>Secondly, Zamenhof was still writing from an Enlightenment-era framework that saw language diversity as a problem, something to systematize away. The anarchis

>Secondly, Zamenhof was still writing from an Enlightenment-era framework that saw language diversity as a problem, something to systematize away. The anarchist philosophy that was responsible for the global spread of Esperanto was far more complex than this and rooted in a rejection of reductive, Darwinist cultural formulations that were coming to prominence at the time. The idea was to preserve local autonomy, while providing a universal medium for exchange, such that communities could develop their own unique cultural systems and permutations thereof, but still have recourse to share them in a mutally beneficial way with others. Esperanto was widely popular in Japan under this rubric, for example: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23357508 https://www.jstor.org/stable/23357508 It was likewise suppressed by authoritarian regimes on the left and right for its encouragement of this eclecticism.