Esperanto Language Blog

Esperanto has two similar prepositions, “de” and “da,” that mean two different things but are similar enough to trip up students of other languages. Having studied Spanish as my first excursion into foreign language, “de” and “da” manage to confuse me on occasion. We shall have a look at them here today.

“De” roughly means “from” or “of” in English. You use it in Esperanto to express origins, causes, properties of items (including possession), and on rare occasion, time.

Glaso de lakto – Glass of milk
Hundo de mi – My dog (literally, “dog of me” or “dog of mine”)
Li venas de la urbeto – He comes from the suburbs

“Da,” on the other hand, is used to express quantities and units of measurement. This is where students of Spanish might trip up. In my mind, when I hear “pint of water,” I jump to the Spanish word “de” due to its similarity to the Esperanto word. However, the preposition “da” is the appropriate one in this context.

Litro da akvo – Liter of water
Kilogramo da sukero – Kilogram of sugar

Practice using these two prepositions, and they’ll be easy to remember in no time at all!

Esperanto was not the first attempt at a universal language. There were a few ill-fated ventures throughout history. Mostly, they had the right idea, but simply did not connect with the human mindset.

My favorite example was Solresol, a curious language that used the seven notes of the musical scale. It came into existence a few years before Esperanto did, but was not quite as successful. Solresol used various combinations of the seven musical notes, called “syllables” in order to create nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech. If you truly wanted to, you could hum an entire Solresol sentence, or “speak” it on a piano or other instrument.

While it seemed like a good idea in theory, Solresol never fully caught on in popularity. One drawback to it was that there were not enough root words one could form in the Solresol system. While in Esperanto you know that any word that contains “vir-” has something to do with men or males, a Solresol word that contains the note “la” usually means a bunch of dissimilar things. Luckily, L.L. Zamenhof noticed this trend, and made Esperanto a highly consistent language!

At two salient points in world history, Esperanto came within a fraction of a hair of being globally embraced. Unfortunately, neither of those instances proved fruitful for our favorite secondary language. However, it is worth noting that Esperanto comes closer and closer to worldwide recognition with each consecutive try – so we should be there soon!

After World War I finally ended, and the League of Nations had been established, a proposal during the first meeting of the League came about in favor of teaching Esperanto in the schools of every country. Having emerged from a global conflict in which alliances and causes for war were unclear, any effort to foster world peace was met with welcome. Esperanto, as a universal second language, would have been a helpful tool. Unfortunately, due to a vehement French delegate, the proposal was defeated – the delegate insisted that French was, in fact, the universal language that the world sought.

Later on, a similar proposal appealed to the United Nations in the 1940s. The measure sought to teach Esperanto in schools across the globe, as well as to use Esperanto as the language for international tourism and commerce. It almost worked – the proposal was backed by French President Vincent Auriol, four different prime ministers, over 400 parliamentarians, and uncounted thousands of scientists, linguists, and educators. Alas, this proposal also met its downfall, but at the hands of the United States. Since the US was a major economic power at the time, they adopted a mindset similar to the post-WWI French: English was the way to do things.

Perhaps we will learn from history this time, and support Esperanto when the opportunity arises?

(A more complete history of Esperanto can be found in David Richardson’s “Esperanto: Learning and Using the International Language [Washington: Orcas Publishing, 2004])