Esperanto is a constructed international language. The name derives
from the pseudonym (Dr. Esperanto) under which L. L. Zamenhof published
the language in 1887. His intention was to
create an easy-to-learn, neutral language to supplement rather than replace the use of existing languages. Although it has not
been adopted officially by any supranational agency, it has had a growing speaker community continuously using it since its
publication. Today Esperanto is used for many activities including travel, correspondence, cultural exchange, conventions,
literature, and language instruction; it is the most widely used constructed language, and has some native speakers.
History
- Main article: Esperanto history
As a constructed language, Esperanto's history is both
short and well-known. Esperanto was developed in the late 1870s and early 1880s by L. L. Zamenhof. After about
ten years of development, including translating and original writing in the language, he published the first grammar of the language in July 1887 in Russian, followed by
versions in several other languages from 1887 to 1889. The number of speakers grew over the next few decades, at first primarily
in the Russian empire and eastern Europe, then in western Europe and the Americas. In the early decades speakers of Esperanto
were kept in contact primarily by magazines and correspondence. In 1905 the first world
congress of Esperanto speakers was held in Boulogne-sur-Mer,
France; since then world congresses have been held every year except during the two
World Wars.
Language evolution
A declaration endorsed by the Esperanto movement at the world congress in 1905 limits changes to Esperanto. That declaration stated, amongst other things, that the basis of the language should
remain the Fundamento de Esperanto ("Foundation of Esperanto", a group of early works by Zamenhof), which is to be binding
forever: nobody has the right to make changes to it. The declaration also permits new concepts to be expressed as the speaker
sees fit, but it recommends doing so in accordance with the original style.
Many Esperantists believe this declaration stabilizing the language is a major reason why the Esperanto speaker community grew
beyond the levels attained by other constructed languages and has developed a flourishing culture. Constructed languages are
often hindered from developing a speaker community by continual tinkering, with the constant changes making the language
impossible to learn and use. This declaration gave Esperanto a stability of structure and grammar similar to that which natural
languages possess by virtue of their great body of literature and speakers. Thus one could learn Esperanto without having it move
from underfoot.
Zamenhof declared that "Esperanto belongs to the Esperantists" and moved to the background once the language was published,
allowing others to share in the early development of the language. The grammar description in the earliest books was somewhat
vague, so a consensus on usage developed over time within boundaries set by the initial, unchanging grammar outline (Auld 1988).
Modern Esperanto usage departs to some degree from that originally described in the Fundamento, though the differences
are semantic (involving changed meaning of words) rather than grammatical or phonological. The translation given for "I like this
one", in the phrases below offers a significant example. According to the Fundamento,
Mi ŝatas ĉi tiun would in fact have meant "I esteem this one". The traditional usage would instead have been
Ĉi tiu plaĉas al mi (literally, "this one is pleasing to me"), which, although it differs from the English
phrasing in "I like this one", more closely reflects the phrasing in several other languages (e.g. French celui-ci me
plaît, German das gefällt mir). The more traditional Ĉi tiu plaĉas al mi is still used as well,
though it may be a minority usage.
In addition to these changes, Esperantists have formed many words to express concepts which have arisen since the publication
of the Fundamento, but where possible these have indeed conformed to the existing style of the language. For example,
early translations proposed for the word "computer" included komputero and
komputoro, but the modern word in universal use is komputilo (adding the suffix -il-, meaning 'tool', to the
root of the verb komputi, 'to compute'). Not all new coinages meet ready acceptance, however. For example, the neologism
"ĉipa", meaning "cheap", has appeared as an alternative to the more verbose "malmultekosta", meaning "the
opposite of expensive", but remains in minority usage.
Dialects and derived languages
No new languages or dialects have formed through fragmentation of Esperanto as
they do in natural languages, presumably mainly due to the regular nature of the language and its intended field of use. People
tend to create slang and regional variants in the language(s) they use day to day, rather than those used primarily for
intercommunication with different-language speakers; in the case of Esperanto, such variations, if heavily different from the
official Fundamento version, would make universal comprehension less likely and negate the intended purpose of the language.
Esperanto has slang words — for example, saluton (hello) is sometimes clipped to sal, and fajfi (to
whistle) is often used to mean not to care about something. There are many other slang and swear words. There is not as much
slang in Esperanto as in other languages, because slang tends to make international communication more difficult.
