6/18/14 Off to the Esperanto Museum

Wednesday was our last day in Vienna.  After breakfast, we packed up our things and double-checked the rooms, then gathered in the lobby before locking up our baggage for the afternoon.

One of the nuns has a hobby.

The Esperanto museum was pretty easy to get to, being right outside the Herrengasse U-Bahn station.

It's a small museum, but I enjoyed it.  "Museum for Esperanto Propoganda" might be a better title, since I found some of the claims a little exaggerated, but it was entertaining.

For the non-language enthusiasts, Esperanto is an artificially constructed language.  Constructed languages tend to start out as hobby projects, such as Tolkien's languages for Middle Earth, but Esperanto was/is more of a utopian project.  Its creator believed that overcoming the language divide would help unite different peoples.  The goal was to create a language without any irregularities that would be easy for speakers of all languages to learn.

In reality, Esperanto is heavily based on Romance languages with a bit of Slavic flavor and relies on naive assumptions of what features a language needs.  I can read it without too much trouble, but a speaker of Chinese would not find it particularly easy to learn.  As for being perfectly regular, that can only exist as long as the language isn't actually spoken by real human beings, because real human beings will change things even if they don't realize it.  There was a movie with an introductory lesson in Esperanto and I had to giggle because there were marked pronunciation differences between speakers in some places.

Nevertheless, it was an interesting little museum and putting the development of Esperanto in the context of the Austro-Hungarian Empire made a lot of sense.  If you'll recall back to my library post, you'll remember that various announcements had to be written in multiple languages.

Here are some of the first grammars for Esperanto.

This is a photo of the International Esperanto Congress.  Can we pleeeeease bring back Edwardian hats?

Part of the strategy for spreading Esperanto involved creating advertisements in Esperanto.  These ads also have the green Esperanto star, so they're advertising the product and the language at the same time.

Here is a collection of various badges worn by Esperanto enthusiasts.

Esperanto was suppressed by the Nazis as a threat to the state.  Esperanto was essentially part of a peace movement, thus enthusiasts came under suspicion in times of war.

According to this exhibit, Esperanto enthusiasts were early advocates for universal currency.  Apparently a derogative term for the Euro is 'Esperanto money'.

Here are more products and ads with Esperanto text.

The museum had an Esperanto library, as well as several pieces on display.  There are a great number of works translated into Esperanto but it possesses a 'native' literature as well.  This is the manuscript of the first novel written in Esperanto.  There was also an exhibit where you could listen and read along to erotic poetry written in Esperanto.

This machine was great fun.  It's a video game for learning languages based on PacMan.  In order to advance, you would have to solve a puzzle in the form of a word/sentence that was missing parts.  For example, a word would be given and you'd have to chase down the little ghost with the present tense ending in order to conjugate it.

Louise and Caroline were having fun with it.

There was also an exhibit on other constructed languages, as well as how various invented words worked their way into 'normal' languages.  You could listen to samples of Klingon and whatnot.  High Valyrian isn't made the radar yet.

I wanted to do different things than the others in the last few hours before we had to meet back at the nun hotel to pick up our things before heading to the train stations, so I bid adieu to the others and headed off in search of a fabric store I had read about online.