Esperanto: european or asiatic language?

The Intrinsic Plane

As far as its core is concerned, Esperanto is an isolating language. It completely fulfils the structural criterion defined above: in variance of morphemes. Variations such as direkc/direkt or frag/frak make up only an exceedingly small proportion of what is said and written in Esperanto (between 0.1% and 0.3% of the sample studied by us). Further, these are not cases of a single morpheme occuring in various shapes, as with French directeur/diriger. This is shown by the fact that every Esperanto root can give rise to an entire series of new derivatives. Thus from direktor ‘director’ we get direktori, ‘to act as a director’, direktorigi ‘to appoint as director’, direktorado ‘the exercising of the functions of a director’, which are not at all synonyms with direkti ‘to direct’, direktigi ‘to make somebody direct something’, direktado ‘the act of directing” and the like, from direkt. These are therefore cases of roots which are obviously related in terms of etymology but which are, structurally speaking, distinct morphemes.

The idea that Esperanto is an isolating language is supported by the many basic features it shares with Chinese. (Since this text is meant for laymen, the linguistic facts are couched in terminology which is familiar to Westerners. It should be borne in mind that these terms, historically anchored as they are in the Indo-European understanding of language, are not fully adequate to describe the structures of other types of languages. The use of terms like “preposition” or “adverb”, for example, must not be taken to mean that Esperanto and Chinese have prepositions and adverbs the way Western languages do.)

1) The Esperanto “affixes” are actually full-fledged words. In this respect Esperanto is somewhat more isolating than Chinese is. Many Chinese affixes take on a new meaning when used alone. For example, the Chinese suffix -jia means ‘specialist’ in compounds:

But jiā means ‘family, home’ when used alone. Many Chinese affixes cannot be used independently at all. For example the syllable nü designates human females, but requires completion to stand as a word. ‘Woman’ is nüren (from rén ‘human being’) or nür or nüz (formed with noun formatives -r or -z). The suffix -huà, like the English -ation refers to a process. It occurs in lādīnghuà, ‘romanization’ (from Lādīng ‘Latin’), but, like -ation, it cannot stand alone.

2) The Esperanto relation between possessive adjectives and personal pronouns has an exact counterpart in Chinese:

This is no mere surface detail or coincidence, but on the contrary follows directly from the basically isolating nature of both languages. Neither agglutinative nor inflectional languages show this feature, which would not conform to their spirit.

3) In Esperanto, as in Chinese, the verb lacks a conjugation. Esperanto verb endings play a role analogous to the particles which colour or demarcate the time and aspect features of Chinese verbs.

4) The two languages structure the expression of negation similarly:

5) In Esperanto it is usually prepositions, rather than suffixes (as in agglutinative languages), that introduce complements. Chinese generally resembles Esperanto in this matter, and there are Chinese equivalents of such prepositions as al, kun, per, por, anstataŭ, etc. that are used as in Esperanto. (However, for time and place complements Chinese uses a postposition. Thus zhuōz-shàng, literally ‘table-above’ means ‘on the table’. This is often additionally heralded by a preposition: zài zhuōz-sháng, literally ‘at table-above’.)

6) As stated earlier, Esperanto word compounding also resembles that of Chinese, although Chinese uses the device much more extensively. Here are some more examples of morpheme-compounding which show an exact parallelism between the two languages.

Neantaŭ…ebla

vid- → neantaŭvidebla

sci- → neantaŭsciebla

sent- → neantaŭsentebla

kalkul- → neantaŭkalkulebla

Bùkĕyù…de

jiàn → bùkĕyùjiànde

zhī → bùkĕyùzhīde

găn → bùkĕyùgănde

suàn → bùkĕyùsuànde

Unfore…able

see → unforeseeable

know → unforeknowable

feel → indetectable in advance

reckon → unprecalculable

Sam…ano

urb- → samurbano

land- → samlandano

ide- → samideano

ras- → samrasano

religi- → samreligiano

Tóng…rén

chéng → tóngchéngrén

guó → tóngguórén

dào → tóngdàorén

zú → tóngzúrén

jiào → tóngjiàorén

Fellow…man

town → fellowtownsman

country → compatriot

belief → fellow believer

race → member of the same race

religion → coreligionist

No such isomorphism obtains between these and the inflectional languages. In most of the latter, many of the relevant words are missing, as we see illustrated in the irregularities in the English translations above. Those which do exist are formed irregularly, as one can see from the following:

samlaridano / tóngguórén / compatriot

samreligiano / tóngjiàorén / coreligionist.

