Bittersweet Infamy - #64 - The Universal Language

Episode Date: February 19, 2023

Taylor tells Josie about the world's best-known constructed language, Esperanto. Plus: Tijuana's "La Mona", the gigantic naked woman you can live inside.

Welcome to Bitter Sweden. I'm Taylor Basso and I'm Josie Mitchell. On this podcast, we share the stories that live on and indeed. The strange and the familiar. The tragic and the comic. The bitter. And the sweet. Yeah, I'm excited for this week's episode. I think it'll be funsies. Oh. Wait, you think you know what it is now? Because I said it'll be funsies. Please enlighten me. I just spoiler alerts about and I can feel it. No, there's a little bit of sadness in this one. It's not all light. There's some genuine sadness in it. So it's not all funsies. You mean it's bitter and it's sweet? It is both bitter and sweet. Oh, wow.

I know that's rare. I'm trying something new. Going outside of the box over here. Mm-hmm. The box of ice creams. You really can't hear my neighbors. No, what do they say? Are they talking shit about me? No, I can just hear general voices outside. Oh, is he military? General voices? Your neighbor? Whoa, dude. Whoa. Yeah, I'm always ready. I am always ready. Yeah, you are always suited up in uniform on time. If you never leave, you're always on time. That's your motto. That's true. You can't be late if you never leave the house.

So wise. So wise. What is your relationship with your neighbors? Do you got any good neighbors, bad neighbors? You know, when I was young, the bassoes are an anti-social species. So I never really knew for real. And like deliberately so, my parents chose, especially our second place they chose for privacy. We've got like a great forest all around us. Yeah, it's beautiful. And also like where I grew up and when I grew up, you didn't always need to be in your neighbor's business in their grow-up. You know what I mean? It was nice to keep fences. Oh, okay. Yes, yes. Fences make good neighbors. Yes. Good friends make good neighbors. And now, though, when I'm older, I'm still in touch with my neighbor,

Seema, from the first place that I ever lived in. She's 97 years old. We've been buddies for more than 10 years. Yeah, girl. Get it. Now, I'm also really good friends with my next-door neighbor, Crystal. She's sweet. She's a hoot. Sometimes when I'll go out for air in between, when we take a little break while taping, I'll mention her. I'll be like, yeah, I'm inside. Josie's telling me all about Brittany Murphy today. She'll be like, oh, you mean like the mold? And I'm like, don't touch she's, you're spoiling me. I don't know about the mold. Oh, Crystal, she's deep. She's deep in. Yeah. I like Crystal. I've also got my upstairs neighbor, Maureen. She's a sweet lady. You can hear her in our first ever Christmas episode. You can hear her walking around the block shaking

her little maraca at 7 p.m. for the first responders because there's the pandemic. It wasn't his. And then I've got another dude named Jeffrey. Works at the hospital in STEM capacity, really chill dude. So yeah, I think that my naturally gregarious nature about neighbors has overcome my upbringing to be private to the point of hostility. Your hereditary inclination to... Yeah, both nature and nurture in this case. Yeah, that's beautiful. Were you always cozy with the neighbors or not? Yeah, growing up we were. We had some neighbor friends who like turned into like really close family friends. Cool. Yeah, I especially remember when I was little and my dad was sick, we were always, my brother and I were always at the neighbors,

because it was just like so much happening at home. That's good that they were willing to do that. They had already become family friends at that point, you know, they're like, and they had kids our age and blah, blah, blah. And we lived on like a cul-de-sac and, you know, it was all very cozy. Oh, you were a cul-de-sac kid. It was a cul-de-sac, but it was like a fake cul-de-sac. The fire department had put up blockades, so regular traffic couldn't go through, but the fire department could. Like they would come and unlock the gates and go up the hill. That's complicated. It's very complicated. That's why I'm such a complicated person, because... That's true. I'm a cul-de-sac kid, but am I a cul-de-sac kid? Really? You have

imposter syndrome. I... yes, I do. I struggle with that a lot. Shoot. Yeah. What's a fake cul-de-sac kid called? A fake-a-sac? There's a pun in there. There's something. A cul-de-fake? No, not quite. A cul-de-fake? Fake-a-sac? Let's brew on it. Cul-de-sac. Yeah, I don't know. I think... Cul-de-sac. This is... Cul-de-sac. This is challenging my very, very limited knowledge of French language. That might be it. It means cul-de-sac in French. Cul-de-sac. Yeah. Taylor, imagine if one of your neighbors erected a 53-foot tall nude stack shoe, female nude stack shoe, next to your apartment. How would you enjoy that? Um, I'd be into it. It would be tricky because I think it would result in like increased foot

traffic, look-y-loose, you know, the Google car come by. Often, yeah. So I would be a little sketch about it that way, but I am all for erecting more 50-foot nudes. So, yeah. Okay. Yeah. If you're trying to challenge me with, you know, challenging public art, I'm the demo, baby. I know. I'm Rob. I want... Is she lonely? Should we put up another statue? Like... Yeah. Yeah. No, you are definitely on the pro committee, like poster boy. For sure. What do you mean they don't like that the eyes are bleeding? What's wrong with them? It's symbolic, okay? It's symbolic. Yes, the horse has a big blue asshole. It's anatomically correct. Have you seen a horse in real life? This is what we're getting. Well, Armando Munez Garcia, he did just that. Erected a 53-foot tall concrete nude stack

shoe in his neighborhood. Concrete? Yeah. It's a big mold. Well, if he used one, but she did not, so... Oh, okay. Okay, so we're freestyling it. Freestyle. Total freestyle. She is overlooking a residential canyon in the eastern Tijuana neighborhood of Colonia Aeropuerto, which is, as you could probably imagine, as close to the airport. Yeah, I got that. Yeah. Yeah. But there's a San Isidro border crossing, and she's just a little bit east of that. And it is most definitely a residential area. It's up in these coastal canyons, so houses are kind of stacked up the canyon walls and then up at the top and little palm trees popping up, homes and additions. And boom, 53 feet of all women just standing there looking over the city. Good. She's keeping a watch over

everybody. She's making sure the planes land safe. Yeah, no. Exactly. Exactly. So in 1987, Armando, which we'll call him, he was a part-time art student in Tijuana, and he got this idea to build a centennial sculpture to celebrate Tijuana's 100 years of being a city. It was 87 in 1990, was the centennial. So he approached the city to see if he couldn't get some funding for a downtown statue, like a proper civic installation in the heart of Tijuana. He received no word back, they just kind of ghosted him, nothing. Well, they get what they deserve then. And so instead, he approached some of his teachers and fellow students at art school asking if they wouldn't want to be involved in this project, get a few more hands on it, get some insight from teachers,

make it a school project that way. And they balked at his idea. It would be much too expensive to fund, and it would be way too hard to complete with just student workers and just insights from professors. It would essentially just be impossible. But for our man, Armando, nothing is impossible. No such thing. Nothing is impossible. So he sells his car, all his furniture. Oh, no. Anything of value that he could muster up. A dream. I've seen this man in a dragon stand.

Yes, exactly. He took on a few extra jobs to create funds for this project, for building materials. And during this time, when he realized he wasn't going to get any civil reimbursement or any type of grants for this project, nor any help from art school, he decided that he would go with more construction technique rather than sculptural technique. Okay. Instead of a bronze statue or made out of more traditional sculpture materials, he was going to use concrete and he was going to use rebar. And that is what was going to construct this woman. And it also, it made sense cost-wise, but it also made sense considering it was going

to be smack in the middle of a neighborhood. The concrete would fit in with the surroundings. There were plenty of other concrete structures around. Were they all 50-foot tall nudes? No, no. Generally, they were small thumbs. Maybe they wouldn't, maybe. That's what I'm thinking. So maybe. So the concern about matching the materials? Yeah, I don't know. So he was mid-construction when it occurred to him, and really it was all of a sudden, occurred to him because he was kind of, you know, trial by error building this 53-foot

tall statue. And he realized that he didn't need to use, if he wasn't going to be using traditional sculptural materials and methods, then he didn't need to use traditional sculptural supports. So instead, he realized he could build an elliptical beam through the figure's midsection. And it would support the whole thing up and down without having to fill in the sculpture. The beam would be enough, so then it would be a hollow sculpture. Interesting. I wonder, I mean... I'm 50-50. I'm 50-50. So I, on the one hand, yes, innovation. Nobody is going to be living in this statue. It doesn't need to be up to code. You can, it doesn't matter if it can, like,

bear weight, for example, because nobody's going to be standing on it. Is it safe for earthquakes? Yeah. Is it safe for heavy weather? Is it safe for these weird twists of fate where a hurricane blows over palm tree and the palm tree hits the leg and it teeters and, you know? So I'm of two minds here. I'm split up the middle. If it ends up going well, I think it was a great idea. If it does not end up going well, well, I told you so. Well, I think there's even more to consider here, because once Armando realized that the sculpture would be hollow, and I'll quote Armando here, at that moment I decided, well, if I have this room, I have to live inside it.

