Please Don’t Cuss, Esperantists

Let's keep it clean, Zamenhof

While many newspapers ran articles tweaking Esperanto for a lack of “cuss words,” one newspaper, the Hartford Republican of Hartford, Kansas, saw that as a feature, not a bug. As I noted before, it’s not entirely clear when obscene[1] and profane[2] words entered Esperanto. The writer Kálmán Kalocsay in his Sekretaj sonetoj certainly documented a number of obscene terms; I’m not certain if he also coined them. If he did, that would be about 1930. If Kalocsay didn’t coin these words, they might have circulated in conversation and private correspondence. Plena Ilustrita Vortaro does not offer dates for when a word entered Esperanto, and the Akademio de Esperanto only lists words that are official, which many of these terms are not.[3]

It’s certainly clear that Zamenhof had no particular hurry for coining words to translate words found objectionable in the natural languages. Nor has the Akademio de Esperanto has shown any particular hurry to acknowledge these words as official. I plugged a series of off-color words into the search box of the Akademio Vortaro, and found only one, furzi (to fart), which was official, and that only since 2007. I have a 1934 edition of Plena Vortaro de Esperanto, which does include furzi, though it contains none of the other terms I sought (the current edition of PIV certainly has them all).[4]

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Damn You, Esperanto!

Curses!

More about Esperanto and cussing. In the early press items on Esperanto, there was this steady beat of criticism (less often, praise) that Esperanto lacked cuss words. In 1911, on their way to the Universala Kongreso, a group of Esperantists sought to set the record straight, although it does seem that there really weren't cuss words in Esperanto in 1911.

The following was reported in the Times Dispatch of Richmond, Virginia on September 15, 1911, as having occurred in New York. I have no idea why it isn’t in a New York paper. Maybe it was. Newspapers of the era would frequently reprint things from other papers, after all.

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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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