Nevertheless, between Esperanto and other isolating languages there is also a difference: the indication of grammatical function is always obligatory in Esperanto and never so in other isolating languages. Because of this difference, and despite structural similarity, the style and overall sentence pattern of Esperanto diverge greatly from those of other isolating languages. In Chinese,

wŏ — I

wŏde — my

wŏmen — we

wŏmende — our

form a derivation table even more regular than in Esperanto. But the placement of the suffixes -de and -men is optional. Mia libro (Esperanto for ‘my book’) corresponds to either wŏde shū or wŏ shū. Sometimes an unambiguous context makes it possible to omit even the -men ending after a pronoun which, nevertheless, continues to function as a plural: wŏmende guó ‘our country’ can be (and usually is) clipped down to wŏ guó ‘my/our country’.

Thus the official Chinese text of the United Nations Charter begins Wŏ liánhéguó rénmín, literally ‘I United Nations people’, meaning ‘We, the peoples of the United Nations’.

This possibility of leaving grammatical function unexpressed enables isolating languages to neutralize the distinctions between passive and active, transitive and intransitive forms. More examples from Chinese:

I have not yet drunk (the) wine.

(Méi is an amalgam indicating at once negation and past tense.)

(The) wine has not yet been drunk.

In the case of wine there is no risk of confusion, but in many cases only context makes the meaning clear. The construction zhè yú bù néng chī le may mean ‘This fish can no longer be eaten’ or ‘This fish can no longer eat’.

(Ambiguities of this sort crop up often in all languages which do not clearly mark grammatical function, including English, which seems to be evolving towards a Chinese-like structure. Thus people have different interpretations of the name of the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA), an organization which played an influential part in the history of international planned languages. Some interpret it as ‘association for an international auxiliary language’; others[2] as ‘international association for an auxiliary language’. Oddly enough, such ambiguities usually go unnoticed: the first interpretation seems to have a kind of strength of obviousness which prevents consideration of the other possibilities and even the realization that they might exist.)

In general, isolating languages other than Esperanto mark tense only where the context does not indicate the time of a verb’s action. In Chinese, for instance, ordinary conversation distinguishes between

tā lái ma? is he coming?

and

tā láile ma? has he come? did he come?

But if there is no doubt as to when the matters spoken of came, are coming, or will come to pass, time remains unmarked:

Consider the verbs in the following sentence:

Here was a person who came and said to him: “Master, wherever you go, I want to follow you.”

Jen estis homo, kiu venis kaj diris al li: «Mastro, kien ajn vi iros, mi volas sekvi vin».

Compare the compulsory expression of tense (in italics) in the English and Esperanto versions. The tense indications are completely absent in the Chinese original.

In fact, the need to use verb endings in impersonal forms, in Esperanto, reminds one of Japanese, a language which is usually regarded as agglutinative.

In some respects Esperanto resembles the agglutinative languages. But since the crucial test for being agglutinative — variability of shape of affixes or grammatical morphemes — yields negative results, one must consider Esperanto basically non-agglutinative. Yet the exceptional visibility of the grammatical structure of the sentence is a feature which brings Esperanto closer to agglutinative than isolating languages.

In the Japanese sentence

watakushi-wa isha-o denwa-de yobimas

‘I call the doctor by telephone’,

the entire grammatical “skeleton” of the sentence leaps to the eye (-wa marks the subject, -o the object, -de the instrument, -imas a present-tense verb).