You know, I didn't see it coming, but I'm happy that it happened. You know, yeah. Now I have grave concerns about the workmanship of the project, however. If it needs to be habitable, then yes, bitch, that does need to be up to code. Running water, what is happening? So I think maybe thinking about... I thought he was going to put a baby in it, but I thought he was going to make a concrete baby and put it in there. Oh, wow. That, wow. Not imagination. Look at you go. You know, but he went up to me, Armando did. Yeah, he became the baby. He put himself inside it.

Oh, and baby. Yeah. In one breast is the living room. I have to say pretty ample breast. Nice. Wow. The left one's a bit bigger because I wanted to put up a flat screen. Got you. In another breast is the bedroom, in her stomach is the kitchen, and down a winding, some might say intestinal like hallway to her butt is the bathroom. That makes sense, but I like... Total sense. Well, time to go to the labyrinth again every time I need to piss. Later on, he constructed so that now there is an office, a study in her head, that also contains I like windows that overlook the whole city.

Okay. Great. Yeah. Yeah. I love this person house. Oh, yeah. And I think when we're talking about like support, structurally sound codes, Armando understood that he would be living in it. So I think he put in a lot of intention to make sure it was safe. Yeah, but he's not an electrician or like he's not formally trained in any of this shit other than art. He's an art student. And he says there is no university for inventors. Inventions come from nothing. Yeah, well, he showed me. Yeah. So that is where she's coming from. She's coming from just pure adrenaline. An idea. Pure idea. Yes. He designed the woman, the sculpture, his home after his girlfriend at the time.

At the time. At the time. That's awkward. Yeah, it's a little awkward. And he made it so that one knee is bent as if she's about to take a step. And then her right hand, it's her right hand is lifted aloft over her head with her pinky up. Why? This is a very good question. So he designed her initially as a tribute to the city, a civic statue, a tribute to his city Tijuana. So in his own words, he says, that is why her right knee is bent because at a hundred years, the centennial, a young city like Tijuana is just starting to walk. And if you look at her raised hand, notice the pinky pointing up and to the left, this is Tijuana's place on a map of Mexico. So the uppermost northwest. Sure. Yeah, I mean, it's art, baby. Yeah, that's as good

a reason as any, I suppose. In addition to this, when it was first built, there was a white and blue painted ribbon that came down her aloft arm signifying water scarcity in the region. Okay. Along these lines of it being a municipal sculpture and representative of the city, Armando named it Tijuana Tercer Milenio or Tijuana Third Millennium. That is what the sculpture, he named it. That's what it's called. So it took him about a year and a half to build this using his own funds, sacrificing quite a bit of his own money and time. And it is not in downtown, right? It's in this very kind of outskirt neighborhood where probably at the time it was more outskirt, Tijuana's gotten bigger, so it's a little bit more closer in. And when it was first completed,

neighbors were a little weirded out because she's a long legged, voluptuous woman. Tall drink of concrete. Yeah. I totally imagine there were some like rosary bound abuelas who were like, they do not want their grandsons walking by that's to actually on their way to school. Like, no, you will go the other way. I bet there's like a lot of dudes who are into like tall ladies in that neighborhood. I haven't grown up there. Just a bunch of Mexican dudes who like have these like six foot three girlfriends. But over time, the neighborhood began to embrace this statue. In fact, they have adopted her under a different name. She has her own little pet name called La Mona, which means the doll. Of course, there's the recognition that she's a female statue,

very attractive, the doll, there's all part of that. But according to Armando himself, in the area, they used to make plaster tourist statues. So people started calling it that because it was like, Oh, La Mona, she's from this neighborhood that does it. And you know, the plaster statues I'm talking about, they're like a foot or like a foot and a half tall. And they'll be like the Virgin of Guadalupe or like Mickey Mouse or like Bart Simpson and that kind of thing. Yeah, yep, yep, yep. Yeah, she is a beloved sculpture in the neighborhood now La Mona. Yeah, I love that for her. In fact, one reporter that was reporting on her, he he was trying to find her and he kept giving the address like the this is the number and the street where

I'm trying to find and everyone was like, Sorry, bud, I don't know. And then finally he was like La Mona, the statue and they're like, Oh, whoa, whoa, okay, take a right. And then you go up and then and then look up. She's right there. The chick with the pinky. Yeah, the chick with the pinky. It received its most official welcome when on March 22, 1990. So just a few years after construction ended, Baja California Governor Ernesto Rufo Appel, accompanied by a crowd of dignitaries, they officially unveiled the statue giving it the city's official stamp of approval. What a aspirational story. So it worked exactly as this man thought it might. Exactly. It was a unifying, we need a 50 foot tall, concrete statue. And it was, oh, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no. But it turned out, yeah, that's exactly what we needed. And you can live in the titty. Yeah. Win win. Three years later, Armando made a trip to Zacatecas and he met his now wife, Maria Del Refugio Saldavar. How tall? You know, they didn't report on how tall she was. Damn it. 50 feet. But she does when they came back to Tijuana, they did live in the house together. Good. Armando says upon first meeting her and you know, wooing her and all that. I told my wife, well, you have a house in Tijuana, but I didn't say more than that. I can only imagine what this guy's lines were to get her. And hey, you want to see the biggest bitch you've ever seen? Have you ever taken a shit in a butt? In a butt.

Maria was surprised to say the least when she arrived at LaMona's feet and looked up at her. But like the neighborhood and the city itself, she's come to love the sculpture. She says, I never thought I was going to live in a naked woman, but as soon as I started living there and cleaning the house, I felt closer to it. Perfect. Yeah. Which I'm also like Armando, you brought her to clean your house, like shut the fuck up. So today the sculpture still stands in its same location. It is an icon of Tijuana and a solid fixture in the thriving Tijuana art scene, which by the way is supposed to be a very, very dope scene. Like a lot of really cool stuff coming out of it, not just sculpture or visual art, but like music and all types of performance and

awesome bittersweet field trip, baby. Oh yeah. I mean, we are going to be in San Diego. So that's exciting. I'm seeing Josie's wedding. By the way, everybody. I'm very excited. You're seeing it. I'm seeing it. Oh, I thought you said I'm seeing it. I'm the MC. I'm like, what are you going to see? You're going to see it, but you're also, yeah, I was like, you're going to do more than just see it. Josie's letting me watch from outside a window. I have to take notes and send the minutes out to everyone after the wedding. Yeah. It's a big job. I'm so thankful that you took it on. Oh, you're welcome. Yeah, maybe we'll have to go down here and take a peek at La Mona.

Ooh, La Mona. She seems cool. Apparently tourists from all over the world come to see it. And news crews included in 2015. So relatively recent, there was a whole project surrounding La Mona where 11 graffiti artists from around the world were invited to come and paint different parts of her as representations. Ooh, give her tattoos. Pretty much, yeah. So she has like the Corazon, like right between her breasts. There's like a long-eared rabbit, long-eared, I don't know, hair on her stomach. And like all these different cool things. Armando, he no longer, him and his wife, they no longer live in La Mona. They live in another building that he built, another bare-breasted woman that he built. He's kind of type. La Sirenita in Puerto Nuevo. Okay. And

she's just a torso. So kind of like right below the boobs up is her deal. Abust. Thank you. Abust. There was some time there where he was looking to, well, I think he is looking to sell La Sirenita in Puerto Nuevo. And he's pretty convinced that he has to find a crazy American who will buy it because nobody else will. Which, you know. You know, they make oddballs in every country. Mm-hmm. They do. They really do. Crazy doesn't discriminate. No, sir. I love this story for Armando's perseverance. Against all odds, he didn't fuck this up. He actually seems to have done what he accomplished to with a minimum of drama. Who knew? Yeah, in like a relatively short period of time. And he's kept it up as well, which I think is pretty dope. The house is habitable. The people