Through the years many groups and individuals have proposed new language projects as 'reformed' versions of the Esperanto.
Almost all of these projects have remained stillborn, failing to progress past the planning stage, and the only one to have had
significant success has been Ido (Esperanto for 'offspring'). Ido was proposed by the
Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary
Language in Paris in October 1907. Its main
differences were in the fields of alphabet and some grammatical features. Early on there was a relatively large number of people who moved their support behind the Ido
project, but the Ido movement itself descended into fragmentation and decline as others proposed further changes. Modern
estimates place current speakers of Ido between 250 and 5000. Esperanto is also credited as being the foundation for later
competing projects, such as Interlingua and Occidental, but these languages also lag far behind Esperanto in numbers of speakers.
Some small-scale reform projects, affecting only a small part of the language, have gained a few adherents speaking a somewhat
idiosyncratic version of the language: for instance, Riismo, which modifies the language
to incorporate non-sexist language and gender-neutral pronouns.
Official status
Esperanto is not an official language of any country, although there were plans at the beginning of the 20th century to
establish Neutral Moresnet as the world's first Esperanto state, and the shortlived
artificial island micronation of Rose Island used Esperanto as its official
language in 1968. However, it is the official working language of several non-profit organizations, mostly Esperanto organizations. The
largest of these organisations, the World
Esperanto Association, is in official relations with the United
Nations and UNESCO in a consultative role.
Linguistic properties
Classification
As a constructed language, Esperanto is not directly
genetically related to any non-constructed language. However, its phonology and vocabulary were influenced by Indo-European languages. The phonology was primarily based on
Slavic languages, while the root vocabulary came primarily from the Romance languages, with smaller contributions from Germanic
and Slavic languages. Pragmatics and other aspects of grammar not defined by Zamenhof's original documents were influenced by the
native languages of the early speakers, primarily Russian, Polish, German and French.
Typologically, Esperanto has default SVO, AN word order, and is prepositional.
It is primarily agglutinative.
Phonology
- See also Esperanto pronunciation.
Esperanto has 28 segmental phonemes, 23 consonants and 5 vowels. Stress is always
on the penultimate vowel, unless a final vowel o is elided for poetic purposes, and on alternating vowels preceding it:
familio [ˈfa.mi.ˈli.o], famili' [ˈfa.mi.ˈli] (family). Tone is not phonemic.
Consonants
The phoneme
/r/ is pronounced as either an alveolar flap
[ɾ] (more common) or an alveolar trill
[r]. The phoneme
/v/ is pronounced as a labiodental fricative
[v] (most common), a labiodental approximant
[ʋ], or a labial-velar approximant
[w]. The phoneme sequence
/dz/ is pronounced as an affricate
[ʣ]. The semivowel
/w/ normally occurs only in diphthongs after the vowels
/a/ or
/e/.
A large number of possible consonant clusters can occur, up to three in initial position, or four in medial position (e.g.
instrui, to teach). Final clusters do not occur except in foreign names and poetic elision of final o.
Vowels
There is a good deal of allophony among the vowels; for instance
/e/ has allophones
[e] and
[ɛ]. The exact environment in which particular allophones occur varies from one speaker to another, perhaps
influenced by the phonology of their native language (Wells 1989). Vowel length is not phonemic. A glottal stop may occur between
adjacent vowels in some idiolects, especially where the two vowels are the same,
such as heroo (hero) and praa (ancient).
Six diphthongs occur phonetically:
/uj/,
/oj/,
/ej/,
/aj/,
/aw/, and
/ew/, but they are phonemically sequences of a vowel and a semivowel.
Grammar
- Main article: Esperanto grammar
Esperanto is primarily agglutinative (Wells 1989 calculates an index
of agglutinativity of 0.9999, higher than any non-constructed language), with all grammatical function suffixes appearing at the
ends of words, and a mix of prefixes and suffixes with lexical meanings. It also makes extensive use of compounding to derive new
words from a comparatively small stock of phonologically invariant root words. Morpheme order in compounds is modifier-head. All open-class words are suffixed with one of the word-class
suffixes: -o noun, -a adjective, -e adverb, or one of six verb endings. The number and case suffixes follow the noun or adjective marker; all other suffixes come between the root word and the
word class suffix.
