July 26: A language nobody asked for

On July 26, 1887, the Unua Libro was published, founding Esperanto. Tonight's film: The Fifth Element (1997).

There’s a thing that always hits me when a war story breaks: that people don’t speak each other’s language. I don’t mean the mother tongue. I mean that a Jewish kid in Lithuania and a Polish kid in Warsaw can grow up side by side and not understand a single word the other says. I didn’t grow up exactly like that, but in something close. A former Soviet republic, where five languages swirled on the street, and people still stayed locked inside themselves.