamenhof in 1887. Zamenhof published the foundations for the language. He didn't create the entire language. In fact, he created only a tiny portion of the language. And from there, it evolved into this full-fledged language we have today. The first book was published by Zamenhof. And in the first book, he stated three, three ideas for why he thinks Esperanto is needed, why he basically created it. So let's go through these ideas and see if this sounds like something that's cultish to you. So he said, to render the study of language so easy as to make its acquisition mere play for the learner. So basically he wanted to create a language that was so easy, it would basically be a game. So what he was talking about was gamification before Duolingo made it cool. So he wanted a language that was just super easy. Second one, to enable the learner to make direct use of his knowledge with people of any nationality, whether the language be universally accepted or not, that or not is important for later. In other words, the language is to be directly a means of international communication. Very simple to understand. He wanted to create a language that could be used for international communication between people who didn't share the same language. Those first two points are very simple to understand. The third point needs a little bit more historical context. So I'll read the third point now. To find some means of overcoming the natural indifference of mankind and disposing them in the quickest manner possible and en masse to learn and use proposed language as a living one and not only in the last extremities and with the key at hand. So let's break down what he's talking about here. This refers to the internal idea that exists within Esperanto community. So the Esperanto community has these three things that are the internal idea, but this one's more so the last. So there's three things he mentions, natural indifference. So he's talking about the historical context in which Esperanto was born. Esperanto was born during a time in history when Poland was ruled by Russia and the whole of Europe, okay, was divided based on language. So if you spoke French, you're French. If you spoke German, you're German and we don't like each other. That's just how it was. So the natural indifference was extreme tribalism and nationalism, which was just rampant in society. And this was reflected in the town of which Zamenhof grew up in. Basically those Poles, Germans, Russians, Yiddish, and no one spoke to each other because they all belong to different groups. They were all different ethnic groups. So this was the extreme tribalism or the natural indifference of society. And he wanted to dispose of this. He also wanted to create a living language. Now here's the idea of a living language and the idea of a living language for some groups of modern Esperanto speakers is quite different. Zamenhof wanted to create a language that would be learned by everyone, eventually almost as a native language, but we would speak, say in Australia, I'd speak English. And when I went to China, I wouldn't speak English, my native language. I would swap the Esperanto and speak Esperanto with an Esperanto speaking Chinese speaker. And when they came to Australia, it'd be vice versa. So we would keep our native languages, but we would also have a secondary native language Esperanto. Now a lot of modern Esperanto speakers are like, no, no, no, no, Esperanto is the second language and you have your native language. So they're against the idea of anyone learning Esperanto as a native language. But you can see Zamenhof's idea in the fact that he taught Esperanto as a language to his children. And a lot of early Esperanto speakers took on this ideal. But basically what happened is in the early history of Esperanto, the idea is swapped and less people start teaching it to their children. A lot of people still teach it to their children and I feel like a lot more are starting to now, like some of my friends are. So there's been an evolution in ideas about should Esperanto be a native language or not, but he believed in a sense that it should be. The last part he says the key at hand, this is not some mysterious, cultish thing. It's simply talking about the Nualibro. It basically had a key within it. And the key was these are the words. This is the grammar. You can use this as a cipher to transfer your English to Esperanto, write a letter, send it off to your friend who would use their key to decipher it back into, or back into like whatever their language is, Russian. So it was basically like a really poor version of Google translate. And eventually he hoped that when people got good at that, then they'd speak it, that evolve on it and never become its own language. In fact, Esperanto was probably the first crowd source language, the first open source language, because when Zamenhof published it, he said, hey, I created this, but it ain't mine. Don't come to me asking for questions. You guys figure it out. He basically went, I'm not, I'm not the like the leader of this movement in any sense. But the funny thing is I've given you all of this historical information, but the vast majority of Esperanto speakers don't know anything about this. It's like those people who know a ton of information about the constitution of the US and the founding fathers and what they think and all that type of stuff. You go ask the standard person on the street what the founding fathers thought about this and that, or you ask them about the constitution. And they'll have a vague idea about a couple of things here and there. So that's what the Inua Libido is to Esperanto speakers. It's like the constitution, but without the legal backing that comes with it. So it's kind of like this document that we look at historically and it impacts on certain aspects of the Esperanto community, but there's no legal force behind it. So realistically, it doesn't have that much of a influence in the modern Esperanto community. So the next thing he spoke about was homaranismo. So homaranismo is something completely