komunismo

The -ismo machine, and this time it assembles cleanly. -Ism- names a doctrine, a system or a movement; its partner -ist- names the person who holds to one. You have had the pair since kapitalismo at rank 2,391 and socialismo at 2,623, and komunisto has been in the course since rank 1,611. So komunismo is komunisto with the other ending, exactly as faŝismo is to faŝisto.

But notice what sits in the middle, because it is different from the last one. The socialismo page had to warn you that its middle is social- and not the socia- you would build from Esperanto's own root: the whole word came over from French in one piece. Komunismo is not like that. Esperanto's root komun- gives komuna at rank 657, meaning common or shared, and komun- plus -ism- plus -o lands exactly on the international word with nothing left over. Two words off the same shelf of the vocabulary, one of them decodable from roots you own and the other not, and no rule tells you which is which. That is the real lesson of the political vocabulary: the -ismo ending is regular, and what precedes it may or may not be.

The rest of the family runs the same way: komuna common, komune in common, komunumo a community with the -um- suffix, komuniko a communication. Komunismo sits among them without being derived from any of them in particular.

The historical facts, briefly and without taking a side. The French communisme and the English communist both appear around 1840; Goodwyn Barmby claimed to have coined the English word in that year. Marx and Engels published the Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei in 1848, and from 1917 the word attached itself in ordinary usage to a specific set of twentieth-century states rather than to the idea in general. Both readings are live in Esperanto too, and the sentence usually tells you which is meant: la komunismo de Marks is the theory, sub la komunismo is the period.

Why the word matters to this language in particular. Esperanto's own history runs straight through the middle of it. The Soviet Esperanto union, Sovetrespublikara Esperantista Unio, was large and active through the 1920s under Ernest Drezen, and Esperanto was for a while treated as a natural vehicle for internationalism. Then it was destroyed: Drezen was arrested and shot in 1937, the union was suppressed, and correspondence with foreigners became evidence. The language was proscribed under Hitler and effectively proscribed under Stalin, which is a fact both of the -ismo pages in this chapter have to carry. A movement whose whole premise is people in different countries writing to each other was never going to be popular with a state that read the post.