See also other languages'
versions:
If
you examine Esperanto from the outside, you’ll
be tempted to consider it a Western language.
Its pronunciation will remind you of the sounds
of Italian and its vocabulary has, to a large
extent, a definite Romance flavor. If you have
the opportunity to hear a conversation in Esperanto,
you will soon notice that "yes" is
used just as in English and is pronounced in
the same way (though it is written jes).
This will seem to confirm the Western nature
of the language. If, being more conversant with
linguistics and listening more carefully, you
perceive a relatively high proportion of Germanic
roots, you will conclude that it is indeed a
Western language, and that, just as in English,
its words are of both Latin and Germanic origin.
If
you have studied Greek, you will find it a bit
more Eastern than you thought at first. "And"
translates as kaj (rhyming with I),
which is the exact equivalent of the ancient
Greek kai, and plurals are apparently
inspired by Homer’s language. In ancient Greek,
parallelos 'a parallel line' becomes
in the plural paralleloi 'parallel lines';
in Esperanto, the plural of paralelo
is paraleloj (rhyming with boy),
a very close approximation to the classical
Greek pronunciation.
Seeing
an Esperanto text may somewhat alter your first
impressions. The presence of some consonants
with little hooks, the recurrence of the letter
j after a vowel at the end of words,
groups of letters like kv give it an
aspect reminiscent of Slovene or Croatian. If
this suggests to you a Slavic influence, you’ll
be on the right track. Esperanto was born in
Eastern Europe. Its syntax, many grammatical
features, a number of phrases and the style
of a typical sentence do betray an important
Slavic substratum. The same may be said of semantics.
While the word plena 'full' is taken
from Romance languages, its usage is not restricted
to the meaning of the French plein or
the Portuguese pleno: it covers the same
semantic field as the Russian polnyj,
which derives from the same Indo-European root
pln. In no Romance language could you
speak of a plein dictionnaire or pleno
dicionario (literally, 'full dictionary'):
you'll use a word like complet or completo
and put it after the noun. Plena vortaro,
in Esperanto, is a literal rendering of the
Russian 'polnyj slovar' even in the way
'dictionary' is derived from 'word' (Russian
slovo 'word', slovar 'dictionary';
Esperanto vorto 'word', vortaro
'dictionary').
Has
Esperanto anything in common with Semitic languages?
In form, no; in spirit, yes. As in Arabic and
Hebrew, Esperanto creates most of its vocabulary
through derivation from invariable roots. True,
in Semitic languages, roots are almost always
made up of three consonants and derivation is
often effected by inserting vowels in between,
whereas roots in Esperanto have no predetermined
pattern and the only way of deriving a word
from a root is to add something either at the
beginning or at the end. All the same, the Esperanto
version of the Hebrew Bible contains approximately
the same number of roots as the original. In
this it is much closer to the latter than translations
in Western languages, forced to use numerous
words which, unlike their equivalents in Hebrew
and Esperanto, have no transparent derivation.
If,
heading further towards the Orient, we proceed
from Arabic to Persian, we leave a language
with a complicated grammar and many exceptions
to encounter a rather remarkably consistent
language. To form the plural in Arabic you often
have to transform the whole interior of the
word: kitab 'book' becomes kutub 'books'.
Persian, which has borrowed many words from
Arabic, has not kept the latter's irregular
plurals. To form the plural, you simply add
the ending -ha, so that the plural of
kitab doesn't have to be memorized separately,
but is simply kitabha 'books'. Esperanto
is characterized by a similar simplicity. You
need just a split second to learn how to form
the plural of any noun, since you only have
to remember that this is done by adding a j,
which is always pronounced as the y in
boy. What a difference from languages
like German, Hausa and Arabic, in which you
are practically obliged to learn the plural
with every new noun! And even from English,
which is more consistent but still presents
various exceptions: woman, child, foot, mouse,
sheep, and many other words do not follow
the general rule stating that the plural is
formed by adding an -s.
Most
Westerners do not imagine that some languages
are so consistent that irregular verbs, exceptions
in plural formation or unclear derivation are
unthinkable for their speakers, something like
the aberrant product of a neurotic mind. It
is so much more pleasant to do without those
inconsistencies and yet understand one another
perfectly! Among such languages are Chinese,
Vietnamese and... Esperanto. These three have
in common a feature that sets them apart from
most languages, especially the Indo-European
ones: they are composed of strictly invariable
elements which are combinable without restriction.
For people who speak such a language, the idea
that 'first' cannot be derived from 'one' as
tenth is from ten, seems quite
bizarre, as it seems incomprehensible that there
is no pattern in the modulations of pronouns,
so that you have to learn, besides I,
a whole series of words like me, my and
mine. In Chinese, 'my' and 'mine' are,
so to say, the adjectival form of 'I': wo
'I', wode 'my', 'mine' (compare women
'we', womende 'our', 'ours').
