Modern evolution of Esperanto
Encyclopedia
Esperanto
has been remarkably stable since its creation compared to other planned languages. This is due to the Declaration of Boulogne
in 1905, which made the early works of Zamenhof
binding; most attempts at change have been therefore seen as distinct language projects (so-called esperantido
s), and in the main the Esperanto community has ignored them. The main change in the language has been a great expansion of the vocabulary, largely driven by translations of technical jargon, which is explicitly allowed for by Boulogne. However, there have been more subtle changes to syntax and semantics as the majority of Esperanto authors shifted from native speakers of Slavic and German to other languages, such as French and English. See History of Esperanto#Evolution of the language. This article considers some of the purposeful changes to the language since Boulogne.
There has been some criticism of using the prefix mal- to create the antonym
s of common adjectives, such as mallonga "short" from longa "long", or malmultekosta "inexpensive" from multekosta "expensive". Several dozen neologisms have been coined for these antonyms (in these cases kurta "short" and ĉipa "cheap"), often for purposes of poetry, but few have met with much acceptance. One of the few that has been is dura "hard", as the original word malmola, from mola "soft", is argued to sound too soft to mean "hard". In one case a antonymic suffix has been proposed, a laudatory -el-, which would contrast with pejorative -aĉ-: skribo "writing", skribaĉo "scrawl, scribbling", skribelo "calligraphy". Unlike aĉa, it is problematic to use the suffix -el- as a word in its own right, due to an existing preposition and prefix el.
. For example, the German-derived word ĥino "Chinese" has been replaced by an Italian/English ĉino. In most other cases, ĥ has been replaced with k, as in kemio for ĥemio "chemistry"; a couple of the few words which commonly retain it are ĉeĥo "Czech", eĥo "echo" and ĥoro "chorus", though it continues to be used in the transcription of foreign names. See Esperanto phonology#Loss of phonemic ĥ, and the section preceding that for examples of assimilation which do not affect the written language.
Changes in phonotactics
, which was never laid out explicitly by Zamenhof, have been introduced along with new vocabulary and especially foreign names. One of these is the extension of ŭ, which originally was only found as a vowel in the diphthong
s aŭ and eŭ, to a consonantal use analogous to English w, which Zamenhof had universally replaced with v. However, Slavs and Germans, among others, have difficulty distinguishing v and consonantal ŭ, and in most neologisms, consonantal ŭ has been replaced with v, as it has in ŭato → vato "Watt". In proper names, such as Ŭakajama ~ Vakajama "Wakayama", there is more variation. Similarly, new ŭ diphthongs such as oŭ have not gotten far; the English word bowl was adopted as bovlo, not *boŭlo.
Another debated change has been the introduction of geminate consonants. In traditional Esperanto, double consonants may occur across morpheme boundaries, as in mallonga (mal-longa) "short", but are not found within roots. Most words introduced with double letters (including tĉ and dĝ) have since been modified, for example Buddo → Budao "Buddha". Perhaps the most common root to retain a double consonant is finno "Finn", which is a near homonym with fino "end". Although suomo has been introduced as a replacement, this has not been used for compounds such as finno-ugra "Finno-Ugric". There is considerable debate whether departing from the international forms of such words is desirable.
reform. A few other Ido suffixes have entered the language, especially in poetry, and are widely recognized, such as -oza "full of", as in poroza "porous".
The perceived clash between several national Romance languages, such as Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, which use the final vowels -o and -a to mark gender, and Esperanto, which uses them to mark parts of speech, has led to a change in some women's names which end in -a in those languages. This has had less effect on names which parallel Esperanto usage, such as Jozefino "Josephine" (from Jozefo "Joseph"), but is now predominant in names such as Johana ~ Johanino "Joanna" and especially Maria "Maria".
Another gender-related change has been a gradual reduction of the number of inherently masculine words. Originally all members of a profession, such as dentisto "a dentist", all people defined by a characteristic, such as junulo "a youth" and Kristano "a Christian", all ethnicities, such as anglo "an Englishman", and all verbal participles used for humans, such as kuranto "a runner", were masculine unless specifically made feminine with the suffix -ino; currently only some twenty words, mostly kinship terms, remain masculine.
A more radical change has been to purposefully eliminate gender from the remaining masculine roots such as patro "father" which are not essentially masculine by the introduction of a masculine suffix to parallel feminine -ino. The most common proposal is -iĉo, which is widely recognized. A parallel change is the introduction of a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun to cover "s/he", but there is little agreement as to what this should be. Both changes are strongly resisted by majority of Esperantists, who hold to the Declaration of Boulogne. (See Esperanto vocabulary#Gender.)
or aspect
, but primarily followed the conventions of speakers' native languages. Eventually a work-around using the inchoative
suffix -iĝ- as a mediopassive became common as a way to avoid the debate entirely.
