Word: zamenhof
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...artificial language they hoped to spread was invented by a patient Polish physician, Lazaro Ludovico Zamenhof, who published his work in 1887. His language looks like a Balkan patter, sounds like a Romance patois. Though it runs on rules like rails, it lends itself to precise shades of meaning. In 1921, as a test, the Paris Chamber of Commerce had two Esperantists translate delicate texts of French into Esperanto, then had two others turn them back into French; the final texts were almost identical with the originals. The language has only 16 simple rules of grammar, to which there...
...frequent congresses and enjoy an extensive literature either written in their tongue or translated into it. But if not already a "dead" language, Esperanto is at least a static one, for its adherents have refused to change it since 1880 when it was launched by its inventor, Dr. Lazarus Zamenhof of Poland. Says Henry Louis Mencken in The American Language: "The trouble with all the 'universal' languages is that the juices of life are simply not in them. They are the creations of scholars drowning in murky oceans of dead prefixes and suffixes, and so they fail...