(Japanese is usually classified as an agglutinative language. Although most of its grammatical morphemes are invariant, it does pass our test, since there are two “conjugations”, two categories of verbs with different endings. Besides, Japanese has some irregular verbs, although not enough of them to warrant its inclusion in the class of inflectional languages. As in Esperanto, the verb in Japanese has endings which contain markers of time and mode but not person. On the other hand the Japanese verb differs from its Esperanto counterpart in several ways, above all in that it shows a dimension of politeness. Thus for example Esperanto manĝas ‘eat(s)’ corresponds to Japanese taberu if an intimate acquaintance is spoken to, but it corresponds to Japanese tabemas if one is speaking, in a main clause, to a distant person. Further, Japanese verb endings incorporate the expression of negation: koroshita ‘killed’, korosanakatta ‘didn’t kill’, compared with Esperanto mortigis and ne mortigis, respectively. As a third difference, the personal pronoun is often understood, as in a telephone conversation sequence:

The conversation partners rely on the context of the situation to make it clear that the question is “where are you?” and that the answer is “I am home.”)

Esperanto is Indo-European only in its extrinsic aspects. Neverthe-less it shares one fundamental intrinsic trait with many languages of the Indo-European family: the need for the adjective and some pronouns, in the plural and in the “accusative”, to agree with the words which bind them. However, in view of the complete regularity of the Esperanto system, it would be wrong to regard the plural and objective endings as inflectional. This remark is all the more valid because the relevant grammatical markers (j, n) merely attach to the word: they never take the place of another ending or induce modification of the stem[3].

Although Esperanto shares many features with Indo-European languages, it is, then, fundamentally, non-inflectional in structure. In fact, the special character of Esperanto consists in its combination of two principles: complete autonomy and invariance of lexical and grammatical morphemes (a major trait of isolating languages) and readily perceptible grammatical analysis (which is to some extent a characteristic of agglutinative languages). The Esperanto phrases mia sonĝo ‘my dream’, mi sonĝas ‘I am dreaming’ and sonĝa mondo ‘a dream world’ expressly indicate the grammatical role of the concept sonĝ-, whereas-in English and French phrases, even the verb or noun function of the word dream and rêve must be guessed from the context (’I dream/my dream’, je rêve/mon rêve).

Only very seldom do Esperanto sentences contain elements whose role is not immediately apparent. One of the rare structures to harbour an occasional ambiguity is the compound word: son-ĉasisto can mean ‘hunter of sounds’ or ‘one who hunts by means of sounds’. Such ambiguities also crop up in agglutinative languages, which excel in grammatical clarity.

The Middle Plane

At the middle plane Esperanto is indubitably Slavic. It exhibits many Slavic characteristics:

1) in word order and style (the normal word order of Esperanto texts tends to resemble Slavic word order):

Esperanto: mi lin vidis/mi vidis lin (I saw him)

Russian: ja ego uvidel/ja uvidel ego.

(The Western European languages assign their pronouns a definite, unalterable place.)

Esperanto: kiel vi fartas? (literally: how you do?)

Russian: kak vy poživaete?

English: how are you?

Esperanto: kion li legas? (literally: what he reads?)

Russian: čto on čitaet?

English: what is he reading?

(The Western European languages tend to position their pronouns after the verb in such sentences.)

2) in syntax:

a) sequence of tenses

Esperanto: mi pensis, ke pluvas

Russian: ja dumal, čto dožd’ idët

English: I thought it was (literally: is) raining;

b) obligatory reflexive

Esperanto: ŝi amas sian edzon

Russian: ona ljubit svoego muža

English: she loves her (own) husband

(in contrast to:)

Esperanto: ŝi amas ŝian edzon

Russian: ona ljubit eë muža

English: she loves her (someone else’s) husband;

c) a distinction in grammatical form between modifying and predicative complements

Esperanto: la kuracisto trovis la sanan infanon — la kuracisto trovis la infanon sana

Russian: vrač našel zdorovogo rebenka — vrač našel rebenka zdorovym

English: the doctor found the healthy child — the doctor found the child healthy;

d) use of adverbial form with infinitival or clausal subject

Esperanto: laboro estas necesa — labori estas necese

Russian: rabota nužna — rabotat’ nužno

English: work is necessary — to work is necessary (literally: necessarily);

e) infinitive as prepositionless complement of noun

Esperanto: la deziro venki

Russian: želanie pobedit’

