L.L. Zamenhof was the man who looked into the revolutionary idea of eliminating that problem altogether and coming up with a new international language. One that will be completely neutral and will be spoken by people all over the world no matter what their first language is.
Humble Beginnings
Eliezer Ludwig Zamenhof was an eye doctor and an amateur linguist. He was born in the city of Bialystok which lies in modern-day Poland as the eldest of nine children. He grew up in a house that spoke Yiddish and Russian but he was also fluent in German and Polish. Later on, he learned French, Greek, Latin, English, and Hebrew. Needless to say, he was a very smart guy and his interest in languages was very prominent in his life. Not only that but both his father and grandfather were language teachers.
Zamenhof grew up within a population of people who spoke different languages. There were Polish, Russians, Belarusians, Germans, and more, but most of them — about 68% — were Yiddish-speaking Jews. Zamenhof saw the many fights or miscommunications between the different ethnic groups and was saddened by it. He hypothesized that the bias and prejudice within the different groups were a result of the difficulty people had in learning each other’s language so they couldn’t understand each other well enough. The international language that Zamenhof was going to come up with was named Esperanto but it took a while for him to get there. He had attempted to create an international language before. The first time was in 1873 as a university student in Warsaw.
Hard Work Needs to be Paid Off
By 1885, Zamenhof graduated and started practicing as an eye doctor all the while still working on his international language project on the side. As it turns out, popularizing a new language is quite an expensive business and Zamenhof needed to find funding in order to publish his work and spread it around. After 2 years of looking for funding, in 1887 he was able to get the financial help he needed from his future father-in-law and published the handbook with the pseudonym Dr. Esperanto, which became the name of the language as a whole.
As a peace lover and a peacemaker, Zamenhof did not think of his new language only as a means of communication but also as a tool for spreading the idea of coexistence and tolerance towards people from different cultures. In that spirit, he waived any kind of copyright over the language because he thought of it as the property of whoever it is who speaks it, just like any other national language would be.