Verbs distinguish three tenses in the indicative mood, plus three
other moods (infinitive, imperative, and conditional) not marked for tense. They are not marked for person or number of subject
or object. Nouns are marked for case (nominative and accusative) and number (singular or
plural); adjectives are marked for the same categories, and generally agree with
nouns they modify.
Word order is comparatively free: adjectives may precede or follow nouns, and subject, verb and object (marked by the
accusative ending -n) can typically occur in any order. However, the article la or other deictic particles come at the beginning of a noun phrase, and prepositions come at the beginning of prepositional phrases. Similarly, the negative ne and conjunctions
such as kaj (both, and) and ke (that) precede the phrases or clauses they modify. In copular clauses with
esti (to be), word order can also be important, as neither noun phrase takes the accusative ending.
Vocabulary
- See the lists of Esperanto words and Esperanto words from Universala Vortaro at Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Wikipedia's sibling project.
The initial vocabulary of Esperanto was defined by Lingvo internacia, published by Zamenhof in 1887. It comprised 900
root words. However, the rules of grammar allowed speakers of the language to borrow words as needed, recommending that they look
for the most international words which exist in some form in many languages. In 1894, Zamenhof published the first Esperanto
dictionary, Universala Vortaro, comprising a larger set of root words, translated into 5 languages.
Since then, many more words have been borrowed into Esperanto from other languages, primarily but not solely the western
European languages. Not all words borrowed by one speaker of the language catch on and come into general use, but many do. In
recent decades, most of the new borrowings or coinages have been technical or scientific terms; terms in everyday use are more
likely to be derived by compounding existing root words (e.g. komputilo), or extending them to cover new meanings (e.g.
muso (mouse), now also signifies a computer input device, as in English). There are frequent debates among Esperanto
speakers about whether a particular new borrowing is justified or whether the need can be met by compounding or extending the
meaning of existing words.
In addition to the root words and the rules for regularly combining them, a learner of Esperanto must also learn some
idiomatic compounds; e.g., eldonejo, literally a "giving out place", signfies "publisher" or "publishing house". Some root
words also have idiomatic meanings in addition to their literal meanings; for instance, krokodili, from krokodilo,
a crocodile, is a verb meaning "to speak a national or ethnic language in a situation where one ought to speak Esperanto".
Writing system
Main article: Esperanto orthography
Esperanto is written using a modified version of the Latin alphabet,
with six accented letters: ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ (c, g, h, j, and s with circumflex), and ŭ (u with breve). The alphabet does not include the letters
q, w, x, or y. (Everson 2001)
Therefore the 28-letter alphabet consists of: a b c ĉ d e f g ĝ h ĥ i j ĵ k l m n o p r s ŝ t u
ŭ v z.
The unaccented letters are pronounced as the lower-case equivalents in IPA, with these exceptions:
| Letter |
Phoneme |
| c |
/ʦ/ |
| ĉ |
/ʧ/ |
| ĝ |
/ʤ/ |
| ĥ |
/x/ |
| ĵ |
/ʒ/ |
| ŝ |
/ʃ/ |
| ŭ |
/w/ |
Two ASCII-compatible writing conventions have been used over the years: the original
"h-convention" and its modern replacement, the "x-convention". These are sets of digraphs that replace the accented letters in
environments where it isn't practical to use them, such as manual typewriters and the early 7-bit ASCII Internet. The
h-convention was motivated by the familiarity of digraphs such as ch and sh in other languages. The x-convention
was devised to replace the h-convention because x is not otherwise a valid character in the Esperanto alphabet, enabling simple
automated conversion to and from the standard orthography, and because computer word sorting programs alphabetise these digraphs
correctly (cx after cu, sx after sv, etc.).
Examples
Here are some examples of Esperanto sentences, with IPA transcriptions.
- Hello: Saluton
[sa.ˈlu.ton]
- How much?: Kiom?
[ˈki.om]
- Do you speak Esperanto?: Ĉu vi parolas Esperanton?
[ˈʧu vi pa.ˈro.las ˈes.pe.ˈran.ton]
- I like this one.