separate to Esperanto that Zamenhof created. So let's talk about that now. Homaranismo is a philosophy that Zamenhof created and the idea was that everyone's religious. During the time when Zamenhof was like alive, everyone was religious. Everyone belonged to some religion and the religions were almost linked with languages and the infighting between the religions was based around these religious slash language linguistic groups. And he kind of wanted to find a solution to that as well. So he was working on two things at once. So he created homaranismo and it was originally based on hillialism. I don't know how to pronounce that word. Anyway, it's like a Jewish belief system. He based on that originally and then he went, ah, no, scrap this. So he completely ditched that and he created his own belief system. And basically the belief system is a philosophy. So here are the two main core beliefs of homaranismo. And I'm going to, these are in Esperanto. So I'm going to translate them to English on the fly. So my translation may not be like the best, but I was too lazy to just translate it because there is no English translation. So he says, I am a human and the entire human race I see is one family. The division of the human race. See, I put division in green. The division of the human race into different like enemy ethnic groups and the ethnic religious communities I see as the biggest unhappiness, the biggest unluck. Okay, which sooner or later must disappear and whose disappearance I will accelerate according to my ability. So what he's saying is he regards the division as the biggest worst thing that's happened, not the ethnic groups, not the religious ethnic groups, but the division between those groups. So he supports the ethnic groups, but he hates the division that's been formed between them by people using them to their benefit, you know, to their own personal benefit. And he wants to make that disappear, the division. I'm pretty sure anyone in the world would agree that division between ethnic groups is a bad thing and anyone who proposes creating division is just being bad in general. Now the second point is I see in every human only a human and I treat every human according to his personal worth and actions. Every offence and oppression that's in green of a person because of that, he belongs to a particular ethnic group or language or social class that's different to me. I see as a barbarity. So he sees the oppression of people as a barbarity. So Zamenhof is all four ethnic groups. He believes in the diversity of the human race. I think anyone who looks at this and associates this as cultish or as something that belongs to communism really is misreading it. Now maybe on its surface communism and this have something like aligned with each other, but this is just as much aligned with the beliefs of Christianity or Islam, at least in my eyes. So anyway, that's what he actually believed regarding Homaranismo. Esperano was separate and in fact, as I said, Homaranismo died. It would probably been better if it survived, but it died off. So he believed oppression is bad, division is bad. So another thing this person says in their blog is Esperantistan is an ideologically homo-genant, I can never pronounce this word, I'm not even going to bother, landscape. So he's basically saying that everyone in the Esperano community thinks exactly the same. First off, I just want to point out one thing. He said Esperantistan. I found this quite a strange word. Now the Esperano word for an Esperano speaker is Esperantisto. So he obviously knows a little bit about, you know, word formation in Esperano, but then he's used this English ending stan, which is only ever used for words around the Middle East or maybe like ex-Soviet countries. I'm wondering why he did that. There's only one of two reasons. One is because he loves Arabic culture so much and he's just got stan stuck in his head. Or two, he's thinking more along the Bogan English thinking. A lot of Bogan like English speakers, especially in Sydney, add stan to an end of a place name to make it sound like a war zone or something that's just bad and generally not good to go to. So I don't know which meaning he's aiming at here, but you know, it's really not that important. The actual word for the Esperano community would be Esperantuyo. So you can use that in future blog posts. Wherever you travel, you meet people of all different persuasions. No matter what language you learn, you'll meet speakers all the time from the far left to the far right of the political spectrum. You'll also meet non-believers, nominal believers, the devout and the extreme, Esperano being an ideological tool that it is opposes this. So he's basically saying Esperano has one belief system. We all follow that. So the question is, are modern Esperano speakers all either logically the same? Well, no, because I'm proof of that, even though that's kind of anecdotal. Let's start with myself because I know myself. I am the most popular Esperano YouTuber in the world. That's saying a lot for a small community, but I am, well, it's not really saying that much, but I am the most popular Esperano YouTuber, not kind of like trying to flout it or anything. But the reason I'm pointing this out is because I probably go against the trend of a lot of groups. Now, I am not a communist. I in fact think that communism is an ideology that has resulted in the depths of millions is terrible. It sounds good on the surface, but once you actually try to apply it to humans, which in essence are broken, like humans are easily corruptible, it becomes terrible. So I'm actually a capitalist. I believe that, you know, we should work for goods and we trade goods based on our own means without interference from others. I don't believe in big government. I feel like small government's the way to go. I believe some regulations required, and I'm totally not religious. So I'm probably more right leaning in a lot of ways, probably in the majority of ways. Now to give you an idea, my local Esperano group, which basically consists of my friends, we