Esperanto in the context of Constructed language

An international auxiliary language (sometimes acronymized as IAL or contracted as auxlang) is a language meant for communication between people from different nations who do not share a common first language. An auxiliary language is primarily a foreign language and often a constructed language. The concept is related to but separate from the idea of a lingua franca (or dominant language) that people must use to communicate. The study of international auxiliary languages is interlinguistics.

The term "auxiliary" implies that it is intended to be an additional language for communication between the people of the world, rather than to replace their native languages. Often, the term is used specifically to refer to planned or constructed languages proposed to ease international communication, such as Esperanto, Ido and Interlingua. It usually takes words from widely spoken languages. However, it can also refer to the concept of such a language being determined by international consensus, including even a standardized natural language (e.g., International English), and has also been connected to the project of constructing a universal language.

Zonal auxiliary languages, or zonal constructed languages, are constructed languages made to facilitate communication between speakers of a certain group of closely related languages. They form a subgroup of the international auxiliary languages but are intended to serve a limited linguistic or geographic area, rather than the whole world like Esperanto and Volapük. Although most zonal auxiliary languages are based on European language families, they should not be confused with "Euroclones", a pejorative term for languages intended for global use but based primarily on European material. Since universal acceptance is not the goal for zonal auxiliary languages, the traditional claims of neutrality and universalism, typical for IALs, do not apply. Although they may share the same internationalist commitments of the latter, zonal auxiliary languages have also been proposed as a defense against the effects of the growing hegemony of English on other cultures or as a means to promote a sense of ethnicity or community in a manner similar to revitalized languages, such as Modern Hebrew and Cornish. Related concepts are koiné language, a dialect that naturally emerges as a means of communication among speakers of divergent dialects of a language, and Dachsprache, a dialect that serves as a standard language for other, sometimes mutually unintelligible, dialects. The difference is that a zonal language is typically a mixture of several natural languages and is aimed to serve as an auxiliary for the speakers of different but related languages of the same family.

Most zonal constructed languages were developed during the period of romantic nationalism at the end of the 19th century, but some were created later. Most older zonal constructed languages are now known only to specialists. A modern example is Interslavic, which has become the most successful example of all zonal constructed languages.

Languages of science are vehicular languages used by one or several scientific communities for international communication. According to the science historian Michael Gordin, scientific languages are "either specific forms of a given language that are used in conducting science, or they are the set of distinct languages in which science is done." These two meanings are different, since the first describes a distinct prose in a given language (i.e., scientific writing), while the second describes which languages are used in mainstream science.

Until the 19th century, classical languages—such as Latin, Classical Arabic, Sanskrit, and Classical Chinese—were commonly used across Afro-Eurasia for international scientific communication. A combination of structural factors, the emergence of nation-states in Europe, the Industrial Revolution, and the expansion of colonization entailed the global use of three European national languages: French, German, and English. Yet new languages of science, such as Russian and Italian, had started to emerge by the end of the 19th century—to the point that international scientific organizations began promoting the use of constructed languages such as Esperanto as a non-national global standard.

According to the alphabetic principle, letters and combinations of letters are the symbols used to represent the speech sounds of a language based on systematic and predictable relationships between written letters, symbols, and spoken words. The alphabetic principle is the foundation of any alphabetic writing system (such as the English variety of the Latin alphabet, one of the more common types of writing systems in use today). In the education field, it is known as the alphabetic code.

Alphabetic writing systems that use an (in principle) almost perfectly phonemic orthography have a single letter (or digraph or, occasionally, trigraph) for each individual phoneme and a one-to-one correspondence between sounds and the letters that represent them, although predictable allophonic alternation is normally not shown. Such systems are used, for example, in the modern languages Serbo-Croatian (arguably, an example of perfect phonemic orthography), Macedonian, Estonian, Finnish, Italian, Romanian, Spanish, Georgian, Hungarian, Turkish, and Esperanto. The best cases have a straightforward spelling system, enabling a writer to predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation and similarly enabling a reader to predict the pronunciation of a word given its spelling. Ancient languages with such almost perfectly phonemic writing systems include Avestic, Latin, Vedic, and Sanskrit (Devanāgarī—an abugida; see Vyakarana). On the other hand, French and English have a strong difference between sounds and symbols.

La Nuit Bengali (transl. Bengal Nights) is the English-language title of 1933 Romanian novel, Mayitreyi, written by the author and philosopher Mircea Eliade.

It is a fictionalized account of the love story between Eliade, who was visiting India at the time, and the young Maitreyi Devi (protégée of the great Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, who became a famous writer herself). The novel was translated into Italian in 1945, German in 1948, Spanish in 1952, Bengali in 1988, Esperanto in 2007 (as Fraŭlino Maitreyi as part of the Serio Oriento-Okcidento), Catalan in 2011, Georgian in 2019, and Albanian in 2022. Its most famous translation is the one in French, published as La Nuit Bengali in 1950.

