Esperanto/Lesson 13

Esperanto was created in 1887 by Dr. Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, a Polish-Jewish ophthalmologist. He was born on 15 December 1859, at Bialystok, Poland. At the time, Poland was under the Russian Empire. His mother tongue is unknown because, at the time, Bialystok was a multi-ethnic city of Russians, Poles, Germans, and Jews. He taught Polish, Russian, German, Yiddish, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and the conlang Volapuk.

Dr. L. L. Zamenhof in 1908

In 1878, he started to create an international language, known as "Lingwe uniwersala", but his father, Markus Zamenhof, destroyed his work. However, after studying medicine, he resumed his language development and in 1887, published a book called "International language: Introduction and complete textbook" in Russian. He used a pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto as well. When the readers liked the pseudonym, the official name of the language became "Esperanto".