are people who fit into pretty much every political ideology. Now in Australia, he's aware of this, but I'll point out for everyone else. In Australia, there's three major parties, the Greens, Liberals, and the Labor. So the Greens, you're probably aware of what they are. They're basically far left. Then you got Liberal. Liberal's kind of like our version of the Conservative Party and the US. So they're kind of like right. They're like leaning towards the right. And then you got Labor, which is like our version of the Democrats, which are leaning towards left. So I vote Liberal because I think their policies in general are just better for us as a society. Now in my local group, there are Greens voters, there are Liberal voters, and there are Labor voters. And we're all Esperano speakers and we all get along fine. We have our political debates, but that's about it. We are not all ideologically the same and definitely are very different in a lot of regards. Now I put in red here that the only thing every Esperano speaker agrees on is that we speak Esperano. And we can't even agree on that most of the time. If you look at my YouTube comments, often I'll have YouTube comments like, you're not speaking real Esperano because you're using this or that made up word. You know, it's like when someone says you can't use they as a singular in English, and then you have the whole thing. It's the same thing that happens in Esperano. There's always like a grammar debate somewhere. And that's pretty much just how it goes. So the only thing Esperano speakers agree on realistically is that we speak Esperanto or at least some form of it. So the idea that we're all the same is a bit strange to me. And he used one reference to one person's anecdotal experience about going to an event. Now the thing is with events. Events anywhere in the world are representative of the people who run those events. And if the people who run that event are all left leaning, then the event in general is going to be very left leaning. If all the people who run the event are very right leaning, the same thing happens. So if you just happen to go to an event that sounds interesting, but unfortunately it's being politically tainted by the people who run that event, then that means you're going to feel like everyone around you is of the same political persuasion. It's not true in the Esperano community. It's not true in general. I think that's probably a bad example. Now he says, not only does it have no culture, but its inheritance are delusional. Esperano has no country or geographical ties to an ancestral homeland. Unlike natural languages, you don't learn Esperano because you're fascinated by country, people, group, or location. Outside of a few crackpots who decided to turn their kids into circus acts by raising them with Esperano as their first language, it has no intergenerational identity or national tribal history. Okay. So before I break into responding to that, I'm just going to read the follow-up part he wrote. To which some people say Esperano does have culture because it's got music, food, events, literature, and he responds with, I think this is incredibly shallow and a poor understanding of what culture actually is. So let's go back to the previous spot. He says, Esperano has no country or geographical ties to an ancestral homeland. That's true. We don't have a country. There is some geographical places that are linked very closely to Esperano. For instance, the Esperanto Urbetto, which is a small town in Germany, I forget the German name. Someone will put it in the comments. Basically there, Esperanto is part of the local community, all the signages in Esperano, but it's used more as kind of like a tourism thing. So it's not really like a thing that's been passed on generation to generation. So I agree with him Esperano has no country or geographical ties. Okay? That's the extent of my agreement. Unlike natural languages, you don't learn Esperano because you're fascinated by country, people, group, or location. I don't necessarily learn a language because I'm fascinated. Like for instance, I learned Chinese not because I'm fascinated with the country, the people, the group, or the location. I learned Chinese because I needed to speak with my wife's parents. Afterwards, I became fascinated in the country, people, and the location, but I didn't start learning it because of that. So this is a flawed assumption that people learn language because of this. It has no intergenerational identity or national tribal history. So Esperano was 130 years old. So it can't develop a very big tribal history. I'm going to call it tribal history to keep it in line with what he's saying during that time. But there is fourth generation Esperano speakers. That means they learned Esperano their parents, their parents, their parents, you know, going back four generations. They do exist. We've actually got one here in Sydney. She, not fourth generation, I think she's like third generation. So Esperano's been in her family for quite some time. And she has basically photo albums going back to her great grandma, where she's showing pictures of them at Esperano events, how they met, you know, Esperano pass along through the family. It's the same thing when I went to Germany, I stayed with an Esperano speaking family from Moonech. And they have Esperano and their family for a few generations. And if you told them that it wasn't part of their family history, you would basically be insulting them because it's how their family even formed a couple of generations ago. Now, Esperanto has not just a tribal history. It also has like tribal pain in a sense. So I've got this book here called La Dunjera Língvo, which means a dangerous language. And it basically details all the times during history, Esperano speakers have been killed due to the fact that they speak Esperanto, or they have been locked up because they speak Esperanto. It talks about how Hitler killed Esperanto speakers, Stalin killed Esperanto speakers, how the Japanese locked them up in World War Two. It goes into depth. And