love it. Mm-hmm. I'm sure the city feels bad for ignoring his letters. Yeah. So, win-win. Armando says, and I'll give him the last word here, give me enough rebar, an oxy acetylene torch, and I'll line the border with giant nude Amazons. Exactly. Sure. Yes. The answer is yes. Please do it. The answer is yes. The world needs more art. So, let's do it. Why not? Big titty art ladies. Yeah. By the way, I figured it out. Called the quacks. Damn, you're good. Today's story begins in the late 19th century in the Russian-controlled Polish city of Bialystok, where we find a humble, idealistic man of Ashkenazi Jewish descent

named Ludwig Zamenhof, aka L.L. Zamenhof, born 1856. Okay. Unfortunately, Zamenhof exists at a time of great prejudice towards Jewish Europeans. Starting in 1881, the Russians begin to implement pogroms or organized massacres against the Jewish population. Okay. The horror of these pogroms kickstarts the Zionist movement, the idea that there should be a Jewish ethno-state in the Middle East and Palestine, which will eventually bear out the state of Israel. And while this initially intrigues Zamenhof, he ends up very disillusioned by the movement and its rhetoric. While Zamenhof loves Jewish culture, he hates nationalism. He thinks it separates us when we should be working on building bridges of understanding and communication. And Zamenhof, whose father taught German and French and who

himself knew around a dozen languages, thinks that maybe the issue is that everyone's speaking different languages. Is this the story of Esperanto? Yes. Yes! You got it. Yeah, that's what this is. Yes! Amazing. I'm so stoked. I love language. Okay, perfect. Quote. The place where I was born and spent my childhood gave direction to all of my future struggles. In the Alistach, the inhabitants were divided into four distinct elements, Russians, Poles, Germans, and Jews. Each of these spoke their own language and looked down on all the others as enemies. In such a town, a sense of nature feels more acutely than elsewhere, the misery caused by language division, and sees at every step that the diversity of languages is the first, or at

least the most influential, basis for the separation of the human family into groups of enemies. I was brought up as an idealist. I was taught that all people are brothers. While outside in the street at every step, I felt that there were no people, only Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews, and so on. This was always a great torment to my infant mind, although many people may smile at such an anguish for the world in a child. Since at that time, I thought that grown-ups were omnipotent, I often said to myself that when I grew up, I would certainly destroy this evil. Well, baby thoughts. I like it. Yeah, and I don't find that, like, if you don't have anguish for the world, you're not paying attention. Anyway. Fair enough, yeah.

And so Zamenhof sets from a very early age toward building a way for the world's peoples to better communicate irrespective of creed or nationality. At his 19th birthday party, he debuts a booklet containing a self-created artificial language with the ultimate goal that it could eventually be adopted for international use. Just a quick jump in here. Nerd. Nerd alert. Nerd alert. That's what that siren is. He shows it to his friends. They politely feign interest because I'm sure they're used to this dude being a nerd by now. Yes, exactly. Thank you. They're like, cool, kind of child. Big language nerd. Yeah. And that's, this is nerd on nerd violence. I'm a nerd. I don't, you know,

whatever. Yeah. They sing a little hymn together that Zamenhof has prepared. Oh my god. And in part, it goes, Malamikete las noches, Kado Kado, Jan Tempesta, La Toto Mose, and Familie Conenjare, Sodeba, which means translated roughly, enmity of nations, fall, fall, the time has come, may the whole of humanity be united as one. It's like that friend who's like, I have this special game I want to play. Let's play it and you'll be this person and then I'll be, and you're just like, I don't want to play your stupid game, dude. That's me. No. That's me. I'm that friend. No, no, no. I'm that friend. That was, I came to you with this podcast. That was, do you want to play a stupid game? But you are much more understanding and collaborative than the scenario in which I

am talking where it's like, you're kids, you're definitely kids. You're like, I'm tired. I think my mom has to come pick me up. I want a juice box. And they're like, no, we haven't finished the game. You're the horse and I'm the cowboy. And it's just like, I don't want to be the horse anymore. Yeah, that person, that person did always want to be the cowboy. Yeah, always, always, always. So Zamenhof goes off to college to study medicine, where upon his father, Marcus, concerned about the amount of time his son is spending on this trifle, throws the notebooks of his constructed language on the fire.

Oh, shit. D&D is bad for you. You can't play no more. Exactly. This is, this is kiddie stuff. You need to focus on, you know, having kids and making a respectable blah, blah, blah. Anyway, Zamenhof goes on to be an ophthalmologist, as well as a married father of three. He recreates the language even in spite of this, which he tinkers with until in 1887. He adopts a pen name and releases a text containing the vocabulary and the rules of the Lingvo Internacia. Oh my God. Cones of Denshire. Love it. A little bit, yes. The book originally published in Russian ends with the universal vote.

And this is a petition encouraging readers to pledge to learn this language if 10 million signatures are collected, thereby rendering it objectively useful. Okay. Okay. I like that approach. Objectively useful. It also understands that, like, I realize right now, objectively, it is not useful, unuseful. But if it is learned, then we change that. So, okay. If a bunch of, if a bunch of people promise that they're gonna learn it with you and speak it to you, then it's useful. Like a New Year's resolution. Keep yourself honest. Yeah.

10 million is hard, though. It's a big number. And you're only at this point, he'll obviously eventually go on to translate this book into other languages. But for right now, we're only in Russian, right? So, this is gonna be hard. Also, like, when you look at inflation, like 10 million in the late 1800s, that's really big. That's like 100 million now. Think about it. Yeah, yeah. That's how inflation works, by the way.

It's exactly how inflation works. Economists don't write us. But follow us on Instagram, at Better Sweden for Me. Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. So, this book will come to be called The Unua Libro, which is the first book. Okay. It's proper title, however, better explains its pseudonymous author's intent. By 1890, Dr. Esperanto's International Language has been published in 14 languages. In the end, it's the doctor's pen name Esperanto, which means one who hopes that captures the public imagination and gives the language itself a new name.

It's almost like this guy was building a 53-foot tall nude statue, but of language. Think about it. It's exactly like that. They mash. They are identical. While the universal vote, so this petition, it only managed, in the end, to amass a thousand signatures. So, that's 0.01% of 10 million.

In spite of this, Esperanto will go on to become the world's most widely spoken constructed language. Josie, what do you know about Esperanto? What are your perceptions of Esperanto? Give it to me. I think I shared my philosophy about nerds. So, there's that. Okay.

You think it's for nerdlingers? No, I don't. No, I don't, because I think Tolkien's constructed languages are for nerdlingers. Tolkien was an Esperantist. Really? Makes total sense. Makes total sense. Yes, okay.

But I think maybe some of my connotations of Esperanto, too, are like, your homeschooled and your parents make you learn it. Kind of slightly culty vibes, where language is a natural evolving. It's built on centuries of usage and mistakes and corrections and overcorrections and double mistakes. And it's like this very vibrant living entity. And so, to construct one is like, oh, here's this beautiful, you know, thousand-year-old sequoia tree that is language.

And then it's like, oh, here I made like a little artificial plastic tree for all of us to enjoy and use. I mean, it's still amazing that you can build a tree, like a beautiful artificial plastic tree, like cool, tight, tight, tight, good on you. But there's a little bit of like the magic and the pizzazz and the like breath of life that feels a little missing from it. That's my connotation, which could be very easily changed. If I knew more, this is a very bare bones, rebar and concrete kind of construction.

Well, no, I like that because, okay, so let me put it to you this way. I wondered if Esperanto quite fit the bill as an infamous subject before I picked it, because I was like, um, this might just be an interesting subject, but is it infamous? And then I realized, I'm like, my opinions of it are somewhat dismissive and much like you, for no real reason, but ignorance. Like, I don't know anything about it. Even its proponents acknowledge this linguist Erica Onrin says it's perceived as quote, something idealistic and utopian that never went anywhere and died out.

Professor Humphrey Tonkin says, Esperanto is not a language that carries much prestige and that when he says he speaks it, people start looking at him funny. I think what it also, what it ultimately comes down to is the gap between its original aim and its current status. It's the universal language that nobody speaks. Yeah. Of course, we will find out it's more complex than that.

Yeah. Plenty of people speak it and there are even native speakers. And most of those who speak it in the present day harbor no particular illusion that it will eventually become the lingua franca of the world. Right. English, with all its colonial baggage, seems fit to take that crown by force at the current moment. Yeah. Though who knows what the future will bring.