John Christopher Wells (born 11 March 1939) is a British phonetician and Esperantist. Wells is a professor emeritus at University College London, where until his retirement in 2006 he held the departmental chair in phonetics. He is known for his work on the Esperanto language and his invention of the standard lexical sets and the X-SAMPA encoding of the IPA.

An interrogative word or question word is a function word used to ask a question, such as what, which, when, where, who, whom, whose, why, whether and how. They are sometimes called wh-words, because in English most of them start with wh- (compare Five Ws). Most may be used in both direct (Where is he going?) and in indirect questions (I wonder where he is going). In English and various other languages the same forms are also used as relative pronouns in certain relative clauses (The country where he was born) and certain adverb clauses (I go where he goes). It can also be used as a modal, since question words are more likely to appear in modal sentences, like (Why was he walking?)

A particular type of interrogative word is the interrogative particle, which serves to convert a statement into a yes–no question, without having any other meaning. Examples include est-ce que in French, ли li in Russian, czy in Polish, чи chy in Ukrainian, ĉu in Esperanto, āyā آیا in Persian, কি ki in Bengali, 嗎/吗 ma in Mandarin Chinese, mı/mi/mu/mü in Turkish, pa in Ladin, か ka in Japanese, 까 kka in Korean, ko/kö in Finnish, Kasi (or "Ka" for short) in Tumbuka, tat in Catalan, (да) ли (da) li in Serbo-Croatian and al and ote in Basque. "Is it true that..." and "... right?" would be a similar construct in English. Such particles contrast with other interrogative words, which form what are called wh-questions rather than yes–no questions.

Ido (/ˈiːdoʊ/) is a constructed language derived from a reformed version of Esperanto, and designed similarly with the goal of being a international auxiliary language (or universal second language) for people of diverse languages. To function as an effective international auxiliary language, Ido was designed specifically to be grammatically, orthographically, and lexicographically regular (and, above all, easy to learn and use). It is the most successful of the many Esperanto derivatives, known as Esperantidoj.

Ido was created in 1907 due to a desire to reform the perceived flaws of Esperanto, a language that had been created 20 years earlier to facilitate international communication. The name comes from the Esperanto word ido, meaning "offspring", since the language is a derivative of Esperanto. After its inception, Ido was endorsed by some of the Esperanto community. A setback occurred with the sudden death in 1914 of one of its most influential proponents, Louis Couturat. In 1928, promoter Otto Jespersen quit the movement for his own language Novial.

Volapük (English: /ˈvɒləpʊk/; Volapük: [volaˈpyk], 'Language of the World', or lit. 'World Speak') is a constructed language created in 1879 and 1880 by Johann Martin Schleyer, a Roman Catholic priest in Baden, Germany, who believed that God told him to create an international language. Notable as the first major constructed international auxiliary language, the grammar comes from European languages and the vocabulary mostly from English (with some German and French). However, the roots are often distorted beyond recognition.

Volapük conventions took place in 1884 (Friedrichshafen), 1887 (Munich) and 1889 (Paris). The first two conventions used German, and the last conference used only Volapük. By 1889, there were an estimated 283 clubs, 25 periodicals in or about Volapük, and 316 textbooks in 25 languages; at that time the language claimed nearly a million adherents. Volapük was largely displaced between the late 19th and early 20th century by Esperanto.

Peter A. Seligmann (born September 30, 1950) is an American conservationist and nonprofit founder. Seligmann is chairman of Conservation International, an Arlington, Virginia-based environmental nonprofit organization, and from 1987 to 2017 served as its founding chief executive officer. He is also the founding CEO of Nia Tero, a global collaborative whose name translates in Esperanto to "our Earth."

Seligmann is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations; the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at The New School; a director at First Eagle Holdings, formerly Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder Holdings Inc.; and the Mulago Foundation. He has served as a member of The Coca-Cola Company's International Public Policy Advisory Board.

Yakult (ヤクルト, Yakuruto) is a Japanese sweetened probiotic milk beverage fermented with the bacteria strain Lacticaseibacillus casei Shirota. It is sold by Yakult Honsha based in Tokyo. The name "Yakult" was coined from jahurto, an Esperanto word meaning "yogurt".

Polish literature is the literary tradition of Poland. Most Polish literature has been written in the Polish language, though other languages used in Poland over the centuries have also contributed to Polish literary traditions, including Latin, Yiddish, Lithuanian, Russian, German and Esperanto. According to Czesław Miłosz, for centuries Polish literature focused more on drama and poetic self-expression than on fiction (dominant in the English speaking world). The reasons were manifold but mostly rested on the historical circumstances of the nation. Polish writers typically have had a more profound range of choices to motivate them to write, including past cataclysms of extraordinary violence that swept Poland (as the crossroads of Europe), but also, Poland's collective incongruities demanding an adequate reaction from the writing communities of any given period.

