Illustrated with 10 images. This book will be a descriptive grammar of the Esperanto language invented by L. L. Zamenhof, which will be complete and comprehensive in regards to a) the grammar of Esperanto as first outlined by Zamenhof in Fundamento de Esperanto and other foundational documents, and b) Esperanto as it is spoken today by the most committed Esperantists. (Proposed reforms to the Esperanto language will be discussed if they have serious support from a significant fraction of Esperanto enthusiasts). This book was started practically on a dare from the August 2006 issue of Bob's Poetry Magazine, in which Robert Happelberg boasted that he could print a complete and comprehensive grammar of Esperanto in just one 6 by 7 inch page. While this is obviously wrong, it's not too far off the mark. When completed, this book will require several standard size (8.5 by 11 in the USA) pages, but will still be much shorter than a complete grammar of a natural language like English or Slovene. In view of this goal, the number of examples provided for each concept will be kept to a bare minimum. Those wishing to build their Esperanto vocabularies are also referred to the Esperanto textbooks. It is acceptable in the beginning to word the text in an accessible manner like in a textbook, but the goal should be for all the text to be technical with a full command of linguistic jargon.

The problems of international communication and linguistic rights are recurring debates in the present-day age of globalization. But the debate truly began over a hundred years ago, when the increasingly interconnected world of the nineteenth century fostered a desire for the development of a global lingua franca. Many individuals and social movements competed to create an artificial language unencumbered by the political rivalries that accompanied English, German, and French. Organizations including the American Philosophical Society, the International Association of Academies, the International Peace Bureau, the Comintern, and the League of Nations intervened in the debate about the possibility of an artificial language, but of the numerous tongues created before World War II, only Esperanto survives today. Esperanto and Its Rivals sheds light on the factors that led almost all artificial languages to fail and helped English to prevail as the global tongue of the twenty-first century. Exploring the social and political contexts of the three most prominent artificial languages—Volapük, Esperanto, and Ido—Roberto Garvía examines the roles played by social movement leaders and inventors, the strategies different organizations used to lobby for each language, and other early decisions that shaped how those languages spread and evolved. Through the rise and fall of these artificial languages, Esperanto and Its Rivals reveals the intellectual dilemmas and political anxieties that troubled the globalizing world at the turn of the twentieth century.