Knife point, gun point, yeah. But if it's unlikely that Esperanto will become the universal language, then what still appeals about it to its fervent 21st century diehards? Good question. To figure that out, why don't we learn a little bit more about the language itself and how it operates? Okay. Before I give any more hot dismissive takes.

Well, no, I deliberately prompted you for that hot dismissive take. Because I feel like I could have given a similarly hot dismissive take before I learned more about it. Yeah. Okay. And now I have. I've been doing Duolingo Esperanto. What? That's amazing.

Yeah, they have a Duolingo Esperanto. So fun, so fun. Do you do it every day? Like what's your routine? What's happening? Yeah, I do like 10 minutes a day. Okay, so Esperanto is not the world's only constructed language, nor is it the first. Right.

The late 19th century was a boom period for all manners of ideologies and social experiments, including constructed languages. Yeah. There was another language, for example, called Volapuk, that Zamenhof notably hated for its... He thought it was difficult to learn. Esperanto word for gibberish is volapukayo. Ooh, that's shade!

Even the constructed linguists are bitches when they want to be. That's the breath of life I'm talking about. That's nice. There you go. That's good. Additionally, we now live in a world where millions of computer programmers use constructed languages like C++ and Python to give commands to machines every day. Fair enough.

If you want a more detailed history of constructed languages, including Esperanto, Erika, honor its book in the land of invented languages, Esperanto rock stars, Klingon poets, Loughlin lovers, and the mad dreamers who tried to build the perfect language, is available to read for free on archive.org. Great resource, archive.org. Go check it out. The whole thing is available there. Yeah.

Fantastic. You can check it out, a PDF version of it, the same way you might an e-book from a library. That's so cool. Love it. Yeah. So what sets this language apart from others? It was deliberately crafted to be easy to learn, although adherents to other constructed languages might fight you that theirs is better.

Right. It has only 900 roots. Its verb conjugations are very simple. It can be learned in a tenth of the time of other languages. Whoa. Study it for a couple months and you're pretty much set to have conversations. Wow. Studies have shown that learning Esperanto helps you learn other languages much faster.

It's been accused of being silly sounding, a mutt of romance, German and Slavic languages, Eurocentric, sexist due to its default masculine gendered nouns and feminine derivatives, but anecdotally, all the lay people who have picked up the language seem pretty impressed by how cool it is to suddenly be fluent in the language after only a few weeks of study. Yeah. I will say though for that one note about it makes learning other languages easier. I think learning any foreign language to yourself to your original native language makes learning another language easier.

Basically, the way that it was described when I saw it was like, if you learn Esperanto and then two, three years of French, you're better off than if you had just learned French for four years. Okay. That makes sense. Singular nouns end in O. Curtin is Gorteno. Plural nouns end in OJ pronounced OI. So, curtains are Gorteno.

Oh, okay. Singular adjectives end in A. Plural adjectives end in AJ. If you want to say that's a good podcast, you'd say, Tio estás bona por casto. If you wanted to say those are good podcasts, Tij estás bona por casto. Okay. Yeah, that sounds a little bit like Latin.

It sounds like all of them. Yeah, it really does, yeah. It sounds like Latali-an-ish-ench. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. Note that in both cases the verb for to be is expressed as estas. This is for simplicity's sake in their infinitive forms. Every verb ends in I, so esti, that's to be.

Okay. In the present tense we add a s. I am mi estas. You are vi estas. We are ni estas. She is si estas. He is li estas. No complicated changes.

Past tense, I s. I was mi estas. You were vi estas. We were ni estas, et cetera. Future tense, O s. Mi estos, vi estos. Conditional US. Imperative ends in U.

Estu, that means be. I'm commanding you to be. Cool. Or like lernu is learn. If I'm telling you to learn. Lernu, okay, yeah. Josi, lernu, et cetera. Why is my name accented?

Why is my name accented? No, you'd be Josio and I'd be Te Loro. Oh, oh, we changed our names. We have Esperanto names. You got Esperanto names, baby. Oh, I like, okay. You get an Esperanto sona to inhabit when you're speaking Esperanto.

I am changing my dismissive comments as I speak it. There you go. Dude, it's all falling away. Did you have names in your other language classes, like in high school and stuff? Do you have like a Spanish name or like a French name? I did have a Spanish name.

I don't remember what it was. I think I kind of, because like I am of Spanish origin, I didn't see the point. Yeah. I'm like, Taylor's my Spanish name. Yeah. These verb forms are regular and universal, predictable, even if your mother tongue isn't European.

And in written form, by the way, Esperanto uses a 28-letter alphabet based on the Latin alphabet. So it'll be like G, G with a little hat, you know? Love hats. The rest of the language is set up to be as simple as possible. For example, says language blogger Jacob Marion.

To negate a word in English, we use various prefixes like none, on, in, um, ear, ill, this, and more. And a non-native speaker has to remember when to use which. Yeah. You don't say non-possible or disnecessary, for example. Yeah. In Esperanto, you would use ne for all of those. That's nice.

So just a simplification of it all, yeah. So I am probably not doing the language any justice, so I'm going to pull up a native Esperanto speaker, real quick for you. And to be clear here, a native Esperanto speaker will generally be, not always, but generally be the child of two people who have different mother tongues who met via their interest in Esperanto.

Okay. And made a home, and now have a kid. Right. And be like, well, you're Chinese and I'm Polish, and I don't speak that, and you don't speak this, but we both speak Esperanto. Cute. Hello from Budapest, Hungary.

I'm Stella, and the language I'm speaking is Esperanto. What is Esperanto? Zamenhof in the 19th century created a different language which is my native language. Native means that my parents, in fact, spoke to me the language before my birth. So I really can say that this language is part of my life.

It's not hobby, it's not a big deal. It's a real everyday use for me. It kind of sounds like Spanish to me a little bit, but that's because that's like a romantic language that I know and studied. It's got Estas in there, same thing. Yeah, and maybe kind of like the inflection of it sounds a little bit like a romance language to me as well.

And then I default to Spanish because of that. So yeah, it doesn't seem to be, like I studied a little bit of Chinese when I like Mandarin Chinese when I lived there. And the tones were just really, really hard for me to hear. The different tones where it's like, it's the same sound, but you inflect up or you inflect down. Right.

You inflect up and then down or it's a flat. And it's just like, because I didn't grow up with it and I didn't have it around my ear, I was really, really hard for me to hear. I feel like I could hear every word that she was saying. Like I could distinguish that was a word and that was a word and that was a word, which is very, very fundamental, I realize.

But having Stephanie Chinese, when you don't have that, you're like, you're not at square one. You're like way back. And so I feel like you start, you definitely start square one, maybe even a little further along with Esperanto. Weirdly, contrary to what you might imagine, it apparently makes no difference if you were coming from like...

Esperanto has a huge presence in East Asia, which you might think is counterintuitive because you would think, oh, people who, like my two languages are English and Spanish and you can see those all over this, right? But apparently it makes no difference, really, if you're learning it from a culture whose language is constructed differently.

Yeah. Based on studies, like there's a lot of Chinese, there's a Esperanto museum in China. Yeah. Well, and that also has to do with like the social thoughts underpinning the Esperanto movement, which I will get into. Yeah.

Which I could definitely, I could see that being adopted by a lot of different people, no matter their nationality or original language, yeah. I gotta say, Duolingo Esperanto, easy peasy. I'm blamming through it. You're blamming too. You're not just like firing or like running or like coursing. Sailing, flying, blamming.

Val doesn't even know what to do with me. He's worried. He has to stay one lesson ahead of me. You got him on the back foot all the time. My work before, okay, say it again. Kun mia amico, Josie. With my friend Josie. I work with my friend Josie.

On a podcast, Nomata Dolce Mara Infamio. Infamy, last word is infamy. Bittersweet. Podcast Nomata Dolce Mara Infamio. On a podcast named Bittersweet Infamy. Boom, you know how to speak Esperanto, easy peasy. Nomata, I was like, no matter, no matter. No matter what.

You're saying no matter. No matter what. No matter what. Well, I actually just posted my buddy Chris Ho. He was at our old high school and he found a poster of us from the drama room from a play that we did in 2006. And it's still up. That's amazing.

Yeah, well, we're special, baby. All those kids are looking at your tattoo choker and they're like, damn, Y2K aesthetic, love it. That was a strap that fell off a purse from a drama room prop and I wore it as a choker on my neck like every goddamn day. There you go. That was my signature look. Middle school, I had a short little chain of safety pins.

