L. L. Zamenhof
Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof , usually credited as L. L. Zamenhof, was a Polish ophthalmologist, inventor, and writer. He is most widely known for creating Esperanto, the most successful constructed language in the world. He grew up fascinated by the idea of a world without war and believed that this could happen with the help of a new international auxiliary language, which he first developed in 1873 while still in school.
Zamenhof was born onDecember 1859 in the town of Biaystok in the Russian Empire. His parents were of PolishLithuanian Jewish descent that inhabited the central part of the former PolishLithuanian Commonwealth. He appears to have been natively bilingual in Yiddish and Russian , presumably the Belorussian dialect of his home town, though it may have been only his father who spoke Russian with him at home. From his father, a teacher of German and French, he learned those languages and Hebrew as well. Despite this he spoke Polish, one of the major languages of Biaystok alongside Yiddish, Belarusian, and German, and it was Polish that was to become the native language of his children after settling in the Kingdom of Poland. In school he studied the classical languages Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic. He later learned some English, though in his own words not very well, had an interest in Lithuanian and Italian, and learned Volapk when it came out in 1880, though by that point his int
Source: Wikipedia