Scenes — July 24, 2026

I · Scenes

The eye doctor, the traitor, and the untouchable book

fieldnotes from the language congress

A Warsaw eye doctor published a grammar in 1887 under the pen name Doktoro Esperanto, and more than a century later several hundred thousand people speak the language that kept the pen name.[1][2] They gather by the thousands each August, run a Rotterdam bureau with delegates in 120 countries, and treat a thin 1905 booklet as law no one may change.[1][3][4] In 1907 a committee in Paris voted to improve that language, and the man sent to defend it turned out to have co-written the reform.[6][10] The split produced Ido, a rival tongue that still meets and still publishes, its congresses counted in dozens rather than thousands.[5][8] It is a rare chance to watch authenticity, governance, and betrayal play out at the scale of a village.

The world

The habitat is the congress hall. Every August the Universala Kongreso, the World Esperanto Congress that has run since Boulogne-sur-Mer in 1905, moves to a new city and draws between 1,500 and 3,000 people.[4] For a week they conduct lectures, theatre, worship, and committee business entirely in Esperanto, a language none of them learned at a mother's knee.[1] That is the first thing outsiders miss. A planned language still has to be lived, and living it means idiom, register, and poetry that no rulebook can supply.

Portrait of L. L. Zamenhof, the ophthalmologist who created Esperanto — L. L. Zamenhof, who signed his 1887 grammar Doktoro Esperanto and later wrote the Fundamento the movement treats as untouchable.[2]

At the center sits the Fundamento de Esperanto, the 1905 book of a foreword, sixteen grammar rules, exercises, and a base dictionary that the first congress declared the sole binding authority.[2][3] The Declaration of Boulogne fixed it as the perpetual, obligatory foundation, and defined an Esperantist simply as anyone who uses the language.[3] Prestige, then, is not fluency alone. It flows to those who write well in the founder's idiom and who defend the Fundamento against tinkering.

The only basis binding on all Esperantists, which no one has the right to change, is the little work Fundamento de Esperanto.

The deepest shibboleth is the correlative table, a grid of little words built so that meanings rhyme by design. From the prefixes ki-, ti-, i-, neni-, and ĉi- and a fixed set of endings come kiu, tiu, iu, neniu, and ĉiu, that is who, that one, someone, no one, and everyone.[7] Learn the grid and half the pronoun system falls out for free. A second badge is orthographic: the six accented letters ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, and ŭ, which mark a text as Esperanto at a glance.[7] The institutions are real. The Universala Esperanto-Asocio, founded in 1908 by the Swiss journalist Hector Hodler and headquartered in Rotterdam, reported 5,501 individual members and some 9,215 more through national associations in 2015.[4] Its delegito network, local delegates who serve as contact points, gives a member in one country a name to write to in another.[4] A separate body, the Akademio de Esperanto, may add vocabulary but may not touch the Fundamento.[3]

100k–2M

Esperanto speakers

1,500–3,000

at the yearly congress

100–1,000

Ido speakers

~20%

of leaders lost in 1907

The schism

The trouble began with a good-faith committee. In 1901 the French logician Louis Couturat and the mathematician Léopold Leau founded the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language, prompted by the babel of the 1900 Paris World's Fair.[6] Its charge was narrow: choose one auxiliary language for science and commerce. After the International Association of Academies declined the task in May 1907, the Delegation convened its own committee of twelve in Paris that October, among them the linguist Otto Jespersen and the chemist Wilhelm Ostwald.[6]

Esperanto arrived with a champion. Louis de Beaufront, who had founded the French Esperanto society in 1898 and was known as the language's second father, came to argue its case.[6] Then an anonymous project signed Ido, the Esperanto word for offspring, was submitted late and out of order.[6] It stripped the accented letters, made the accusative optional, swapped the plural in -oj for an Italianate -i, and replaced the correlative grid with more Latin-looking forms such as qua and omnu.[7] The committee voted four in favour with one abstention and none against, accepting Esperanto on condition that it be reformed toward Ido, and gave the Esperanto Language Committee one month to respond.[10] For a body scattered across a continent, one month was no time at all.[6]

Then came the reveal. The anonymous author of Ido was de Beaufront himself, working in concert with Couturat, the very committee chair.[6][10] The man sent to defend Esperanto had co-written the case against it, and there was, in one contemporaneous account, much bitterness on both sides.[10] Zamenhof refused to reform his language.[7] The exodus that followed was lopsided: roughly a fifth of the movement's major promoters left for Ido, but only three or four percent of ordinary Esperantists went with them.[8] The reformers built their own institutions, the journal Progreso from 1908 and the Uniono por la Linguo Internaciona Ido from 1910.[5]

The rival movement then lost its engine. Couturat died in a car crash in 1914, a blow from which Ido never recovered, and in 1928 Jespersen abandoned it to promote his own creation, Novial.[8][10] The cold war has settled into a stable asymmetry. Esperanto claims somewhere between 100,000 and two million speakers and fills a congress hall each year; Ido counts perhaps a few hundred to a thousand, and its yearly conventions draw ten to fifteen people, fifteen in Berlin in 2019.[8][10][5]

What it reveals

The schism turned on a bet about what a language is for, and the smaller side bet wrong. Ido was, on its own terms, the better specification: fewer diacritics, a lighter grammar, forms friendlier to Romance eyes.[7][9] The software analogy is tempting, and it fails here for a specific reason. A cleaner fork wins in software because the code runs the same whether one user or a million adopt it, but a language has no value apart from the people who already speak it. A technically superior tongue with a hundredth of the speakers is simply worse at the one thing an auxiliary language exists to do, which is let strangers understand each other. The reformers optimized elegance and lost the network.

Authenticity here is measured by submission, not by improvement. The Fundamento functions as a constitution, and freezing the language was precisely what let it survive a century of proposed fixes; the Declaration of Boulogne made an unchangeable text the price of a stable community.[3] The Delegation offered the opposite model, expert standardization imposed from above by committee vote, and it is the community bound to a sacred booklet, not the one that trusted the experts, that still fills a hall.[4][6] The last lesson is about trust in named people. The break drew its heat less from grammar than from de Beaufront's double role, a reminder that a movement this small runs on the credibility of individuals, and that a betrayal by one insider can hollow out a case that argument alone could not.[6][10]

Sources