Sick. Sick. Can't believe we're friends. Point being, that play was the exact same play that Josie and I would go on to work on when we were like 18 or so, which is a collection of short plays by a playwright named David Ives. All in the timing is what it's called. That we did it as the Ives of March in high school because it was in March.

The play that I did in that was a play called The Universal Language and when we did it, I think Emily Griffiths and Ryan Caron were the couple in it. Oh, yeah. And it was entirely in this fake language. It was in David Ives' parodic version of Esperanto. Yeah. It has made a bass version of it. But it was the same shtick where at first you're like,

this is completely incomprehensible. And then when you take two seconds to actually figure it out, you're like, oh, this is very easy. Yeah. And you understand what's happening. Yeah. Yeah. Well, especially when you hear people inflecting and acting and you know,

you're not just hearing it like on a telephone or you're recording. It changes it. But yeah. I got my first kiss rehearsing for that play, by the way, because it ends in a kiss. Yeah. That is cute. Look at me and then on the night of opening, right before we did the kiss for whatever reason,

I looked out in the audience and the person that I made eye contact with was her fucking dad. And I was just like, oh. And then afterwards I went up to him and I said, I'm sorry for violating your daughter. I thought it was a funny joke at the time. Yeah, I know. Now I know. So Esperanto didn't come prepackaged with swear words or sex words,

but people made them. Well, yeah. A language needs, it's the first thing you learn. Like when you know a language that your friend doesn't and they're like, you want to teach them something. What's the first thing you teach them? The dirty words. Yeah, I know.

I was just about to rattle off like all these Spanish dirty words. I'm like, wait, this is inappropriate. Can't do that. They're the best ones. The best ones, yeah. But people made them. Fiki is to fuck. And per Erika Onrent, the Esperanto community has its own pieces of unique slang.

For example, crocodile or to crocodile means to speak a non-esperanto language at an Esperanto event. So you're just flapping your gums like a crocodile. No one even knows or kisses coming out. This is the breath of life that I said Esperanto is missing. But they have it. They have it. Why would you assume that a language entirely trafficked by delightful weirdos wouldn't have any spirit to it? My goodness.

I know. I apologize. How do I say I apologize in Esperanto? Nerds. You called them nerds. Nerd on nerd violence. You said that. I also adopt that.

How do you say I'm sorry in Esperanto? Okay. Nedenkinde is your welcome. Perdonu. Perdonu. Oh yeah, because it's imperative. Perdonu. Perdonu.

Esperanto. Perdonu. Did you see my like pretty good Esperanto recall there? That was, I mean, you have an amazing memory though. You have a little steel trap up there. Thank you. Too good for my own good. I wish I could forget a few things.

So you could be a crocodile at an Esperanto event, but if you go too far in the other direction, you might become a verdapapo or a green pope prone to bloviating on and on with long-winded thoughts and dreams about Esperanto. Yes, baby. Yes. Okay.

A green pope. Green is the color of Esperanto. It's the color of hope. Okay, okay. It's the color of the Esperanto flag. Yeah, yeah. Oh, they have a flag. He wasn't internationalism, but they have a flag, hey?

Every movement needs a banner under which to unite. Let's make a bittersweet infamy flag. Is that just our cover art? It's our album art, yeah. I guess you're right. Again, you're fucking right. And indeed, most Esperantists true to their language's name are dreamers, idealists in the mold of Zamenhof himself,

as Professor Tonkin puts it, behind Esperanto is a notion of the fundamental goodness of humanity. This isn't just an auxiliary language, Intuit or baked ideas of egalitarianism and intercultural communication. You're learning this because you want to speak to other different people. Yeah. This suits the time of its creation, the 19th C,

communism, socialism, science, industry, all of it, all at once. Yeah, communication lines are being opened and yeah. By 1905, there are Esperantists from... So this is not the 1887, he dropped Unua Libro. Album drop, totally, yeah. Yes, yes. By 1905, there are Esperantists from Argentina, to Algeria, to Australia. Zamenhof hosts the first Esperanto conference

or World Congress in Belong-sur-Mer, France. France, I knew I was going to do that. France. That's how you say it in Esperanto. How do you say France? France-io. France-io. How do you say France in French?

France! Have you seen that meme of the lady screaming France? They had to say their names at the beginning of a beauty pageant and the one lady goes, France! Oh, no, that was from the Miss Universe contest that just happened, yeah. Good for her, represent.

Yeah, go France. 688 people show up to this World Congress. It's a modest hit. These will continue every single year until the present day with the exception of the World Wars and the COVID-19 pandemic. Whoa, look at us up there and with the World Wars. Our COVID-19 experience. We're special.

Since the Second World War, they have been attended by an average of more than 2,000 people in a peak of about 6,000 attendees. To this day, these are the primary events in the Esperanto social calendar. You may have noticed that a lot of that Esperanto slang was conference-based. Yes, yes.

I'm also going to posit this idea that there's probably a lot of Esperanto babies that come out of that conference, too. The Youth Conference is apparently a fuckfest. That's what I've heard. Yeah, yeah. An Esper- a feaky-fest. A feaky-fest. So if you're an aspiring Esperantist,

you'd better like conferences, albeit pretty unconventional conferences, largely populated by friendly, odd people who are stoked that you're there. Right, yeah, and maybe want to get freaky, yeah. And you're going to get feaky and freaky and Esperanticky. Yes. In the early 20th century, we also see the development of an Esperanto anthem and flag, green and white,

with a green star in the upper left corner. Tight. Green is the color of hope. Esperantists set up a system of consoles, local representatives in global communities to help facilitate the spread of the universal language. Esperanto becomes entwined, actually, with the Bahá'í Faith specifically,

whose doctrine strongly supports the implementation of an auxiliary language in Zamenhof's own daughter, Lydia, will become a convert to Bahá'í. Oh, whoa. I had a good friend in high school who was Bahá'í, and she still is. We're just not as good friends. That was the best.

She was always talking to you in Esperanto, and you didn't know what the fuck she was saying. I get it. S2, S2, yeah. No, what's the past tense? Wait, S2 is the imperative. What's the past tense? Past tense?

Esthís, esthís. Esthís amicus. It would be esthís amicoi. Amicoi, okay. Amicoi, it always ends in an O. The way that it works with like gendered shit is like, man, viró, woman, viríno. That's bullshit.

So this is like a common criticism of Esperanto, because it came up in the 19th century, language is very gendered, you know? I mean, language still is very gendered, but yeah. Yes, but like, in escape, like they didn't have, you couldn't be a Patrínex, you know what I mean? Not yet. Breath of life, the breath of life.

So apparently one of the things actually that sustained Esperanto over something like this other language, was when it came time to make revisions to volapuk, everyone had different ideas about what they should be, and this would eventually splinter the volapuk community with this person making volapuk spin-off number one over here, this person making volapuk spin-off number two over here. And there's like a 2A and a 2B, yes.

Whereas when Dr. Esperanto was like, okay guys, time to make some changes to the language, what do you guys want to, you know, start with doing, they were all like, no, don't change it, because the fact that it is static and unchanging makes it incredibly easy to learn. You don't really have to worry about it changing underneath you. It'll be the same.

You can grab any old Esperanto book and learn it to this day. Yeah. Other than us brute forcing some words like podcastoy in there. Right, yeah. And then what's the difference? Yeah. Huh, interesting, because I feel like that does make it easy to learn, but it might hinder it as time goes on.

They had 900 root words back then, we just have more things now. Yeah. I do see where you're coming from though, and I do agree. Right, yeah. It's a balance, right? It's a balance. Yeah, yeah. Language is hard.

Languages are complicated, it turns out. Yeah. So we see movements to establish Esperanto-speaking territories in the early 20th century, like Neutral Moresnet, tiny territory on the border between Belgium and Germany, the currency, anthem, flag are all ready, but then boom, World War One. Oh, yeah.

Does an Esperanto-speaking territory defeat the purpose of it? Because then it becomes a nationalist in some way, if you have a currency and anthem and a flag. See, that's what I'm saying about, that was my inkling towards the flag. Yeah. It's a little contradictory, aren't people such interesting enigmas? That's true.

The language is pitched as the official language of the League of Nations in the 1920s. Oh. We're international, baby. And it actually gets good legs under it. Like, this movement actually does get the signatures, or at least the go-ahead, from everyone but the French delegate, Gabriel Hanateau, who's a member of the Académie Française, which protects the French language.