these types of things for me are what glue culture together, the sufferings and the shared culture. So this is a book. And now I'm going to quickly just place in a short video of me walking around the Esperanto library. I know he considers literature to be a shallow example of culture. But for me, literature is a perfect example of culture. Now I'm showing you the Esperanto library here. As you can see, there's lots of books. I'm not going to put in too much. You can search for this in my YouTube channel if you want more in depth videos. Now he says a good definition of culture is something that's intangible aspects of human societies, patterns of behaviors and interactions, cognitive constructs. For me, this definition is so abstract that I'm unable to define culture through this definition. So if I was him, I would have presented an example of this through Australian culture. So what are the intangible aspects of Australian culture, whether the patterns of behavior of Australian culture and interactions and the cognitive constructs? I can't even think about that for Australian culture. So I definitely couldn't think about that for Esperanto culture. I feel like this is a meaning that's so abstract that it's lost its meaning. Anyway, maybe there is some way that you can do this. You would have to be a neuroscientist to figure this one out, I think. So in the end, he says the original goal for Esperanto in fact conflicts with the very nature of human cultures to serve, to separate and distinguish humans as unique groups. Well, remember what the original goal was according to Zamenhof? It was to create a tool in which we could contact each other across culture. It was not to replace culture. Now I've been speaking about Esperanto culture for the last five minutes or so. So you're probably a bit confused. Not everyone follows what Zamenhof originally intended. In fact, the vast majority of the Esperanto community do as they please. And although Esperanto was created with an original goal by Zamenhof over 130 plus years, it has evolved into many different directions and people use it for many different reasons. So there is still a few people who use it as that original tool for international communication and there's lots of people like me who simply enjoy the culture that evolved out of Esperanto. So he also says that Esperanto evangelicists, I can't even pronounce that word because I barely ever use it, aren't just passionate, they're fanatical. So yeah, the extreme thing. Discussing Esperanto with an Esperanto is like discussing theology with a Jehovah's Witness or animal rights with a Peter activist. Now I know he's going to use this video as an example, so I'm just going to point this out. You can go learn whatever you want. I don't care if you learn Esperanto. For you, the viewer, if you randomly stumbled across this video, I don't care if you go learn Esperanto. If you choose to, great, you know, do it for you if that's something you enjoy. But I'm not saying you need to learn Esperanto. And I think the vast majority of Esperanto speakers are like that. What I'm trying to do through this video is to provide an interesting perspective into a unique community. And do we worship Zamenhof? Because through this whole thing, he's trying to present Esperanto like a religion. And I get the feeling that he's saying that we worship Zamenhof. Now, there are probably a few Esperanto speakers that do worship Zamenhof. Just like there are a few Americans who probably worship the founding fathers, there is always a fanatical person in every community. Do we define the communities based on those few fanatics? No, we don't. Okay. And to give you an example here, Moyosuyo. Moyosa means cool in Esperanto. Uyo, as I said previously, is kind of a country. So Moyosuyo is a cool country. What happens a lot is Esperanto speakers, when speaking in public, people hear us speaking and I'll go, hey, what language is that? Because it sounds so weird or like foreign to them. And we'll explain what it is. And then we'll often get like mocked. Like people will just mock us. They're like, why would you speak that language? Why not learn a real language? Even though there's no definition for a real language. Anyway, so what Esperanto speakers often do in public is we say, oh, we're from Moyosuyo. It's just a small Eastern European country. And then that would be the end of the conversation just due to the fact that we don't want to have this have this discussion every 10 seconds. So the idea that we go fanatically around and go, you must learn Esperanto speakers, you must learn Esperanto is it's kind of strange. Okay, so I'm just going to finish this off. And he says Esperanto has failed. Not that we needed it anyway. I'm going to leave you with the quote from Zamenhof, from the Anua Libre de Esperanto, the first book of Esperanto, to enable the learner to make direct use of his knowledge with people of any nationality, whether the language be universally accepted or not. Esperanto speakers don't care what the international language is. We use Esperanto for many different reasons. Some might use it for international communication as Zamenhof proposed. Some like me use it because it's an interesting cultural thing and all my friends speak it. Some use it because it's a family language. Has it failed for me? No, I found it interesting. I've used it in international communication. I make money through Esperanto and my friends speak Esperanto and my children probably will speak it too. So for me, it's just an interesting thing. And it's part of my personal culture. Has it failed to become the international language? For some people like me, it's worked as an international language. For others, no. So anyway, that's the end of the video. Just wanted to give my input on this. Sorry if it's extremely long. And if you liked this video, you know what to do. Like it, share it around, sub to the channel if you haven't already. And I'll see you all in the next video. And I'll leave you with a warning. My future videos are pretty much all going to be in Esperanto.