Portal:Esperanto/Article of the month/July 2006
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dr. Ludovic Lazarus (Ludwik Lejzer) Zamenhof (December 15, 1859–April 14, 1917) was an ophthalmologist, philologist, and the initiator of Esperanto, the most widely spoken planned language to date. His native languages were Russian and Yiddish, but he also spoke Polish and German fluently. Later he learned French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew and English, and he also had an interest in Italian, Spanish and Lithuanian.
Zamenhof was born on December 15, 1859 in the town of Białystok (in what is now Poland but was then part of the Russian Empire) to a Russian father and Jewish mother. The town's population was made up of three major ethnic groups: Poles, Belarusians, and a large group of Yiddish-speaking Jews. Zamenhof was saddened and frustrated by the many quarrels between these groups. He supposed that the main reason for the hate and prejudice lay in mutual misunderstanding, caused by the lack of one common language that would play the role of a neutral communication tool between people of different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. Find out more...