More recently, stative verb
s have been increasingly used instead of copula-plus-adjective phrasing, following some poetic usage, so that one now frequently hears li sanas for li estas sana "he is well". This may have been inspired by Asian languages such as Chinese and Japanese which treat adjectival concepts as essentially verbal. There was resistance especially in the case of participle
s (li falantas "he is falling", li falantis "he was falling", li falintas "he has fallen", li falintis "he had fallen", etc.), which many Europeans found overly complex. Although still minority usage, the debate over such forms has largely subsided.
A few new prepositions have been introduced by removing the part-of-speech ending from existing roots. The most common of these is far "by", an abbreviation of fare de "done by". The phrase fare de helps avoid sometimes ambiguous readings of the preposition de "of, from, by". Another neologism is cit from the verb citi "to quote", and used to introduce quotations. (Sometimes je or na (below) is seen instead.)
An occasional difficulty in Esperanto is using the accusative with noun phrases which do not readily accept the accusative suffix -n, such as correlatives like ties "that one's", quotations (see cit above), or phrases which already include an accusative suffix, such as provoj savontaj ĝin "attempts to save it", forpelado hundon "driving away the dog". Traditionally, the preposition de has been used in the latter situation, but this is highly ambiguous: forpeladon de hundo could mean the dog was driven away (accusative case), something was driven away by the dog, or something was driven away from the dog. An accusative preposition na has been proposed and is widely recognized. However, the existing indefinite preposition je might be used just as well: forpeladon na hundo, je hundo.
conditional
participle
s -unt-, -ut- have been created by analogy with the past, present, and future participles -int-, -it-; -ant-, -at-; -ont-, -ot-, by extending vowel equivalences of the verb tenses -is, -as, -os to the conditional mood -us. For example, a la reĝunto is "the man who would be king"; a hakuta arbo is "a tree that would be chopped down" (if it weren't spiked, etc.). However, while these forms are readily recognized, they are uncommon. Similarly, a nonce active participle with gnomic tense has been created by analogy with existing pairs of noun and verb such as prezidento "president" and prezidi "to preside", and the resulting participles prezidanto "one who is (currently) presiding", etc. There is no passive equivalent apart from the inchoative suffix -iĝi mentioned above.
Esperanto
is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Its name derives from Doktoro Esperanto , the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof published the first book detailing Esperanto, the Unua Libro, in 1887...
has been remarkably stable since its creation compared to other planned languages. This is due to the Declaration of Boulogne
Declaration of Boulogne
The Declaration of Boulogne was a document written by L. L. Zamenhof and endorsed by the attendees of the first world congress of Esperanto in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France in 1905...
in 1905, which made the early works of Zamenhof
Zamenhof
Zamenhof is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:* Rozalia Zamenhof, née Sofer , mother of Ludwik* Romana Zamenhof , a Jewish Polish female Esperantist and pharmaceutist...
binding; most attempts at change have been therefore seen as distinct language projects (so-called esperantido
Esperantido
Esperantido is the term used within the Esperanto and constructed language communities to describe a language project based on or inspired by Esperanto. Esperantido originally referred to the language of that name, which later came to be known as Ido. The word Esperantido is derived from Esperanto...
s), and in the main the Esperanto community has ignored them. The main change in the language has been a great expansion of the vocabulary, largely driven by translations of technical jargon, which is explicitly allowed for by Boulogne. However, there have been more subtle changes to syntax and semantics as the majority of Esperanto authors shifted from native speakers of Slavic and German to other languages, such as French and English. See History of Esperanto#Evolution of the language. This article considers some of the purposeful changes to the language since Boulogne.
Lexicon
There has been considerable debate over whether technical terminology should be taken from international usage by adopting new roots into Esperanto, or whether, in cases where the need can be met through traditional Esperanto word formation, that is the better way to go. To a large extent this is a cultural debate: Europeans who are already familiar with such "international" vocabulary often favor adopting such terms, whereas Asians who may not be familiar with them often favor replacing them. One example is the word for "computer". Early proposals for the word "computer" included komputero and komputoro, but they were eventually replaced by the internal creation komputilo, from the verb komputi "to compute" plus the suffix -ilo "instrument".There has been some criticism of using the prefix mal- to create the antonym
Antonym
In lexical semantics, opposites are words that lie in an inherently incompatible binary relationship as in the opposite pairs male : female, long : short, up : down, and precede : follow. The notion of incompatibility here refers to the fact that one word in an opposite pair entails that it is not...
