Esperanto La Fundamenta KrestomatioAuthor: David Poulson Last week, I summarised the invaluable work carried out by Zamenhof to establish his International Language as a medium of communication comparable to the world's greatest ethnic languages. He fully understood that, like English, Italian, German and French, Esperanto had to evolve and develop. And, although Esperanto is sometimes referred to as "an artificial" language ("a planned" language is a better term), this development or evolution occurred just as "naturally" in the case of Esperanto as it did in any other language. Esperanto grew because it was used and because from that use, by a groutfg community of speakers and writers, emerged certain texts were acquired the status of exemplary models. This is one of the many unobvious facts about Esperanto that its opponents refuse to believe and, in fact, many people show surprise when they learn of this for the first time. It's worth the trouble, I think, to consider this whole matter more fully. Let's start by considering the case of English. It isn't hard for a high school graduate to identify at least some of the major influences on the growth and development Modern English. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, notably The Canterbury Tales The Book of Common Prayer The "King James" or Authorised Version of the Bible The flood of glorious works of the English Renaissance, from authors such as Marlowe, Shakespeare, Bacon, Jonson, Donne, Raleigh, Browne, Burton and many others The Novels of Daniel Defoe The Journalism of Addison and Steele and a proud procession of other great authors, right up to our own time, where the essays and journalism of George Orwell are, in my opinion, the best examples of clear, unambiguous English prose written in the last two hundred years. Residents of Canada and the USA might prefer to choose Robertson Davies or Mark Twain, both excellent writers. (For an infomation-rich site of resources on English literature, please visit: English Literature.) And in the same way, the development of Esperanto, too, during the last 111 years has been as a result of some outstanding literary figures and I shall be paying my respects to some of them in later articles. They come from Poland, Russia, France, Scotland, Czechoslovakia, Jugoslavia, China, Japan, India, Switzerland, Australia - from all over the world, really! But they all, without exception, needed a firm foundation on which to build their own literary monuments. That foundation Zamenhof, through a combination of native genius and sheer hard work, provided. Not only did he produce the full-length books I talked about in the previous article, not only did he produce a very large volume of correspondence, articles and speeches, he also, in 1903, published La Fundamenta Krestomatio, which I will now refer to as FK. |