iad58 | Mi ne estas esperantisto

Mi promesis al unu de miaj gelegantoj rakonti, kiel mi telefonparlis esperante.

The year was 1991, near the end of my time at college in the States. I had recently discovered Usenet and was spending many hours every day reading various groups and posting to them. One day the phone in my room rang. A voice I didn't recognise inquired if it was Mr – followed by a typical American guess as to what my name and surname sound like – and, when I replied in the affirmative, broke into a flood of strange speech that was almost intelligible, yet not instantly recognisable, something Romance- and Germanic-sounding at the same time, but not anything I could think of. My agonising attempts to identify the language were ended by the spoiler that came from the receiver.

‘soc.culture.esperanto …’

Why, of course! I had taken part in some discussion there, in Esperanto of course, and here was the consequence. The chap was an Esperantist who worked at the university; he had seen my post, followed the fallacious line of thought ‘one who writes in E-o knows E-o; one who knows E-o is an E-ist’ and, thrilled to have found a samideano (as he believed), had looked up my number in the campus phone directory and rung me up for a chat in Esperanto.
There was no way out; I had to do my best and keep up my end of the conversation. I take some pride in the fact that I passed the Turing test.

As you may know, Esperanto (and the knowledge thereof) consists of the following:

A few facts about its grammatical setup that are partly a posteriori (word order), partly a priori, for a European language (agglutination, compounding, unlimited conversion, capacity of using any derivational prefix or suffix as a root).
A small set of (largely) a priori tense/mood, voice, part-of-speech, number and case markers.
A two-dimensional table of so-called ‘correlatives’, that is, of non-personal pronouns (words such as ‘what’, ‘everywhere’, ‘then’, ‘anyhow’), also (largely) a priori.
A set of a posteriori prefixes, suffixes and function words.
An a posteriori root lexicon.

The a posteriori parts are a hodgepodge of Germanic, Romance, Russian and Greek elements, easy to comprehend if one is acquainted with these languages, though if one hasn't studied Esperanto, it is a challenge to have to guess where this or that root may have been borrowed from. I made up for this by listening very carefully to my interlocutor and making the best possible use of the words he had said. I missed the table of correlatives, but I knew most of the other closed-class things. All in all, it worked.