Esperanto
derives its corresponding words in the same
way. As a result, parallel realities are expressed
in both languages by parallel forms, which cannot
be said of any Western language. In 'He takes
yours, you take his', the reciprocity of the
gestures appears in the language as appropriately
in Chinese (ta na nide, ni na tade) as
in Esperanto (li prenas vian, vi prenas lian).
In English, while the symmetry is visible, it
is not as perfect as in Chinese and Esperanto:
you cannot form yours from you
or his from he, you have to learn
those words as separate entities, and what is
take in one part of the sentence becomes
takes in the other. Units or details
that have to be memorized in order to express
oneself correctly are considerably more numerous
in Western languages than in Chinese or Esperanto.
In
word formation as well, Chinese and Esperanto
share a similarity of patterns. In English,
as in French, you have to learn separately such
words as fellow-citizen and coreligionist,
and you cannot express in one word the concept
'a person of the same race' or 'somebody who
speaks the same language'. In Chinese you only
have to know the structure and the basic word,
and it is the same in Esperanto: to form samlandano
'fellow-citizen', 'compatriot', samreligiano
'coreligionist', samklasano 'member of
the same class', samrasano 'person of
the same race', samlingvano 'person with
the same language', you just have to know the
pattern sam...ano and insert the corresponding
root. Similarly, a Chinese who studies English,
French or Italian has to memorize as a completely
different unit the word foreigner (étranger,
straniero). If he learns Esperanto, he has
only to translate syllable after syllable (morpheme
after morpheme, a linguist would say) the three
elements of the word in his mother tongue: waiguoren
'foreigner' is made up of wai 'outside'
(Esperanto: ekster), guo 'country'
(Esperanto: land) and ren 'human
being' (corresponding here to the Esperanto
ano, a human being who belongs to, who
is a member of, who resides in...). 'Foreigner'
is thus eksterlandano in Esperanto.
Here
is another example. The Chinese who tries to
acquire a Western language and wants to be able
to speak accurately of animals has to memorize
a whole series of nouns which, in his own language,
follow regular patterns. To have learned horse
is of no avail if he has to express (or understand)
mare, colt and stallion; similarly,
knowing how to say ox does not help him
say cow, calf and bull (to say
nothing of beef, veal and similar
words). In Chinese, such words are part of a
consistent table. They are respectively ma,
muma, xiaoma and gongma (for the
horse family), niu, muniu, xiaoniu and
gongniu (for the ox family). The system
is equally consistent in Esperanto. The relationship
is the same between, on the one hand, ĉevalo
(ĉ is pronounced as ch) and ĉevalino,
ĉevalido, virĉevalo, and, on the
other hand, bovo and bovino, bovido
and virbovo.
Those
who criticize Esperanto for being too Western
overlook two important aspects of the question.
First, they neglect to proceed to a linguistic
analysis of the language, which is the only
way to discover how different it is, in depth,
from what it seems to be at first sight: their
judgment is purely superficial. Second, they
ignore the fact that some language is necessary
if people with different mother tongues need
to communicate. In practice, what language does
one fall back on when mutual comprehension is
needed and Esperanto is not used? On English!
Isn't this one a Western language? As a matter
of fact, it has many more Western features than
Esperanto, and is much more difficult to learn
and use for the large majority of the inhabitants
of our planet. No language could put all peoples
on an equal footing. But among all those that
exist and are being used, Esperanto comes closest
to that ideal. After 2000 hours of English (five
hours a week for ten school years), the average
Japanese and Chinese are incapable of using
it in a really operational way. Their clumsiness,
as well as their difficulty in producing the
relevant sounds, tend to complicate communication
or to make them appear ridiculous, a problem
from which the native speaker of English is
spared, and unfairly, as he is the one who has
made no effort towards mutual understanding.
After 220 hours of Esperanto, on average, Eastern
Asians can genuinely communicate in that language,
which is a foreign language for everyone and
in which the risk of sounding strange is thus
equally distributed.
Whoever
wants to play fair and be objective has to refrain
from criticizing Esperanto until he has adequately
analyzed the language and compared it to English
and the mother tongues of the peoples whose
interests he pretends to defend. In a democracy
one is presumed innocent as long as one's guilt
has not been proven. It would be in accordance
with the best Western traditions to apply that
principle to Esperanto as well, and to reserve
one's judgment until the evidence has been examined.
No serious linguist, journalist or politician
would dare pass judgment on Tagalog or Malayalam
without having gathered facts on those languages.
There is no reason to adopt a different attitude
concerning Esperanto.
