Steloj: an “Esperanto” Currency
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In Esperanto the suffix -ujo, refers to a container of something (e.g., monujo = “money-container,” i.e., wallet). In many cases the compound also has another name that is more specific. With -ujo Zamenhof may have overshot his goal of simplicity. He used -ujo to refer to a fruit-bearing tree (a now largely obsolete usage). He also extended it as a name for countries, where it soon developed that there was something more than a little risible about Francujo (France), for example as “a container for Frenchmen.” (And multiethnic lands like Brazil were named differently.) Although -ujo as a suffix for countries has persisted, today the internationalized suffix -io is more common (Francio rather than Francujo).
As a metaphor, it remains common to refer to the community of all Esperanto speakers as Esperantujo —sometimes translated “Esperantoland.” This expression is also often used to refer to any gathering, such as a club meeting, where only Esperanto is spoken. Sometimes the word Esperantujo is used to refer to an immersion language program or the place where it is offered, like the little Chãteau de Grésillon in the France’s Loire Valley, or the Esperanto-domoj that people create from time to time in various countries.
The word Esperantujo, however, has sometimes metastasized beyond a metaphor. From its earliest years the language intended for use between language communities, has sometimes been misunderstood by its critics as intended (or destined) to displace other languages, and has sometimes inspired fantasies by its speakers of a nation where it would be the sole language.
In works of Esperanto fiction the characters naturally speak Esperanto and the stories are usually set in unidentified countries. One author (Johán Valano, a pseudonym for Claude Piron) even includes descriptions of a couple of unusual dialect features of the valley in which his series of murder mysteries take place. Only occasional authors set the scene explicitly in Esperantujo. One writer, Manuel Halvelik, devised a deliberately archaicized version of the language that he called Arcaicam Esperantom that he proposed for use in Esperanto fiction set in medieval Esperantujo. (My own stories (link), although admittedly satirical, take place during the reigns of ancient kings of that land, but the characters speak modern if occasionally comically tortuous Esperanto.)
Setting works of fiction in Esperantujo is just fun, of course. However, the idea of Esperantujo has also inspired other, more serious, sometimes strikingly political projects. Here are a few examples:
Esperanto has sometimes inspired non-language movements with globalist ambitions. For example the Internacia Ligo, secretly founded in 1942 by Esperantists in the German-occupied Netherlands, sought worldwide peace through a single universal currency —the stelo or “star”— and even minted coins bearing slogans like “one world, one language, one currency” and “The world is one land, humanity one people.” (The project began well but ultimately failed and the Ligo was dissolved in 1993.) (For an external link on this, click here.)
Zamenhof himself, a Zionist in his youth, came to the conclusion that concern for the special welfare of Jews was incompatible with concern for all humanity and, abandoning Zionism, sought to inspire a movement —he seems to have thought of it as a religion— called Hilelismo, centering upon the universal neighborliness of Hillel the Babylonian (died A.D.10), a rabbi also commemorated in the names of Jewish centers on American college campuses. Zamenhof’s fellow Esperantists objected that Esperanto was merely a tool, and the movement to promote it should be unencumbered by other goals. He responded with the argument that, as an inter-community language it obviously had an “internal idea” of world harmony; that was the whole point of it. For the most part, the argument for institutional neutrality prevailed, while concern for social harmony remained widespread among Esperanto speakers.