- Mi ŝatas tiun ĉi
[mi ˈʃat.as ˈti.un ˈʧi]
- Ĉi tiu plaĉas al mi
[ʧi ˈti.u ˈpla.ʧas al ˈmi]
- Is it cheap?: Ĉu ĝi estas malmultekosta?
[ˈʧu ʤi ˈes.tas mal.ˈmul.te.ˈkos.ta]
- Are you an Esperantist?: Ĉu vi estas Esperantisto?
[ˈʧu vi ˈes.tas es.ˈpe.ran.ˈtis.to]
- Five euros: Kvin eŭroj
[ˈkvin ˈew.roj]
- Do you accept US dollars?: Ĉu vi akceptas usonajn dolarojn?
[ˈʧu vi ak.ˈʦep.tas u.ˈson.ajn do.ˈla.rojn]
- Please give me a receipt: Bonvolu doni al mi kvitancon
[bon.ˈvo.lu ˈdo.ni al mi kvi.ˈtan.ʦon]
- Thank you: Dankon
[ˈdan.kon]
- It is a nice day: Estas bela tago
[ˈes.tas ˈbe.la ˈta.go]
- I love you: Mi amas vin
[mi ˈam.as vin]
- Goodbye: Ĝis revido
[ˈʤis re.ˈvid.o]
The Esperanto speaker community
Geography and Demography
Esperanto speakers seem to be more numerous in Europe and east Asia than in the Americas, Africa and Oceania, and more
numerous in urban than in rural areas (Sikosek 2003).
An estimate of the number of Esperanto speakers was made by Sidney
S. Culbert, a retired psychology professor of the University of Washington (himself a longtime Esperantist who commented regarding the logical
structure of Esperanto: "If the world could be structured that efficiently"). Culbert concluded that 1.6 million people speak
Esperanto at Foreign Service Level 3, "professionally proficient" (possessing the
ability to actually communicate beyond greetings and simple phrases) (Wolff 1996). Culbert's
estimate was not made for Esperanto alone, but formed part of his listing of estimates for all languages of over 1 million
speakers, published annually in the World Almanac and Book of Facts.
Since Culbert never published in detail about his sampling methodology, or intermediate results for particular countries and
regions, it is difficult to gauge the accuracy of his results. In the Almanac, his estimates for numbers of language speakers
were rounded to the nearest million, thus the number for Esperanto speakers is shown as 2 million. This latter figure appears in
Ethnologue. Assuming that this figure is accurate, this means that about 0.03%
of the world's population speaks the language. This falls short of Zamenhof's goal of a universal language, but it represents a
level of popularity unmatched by any other constructed language. Ethnologue
also states that there are 200 to 2000 native
Esperanto speakers.
Ziko Marcus
Sikosek has challenged this figure of 1.6 million as exaggerated. Sikosek estimated that even if Esperanto speakers were
evenly distributed, assuming one million Esperanto speakers worldwide would lead one to expect about 180 in the city of Cologne. Sikosek finds only 30 fluent speakers in that city, and
similarly smaller than expected figures in several other places thought to have a larger than average concentration of Esperanto
speakers. He also notes that there are a total of about 20,000 members of the various Esperanto organizations; though there are
undoubtedly many Esperanto speakers who are not members of any Esperanto organization, he thinks it unlikely that there are 50
times more speakers than organization members (Sikosek 2003). Others think such a ratio
between members of the organized Esperanto movement and speakers of the language is not unlikely. In the absence of Dr. Culbert's
detailed sampling data, or any other census data, it is impossible to state the number of speakers with certainty.
Culture
- Main articles: Esperanto culture, Esperanto literature, Esperanto music
Although Esperanto was used for original literature from the very beginning (the first book included an original poem by
Zamenhof, along with several translations), it's generally agreed that the first poets and novelists whose works can bear
comparison with the better products of national-language traditions emerged during the period between the two World Wars.
Translations from various non-constructed languages constituted a majority of the works published in the early years. Over 100
original novels have been published in Esperanto, besides many novellas, short story collections, and poetry collections. Several
important literary magazines have appeared over the years, including Fonto and Literatura Foiro which are still
being published today.
Besides the literary magazines mentioned above, dozens of other magazines are published; some focused on the Esperanto
movement, some on a specialized subject or interest, and some eclectic. Monato,
for instance, is a general news magazine, described by the Esperanto League for North America's periodical service as "like a
genuinely international Time or Newsweek" [1] (http://www.esperanto-usa.org/epss.html).