s of common adjectives, such as mallonga "short" from longa "long", or malmultekosta "inexpensive" from multekosta "expensive". Several dozen neologisms have been coined for these antonyms (in these cases kurta "short" and ĉipa "cheap"), often for purposes of poetry, but few have met with much acceptance. One of the few that has been is dura "hard", as the original word malmola, from mola "soft", is argued to sound too soft to mean "hard". In one case a antonymic suffix has been proposed, a laudatory -el-, which would contrast with pejorative -aĉ-: skribo "writing", skribaĉo "scrawl, scribbling", skribelo "calligraphy". Unlike aĉa, it is problematic to use the suffix -el- as a word in its own right, due to an existing preposition and prefix el.
Phonology
The most visible change in Esperanto phonology has been the near-loss of the sound ĥH
H .) is the eighth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The Semitic letter ⟨ח⟩ most likely represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative . The form of the letter probably stood for a fence or posts....
. For example, the German-derived word ĥino "Chinese" has been replaced by an Italian/English ĉino. In most other cases, ĥ has been replaced with k, as in kemio for ĥemio "chemistry"; a couple of the few words which commonly retain it are ĉeĥo "Czech", eĥo "echo" and ĥoro "chorus", though it continues to be used in the transcription of foreign names. See Esperanto phonology#Loss of phonemic ĥ, and the section preceding that for examples of assimilation which do not affect the written language.
Changes in phonotactics
Phonotactics
Phonotactics is a branch of phonology that deals with restrictions in a language on the permissible combinations of phonemes...
, which was never laid out explicitly by Zamenhof, have been introduced along with new vocabulary and especially foreign names. One of these is the extension of ŭ, which originally was only found as a vowel in the diphthong
Diphthong
A diphthong , also known as a gliding vowel, refers to two adjacent vowel sounds occurring within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: That is, the tongue moves during the pronunciation of the vowel...
s aŭ and eŭ, to a consonantal use analogous to English w, which Zamenhof had universally replaced with v. However, Slavs and Germans, among others, have difficulty distinguishing v and consonantal ŭ, and in most neologisms, consonantal ŭ has been replaced with v, as it has in ŭato → vato "Watt". In proper names, such as Ŭakajama ~ Vakajama "Wakayama", there is more variation. Similarly, new ŭ diphthongs such as oŭ have not gotten far; the English word bowl was adopted as bovlo, not *boŭlo.
Another debated change has been the introduction of geminate consonants. In traditional Esperanto, double consonants may occur across morpheme boundaries, as in mallonga (mal-longa) "short", but are not found within roots. Most words introduced with double letters (including tĉ and dĝ) have since been modified, for example Buddo → Budao "Buddha". Perhaps the most common root to retain a double consonant is finno "Finn", which is a near homonym with fino "end". Although suomo has been introduced as a replacement, this has not been used for compounds such as finno-ugra "Finno-Ugric". There is considerable debate whether departing from the international forms of such words is desirable.
Morphology
Esperanto morphology has been extended by new suffixes, but outside of international technical terminology few of these are in wide use. Two have been accepted as official: The suffix -io used to derive the names of countries and states, such as Meksikio "Mexico" vs. Meksiko "Mexico City" and Vaŝintonio "Washington state" vs. Vaŝintono "Washington DC". Many Esperantists also use -io in place of -ujo, the original suffix for countries named after their inhabitants, so that Anglio "England" is found alongside the more traditional Anglujo. The other official addition is a suffix -enda indicating that something must be done (pagenda "payable (by)"); this was originally introduced as part of the IdoIdo
Ido is a constructed language created with the goal of becoming a universal second language for speakers of different linguistic backgrounds as a language easier to learn than ethnic languages...
reform. A few other Ido suffixes have entered the language, especially in poetry, and are widely recognized, such as -oza "full of", as in poroza "porous".
The perceived clash between several national Romance languages, such as Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, which use the final vowels -o and -a to mark gender, and Esperanto, which uses them to mark parts of speech, has led to a change in some women's names which end in -a in those languages. This has had less effect on names which parallel Esperanto usage, such as Jozefino "Josephine" (from Jozefo "Joseph"), but is now predominant in names such as Johana ~ Johanino "Joanna" and especially Maria "Maria".
Another gender-related change has been a gradual reduction of the number of inherently masculine words. Originally all members of a profession, such as dentisto "a dentist", all people defined by a characteristic, such as junulo "a youth" and Kristano "a Christian", all ethnicities, such as anglo "an Englishman", and all verbal participles used for humans, such as kuranto "a runner", were masculine unless specifically made feminine with the suffix -ino; currently only some twenty words, mostly kinship terms, remain masculine.
