Unua Libro
Sign in to saveAlso known as International Language: Preface and Complete Textbook, First Book
pamphlet by L. L. Zamenhof, first published in 1887 in Russian and subsequently in other languages, introducing the language Esperanto for the first time
Key facts
- Author
- L. L. Zamenhof
- Audio read by
- Nicholas James Bridgewater ( LibriVox )
- Original title
- Международный языкъ
- Translator
- Julian Steinhaus (1888), Richard Geoghegan (1889), Henry Phillips Jr. (1889)
- Language
- Russian , Esperanto
- Subject
- Esperanto , international auxiliary language
- Published
- Warsaw , Congress Poland , Russian Empire
- Publisher
- Chaim Kelter
- Publication date
- July 26 [ O.S. July 14 ] 1887
- Followed by
- Dua Libro
- Original text
- Международный языкъ at Russian Wikisource
- Translation
- Unua Libro at Wikisource
via Wikipedia infobox
~8 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Dr. Esperanto's International Language (Russian: Международный язык), commonly referred to as Unua Libro (First Book), is an 1887 book by L. L. Zamenhof, in which he first introduced and described the constructed language Esperanto. First published in Russian on July 26 [O.S. July 14] 1887, the publication of Unua Libro marks the formal beginning of the Esperanto movement.
Writing under the pseudonym "Dr. Esperanto", Zamenhof originally referred to the language as the international language; the use of Esperanto did not arise until 1889 when people began to use his pseudonym as the name of the language itself. Zamenhof reproduced a significant portion of the content of Unua Libro in the 1905 Fundamento de Esperanto, which he established as the sole obligatory authority over Esperanto in the Declaration of Boulogne, ratified by the first World Esperanto Congress later that year.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Unua Libro” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.