                       ESPERANTO PROVERBS

1. About Esperanto

Esperanto is the one consciously created language that has an
actual speaking community, albeit a considerably diasporic one. 
It is used, perhaps, by about a million people around the world. 

Esperanto came into existence in 1887, when Lazar Zamenhof, an
ophthalmologist in Warsaw, published the first short grammar. 
The name Esperanto is derived from his pseudonym, meaning "one
who hopes".  Zamenhof hoped that a common language would decrease
the interethnic strife in his own and other nations.  In his
lifetime German, Yiddish and Russian were all spoken alongside
Polish in various walks of Polish life, and this linguistic
diversity reflected and exacerbated uneasy interethnic relations.

The grammar of Esperanto is extremely regular.  There is, for
instance, one set of endings for all verbs, without exception. 
All words are spelled as they are pronounced, and vice versa. 
The vocabulary is based on languages which were and are the most
widely learned (as native or foreign languages) throughout the
world, from the Romance and Germanic branches of the Indo-
European family.  The vocabulary is particularly easy for users
of French and German to pick up, but it's also familiar to users
of English, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, the
Scandinavian languages, and various others.

2. Literature in Esperanto

From the start, the Esperantists did a great deal of translation
into Esperanto, sensing that this would ensure that Esperanto
became a fully functional language rather than a sort of code. 
Zamenhof himself was a polyglot, and among his own translations
were Andersen's fairy tales, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and various
works of Schiller, Heine, Shalom Aleichem, Dickens, Gogol,
Goethe, and Molire, and the Bible, or that portion known to
Christians as the Old Testament.

Original works also appeared, including much poetry and fiction,
even lengthy novels, and this continues to the present day.

3. The Esperanto Proverbs

Mordechai Zamenhof, father of the creator of Esperanto, was also
a polyglot, and interested in the comparative study of proverbs
in different languages.  He put together a collection comparing
proverbs in Russian, Polish, French, and German.  His son decided
to add a section of Esperanto proverbs.  Obviously, there was no
authentic Esperanto folk tradition from which these could be
derived, so Lazar Zamenhof used rhyme, alliteration, and other
devices to form Esperanto proverbs which would stick in the mind,
rather than attempting a particularly literal translation.  He
succeeded remarkably well.

Needless to say, such a collection of traditional sayings is far
from politically correct, nor did either Zamenhof attempt to make
it so.  The proverbs about women are particularly grating for
feminists, e.g. "Virta virino straton ne konas" = "A virtuous
woman knows not the street."

The Esperanto section is in fact the only one which was ever
published in full.  The Russian-Polish-French-German version was
to appear as a series of booklets, as was the later Esperanto
section.  This was all financed by Mordechai Zamenhof, who
announced the intention to add sections in Latin and Hebrew.  He
died before the series was completed, however.  (Although his
manuscript survived him, it probably didn't survive the
Holocaust, which hit his progeny fairly heavily.)  Lazar issued
the Esperanto section as a separate book in 1910.

4. Esperanto Word Processing

The file found herewith is, basically, an ASCII transcription of
the "Proverbaro Esperanta", with certain supplementary material
described in an afterword (itself in Esperanto).  It was
originally done in WordPerfect 5.1, using the Esperanto
characters in that program's Multinational Character Set.

Since the specifically Esperanto characters are not part of the
ASCII set, I have used a workaround which apparently dominates 
the Internet.  For all specifically Esperanto letters, i.e. 
circuflexed c, g, h, j, and s, and breved u, lowercase and
uppercase, I have used the uncircumflexed counterpart followed
by x.  (I use the x in lower case even in all-caps contexts,
since it should here be considered not a letter, but a 
diacritical mark.)

The proverbs themselves and the indexes do not contain carriage
returns.  Your text editor or viewer should be set to wrap them
as needed.

For those who prefer to import the file into WordPerfect 5.1,
three macros are provided to help reformat the text.  ASC2WP.WPM
will convert the workaround characters to the real Esperanto
characters (which must be viewed in 512-character display mode);
CITIL.WPM will change the straight quotation marks (") to pairs
of guillemots as in the original text; and IND.WPM will insert
indents into the appropriate places in the proverbs.  Each of
these macros goes through the entire document at least once
(ASC2WP.WPM twelve times), so you should allow them some time.

5. Sources on Esperanto

Further information on Esperanto is available from:

                    Esperanto League for North America, Inc.
                    P.O. Box 1129
                    El Cerrito CA 94530

and:

                    Universala Esperanto-Asocio
                    Nieuwe Binnenweg 176
                    NL-3015 BJ Rotterdam
                    Netherlands

Both these organizations have extensive book services, which can
provide not only the hardcopy of the "Proverbaro Esperanta", but
hundreds of other literary works, original and translated, as
well as textbooks, dictionaries, and other publications in and
about Esperanto.

This file was provided by Charles R.L. Power, who has worked
professionally for both organizations, and who has done a bit of
translation of his own into Esperanto with short works of Mark
Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Joel Chandler Harris, Kate Chopin, Robert
Silverberg, Harlan Ellison, John Varley, R.A. Lafferty, and
others.  He is married to Daniela Deneva Power, whom he met in
her native Bulgaria, and who has written a popularization of
seismology in Esperanto.