English: the desire to win;

f) asymmetry or constraints placed on the use of prepositions followed by infinitives

While Esperanto allows us to say antaŭ ol foriri ‘before leaving’, it usually avoids post ol foriri ‘after leaving’, preferring the forms foririnte ‘having left’ or post foriro ‘after departure’. In Russian they say prežde čem ujti ‘before leaving’, but not posle čem ujti ‘after leaving’ preferring instead ušedši ‘having left’ or posle uxoda ‘after departure’. Compare this with the symmetry of the English forms just quoted or, for example, with Spanish: antes de salir and despues de salir. (Note that the redundant occurrence of ol ‘than’ in antaŭ ol foriri, literally ’before than to leave’ — it would have been just as clear to say antaŭ foriri — comes by way of literal translation from the Russian prežde čem ujti, which shows the same čem (Esperanto: ol) as the expression bol’še čem on ‘bigger than he’ (Esperanto pli granda ol li.) In Esperanto we say por transdoni ‘in order to transmit’ but not pro transdoni ‘because of to transmit’, and in Russian čtoby peredat’ but not iz-za peredat’. In Spanish, on the other hand, there is para transmitir and por transmitir.

(Extensive discussion about whether sen ‘without’ plus an infinitive is admissible in Esperanto derives from this same Slavic quality. The fact that the structure in question is quite frequent in Romance languages (Spanish: sin olvidar, French: sans oublier) and in Germanic languages (German: ohne zu vergessen) has led to widespread use of this structure in Esperanto. But, because it does not occur in Slavic languages (where one expresses the idea by using ‘not’ plus an adverbial participle, as in Russian ne zabyvaja ‘not forgetting’), it was generally alien to Zamenhof’s own usage and thus was thrown out by the purists.)

3) in various non-Western distinctions of nuance (aspects):

4) in the obligatory distinction between transitivity and in transitivity:

5) in many turns of phrase:

6) in the meaning of many roots even if they are from Romance languages:

The semantic field of plena ‘full’ is the same as that of Russian polnyj, and does not coincide with that of French plein, Italian pieno or Spanish lleno. Esperanto plena verkaro ‘complete collection of works’ corresponds to Russian polnoe sobranie sočinenij. In no Romance language would the word derived from Latin plenus be used in such a case.

(Note the Slavic semantics attached to a Romance root, clearly cognate with English and French ‘occasion’.)

7) in the forms taken by loanwords:

(The French forms, matin and four Martin, without Slavic influence, would have yielded the non-existent forms *matino and *martina forno. The transmutation of French -i- to Slavic -e- can be seen in the Russian term for four Martin: marten or martenovskaja peč’. Similarly Polish transcribes the name of Chopin as Szopen.)

(Note that the alternation between /s/ and /š/ is identical in Esperanto and Russian, though both have borrowed both words from languages where the alternation does not occur in this way.)

8) in the writing system:

Accent-marked consonants occur in Czech, Slovak, Croatian and Slovenian. Esperanto has ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, and ŝ. The invariant pronunciation of c, even in front of a, o, and u, occurs in no Western language, but does occur in Romanized Slavic languages. The traditional way to abbreviate in Esperanto, with a hyphen, follows the Russian model, unused in the West:

The Extrinsic Plane

As far as the origin of its root words is concerned, Esperanto is mostly Romance and Germanic, with a predominance of the Romance (specifically French) element. In the Germanic element one notices a prevalence of the German contribution. The word-initial clusters /šp, št, šm/, for instance, occur only in German and Yiddish.

The Esperanto sound system approximates that of the Romance languages, specifically Italian, but with some Eastern European features. The latter include the complete series of palato-alveolars /č, š, dž, ž/ and perhaps also the frequency of the sequences /oj, aj/, although in this case one might postulate concomitant influence of Yiddish and of the traditional pronunciation of Ancient Greek. Stress follows the Polish model.