And that's a tight protection. If you don't know anything about that, they take that very seriously. Very seriously. Very seriously. And you don't get a new word entered into the French dictionary like that. It takes years. Oh, God, no.

God, no. So true to form, he feels very threatened that this new language will displace French. Yes. He uses his veto power to squash it. Gosh. Motherfucker. Two years later, when the League recommends that member states include Esperanto

in their educational curricula, the French government responds by banning Esperanto education from French schools. As according to the French Ministry of Public Instruction, French and English would perish, and the literary standard of the world would be debased. Oh, my God. Said it in French. He said French and English in there.

He wants us on side. Right, yeah. He wants us to see this thread as well. Let's squash Esperanto together, boys. So unfortunately, as we move through the 20th century, a lot happens to put a serious damper on the spread of Esperanto. Zamenhof passes away in 1917 of a cardiac event in his native Poland. RIP.

RIP. On top of that, the hopeful internationalists predominantly left-leaning slash socialist forces that animate the Esperanto movement run headlong into the various fascist totalitarian governments that take center stage during the mid-century. Yeah, oopsie. Right-wing governments in Portugal crack down on Esperanto in its ideals. Franco does the same in Spain.

Yeah. It's on the come up among Korean socialists until Japan crushes it. Okay. From 1936 to 1938, Russian Esperantists are either executed or sent to Siberia by Stalin until the Nazis prove a more pressing priority. That's when 39 is when that kind of tails off because now they're dealing with Hitler. Yeah. Speaking of whom, Hitler specifically singles out Esperanto in his shitty book,

Mein Kampf, as a tool for disruption and a unifying language of the Jewish diaspora. One star review on Mein Kampf for sure. Mein Kampf can get fucked. Fucking from the bottom of my heart. All three of Zamenhof's children, Adam, Lydia and Zovia, are Esperantists and medical professionals who stay in Poland at considerable personal risk to help the Jewish population. In the end, Adam is shot in the chest by an SS officer while Lydia and Zovia are murdered at the concentration camp, Treblinka.

Oh my god. Oh. Really, really upsetting and really gave me a moment when I was researching this story about people seeking to build connection with others and share ideas and thoughts and how I think that that is something like the best of humanity in its way. Yeah. And then the opposite, which is people being scapegoated for being different and compassionate and... Yeah.

And I think that's the absolute worst of humanity. Condoning and breeding division, yeah. And participating in like the wholesale extermination of people that they deem threatening based on misinformation peddled by despots who are taking advantage of their fears and insecurities and ignorances. By manipulation, yeah. So kind of an interesting note is that you may have noticed that Italian wasn't on the list of like right-wing despots cracking down on this shit over fuckface.

Mussolini. What's his name? You know what I'm talking about. Thank you. Apparently, he half-assed liked it because it sounded like Italian. Because of it kind of half-assed sounds like Italian. In the true spirit of Esperanto and to hope these people who knew Esperanto and were in the concentration camps would teach other inmates Esperanto.

And when the guards would come over and try to crack down on it, they'd be like, we're just teaching them Italian, man. And because Italy was an ally of Germany, they could continue these language lessons in plain sight. That's fucking wild. That's cool, huh? That is cool. That's the tittiest tidbit I've ever heard. Damn.

So thankfully, and in amongst all of this like atrocity and this attempt to like exterminate the Zamenhof line, Adam's son, Louis Christoph. I hope that's how that's pronounced. Could be Louis Christoph. So this is LL Zamenhof's grandson. He's able to escape and hide in Poland. He works in a tomato field. One day, someone asks him,

are you with Esperanto? Which means, do you know Esperanto? And he responds, oh yes, I know Esperanto. I invented it. Which means, oh, I know it. My grandfather invented it. And he's so scared that he's given himself away, but he hasn't.

And thankfully, he's able to survive the war and live till 2019. His daughter, Margaret, is still active in Esperanto circles. Very cool. While Esperanto and its ideals about humanity are obviously rattled by the goings on of the war, the scattered community manages to continue into the 20th century. They aren't ready to let go of this language and philosophy that means so much to them. One of these people is a young George Soros, whose father is an ardent Esperantist to the point of changing the family's surname

from Schwartz to Soros, which means to soar in Esperanto. Woded to not know that. There you go. And he's not the only one. Other big names, Lord of the Rings, author J.R.R. Tolkien, as we discussed, Yugoslavian president, Josip Broz Tito, very controversial man,

and Brazilian soccer player Pele, R.I.P. Oh my god. Moving forward in the century, we see efforts by very serious-minded figures like Yugoslavian Eva Lepenna to iron out the public image of Esperantists as these wacky eccentrics. Right. He says of his experience attending the 1947 World Congress in Bern, Switzerland. One woman with green stockings explained to me that every lady Esperantist

should wear only green stockings for propaganda purposes. One came to the ball in a dress like a nightdress with masses of green stars, large, medium, and small. I saw a loud yellow tie with an even louder green star woven into it. In general, one could see stars everywhere, on the chest, in the hair, on belts, rings, etc. People will say again that everyone has the right to dress as he wishes. Certainly, but could we not kindly request such cranks

not hinder the spread of Esperanto by their standpoint? And external appearance? If that does not work, have we not at least the right to make a mockery of them since they make a mockery of Esperanto? Shade. Shade. Shade.

Throne. Green shade. Throne. The green leaves are fallen. The decrankifying of Esperanto never seems to have occurred. And thank god. Yeah. Says former University of Hartford President Humphrey Tonkin of the present Esperantists.

Sometimes when I'm at Esperanto meetings, I say to myself, and this sounds terrible. I say, am I really like that? But then I sit in a faculty meeting, and I think to myself, this is not terribly different from an Esperanto Congress, because it's true. The fact is that overall, people are wackier than one imagines, so perhaps Esperanto is not that far out.

I like that, yeah. Through the 20th century, we see the history of Esperanto grow along with the body of Esperanto music, art, poetry. In 1966, the Esperanto language movie Incubus is released, starring William Shatner. What? Oh man. Is he an Esperantist? No, and it shows.

Oh. So the rap on this movie specifically is that nobody in it can fucking speak Esperanto well. They've clearly learned it off the script. And yeah, but you know, we need a name. So this is a movie by this director named Leslie Stevens, and he seems to have just made it Esperanto for a gimmick. He was like, okay, we need something to set this apart.

Let's just put it in Esperanto. There's something to it in that I would have never heard of or watched this movie outside of it happening to be in Esperanto. It's, you're gonna be shocked, based on our last encounter with William Shatner. You're gonna be shocked. It's very pretentious, acid trippy 60s garbage where he kisses pretty ladies. Oh, okay. Yeah, that's his MO.

Yeah. That is his genre to a hilt, and he's doing it while it's about this. We're in this like Bergman-esque other realm where these beautiful ladies lure damned men to their death. Oh shit. Kind of siren-esque. Yes, very that. And they send their souls to hell.

But this one particular blonde is very over it because she's sick of all of these damned souls. She wants a pure soul. She wants to send a pure soul to hell. And who's the pure soul we know? William Shatner. Exactly. And so he comes and he's got his like, his fucking dumb ass sister with him. And the siren kind of falls in love with William Shatner.

And the purity of his love is kind of like overcoming her evil nature. He takes her to like a cathedral and she runs screaming out of it because, you know, she's unholy. And then the demon lady's sister is like, you're fucking this up. We need to release the incubus. And so they do. And the incubus is this kind of sallow young man who lures William Shatner's sister to her death and so on. Oh no, all in Esperanto.

All in Esperanto. All in Esperanto. And it's got English subtitles on the bottom. And this is specifically part of the restoration of this film because this film was actually thought lost until 1996. Geebies. They found a print of it at the Cinématec Française in Paris. But like this print that they found was really degraded and had like blurry French subtitles

kind of baked into it. So they just, they restored it and then they overdid those old subtitles with like clearer English ones. Whoa, what a cult night to go and watch that, you know? Oh my god, the deepest of deepest of deep cuts. Yeah, the Rio is like chomping at the bit. Salivating, yeah. The other thing that this movie is half-ass infamous for is the incubus is played by this Serbian actor named Milos Milos who killed his girlfriend and himself.

Like right after all this happened. In real life. In real life and the girlfriend was Mickey Rooney's ex-wife, I think. She was an actress herself. Her name was Barbara Ann Thomason. Oh my. I believe she may still have been married to Mickey Rooney at the time or they were recently divorced. Yeah, separated or something.

