myself. In all cases my letters were thoroughly understood, and in two cases I received replies written in Esperanto, within three days of my writing, from persons who had never previously read a word in the language; these replies were in perfectly good Esperanto, with only one or two trifling errors, and I was quite amazed when I got them.

But then you will say, "What is the use of this Commentary?" Well, it is compiled for the use of those who wish to go deeper into the study of this delightful, logical, flexible, and sonorous language, and who wish to write and speak it, not merely sufficiently well to be understood, but to write and speak it in good style. Esperanto, although so extraordinarily easy to learn, has, like every national language, a certain style and elegance of expression of its own. If we translate French, or any other foreign language, literally into English, we see how bald and strange it reads, and probably some sentences would be unintelligible. A language literally translated into Esperanto would be quite intelligible to persons of all nationalities, owing to the fact that Esperanto is a purely logical, clear, and unidiomatic language, and to the use of the accusative case; but the literal translation might be wanting in style, grace, and smoothness, for the order of the words, although perfectly correct grammatically, might, in some cases, entail harshness of sound, and so the easy flow and euphony of the language would be lost.

The standard book for good style in the language is the "Fundamenta Krestomatio" (Fundamental Chrestomathy), or book of extracts for studying a language. This book, containing 458 pages of prose and verse on numerous subjects, was published by Dr. Zamenhof in 1903, and all the articles in it were either written by himself or, if written, as many were, by others, were corrected by him to such a degree that they do not too widely differ from the Doctor’s own style.

The more the student studies this language, the more he will wonder how it could have been created by the brain of one man; for we must remember that Esperanto was not devised by a group of learned men of different nationalities, bringing the knowledge of their own language to bear upon the construction of an entirely new language, but that it was born of one individual after years of intense thought and labour, and it is marvellous how he has discarded the illogical, and introduced the logical and best points of all the European and dead languages into Esperanto. How this result was obtained can best be shown by a short history of the language, taken generally from the Doctor’s article on the subject in the "Krestomatio," page 241, and also from a letter he wrote to a friend, which was first printed by his consent in 1896, and reproduced in "Esperantaj Prozaĵoj," page 239.

The Origin of Esperanto.

Doctor Ludovic Zamenhof, Doctor of Medicine, the inventor of Esperanto, was born on December 3rd (15th N.S.), 1859, at Bialystok (Bjelostok), in the Government of Grodno, West Russia, where he spent his boyhood.[8] The inhabitants of Bjelostok were of four different nationalities, Russians, Poles, Germans, and Jews, all speaking different languages, and generally on bad terms with each other. The boy’s impressionable nature caused him to reflect that this animosity was occasioned by diversity of language, and thus the first seeds of the idea of an International Language were sown. Even at an early age Dr. Zamenhof came to the conclusion that an international language was possible only if it were neutral, belonging to no nationality in particular. When he passed from the Bjelostok gymnasium to the second classical school at Warsaw he was for some time allured by the dead languages, and dreamed of travelling through the world to revive one of them for common use, but he was eventually convinced that this was impracticable owing to the mass of grammatical forms and ponderous dictionaries of those languages.

In his boyhood he learnt French and German, and began to work out the idea of his new language, but when, in the 5th Class of the Gymnasium, he began to study English, the simplicity of its grammar was a revelation to him, and his own grammar soon melted down to a few pages without causing any loss to the language. But his giant vocabularies left him no peace of mind.

He tried to use similar economy in his dictionary as in the grammar, thinking that it did not matter what form a word took if it had a given meaning; so he began to invent words, taking care only that they should be as short as possible. For instance, he argued that the word "conversation" has 12 letters; why should not the same idea be conveyed by two, say, "pa"? He tried this by simply writing the shortest and most easily pronounced mathematical series of joined letters, and these he gave a defined meaning, e.g., ab, ac, ad, ... ba, ca, da, ... eb, ec, ed, ... etc. He, however, soon abandoned this idea, as he found these invented words very difficult to learn, and hard to remember, and thus he came to the conclusion that the word material for the dictionary must be Romance-Teutonic, changed only as regularity and other important conditions of the language required. He soon remarked that the present spoken languages possessed an immense store of