It would be interesting to test the following “law” in detail:

The word ‘law’ is obviously too strong. Rather it would be more accurate to say that, when the conditions it indicates are not met, tensions show up in the language. We have already cited the case of sen + infinitive. Other examples can be found. The current forms jarcento ‘year-hundred’ and jarmilo ‘year-thousand’ for ‘century’ and ‘millenium’, for example, follow the Germanic model, not the Slavic and Latin models which underlay the older forms centjaro and miljaro.

Another example of strain is the passive participles. When one means “the contract was signed at 10 o’clock”, should one say la kontrakto estis subskribita je la 10ª or estis subskribata? Subskribata seems to mean ‘being signed’. (The most logical form would probably be the German/Dutch form iĝis subskribita ‘became signed’. At a few seconds before ten, the contract is being signed; at a few seconds after, it has certainly already been signed; at the second when the last pen leaves the paper, it is transformed from the state of ‘being signed’ to that of ‘having been signed’, and thus it ‘becomes signed’. Hence if one speaks about it later, one ought logically to say, ‘at ten it became having-been-signed’: ĝi iĝis subskribita. But the usage habits of Slavic, Romance and English speakers are perhaps too strong for them to accept such a form.) The -ita form seems to be winning now, although only after facing serious resistance. In the usage of the first speakers of Esperanto, who mostly lived in Eastern Europe, the -ita form perfectly corresponded to the Slavic past passive participle of the perfective aspect (subskribita = Russian podpisannyj) and the -ata form to the present passive participle of the imperfective aspect {subskribata = Russian podpisyvaemyj). In that system, endings indicate more than time; they intertwine notions of time and aspect: -ata stresses the fact that the action takes place over time, without regard to a definite end point, if any, while -ita underscores the reaching of a definite end point.

What strikes Slavs as obvious in this is inscrutable to the Germanic speaker. German er ging ‘he went/he was going’, like Esperanto li iris, translates Russian on šël, French il allait, Spanish andaba (action regarded as repeated or continuing) as well as it does Russian on pošël, French il alla, Spanish anduvo (a precise, one-shot, definite action). Consequently, Germanic-language Esperanto-speakers fail to find in the phrase estis subskribata the feeling of extendedness in time, in duration, which it conveys to the Slavs.

As for Romance speakers, they find this shade of meaning less foreign than the Germanic speakers do, since they have it in their conjugation; but in their languages it never affects participles, so that it is hard for them simply to follow the system which comes naturally to the Slavs. As a result, passive participles now constitute a point of tension in the language, and the usage is not too coherent here. One often notices Westerners using -ita participles in situations where the action is clearly a repeated one.

Let us now turn to some examples of the “law” in effect,

• In the sound system, the use of /kv/ where Romance languages have /kw/ or /k/ (a feature characterizing most but not all Germanic languages).

• Distinction between ‘her’ and ‘his’ (Esperanto ŝia and lia), unlike Romance languages. (French son livre, Spanish su libro, can both mean either ‘his book’ or ‘her book’.)

• Habit of placing the attribute before its head. In a Romance language one would never speak of a terrible, for me intolerable situation (Esperanto: terura, por mi neelportebla situacio); the adjectives would come after the noun. (Interestingly enough, in Zamenhof’s usage the attributive adjective generally follows the Polish and not the Russian model. For international language, for example, Zamenhof tends to say lingvo internacia, corresponding to Polish język międzynarodowy, rather than internacia lingvo, corresponding to Russian meždunarodnyj jazyk.)

• In the sound system, the voiceless consonants are unaspirated: /p, t, k/ are pronounced as in Polish and Italian, not as in English, German, and the Scandinavian languages.

• The Esperanto prefix mal-, used for the derivation of antonyms, was probably selected in preference to Latin in- and dis- or to Germanic un-(or on-) because, although it helps form many derivatives in Romance languages, where it specifically means ‘bad’, it also occurs as a Slavic prefix with the sense of ‘little’:

The use of the Esperanto negative prefix ne-, we note in passing, is also Slavic:

• Negative form of verb. The Esperanto structure (ne + verb) follows the model of all Slavic languages and of all Romance languages except French. It does not occur anywhere in the Germanic languages.