A more radical change has been to purposefully eliminate gender from the remaining masculine roots such as patro "father" which are not essentially masculine by the introduction of a masculine suffix to parallel feminine -ino. The most common proposal is -iĉo, which is widely recognized. A parallel change is the introduction of a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun to cover "s/he", but there is little agreement as to what this should be. Both changes are strongly resisted by majority of Esperantists, who hold to the Declaration of Boulogne. (See Esperanto vocabulary#Gender.)
Syntax
An early debate in Esperanto syntax was whether phrases such as "he was born" should use the present participle -at- (naskata for "born"), preferred by native speakers of Germanic and Slavic languages, or the past participle -it- (naskita), preferred by native speakers of Romance languages. The debate partially centered on whether the essential difference between the suffixes was one of tenseGrammatical tense
A tense is a grammatical category that locates a situation in time, to indicate when the situation takes place.Bernard Comrie, Aspect, 1976:6:...
or aspect
Grammatical aspect
In linguistics, the grammatical aspect of a verb is a grammatical category that defines the temporal flow in a given action, event, or state, from the point of view of the speaker...
, but primarily followed the conventions of speakers' native languages. Eventually a work-around using the inchoative
Inchoative
Inchoative aspect is a grammatical aspect, referring to the beginning of an action or state. It can be found in conservative Indo-European languages such as Latin and Lithuanian, and also in Finnic languages. It should not be confused with the prospective, which denotes actions that are about to...
suffix -iĝ- as a mediopassive became common as a way to avoid the debate entirely.
More recently, stative verb
Stative verb
A stative verb is one that asserts that one of its arguments has a particular property . Statives differ from other aspectual classes of verbs in that they are static; that is, they have undefined duration...
s have been increasingly used instead of copula-plus-adjective phrasing, following some poetic usage, so that one now frequently hears li sanas for li estas sana "he is well". This may have been inspired by Asian languages such as Chinese and Japanese which treat adjectival concepts as essentially verbal. There was resistance especially in the case of participle
Participle
In linguistics, a participle is a word that shares some characteristics of both verbs and adjectives. It can be used in compound verb tenses or voices , or as a modifier...
s (li falantas "he is falling", li falantis "he was falling", li falintas "he has fallen", li falintis "he had fallen", etc.), which many Europeans found overly complex. Although still minority usage, the debate over such forms has largely subsided.
A few new prepositions have been introduced by removing the part-of-speech ending from existing roots. The most common of these is far "by", an abbreviation of fare de "done by". The phrase fare de helps avoid sometimes ambiguous readings of the preposition de "of, from, by". Another neologism is cit from the verb citi "to quote", and used to introduce quotations. (Sometimes je or na (below) is seen instead.)
An occasional difficulty in Esperanto is using the accusative with noun phrases which do not readily accept the accusative suffix -n, such as correlatives like ties "that one's", quotations (see cit above), or phrases which already include an accusative suffix, such as provoj savontaj ĝin "attempts to save it", forpelado hundon "driving away the dog". Traditionally, the preposition de has been used in the latter situation, but this is highly ambiguous: forpeladon de hundo could mean the dog was driven away (accusative case), something was driven away by the dog, or something was driven away from the dog. An accusative preposition na has been proposed and is widely recognized. However, the existing indefinite preposition je might be used just as well: forpeladon na hundo, je hundo.
conditional
Conditional mood
In linguistics, the conditional mood is the inflectional form of the verb used in the independent clause of a conditional sentence to refer to a hypothetical state of affairs, or an uncertain event, that is contingent on another set of circumstances...
participle
Participle
In linguistics, a participle is a word that shares some characteristics of both verbs and adjectives. It can be used in compound verb tenses or voices , or as a modifier...
s -unt-, -ut- have been created by analogy with the past, present, and future participles -int-, -it-; -ant-, -at-; -ont-, -ot-, by extending vowel equivalences of the verb tenses -is, -as, -os to the conditional mood -us. For example, a la reĝunto is "the man who would be king"; a hakuta arbo is "a tree that would be chopped down" (if it weren't spiked, etc.). However, while these forms are readily recognized, they are uncommon. Similarly, a nonce active participle with gnomic tense has been created by analogy with existing pairs of noun and verb such as prezidento "president" and prezidi "to preside", and the resulting participles prezidanto "one who is (currently) presiding", etc. There is no passive equivalent apart from the inchoative suffix -iĝi mentioned above.