You Sure as Hell Can Cuss in Esperanto

A bit of poetry

Many of the early articles about proposed international languages looked at their various drawbacks. Volapük, for example, acquired a reputation for unintelligibility in the American press. I’m not sure if this was deserved, but once applied it seemed to stick. I remember that when I first encountered French at the age of 12, it looked utterly incomprehensible; now I read French for pleasure. Esperanto didn’t get the same treatment, probably because Zamenhof was more evident in his borrowings than Schleyer.

In the early twentieth century, several newspaper pieces suggested one possible problem with Esperanto: a lack of indecent words. Perhaps in the first two decades of the twentieth century, there were no indecent words in Esperanto; the earliest attested list is from 1931, though it is unclear if the words were coined or reported. Considering that during that period, many dictionaries weren’t printing swear words, I doubt they would have championed a varied vocabulary in Esperanto for the taboo words. (I have checked my copy of Plena Vortaro de Esperanto kun Suplemento (1980), and it does not have entry for any of the “bad” words that I could think of.) I am well aware that English-language dictionaries in the early twentieth century did not typically print profanity or obscenity. These newspaper writers would not have concluded that just because cuss words weren’t in the dictionary that they didn’t actually exist.

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