Lazar Ludwik Zamenhof was born to a Jewish family in the town of Bialystok in Poland, then in Russian ruled Lithuania. He learned as a child to speak Russian, Polish, German, French, and Hebrew. At nineteen he developed his first ideas about a language that would enhance international communication and before he was thirty, he had published the outlines of his invented language of Esperanto. Zamenhof died in Warsaw in 1917 after a life promoting the language still in use today around the world. (By John Osborne)
Source Citation
Pierre Janton, Humphrey Tonkin, Esperanto: Language, Literature, and Community (New York: SUNY Press, 1993), 23-26.