XI. The Movement to Reform Esperanto
After the Boulogne congress, Zamenhof busied himself with the development of the
language. In his foreword to the Fundamento, he had promised that he would speak in
detail about the language at the Boulogne congress, but he reneged on that promise in
order to avoid conflict at the congress.
Having postponed resolution of the language questions until one of the future
congresses, he dealt with them in his correspondence with Javal. He outlined his ideas
for the development of the language on the 24
th
of September, 1905, in a lengthy, 28-
page letter. He admitted that the language was not perfect. He felt, however, that the
flaws were few, correctable and worth correcting because “Esperanto [had] 100–150
words or forms that were actually bad, and that correcting them would cause each
Esperantist no more than a few hours' work to learn them once and for all, but would be
of colossal benefit to Esperanto” (Mi estas Homo, 113).
He listed the unsuitable items that were to be changed and pointed out that changing
them would necessitate the introduction of neologisms, new words and forms that would
not replace the old ones, but would exist alongside them.
Zamenhof put his project into its final form and sent it to Javal on the 18
th
of
January, 1906. Javal was disappointed that he did not propose any change in the
alphabet. In the future, argued Zamenhof, every printer and telegraph station will have
the Esperanto letters and, in the meanwhile, “h” can be used after a letter to indicate the
accent, just as the Germans use “e” to replace the umlaut. The actual changes he
proposed were few: four grammatical changes and a few dozen words and affixes to
replace some that were too long or were subject to misinterpretation.
Javal authored a report to the Language Committee on replacing the accented letters
with non-accented ones in telegrams. He also persuaded the parliamentarian Lucien
Cornet to sponsor a bill introducing Esperanto into the schools of France as an elective
subject. The bill was co-sponsored by twelve other parliamentarians and was put to a
vote on the 3
rd
of April, 1906. It was defeated.
Javal consulted with parliamentarians and with the Committee on Public Education
and wrote to Zamenhof that they would not accept Esperanto with diacritical marks and
arbitrary correlative words.
11
Zamenhof replied that he would give Javal “the full right
to introduce into Esperanto whatever reforms he found necessary and that [he would]
publicly sign off on everything”, provided Javal would guarantee the French
government's acceptance of Esperanto. Javal, of course, could not give that guarantee.
The second Universal Congress of Esperanto took place in Geneva between the 27
th
of August and the 5
th
of September, 1906 and passed almost without incident. The
question of language reform was not dealt with in the plenary sessions and Javal's report
was not even discussed.
27
In Geneva, Javal convinced Zamenhof to study the question of reforms in a practical
way and promised him 250,000 francs if he would make the changes “he thought
necessary to facilitate learning the language, not only for our contemporaries, but also
for future generations”. The Belgian officer Charles Lemaire, founder of Belga Sonorilo
(Belgian Bell) and president of the Royal Belgian Esperantist League provided part of
the money.
Between the 17
th
and the 23
rd
of October, 1906, a secret conference took place in
Paris, involving Zamenhof, Lemaire, Javal, and two interlinguists, Miguel de Torro and
André Blondel. They all wanted reforms to one extent or another, but they could not
agree on how to make them, because Zamenhof, unlike the others, treated Esperanto, not
as an easily changeable object, but as a living language.
Zamenhof refused the money offered, even though, at four percent interest, it would
have allowed him to abandon his medical practice and live free of financial difficulties
with his family. He did agree, though, that Javal and Lemaire could use a private
replacement spelling and promised that he would not raise a protest if Javal published
his effort. Michaux, Émile Gasse and Gaston Moch aligned themselves with the reform
and Lemaire began using the proposed reforms in Belga Sonorilo.
Meanwhile, professor Louis Couturat, the initiator of the Delegation for the
Acceptance of an International Auxiliary Language, began corresponding with
Zamenhof and various reform-minded Esperantists. The Delegation had been proposed
during the Paris Exhibition in 1900 and was set up on January 17
th
, 1901 to study the
problem of international communication and to select the most suitable international
language. The selection was to be made by the International Association of Academies
and, if that association refused, by the Committee of the Delegation.
On the 1
st
of November, 1906, Couturat circulated his project Esperanto Without
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