Esperanto: european or asiatic language?

VIII. CONCLUSIONS

The problem of where to place Esperanto in the vast gamut of human languages is not easily solved. We have approached it here essentially from the point of view of the intrinsic structure. This has yielded the conclusion that Esperanto is basically an isolating language.

With respect to the origin of lexical material, we would have to classify it between the Romance and Germanic families, with predomi-nance of the Romance element. The two most closely connected languages would then be English and Romansh.

A criterion focusing on style and syntax would accentuate the Slavic quality of the International Language. But we have also noted that Esperanto borders on the agglutinative type in many ways.

The problem turns out to be especially complex because of two factors. On the one hand Zamenhof probably wanted to construct a highly coherent system, and the invariance of the morphemes most likely owes more to this intention than to any wish to follow a Creole or Chinese model. However, we cannot exclude the hypothesis that he might have been affected by an awareness that in the typical intercultural situation, when two people know just a few basic elements of a common language and try to get across to each other, they end up spontaneously transforming this poorly known language into a sort of isolating language.

Since Zamenhof himself had a command only of inflectional languages, their influence, though contrary to the basic principles chosen for the linguistic instrument which he forged, dominated his way of writing and speaking the newly built language, and the model offered to the public was subject to internal strains right from the start.

On the other hand, the isolating structure of Esperanto and its extreme regularity were sharply criticized by sophisticated people in Western Europe, leading Zamenhof more and more to mix the initial language with elements more consonant with the major Western structures; hence the existence of doublets like redaktisto/redaktoro ‘editor’, redaktejo/redakcio ‘editorial office’, etc. This tendency seems to contradict his early ideas, judging from the remark made in the fifteenth rule of the Fundamento (Fundamentals) to the effect that for the so-called “international words” one should follow a policy of taking only the root and then constructing the derivatives according to the autonomous rules of Esperanto itself.

Be that as it may, another factor made its presence felt: the “substratum”. The community which adopted Esperanto speaks, for the most part, inflectional languages, and consequently is unfamiliar with or dislikes the latent potential of isolating languages, with the result that it tends to solve problems of expression (particularity of terminology) along lines which may be viewed as antithetical to the basic spirit of the language. Zamenhof’s vocabulary, especially in the texts of the early years, is much more “Chinese” than that of most later writers. Thus Zamenhof used to say ununombro ‘singular’ (an exact counterpart to Chinese dānshù from dān ‘single’ and shù ‘number’) where later grammarians introduced the term singularo.

Given a heterogeneous substratum, the language has been pulled and stretched by divergent tendencies. The vocabulary shows a tension between, on the one hand, a “naturalistic” tendency, which shows up in many places in the Plena Ilustrita Vortaro (Complete Illustrated Dictionary) — a tendency to borrow profusely from Greek and Latin, more or less respecting their spelling systems (leading to words like relegacii and ekshibicio)—and on the other hand an “Esperantist simplicity”, i.e. an inclination to use short roots (like rilegi and ekzibo) and to exploit Esperanto’s derivational and compounding possibilities instead of intro-ducing neologisms.

The grammar shows another tension: that between “conservatism” (for example in a refusal to use the form ĝis kiam ‘until when’ for ‘until’ or the form sen …/ ‘without …ing’) and “boldness” i.e. a wish to exploit as completely as possible the latent possibilities of the language, whatever the usage in Zamenhof’s day may have been. Examples of the latter include introduction of participles ending in -unta and -uta and abbreviation (on the part of Lanti, among others) of the traditional forms such as junulino or malsanulino to junino or malsanino. Many other examples readily come to mind.

An individual may, of course, be conservative on one point and bold on another. At first sight it would appear that the majority of the Esperanto-speaking public leans towards the “conservative” end, while authors, especially poets, prefer to be “bold”.

It is to a large extent in these tensions that Esperanto’s qualities as a living language are rooted. From a structuralist perspective, it is fascinating to observe the evolution of this extraordinary phenomenon. We find here a structure created by a single person but eluding his control and obeying laws whose existence he, the author, was unaware of. We find it turning into the locus of a remarkable dialectic in the hands of an international community constituting a true diaspora. And no authority, even if prestigiously termed an Academy, can ever freeze the conflicting tendencies toward assimilation and conformity which force the linguistic structure to adjust to the community that uses it, and in turn force the community to adjust to a linguistic structure whose laws are stronger than the community itself.