| Proto-Esperanto | |
|---|---|
| Lingwe uniwersala, Lingvo universala | |
| Created by | L. L. Zamenhof |
| Date | 1878–1881 |
| Setting and usage | international auxiliary language |
| Users | None |
| Purpose | Constructed language
|
| Latin | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
| Glottolog | None |
| Part of a series on |
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|---|
Proto-Esperanto (Esperanto : Pra-Esperanto) is the modern term for any of the stages in the evolution of L. L. Zamenhof's language project, prior to the publication of Unua Libro in 1887.
The precursors to the Esperanto alphabet can be found in Zamenhof's proposal for the use of Latin script in his Litvish-based unified Yiddish project (Esperanto : novjuda lingvo, Russian : новоеврейска языка "Neo-Jewish language"). [1] The consonant letters are equivalent to those of modern Esperanto, apart from lacking a letter for [dʒ]. The diacritic, however, is an acute: ć, h́, ś, ź (the last for Esperanto ĵ ). The vowel letters are the same apart from there being no ŭ. Their values are similar to Esperanto in the Litvish reading, with the addition of oŭ, though Poylish reading is divergent. There was in addition a letter ě for the schwa, which only appeared before the consonants l and n and was replaced by e in some circumstances. The circumflex is used, but indicates that a letter is not pronounced: e.g. ês iẑ is pronounced /si/. The following is a sample, with Litvish and Poylish readings: [2]
Neo-Jewish:
Litvish reading:
Poylish reading:
As a child, Zamenhof had the idea to introduce an international auxiliary language for communication between different nationalities. He originally wanted to revive some form of simplified Latin or Greek, but as he grew older he came to believe that it would be better to create a new language for his purpose. During his teenage years he worked on a language project until he thought it was ready for public demonstration. On December 17, 1878 (about one year before the first publication of Volapük), Zamenhof celebrated his 19th birthday and the birth of the language with some friends, who liked the project. Zamenhof himself called his language Lingwe Uniwersala (Universal Language).
W is used for v. Otherwise, all modern Esperanto letters are attested apart from those with diacritics (ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, ŭ). Known verb forms are present -á, imperative -ó, infinitive -are. [3] Nouns were marked by -e in the singular and -es in the plural; the article was singular la and plural las. It appears that there was no accusative case, and that stress was as in modern Esperanto, except when marked, as in -á and -ó.
Only four lines of the Lingwe uniwersala stage of the language from 1878 remain, from an early song that Zamenhof composed:
Malamikete de las nacjes, | Enmity of nations, |
| —L.L.Zamenhof |
In modern Esperanto, this would be,
Malamikeco de la nacioj,
Falu, falu, jam temp' estas;
La tuta homaro en familion
Unuiĝi [= kununuigi sin] devas.
Jam temp' está remains an idiom in modern Esperanto, an allusion to this song.
While at university, Zamenhof handed his work over to his father, Mordechai, for safe-keeping until he had completed his medical studies. His father, not understanding the ideas of his son and perhaps anticipating problems from the Tsarist police, burned the work. Zamenhof did not discover this until he returned from university in 1881, at which point he restarted his project. A sample from this second phase of the language is this extract of a letter from 1881:
Modern: Mia plej kara amiko, neniam mia senkulpa plumo fariĝus tirano por vi. Mi povas de cent viaj leteroj konkludi, kiel sciigoj de tiu-ĉi speco devas vundi vian fratan koron; mi kvazaŭ vidas vin jam ...
By this time the letter v had replaced w for the [v] sound; verbal inflection for person and number had been dropped; the nominal plural was -oj in place of -es (as well as adjectival -a and adverbial -e); and the noun cases were down to the current two (though a genitive -es survives today in the correlatives). The accusative case suffix was -l, but in many cases was only used on pronouns:
In addition to the stronger Slavic flavor of the orthography compared to the modern language (ć, dź, h́, ś, ź for ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ŝ, ĵ ), the present and past imperfective verb forms still had final stress:
The pronouns ended in a nominal o (or adjectival a for possessives: mo "I", ma "my"), but there were other differences as well, including a conflation of 'he' and 'it':
| 1881 pronouns | singular | plural |
|---|---|---|
| 1st person | mo | no |
| 2nd person | to | vo |
| 3rd masc./neut. | ro | po |
| 3rd feminine | śo | |
| 3rd reflexive | so | |
In addition, there was indefinite o 'one'.
