History: Zamenhof's "Dream" language

Source of version: 2 (current)

!What was the language Zamenhof dreamt in when finding the solution for a/the definite article "la" in his Esperanto? !!!What was Zamenhof's "first" language? (quoted from the ''Mendele list'' vegn mame-loshn --mi'e .aulun) "I thought that the recent postings on the topic of language in dreams had pretty much covered the range of phenomena in existence on this topic, but it appears that I was wrong. I was recently browsing through a biography of Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, called "L'homme qui a défié Babel"(the man who defied Babel) by René Centassi and Henri Masson, when i came across an account of a dream which Zamenhof had, apparently at the age of about 16. That would have been more than 10 years before 1887, usually considered the birthyear of the language, when his first grammar of Esperanto was published. He at that time was concerned with the question of whether his language should have a definite article, having noticed that his own Polish, and also Russian (presumably the prestige language of that time and place, since Zamenhof lived in Bialystok, then part of the Russian Empire), did not. In the dream he was pondering this question near a forest with his uncle Jozef and his Greek teacher, whose name was Billevitch. Zamenhof suggested that they might find someone in the forest who could help them. Billevitch, on the contrary, warned against going into the forest on the grounds that there were three girls in red who wanted to harm them. Zamenhof then looked toward the forest, saw the girls in question, and cried out, "there are - -the-(author's emphasis) three girls in red." Zamenhof then woke up in a sweat, but decided that his problem had been solved. The definite article had in his view proved its usefulness. And, as every Esperantist knows, there is a definite article, namely the invariable "la". I can't remember having or hearing about a dream with this degree of linguistic specificity. It is also not clear what language the dream occurred in. Probably not Polish or Russian, since these lack the article which played such a prominent role. Zamenhof knew several other languages, most of them with definite articles, so these appear to be better candidates. In any case, postings from others suggest that people can dream in languages that they don't know very well. The last possibility is that the language was some embryonic form of Esperanto itself, since Zamenhof was so intensely concerned with this topic. D.M. E. P. asked about whether L. L. Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto, knew Yiddish. Although he apparently regarded Russian as his first (and favorite) non-invented language, he clearly was a speaker of Yiddish and, in fact, wrote a fascinating grammar of Yiddish in Russian. The grammar was not published until 1982 with the original Russian and a complete Esperanto translation. In it Zamenhof argued for Latinization of the Yiddish writing system. He proposes a literary pronunciation that is almost exactly the same as the YIVO norm. A propos of another thread he states that one should spell 'auf' as 'af.' His proposed spelling norms totally reject the daytshmerish orthography in favor of one reflecting actual Yiddish pronunciation. He calls for a purging of daytshmerisms from the language. All in all, a very "modern" approach for 1879-1882, the approximate time of composition. I don't know about the 'the,' but it is widely accepted that only one purely Yiddish morpheme made it into Esperanto. This is the suffix (now, basically, substantive) -edz-o 'husband,' which is viewed as a back formation of -edz-in-o 'wife,' and which appears to derive from the suffix -etsn in the word rebetsn. By the way, Zamenhof's writings on Yiddish are collected in: Adolf Holzhaus. "L. Zamenhof, Provo de gramatiko de novjuda lingvo- kaj -Alvoko al la juda intelektularo. Helsinki, 1982. H. I. A. According to Reyzen's _Leksikon_, Zamenhof's father, Marcus, and his grandfather, Fabian, were both teachers of French and German in Bialystok, then part of the Russian empire, where four languages--Russian, Polish, German and Yiddish--were common. Reyzen says nothing about his first language, but points out that Zamenhof once thought that Yiddish, because of its widespread character, might serve as a basis for an international language. Zamenhof spent three years working on a Yiddish grammar, only fragments of which were ever published (in a Yiddish periodical). In his publications on Yiddish he suggested adopting the Latin alphabet for Yiddish. In 1958 the editor of _Yidishe shprakh_, Yudel Mark, gently '''corrected a reader who had asserted that Zamenhof's mother tongue was Russian''' (emphasize by me) He argued that Zamenhof grew up in a bilingual milieu even if he learned Russian as a child and heard Russian at home--and from his mother at that (YS 18:80). In a subsequent issue of the journal (YS 19 ((1959)):30) another reader expressed his surprise that Zamenhof had written for a Yiddish periodical and worked on the language. He related his own experience of being visited daily by Dr. Zamenhof (who was an ophthalmologist) during the four weeks in 1902 when he was a patient in a Jewish hospital in Warsaw. He reported that the doctor normally used Polish while making his rounds, but since he (the patient) spoke little Polish, Zamenhof spoke "a 'daytshn' yidish" with him. He added that the doctor "(hot) ober keyn mol nit oysgeredt keyn ekht yidish vort." The editor (Mark) conceded that this may have been true, but suggested that the strongly anti-Yiddish attitude of the time would have made it difficult for a doctor to deal officially with his patients in ordinary Yiddish, "nit fardaytshndik a bisl zayn shprakh." Mark added that it is conceivable that a person could perfectly well write about linguistic matters in Yiddish without being a fluent _speaker_ of the language. B. R." ----