Yeah, and then she ends up with this guy Milos Milos who's this 24-year-old Serbian dude who's been in one other movie in this and he killed her and himself. Milos Milos, maybe Mitchell shouldn't take my last name, fuck. This is what I'm saying. Yeah. What if he starts speaking Esperanto to you? Watch out. Showing any incubus indications, yes.

Yeah, any incubations. Get him out of there. We also see in the spirit of Neutral MoresNet attempts to establish Esperanto-speaking colonies. By 1935, there's a thriving Esperanto community on the Dutch island of Teshel with a thousand of 8,000 residents speaking the language to about an eighth. Whoa. An eighth.

And that was very Canadian of me to say about an eighth, about something that was exactly. Got a hedge. Got a hedge. You never know. In the present tense, obviously English has won that war and there's actually like a really quite sad scene in this little Esperanto document. Little in that it's about 30, 35 minutes. Okay.

Esperanto documentary that I watched, it's on YouTube. I think it's just called the Universal Language. There's like an older dude who's kind of looking back on like the Esperanto times and he's talking about, oh, there's the Esperanto monument over there. That's all that's left. They used to raise the Esperanto flag here every year and he gets like a little tear in his eye because he used to have this whole community and they're like, does anyone speak Esperanto around here anymore?

He's like, no. That is sad. It's sad. I think on my grandpa and like how he used to like go to the Italian hall for ship, he's like, yeah, nobody goes there anymore. It's not. Yeah, lots of languages like that is really. Because like we're saying there's like a breath of life in a language

and when you don't get to speak it anymore, it's really like, it is really sad. You lose something. You definitely lose something. Yeah. And that's why you see so many people fighting for the survival of their languages and you see people like talking to indigenous elders who know the languages to get that shit down. Yeah. There's a movie that I cried like a, were you there to watch that with us, Josie?

There's a movie that I cried like a baby to. It's a beautiful sad movie called Sueño en otra idioma, which is I dream in another language. I have not seen it, but you've mentioned it on this podcast. Have I? I think so. It may have gone edited out actually, but. Maybe. It's a beautiful story about these two older, it's a queer story too.

So if you're gay like me, you know, go see. But it's a story about these two older men who are the last two surviving speakers of this indigenous language called Zikril. It's a fictionalized language and these young kind of anthropology students kind of want to get them on tape, speaking it to one another, but they refuse to speak to each other because they've had this huge falling out that has to do with like their sexuality, the influence of Catholicism on the area. And they're just grumpy old men too.

And they're just grumpy old men now and they don't want to change. And it's about I'm tearing up just thinking about it. It's about them trying to get these these two folks together to talk it out so we can save this language. That's when you think about like a plot where two people need to talk and that like the stakes are that high, like bam. Great story. Great story.

Well played. Yeah. Very good story. I'm gonna have to look it up. I watched it at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival. Really, really good. And everyone else was crying and I was trying not to cry. And I interrogate that moment a lot of all of my friends were comfortable crying next to me,

but I wasn't comfortable crying in front of them. Yeah. I was pushing my tongue against the roof of my mouth. So I wouldn't cry specifically. I remember that. Oh no. I didn't think anything of it in the moment, but then afterwards I was like, what was that about?

They were all crying. Everyone was crying just fine. Yeah, everyone in that theater. Waterworks. Yeah. Dude, everybody was a wreck. So. At first, if I said everybody was a wrecked, I was like, oh.

Everybody was rock hard and sobbing. That's Saturday night, baby. In 1968, Italian engineer Giorgio Rosa builds a 400 square meter platform in the Adriatic Sea off the coast of Rimini, Italy, which he declares on May 1, 1968 to be an independent state called Rose Island, or in its official language of Esperanto, insulo de la rozoid. Rozoid. Oh. Rozoid.

A rose is a rose is a rose. I don't know if there's an actual R-roll in there. That's just me speaking Spanish. I don't think you actually have to roll your R's. I think it's just a rozoid, but I'm a rozoid. A rozoid. The platform, which includes a restaurant, bar, nightclub, souvenir shop, and a post office, with stamps, is destroyed with explosives by the Italian Navy in 1969.

You really built that one up? You're so terrible right now. Well, that was a key. So did they. If you're interested, there is evidently a 2020 Italian film called Rose Island done with the blessing of Giorgio Rosa that you can watch to get the story of this. OK. Esperanto is also one of the official languages of the extant 11.3-acre

micro-nation of Melasia in what you Americans call Nevada. I have stumbled upon that Wikipedia page. It is fascinating. Melasia, established by President Kevin Baugh. Hope I'm pronouncing that right. In 1977, based on a teenage micro-nation project, hosts an Esperanto education portal on its official website based on an old-fashioned mail-in correspondence course.

So he's just transliterated his mail-in Esperanto course to this website for you to enjoy. That's so nice. Yeah. Esperantists tend to be quite nice. Right. And they just want to share Esperanto with you, man. Yeah. Fun fact, Melasia's currency is the valora,

which is pegged to the relative value of Pillsbury cookie dough, which he keeps in a shed on the property. So that's the hard currency, then. That's the mint chocolate chip. That was good. You're good. Thank you. You're my god.

I'll click on the jaw. I'll click on the jaw. Is it in fridges? Like what? I don't... I don't think it's loose. I've bought Pillsbury cookie dough in my fridge. I could be...

Maybe I need to make a trip to Melasia. Yeah, yeah. I'll just carry it in like a little organ transplant cooler. Right, yeah. People say Esperantists are cooks. Also in 1977, a message in Esperanto is recorded and included on Voyager 1's Golden Record, making it a truly universal language. Yeah, baby.

That's cool. Bye. Good for them. Yeah, very cool. Good for them. See, exactly. Good for them. It's a good for them situation.

There's something that this guy just fucking made up, and his dad threw it on the fire and said no, no, no. They could be listening to that on another planet now. Yeah. Probably not. By 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall foretells a downturn for Esperanto. Oh. With communism formally vanquished from Europe and ideology-based aspirations

on the Wayne, the World Esperanto Association's membership falls by nearly 60%. What? I mean, it's kind of wild that like a wall coming down means that this language that is meant to like connect people also comes down. We're anti-communism now. We think it's really bad. Yeah, yeah. And we don't, these socialist-y things, capitalism won.

Yeah. Nancy Reagan is saying no. Think for yourself. Yeah. But don't think for yourself. Right. Et cetera. Hairspray, shoulder pads, yeah.

But in true hopeful style, Esperanto is down, but not out. The conferences continue. The camaraderie continues. Esperantists continue to take advantage of Passporta Servo, a sort of proto-Arabian bee where Esperantists across 92 countries are able to couch-surf with one another for free. That's beautiful. That's beautiful thing, couch-surfing. You can go anywhere you want.

You can go anywhere you want and they have different, they all have different things. One of them will be like, no hippies. The other one will be like, you have to be a fucking hippie, a freak, or a punk. The other one will be like, I'm gay and I smoke marijuana. They're like, they're literally just like, they tell you what's up, come sleep on my coach. And I'll give you a tour of the city in Esperanto. In Esperanto, yeah. Because you know we're going to speak the same language no matter where you're from.

Yeah, that's pretty tight. Thankfully, the diminished numbers of Esperanto see a boon with the advent of the internet. The internet, capital I, internet, Al Gore's internet. Al Gore's very own child. In 2001, Viquipedio, the Esperanto language Wikipedia is established. It is only the 11th non-English Wikipedia spin-off. So it got in there pretty early. Oh, really early.

It boasts over 330,000 articuloi. Cute. We get Esperanto education websites like Lairnu. And eventually in 2016, you can learn Esperanto via the language learning app Duolingo. Boom, that's quite the boon when you think about it. That is a boony boon. I have been enjoying the heck out of it. You should take the Duolingo Esperanto course.

It's very amusing. Cool. What is the state of Esperanto now? Finnish linguist Joku Lindsted estimates that there are a thousand native Esperanto speakers in the world. Again, generally the product of Esperantists who met and fell in love. Yeah. About 10,000 fluent speakers.

About 100,000 active speakers. One million who passively understand the language. Which if you interact with this language for any amount of time, you will come to passively understand it quite quick in my experience. If you, depending on your, everybody's different, but I found it quite quick. And 10 million who have studied some amount of Esperanto at some time. That's me. That's you.

