Esperanto

2 Articles

Close up of a Dutch etymology dictionary showing Esperanto, and a candle

Esperanto: The Language That Hoped To Unite The World

December 25, 2024 by 63 Comments

Christmas: a good time to broach a topic of hope. We’re talking Esperanto. This language that spurred the hope it one day could hack the barriers between people, eliminating war and miscommunication. The video below unpacks the history of this linguistic marvel. Esperanto was a constructed language dreamed up in 1887 by Ludwik Zamenhof, a Polish-Russian eye doctor with a knack for linguistics and great ideals. If you’re a little into linguistics yourself, you’ll sure know the name stems from the Latin sperare: to hope.

Inspired by the chaos of multilingual strife in his hometown, Zamenhof created Esperanto to unite humanity under a single, simple, easy-to-learn tongue. With just 16 grammar rules, modular word-building, and no pesky exceptions — looking at you, English — Esperanto was a linguistic hack ahead of its time.

But Esperanto wasn’t just a novelty—it almost became the lingua franca of diplomacy. In 1920, Iran proposed Esperanto as the official language of the League of Nations, but the French vetoed it, fearing their language’s global dominance was at risk. From there, Esperanto’s journey took a darker turn as both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia persecuted its speakers. Despite this, Esperanto persisted, surfacing in quirky corners of culture, from William Shatner’s Esperanto-only horror film Incubus to its inclusion on NASA’s Voyager Golden Record.

Fast-forward to the digital age: Esperanto is thriving on online learning platforms, where over a million learners explore its minimalist elegance. It appears at places in various editions of Grand Theft Auto. It has even inspired modern makers to create new constructed languages, like Loglan, Toki Pona, and even Klingon. Could Esperanto—or any reimagined language—rise again to unite us? For curious minds, watch the video here.

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Custom Font Generation Means Boss Embossing

August 23, 2023 by 19 Comments

[Attoparsec] loves learning languages, but says they have a hard time retaining anything. We find that hard to believe given the number of tongues that [Attoparsec] was able to translate into embossing plastic. That’s right, this project is about making custom font wheels for an embosser, formerly known as a label maker.

If you think this seems like a finicky and perhaps lengthy mission to undertake, you’re right. In case you’re unfamiliar, ye olde embosser uses both a positive and a negative of each glyph in order to impress the sticky-backed plastic strip. It all started when [Attoparsec] found out about the Dymo 1595, which comes with font wheels for both Japanese hiragana and katakana in addition to English.

After sacrificing the English wheel, it was time to model the wheel part itself. That was easy enough, but the characters themselves were another story. Because of how the thing works, the negative has to be bigger than the positive to provide enough room for the tape. After trying to achieve the right draft angle on the characters in several CAD packages, [Attoparsec] was told that it should be fairly easy in OpenSCAD, and it was.

Printing in resin took about five hours to do both wheels at once. Once [Attoparsec] had the workflow down, they were off to the races. In this video alone, they made Old English, Esperanto, the International Phonetic Alphabet, an alphabet created by playwright George Bernard Shaw, Palm Pilot input script, and of course, Tolkein’s Tengwar. Be sure to check out the video after the break.

Tired of turning the wheel of your embosser to make labels? Automate the process with a stepper motor or two.

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