Esperanto: european or asiatic language?

IV. ISOLATING LANGUAGES

The majority of the isolating languages are spoken in Asia, but some also exist in Africa. In the Americas the so-called Creole languages also belong in this category. They are called isolating because it is imagined that in these languages words consist of elements that are self-sufficiently (isolating) usable. In fact this is not the case. Many Chinese morphemes, as we saw above, occur only in connection with others. What really distinguishes the isolating languages is the fact that the morphemes are invariant, each having a form that remains constant in all of its appearances, whether they be combinations, derivations or grammatical variations. In such a language, a person who knows how to say “I” and knows the rules of the language, automatically knows how to say ‘me’, ‘my’, ‘mine’, etc. All nuances, specifications, derivations which, in other types of languages, are expressed by changes of (or in) the morphemes are here translated by word order or by perfectly regular use or combination of morphemes which cannot vary. There exist, also, various processes such as reduplication — cf. Malay puteh ‘white’, puteh puteh ‘whitish’ — which it is unnecessary to treat fully here. The important point is that, whatever the change in meaning or grammar, the morpheme itself remains untouched. A grammatical function is signaled either by word order or by invariant grammatical morphemes.

Both in Malay and in the French-derived Creole of the Caribbean, the modifying word stands after the modified one: my mother’s house is translated as rumah emak saya (Malay) or as caïe manman moin (Creole):

In Chinese, the order is the other way around:

(Wŏ mŭqīn fāngz and wŏde mŭqīnde fāngz are grammatically correct, since the word de, which shows modification, can be omitted if the sense is clear without it. The expression wŏ mŭqīnde fāngz is to be preferred only for stylistic, rhythmic considerations.)

In an isolating language the reciprocity in the things spoken of is necessarily reflected in a parallel reciprocity in the elements signifying them.

Creole:

“li ka-aller caïe manman ou”

“ou ka-aller caïe manman li”.

Chinese:

“tā dào nī mŭqīnde fángz qù”

“nī dào tā mŭqīnde fángz qù”.

The contrast appears if we compare the same sentence in, for example, an Indo-European language such as French or English:

French:

il va chez votre mère —

vous allez chez sa mère

English:

he goes to your mother’s house —

you go to his mother’s house.

There is similarity, but not identity, between he and his, but no similarity at all between il and sa, in contrast to the Creole li/li, the Chinese tā, tā(de). In the same way the verbs in French and English — he goes but you go, il va but vous allez — differ in form, whereas they do not in isolating languages (ka-aller, qù).

In Creole, as in Chinese, to show the interchange of persons one simply interchanges the relevant pronouns; the other elements remain invariant. In French and English, as in all inflectional languages, this beautiful parallelism is entirely lacking. Also in agglutinative languages, because of the system of suffixes, the parallelism does not exist. (Cf. Turkish: ‘he goes’ gidiyor, ‘you go’ gidiyorsunuz, ‘your mother’ ananız, ‘his mother’ anası.)

Like the agglutinative languages, the isolating ones use element combination quite widely. This observation is valid particularly for the so-called monosyllabic languages, in which the majority of the morphemes have but one syllable, like Chinese and Vietnamese. These languages exploit quite a bit the possibilities presented by metaphorical usage, as shown by the following examples from Chinese:

+ huà (speech) = diànhuà (telephone)

+ bào (message) = diànbào (telegram)

+ lì (force) = diànlì (electric power)

By addition of xiàn “line” one creates:

diànhuàxiàn — telephone line

diànbàoxiàn — telegraph line

diànlìxiàn — electric power line

This system always manages to solve terminological problems. When elevators appeared, their function was to replace stairways, and the Chinese accordingly created the following compound:

diàn — electricity

tī — stairway

diàntī — elevator

But what should be done when escalators appeared? Simple enough:

zì — self

dòng — move

zìdòng — automatic, ’self-moving’

tī — stairway

zìdòngtī — ‘self-moving stairway’, ‘escalator’

(It is interesting that the expression moving stairs exists beside escalator in English as well.)