Esperanto: european or asiatic language?

I. TYPES OF LANGUAGES

Do the expressions “European language” and “Asiatic language” mean anything? In fact they do not. In Asia many languages are spoken (including Persian, Bengali, and Sinhalese) which, structurally and historically, belong to the same family as the majority of the European languages, the so-called “Indo-European” family. And in Europe millions of people speak languages (such as Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian, and Maltese) that belong to categories much more widely represented outside Europe. Generally and traditionally, languages are divided into three categories:

a) inflectional languages, such as the Indo-European and Semitic languages,

b) agglutinative languages, such as Hungarian and Turkish, and

c) isolating languages, such as Chinese and Vietnamese.

Two criteria are traditionally used to classify a language into one of these categories: first, the way in which the language in question expresses grammatical relationships and, second, the processes by which its word elements are transformed or grouped to acquire new significance or a new role in a sentence. According to a more structuralist formula, one can say that the criterion is the proportion of morphemes whose form may vary.[1]

A morpheme is defined as the smallest unit with linguistic significance. For example, the French word reverrai, ‘I shall see’, contains three morphemes: re signals repetition, ver the idea of seeing, and rai is an amalgam at the same time expressing the senses of ‘person who speaks’, ‘singular’ and ‘future time’.

The various morphemes of a language have different frequencies, of course. Of the three cited, re is more common in French than ver (and other forms of ver, such as vis, voi, voy, vu, and so on), since we find it in all sorts of words with the same sense of ‘repeat’, ‘start again’, ‘return’ and the like. And rai is commoner than re: in fact it can occur with any French verb with the three senses just mentioned for it.

The most frequent morphemes are those that signal grammatical functions. Their meaning content is very impoverished. (If I were to say, -’s has -ed me -ly! practically no information would be transmitted to you.) We call these grammatical morphemes. What are called semantemes (or lexemes) are the less common morphemes, whose meaning content is much richer. (The line “Take spade work garden,” even if not entirely clear, nevertheless transmits a considerable amount of information. We would never say such a sentence, but we use very similar structures in classified ad sections of our magazines and newspapers every day.) It is among these semantemes that we usually class the “affixes”. Affixes, according to the definition generally used in linguistics (but not really valid for the morphemes which Esperanto speakers call afiksoj), are useful for derivations and cannot be used alone. Re in the French word reverrai is an affix: it can be attached to many roots to form derivatives, but always appears linked to another semanteme and never stands alone. We can now define the three traditional categories of language this way:

1) If there is variation in the forms of all the kinds of morphemes, including semantemes other than affixes, the language is inflectional. For example,

2) If only the grammatical morphemes change form, and among the semantemes, only the affixes, then the language is agglutinative. For example, Hungarian:

3) If none of the morphemes vary in form, the language is isolating. For example, Chinese:

Comparing the pairs brief/brevity and unjust/injustice is a good way to throw the three types of variation into relief:

In French, an inflectional language, variation occurs both at the level of the root — bref changes to brièv — and at the level of the suffix. Thus one finds for example the suffix -té in one case (brièveté) and -ice in another (in-just-ice). In Hungarian, an agglutinative language, only the affixes vary: the radicals rövid and igazságtalan do not change; the suffix is the same, but it appears in two forms: -ség and -ság. In Chinese, an isolating language, no variation occurs: the radicals jiănluè and fēizhèngyì do not change, and the suffix -xìng is used in both cases and without change.

Let us now make some observations on what we have discovered. For convenience we keep the traditional terms “inflectional”, “agglutinative” and “isolating”, although they are poorly chosen and derive from an insufficient analysis of the facts. For example, Chinese is generally cited as the type case of an isolating language, but in fact it contains many morphemes which cannot be used in isolation. This is true not only of many affixes, such as the nü and hùa mentioned above, but also of many other semantemes. The morpheme fù, for example, which means ‘father’, is never used alone in ordinary language (i.e. except in proverbs, maxims, and poetic expressions); one says fùqīn ‘father’, fùmù, ‘parents’ fùxìzhìdù, ‘patriarchal system’, etc. On the other hand, Chinese constantly uses a system traditionally regarded as typically agglutinative: it adds morphemes to each other to form sometimes very long words:

(Chinese morphemes are used singly in the old written language, the so-called wényán. But wényán was never a spoken language, and it would be wrong to confuse it with the language customarily called “Chinese”.)

To classify a language into one of the three categories, the criterion need not apply one hundred percent. A small error must be anticipated, if for no other reason than the regular variation caused by the sound system. For example, in Chinese the suffix -ĕr added to a morpheme ending in a consonant masks that terminal consonant and sometimes modifies the preceding vowel. And when it occurs with a reduplicated root, the second appearance of the root shifts to the first tone (-) if it is not already in that tone:

Sound variation in a semanteme is relatively frequent in Japanese:

We may count a language as belonging to the category in question if the criterion applies to at least ninety percent of the morphemes appearing in, say, ten minutes of ordinary conversation. We are now able to examine the three language categories in more detail.