Dr Ludwik Zamenhof was an eye specialist who was born in 1859 and grew up in Bialystok, which is now in Poland, but was part of the Russian Empire when Zamenhof was a child. The population mainly consisted of members of four ethnic groups, Russians, Germans, Poles and Jews, each speaking their own language. The members of these groups didn’t get along. The young Zamenhof was upset at seeing those groups fighting and thought that if they would speak a common language they would understand each other better and fight less. That’s how he got the idea of creating a language. First he thought of Latin, but realised that Latin grammar was much too complicated for everyone to be able to learn Latin in a reasonable amount of time.
In 1887 a little Esperanto textbook was published in Russian. Soon it was published in other languages too. A year after he put out his first textbook, Zamenhof published a list of the names and addresses of a thousand supporters of the project.
In 1905 the first Universal Esperanto Congress was held at Boulogne sur mer in France. About 700 (688) Esperantists from 20 different countries attended and realised that Esperanto was working very well. Then came the 2 world wars and dictators like Hitler and Stalin who didn't approve of Esperanto at all. Both Hitler and Stalin had large numbers of Esperantists killed.
In our meeting there are no strong or weak nations, privileged or unfavoured ones, nobody is humiliated, nobody is harassed; we all support one another upon a neutral foundation, we all have the same rights, we all feel ourselves the members of the same nation, like the members of the same family, and for the first time in the history of human race, we -the members of different peoples- are one beside the other not as strangers, not like competitors, but like brothers who do not enforce their language, but who understand one another, trustfully, and we shake our hands with no hypocrisy like strangers, but sincerely, like people. Let's be fully aware of all the importance of this day, because today among the generous walls of Boulogne-sur-Mer have met not French with British, nor Russians with Polish, but people with people. -- L. L. Zamenhof (1905)
(thanks to Nicole for providing this material)