The period of Polish Enlightenment began in the 1730s–40s and peaked in the second half of the 18th century. Leading Polish Enlightenment authors included Ignacy Krasicki (1735–1801) and Jan Potocki (1761–1815). Polish Romanticism, unlike Romanticism elsewhere in Europe, was largely a movement for independence against the foreign occupation. Early Polish Romantics were heavily influenced by other European Romantics. Notable writers included Adam Mickiewicz, Seweryn Goszczyński, Tomasz Zan and Maurycy Mochnacki.

Oomoto (大本, Ōmoto; lit. "Great Source" or "Great Origin"), also known as Oomoto-kyo (大本教, Ōmoto-kyō), is a religion founded in the 1890s by Deguchi Nao (1836–1918) and Deguchi Onisaburō (1871–1948). Oomoto is typically categorized as a Shinto-based Japanese new religion. The spiritual leaders of the movement have always been women within the Deguchi family, along with Onisaburō as its founding seishi (spiritual teacher). Since 2001, the movement has been guided by its fifth leader, Kurenai Deguchi.

Oomoto's administrative headquarters is in Kameoka, Kyoto (Onisaburo Deguchi's hometown), and its spiritual headquarters is in Ayabe, Kyoto (Nao Deguchi's hometown). Uniquely among Japanese religions, Oomoto makes extensive use of the constructed language Esperanto to promote itself as a world religion. Oomoto has historically engaged in extensive interfaith dialogue with religions such as the Baháʼí Faith, Christianity, and Islam, since a key tenet of Oomoto is that all religions come from the same source (in Japanese: bankyō dōkon (万教同根)).

Serio Oriento-Okcidento (English: East-West Series) is a publication series initiated by the Universal Esperanto Association, which aims to contribute to the "Program of UNESCO for the study and mutual appreciation of cultures." In the series, particularly important and representative works of world literature are translated into Esperanto. Various publishers have gradually contributed to the Serio, who have published books according to their ability and financial responsibility. The Steering Committee (Estraro) of the UEA approves the work for the Serio according to publisher's proposals, but the UEA has no financial responsibility.

An Esperantist (Esperanto: esperantisto) is a person who speaks, reads or writes Esperanto. According to the Declaration of Boulogne, a document agreed upon at the first World Esperanto Congress in 1905, an Esperantist is someone who speaks Esperanto and uses it for any purpose.

Lou Silver Harrison (May 14, 1917 – February 2, 2003) was an American composer, music critic, music theorist, painter, and creator of unique musical instruments. Harrison initially wrote in a dissonant, ultramodernist style similar to his former teacher and contemporary, Henry Cowell, but later moved toward incorporating elements of non-Western cultures into his work. Notable examples include a number of pieces written for Javanese style gamelan instruments, inspired after his introduction to noted gamelan musician Kanjeng Notoprojo. Harrison would create his own musical ensembles and instruments with his partner, William Colvig, who are now both considered founders of the American gamelan movement and world music; along with composers Harry Partch and Claude Vivier, and ethnomusicologist Colin McPhee.

The majority of Harrison's works and custom instruments are written for just intonation rather than the more widespread equal temperament, making him one of the most prominent composers to have experimented with microtones. He was also one of the first composers to have written in the international language Esperanto, and among the first to incorporate strong themes of homosexuality in his music.

L. L. Zamenhof (15 December 1859 – 14 April 1917) was the creator of Esperanto, the most widely used constructed international auxiliary language.

Zamenhof published Esperanto in 1887, although his initial ideas date back as far as 1873. He grew up fascinated by the idea of a world without war and believed that this could happen with the help of a new international auxiliary language (IAL). The language was intended as a tool to gather people together through neutral, fair, equitable communication. He successfully formed a community which has survived to this day, despite the World Wars of the 20th century and various attempts to reform the language or create more modern IALs (Esperanto itself had displaced another similarly-motivated language, Volapük). Additionally, Esperanto has developed like other languages: through the interaction and creativity of its users.

Dr. Esperanto's International Language (Russian: Международный язык), commonly referred to as Unua Libro (First Book), is an 1887 book by L. L. Zamenhof, in which he first introduced and described the constructed language Esperanto. First published in Russian on July 26 [O.S. July 14] 1887, the publication of Unua Libro marks the formal beginning of the Esperanto movement.

Writing under the pseudonym "Dr. Esperanto", Zamenhof originally referred to the language as the international language; the use of Esperanto did not arise until 1889 when people began to use his pseudonym as the name of the language itself. Zamenhof reproduced a significant portion of the content of Unua Libro in the 1905 Fundamento de Esperanto, which he established as the sole obligatory authority over Esperanto in the Declaration of Boulogne, ratified by the first World Esperanto Congress later that year.