Esperanto: the language that never was
To what extent are many languages today &quot;artificial&quot;? Modern Hebrew was resurrected from a language unspoken for millennia outside of religious services and given an up-to-date vocabulary. Shakespeare and Elias Lonnrot invented thousands of everyday words used today in English and Finnish respectively. Standard German and Italian are products of their unification&#x2F;nationalist movements, supplanting old regional dialects, as is the Greek <i>Katharevousa</i> (official language until 1976).<p>Esperanto and other conlangs are more an extreme case, but there&#x27;s surprisingly little that&#x27;s &quot;natural&quot; about the &quot;natural&quot; languages either.