Heck, oh, it's me. Esperanto is huge in Brazil, where it's culturally associated with seances and spiritism. Oh dope. Very cool. Because that was that was what the first Esperantists in Brazil were using it to talk about like channeling ghosts and shit. So that's what it is mostly known for. What language are you going to speak to ghosts with if they speak something different from

you, Esperanto? Boom. I am so sick of these Portuguese bitches coming in my ear. I want to talk to a Korean ghost. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Who knows Esperanto?

I hope they know Esperanto. Right. There is an Esperanto Museum in China, like I said, that opened in 2013. I think that, again, that's one of those ones where Mao was kind of okay with Esperanto because it fit in with like the people's revolution kind of thought, you know? Yeah. And there's probably more to it than what I'm about to say.

But there was also during Mao's initial reign, the Mandarin language was Pinguinized. So it was put into Romanized lettering. So I wonder maybe if that kind of like fell in line with some of that. There wasn't a clinging to the language. There was like, how can we make this language fit across all these different dialects? And maybe Esperanto fit in with that? I don't know. It continues to be a favorite language of those seeking intercultural connection and

greater shared humanity. It is not the universal language that Ludwig Zamenhof envisioned, although even OLL knew that that might take time. Not yet. Not yet. Hope remains. Spring's eternal, baby. Thank you.

Addressing the 1907 World Esperanto Congress in Cambridge, he said, we hope that earlier or later, maybe after many centuries on a neutral language foundation, understanding one another, the nations will build a big family circle. That also has not happened. Right. But Esperanto remains as a bridge between the curious, the lonely, the affectionate, the philosophers, the thinkers, and the dreamers. Says online commenter Pat Bill Chapman in the comments of 2015 article in The Verge,

I've made friends around the world through Esperanto that I would never have been able to communicate with otherwise. Over recent years, I've had guided tours of Berlin, Duala, and Milan in this planned language. I have discussed philosophy with a Slovene poet, humor on television, with a Bulgarian TV producer. I've discussed what life was like in East Berlin before the wall came down and in Armenia, when it was a Soviet republic, how to cook perfect spaghetti, the advantages and disadvantages of a monarchy, and so on.

I recommend it not just as an ideal, but as a very practical way to overcome language barriers. Or, as one Spanish Esperantist Jorge Camacho succinctly says, Esperanto continues to give me something which I don't find anywhere else in a rational sense of directly belonging to the world. The end. Or as we say in Esperanto, fine. Fine. I love that, that Jorge Camacho is lying about like the irrational, what was it again?

Irrational connectivity? An irrational sense of directly belonging to the world. That captures really nicely like the idealism that was in its very founding, but then also some of the practicality of it as well. We forget how much of the distinctions between us are constructed. Totally. Borders, languages, yeah. It's a little bit out of step with the current moment of like

acknowledging difference and celebrating difference, and I do think there is that element of it because it doesn't... It's not necessarily meant to supplant your native tongue or your native culture. It's meant to... Right. It's meant to broaden the ways in which you think and make you more accepting of and open to different ideas that you might not have thought of, because you haven't spoken to somebody about what life was like in Armenia

when it was under Soviet control, and they say something where you're like, damn, that really makes me think, and that makes me change my mind about something or that, you know? Well, and I love that idea too, where it's like maybe in its infancy, the idea of supplanting other languages that was there, but the way that it's kind of played out is like, no, no, this is a language that you can use in addition, and I don't know, multi-lingual, bilingual, baby, that's where brains get really firing. Yeah, that's some good brain juice stuff right there, so why not?

And that's just on a linguistic level. That's not even about the connection that it can foster. The idealist underpinnings of it really match my own ideals, and made me want to learn it more. When I realized how much fascists broadly hate this shit, I was like, it must be good. That's true. That's true. If Hitler hates it...

It made me feel bad about my dismissive initial response again. But everybody has that response. Everybody. Even the Esperantists say it. Everybody says that. Everybody thinks it. The cranks. Because you're cranks, and it's real easy to make it seem silly,

because why do you need to make it? We all speak a language. You don't speak English. You don't speak Dutch. You're like, why do you gotta make up your own language? Again, this is a language that you're specifically learning, because you want to connect with people who are different from you. What were the Esperantists doing in this story?

They were staying back and helping the Jewish people, and were themselves Jewish people staying there at personal risk, who had potential escape routes that they didn't take, because they were like, no, I need to do what's right by my community, and my own beliefs. Or they were wearing funky green stockings, and stars in their hair, and star belts, and building platforms with nightclubs,

and post offices with stamps. That's cool. I'm fine with that. There is a bit of wackiness, but it's like Humphrey Tonkin says, aren't people just wacky? He was comparing academics and Esperantists, and I think academics are pretty fucking wacky.

But I get it, I get it. Football, salt of the earth, real, real, real, some of the most, no, you don't even know what I'm about to say. I'm about to take it up a level. Okay. Some of the most straight down the line, serious boars in your life can watch a good game of football. Do you know what the Mayo Bowl is, Josie?

No. The Mayo Bowl is a football game that is sponsored by Big Mayo, and at the end of it, the winning coach gets dunked in mayonnaise, and then also throughout the broadcast, everybody is constantly eating mayonnaise, like dunking random sweet things into mayonnaise. It's essentially visceral. Yeah, look at that face.

Look at that face. That's visceral, mayo-based body whore. Is that more or less the same amount of wacky and weird as anything I've said to you today? Fact. True fact. Thank you. Thank you.

So I think people are just wacky, and maybe there are some people who are like outliers in this particular way, but like, fuck me. Can you imagine that the oddballs are slightly lonely and want to connect with each other by a shared hobby? Can you fucking imagine such an insane thing? Anyway. True enough, yeah.

That was my experience of learning about Esperanto. Another one of these ones that I got way more into than I thought I would. Yeah. I thought the whole thing was really cool. I thought the values behind it were pretty solid. Yeah, no, they're pretty consistent. And I was wrong. I like Esperanto.

I was wrong to have judged Esperanto. I like it now. I think Esperanto is cool as hell. Can you say I like it? I like Esperanto. Mi amas Esperanto, and as we always say at the end of every show, rest tu dolcia.

Stay sweet. Thanks for listening. If you want more infamy, we've got plenty more episodes at bittersweetinthamy.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you want to support the podcast, shoot us a few bucks via our coffee account. ko-fi.com forward slash bittersweetinthamy.

But no pressure, bittersweetinthamy is free, baby. You can always support us by liking, rating, subscribing, leaving a review, following us on Instagram, at bittersweetinthamy.com or just pass the podcast along to a friend who you think would dig it.

Stay sweet. The sources that I used for this week's Mimphemous were an article from San Diego Magazine entitled Inside the Icon. Tijuana Tercer Milenio by Derek Shin, originally published June 24th, 2016 and then updated January 21st, 2020.

I read an article in Los Angeles Times by Ralph Ruggoff, entitled It Sure Beats Living in a Shoe, Hallucinatory Relic, Civic Sculpture, La Mona, Armando Munez Garcia's House in Tijuana, is all those things,

as well as Monument to Ingenuity, Courage and Visionary Zeal, published April 14th, 1996. Lastly, I read an article from Atlas Obscura, entitled La Mona, Tijuana, Mexico. Giant nude woman of Tijuana is also the artist's home, published August 10th, 2011. My sources for this week's episode

were the 2012 documentary, The Universal Language, La Universala Lingo, directed by Sam Green. I read In the Land of Invented Languages, Esperanto Rockstars, Klingon Poets, Lodlin Lovers,

and The Mad Dreamers who tried to build a perfect language, by Erika Onman, 2009, available on archive.org. I watched the 1966 film Incubus, directed by Leslie Stevens, and you can find it on the YouTube channel, Finesp Shellnut.

I read Learning Esperanto, is it really worth it, by Jacob Marion, at his language learning blog, jacobmarion.com, j-a-k-u-b-m-a-r-i-a-n.com. I read A Language to Unite, Humankind, by Joe Nakasella,

October 24th, 2016, in the New Yorker, which itself draws from Esther Shor's book, Bridge of Words, Esperanto, and The Dream of a Universal Language. I read How an Artificial Language, from 1887,

is Finding a New Life Online, by Sam Dean, May 29th, 2015, in The Verge. I read the Wikipedia pages, for The Republic of Melasia, The Republic of Rose Island, and Unua Libro.

The clip that you heard earlier, of a native Esperanto speaker, was hosted on YouTube, at Wikitungs, that was still a speaking of the Esperanto language. Our interstitial music, is by Mitchell Collins. Many adults may not know,

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