reiri; mi sciis, kia
sorto atendas kuraciston, kiu dependas de la publiko, se tiu publiko
vidas en li fantaziulon, homon, kiu sin okupas je "flankaj aferoj."
Mi sentis, ke mi metas sur la karton tutan estontan, trankvilecon kaj
ekzistadon mian kaj de mia familio; sed mi ne povis forlasi la ideon,
kiu eniris mian korpon kaj sangon kaj ... _mi transiris Rubikonon_.

THE BIRTH OF ESPERANTO.

Freely translated from an Esperanto version of a Russian letter
written by Dr Zamenhof, by John Ellis.

"This is an appropriate place for me to say a few words about the
material for the dictionary. Much earlier, when I had examined and
rejected every non-essential from the grammar, I had desired to
exercise the principles of economy in respect of the word-material
also. Thinking that it was a matter of indifference what form any
particular word took, so long as it was agreed that it should express
a given idea, I simply invented words, taking care only that they
should be as short as possible, and did not contain an unnecessary
number of letters. Instead of using "interparoli" (to converse), a
word of eleven letters, why should we not express the idea just as
well by some word of two letters, say, "pa"? So I simply wrote the
shortest and most easily pronounced mathematical series of conjoined
letters, to each factor of which series I gave a certain meaning
(_e.g._, a, ab, ac, ad, ba, ca, da ...; e, eb, ec ...; be, ce ...;
aba, aca ... etc.).

"But I immediately rejected this notion, for my own personal
experiments proved that these invented words were very difficult to
learn, and even more so to remember. I came to the conclusion that
the material for the dictionary must be Romance-Teutonic, altered
only so far as regularity and other important requirements of
language demanded. Standing upon this ground, I soon observed that
the present languages possessed an immense supply of words already
international, with which all the nations had a prior acquaintance,
and which formed a veritable treasure house for the future
international language--and, of course, I utilised this treasure.

"In 1878 the language was more or less ready, although there was a
good deal of difference between my _lingwe uniwersala_ of that date
and the present Esperanto. I told my fellow-students about it--I was
then in the 8th Class of the gymnasium--and the greater part of them
were attracted by the idea, and struck by the unusual easiness of the
lang