Historically most of the music published in Esperanto has been in various folk
traditions; in recent decades much new music in rock and other modern genres has appeared.
In 1965, William Shatner
starred in the only known full length feature film written entirely in Esperanto, Incubus. Several shorter films have also been
produced.
Goals of the Esperanto movement
Zamenhof's intention was to create an easy-to-learn language, to serve as an international auxiliary language, rather than to replace all existing languages in
the world. This goal was widely if not universally shared among Esperanto speakers in the early decades of the movement. Later
on, some Esperanto speakers began to see the language and the culture that has grown up around it as ends themselves; they see
the language and culture as valuable to them personally even if Esperanto is never officially adopted by the United Nations or other international organizations.
Those Esperanto speakers who strongly want to see Esperanto adopted officially or on a larger scale worldwide are commonly
called finvenkistoj (from fina venko, meaning "final victory"). Those who focus on the intrinsic value of the
language and culture are commonly called raŭmistoj (from Rauma, Finland, where a declaration on the near-term
unlikelihood of the "fina venko" and the value of Esperanto culture was made at the Internation Youth Congress in 1980). These categories are not mutually exclusive or exhaustive.
Learning Esperanto
Relatively few schools teach Esperanto officially; probably a majority of Esperanto speakers learn the language through
self-directed study or correspondence courses. Several Esperanto paper correspondence courses were early on adapted to email and
taught by corps of volunteer instructors. In more recent years, teaching websites like lernu! have become popular.
Several studies suggest that studying Esperanto before studying any other second language (especially an Indo-European language) may speed and improve learning, because learning subsequent foreign languages is easier than learning one's first, while the use of a grammatically simple auxiliary
language lessens the "first foreign language" learning hurdle. In one study (Williams 1965), a
group of high school students studied Esperanto for one year, then French for three years, and ended up with a better command of
French than the control group, who studied French without Esperanto
during all four years. However, the study failed to prove that Esperanto was responsible for this advantage specifically, as it
is likely that learning any language will benefit the future study of other languages. See Propedeutic value of Esperanto for other
relevant studies.
Further reading
See also
References
- Ludovikologia dokumentaro I (http://katalogo.uea.org/index.php?inf=4006) Tokyo: Ludovikito, 1991. Facsimile reprints of
the Unua Libro in Russian, Polish, French, German, English and Swedish, with the earliest Esperanto dictionaries for those
languages.
- Fundamento de Esperanto (http://www.akademio-de-esperanto.org/fundamento/enhavo.php). HTML reprint of 1905
Fundamento, from the Academy of Esperanto.
- Auld, William. La Fenomeno Esperanto ("The Esperanto Phenomenon"). Rotterdam: Universala Esperanto-Asocio, 1988.
- Everson, Michael. The Alphabets of Europe: Esperanto (http://www.evertype.com/alphabets/esperanto.pdf). Evertype, 2001.
- Harlow, Don. The Esperanto Book (http://www.webcom.com/~donh/eaccess/eaccess.book.html). Self-published on the web
(1995-96).
- Sikosek, Ziko M. Esperanto Sen Mitoj ("Esperanto without Myths"). Second edition. Antwerp: Flandra Esperanto-Ligo,
2003.
- Wells, John. Lingvistikaj aspektoj de Esperanto ("Linguistic
aspects of Esperanto"). Second edition. Rotterdam: Universala Esperanto-Asocio, 1989.
- Williams, N. (1965) 'A language teaching experiment', Canadian Modern Language Review 22.1: 26-28
- Wolff, David T.
Posting to soc.culture.esperanto of 27 March 1996 (http://groups-beta.google.com/group/soc.culture.esperanto/browse_thread/thread/9dbd2f14213a811c/b155141ccf91c6cc?q=4jbo0b$g31@salvelinus.brooktrout.com&_done=%2Fgroups%3Fq%3D4jbo0b$g31@salvelinus.brooktrout.com%26&_doneTitle=Back+to+Search&&d#b155141ccf91c6cc)
quoting Dr. Sidney Culbert on his then unpublished research on the number of Esperanto speakers.
External links
Information on Esperanto
Dictionaries
Esperanto courses
Esperanto organizations
Criticism
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