Esperanto II

As we saw yesterday, it was Zamenhof’s childhood dream for there to be an international common language. Therefore, he brought it upon himself to create one. This was an incredibly difficult task because it must be easy for children to learn as a second language, no matter what their mother tongue was.

He began to consider rejuvenating Latin and encouraging schools to teach it. But he found learning Latin very complicated. Therefore, he created a new language based on existing languages to form an orderly language system.

Phonetics

Esperanto has 28 letters in the alphabet:

However, if a computer is unable to put circumflexes or breves onto the letters, an ‘x’ is placed after the letter to signify the same thing. I.e. cx can be used to mean ĉ  

Stress is always placed on the second to last vowel, unless the last vowel is elided with the following word. In this case, the last vowel has the stress. Even though tone is important in Esperanto, like most language, words cannot normally be differentiated by the tone.

Vocabulary

Most vocabulary is based on Romance languages and therefore very similar to Latin, French and Spanish. For example, the word for house is ‘domo’ which is derived from the Latin ‘domus’ and the Italian ‘domestico’. This similarity is thought to be the reason why if school students are taught a year of Esperanto and then three of French, they will reach a much higher level of French than other students who spend 4 years learning French.

Words are formed by adding prefixes and suffixes to roots. For example the suffix -aĉ- can be added near the end of a root to form a pejorative (expresses negative opinion of an object). An example of this is ‘domaĉo’ which means a shack (instead of ‘domo’ – home).

Zamenhof published a dictionary in 1894 containing 9,000 roots. However, these could form hundreds of thousands when suffixes and prefixes are added.

Grammar

Since Esperanto was created by man, it is very regular and contains a simple grammar system. A similarity to Latin and German is that Esperanto has cases – but only the subject and object.

For example:

Nouns	Subject	Object
Singular	-o	-on
Plural	-oj	-ojn

Esperanto verbs can only exist in three different tenses: past, present and future. Verbs can also exist in three moods: infinitive, jussive and conditional. The verb does not show person or plurals. For example: the infinitive ‘kanti’ means to sing.

Esperanto	English
Mi kantas	I sing
Vi kantis	You sung
Illi kantos	They will sing

To conclude, although Esperanto was constructed and therefore is not genealogically related to any natural language, it is closely based on many different languages. The vocabulary and grammar is very regular and therefore as long as you learn vocabulary and the basic rules, Esperanto is very easy to learn as a second language.

An introduction to linguistic variation and change

No language ever remains the same. Each language is constantly changing to suit its’ speakers and the world around them. Some of these changes are very sudden; however others take hundreds of years. Linguists have tried to track these changes using the ‘comparative method’ to find historical relationships between languages.

American linguists in the 20^th century studiesd lexicostatistics in a study called glottochronology. In this, they wanted to see the rate at which a language has changed and the length of time since two languages diverged. In this study, sets of vocabulary were compared to each other and any recognised cognates are counted. Any words that are completely different show that the languages have changed. Percentages were taken to compare these and any pair of languages with 50% similarity were said to have diverged before a language which had 70% similarity. This technique was able to find family trees of many different sets of languages. They also found that over time, every feature of language changes, but most frequently variations occur in pronunciation and vocabulary.

Changes in sound

Grimm (1822) noticed some regular ‘sound shifts’ between neighbouring languages. For example, when a word began [p] in Sanskrit, Latin or Greek, the Germanic languages used an [f]. For example: ‘pater’ (Latin) became ‘father’ (English). Nine sound changes like this were identified and these are very regular. But Grimm’s law did not explain all of the changes toward Germanic languages. There are many other types of changes in sound over languages, such as ‘loss’ where a sound completely disappears from a language.

Grammatical changes

The main way in which grammatical systems change is called analogy. This is when irregular grammatical patterns are changed into regulars. For example, in Anglo saxon, ‘healp’ was the past tense of ‘helpan’ (help) but in the 14^th century the past tense began to be the ‘helped’ with the usual ending.

Semantic change

Semantics can vary very quickly because they relate very closely to life and culture of society. An example of this is called ‘amelioration’ which is when a word loses its previous negative tone. For example, mischievous used to mean ‘disastrous’, but now is used to mean ‘up to mischief’ which is much milder.