The correlatives were similarly close, though it is not clear if there was a distinction between indefinite and relative forms (modern i- and ki-; these may have corresponded to kv- and k-) and no possessive forms are known:
| -o | -u | -a | -e | -al | -el | -am | -om | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ti- | fo | fu | fa | fi | fej | fe | fan | |
| ki- / i- | kvo, ko | kvu, ku | kva | kve, ke | kvan, kan | kom | ||
| ĉi- | ćio | ćiu | ćii | ćian | ||||
| neni- | fio | fiu | fian |
The last row was evidently pronounced as fj-.
Esperanto at this stage had a consonantal ablaut in verbs, with a voiceless consonant for an attempt at something, and a voiced consonant for success. For example, aŭti to listen (for), aŭdi to hear; trofi to look for, trovi to find; prufi to argue (a point), pruvi to prove. Traces of this remain in a few pairs of words such as pesi 'to weigh (an item)' and pezi 'to weigh (have weight)' (cf. their derivatives pesilo 'scales' & pezilo 'a weight'). [4]
Zamenhof refined his ideas for the language for the next several years. Most of his refinements came through translation of literature and poetry in other languages. The final stress in the verb conjugations was rejected in favour of always stressing the second-last vowel, and the old plural -s on nouns became a marker of finite tenses on verbs, with an imperfect -es remaining until just before publication. The Slavic-style acute diacritics became circumflexes to avoid overt appearances of nationalism, and the new bases of the letters ĵ, ĝ (for former ź, dź) helped preserve the appearance of Romance and Germanic vocabulary.
In 1887 Zamenhof finalized his tinkering with the publication of the Unua Libro (First Book), which contained the Esperanto language as we know it today. In a letter to Nikolai Borovko he later wrote,
I've worked for six years perfecting and testing the language, when in the year 1878 it had already seemed completely ready to me. [5]
— Zamenhof
By 1894, multiple proposals to change Esperanto had appeared. Zamenhof was pressured to incorporate them into Esperanto, and in response reluctantly presented a reformed Esperanto in 1893. A vote was put to the members of the Esperanto League, including all subscribers to La Esperantisto, and the proposal was voted down 60% opposed to 5% in favor, with a further 35% wanting different reforms.
Esperanto is the world's most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Created by L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, it is intended to be a universal second language for international communication, or "the international language". Zamenhof first described the language in Dr. Esperanto's International Language, which he published under the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto. Early adopters of the language liked the name Esperanto and soon used it to describe his language. The word esperanto translates into English as "one who hopes".
L. L. Zamenhof developed Esperanto in the 1870s and '80s. Unua Libro, the first print discussion of the language, appeared in 1887. The number of Esperanto speakers have increased gradually since then, without much support from governments and international organizations. Its use has, in some instances, been outlawed or otherwise suppressed.
Esperanto is the most widely used constructed language intended for international communication; it was designed with highly regular grammatical rules, and as such is considered an easy language to learn.
L. L. Zamenhof was the creator of Esperanto, the most widely used constructed international auxiliary language.
Esperanto is written in a Latin-script alphabet of twenty-eight letters, with upper and lower case. This is supplemented by punctuation marks and by various logograms, such as the digits 0–9, currency signs such as $ € ¥ £ ₷, and mathematical symbols. The creator of Esperanto, L. L. Zamenhof, declared a principle of "one letter, one sound", though this is a general rather than strict guideline.
Gender asymmetry is an aspect of the constructed international auxiliary language Esperanto which has been challenged by numerous proposals seeking to regularize both grammatical and lexical gender.
Esperanto vocabulary and grammatical forms derive primarily from the Romance languages, with substantial contributions from Germanic languages. The language occupies a middle ground between "naturalistic" constructed languages such as Interlingua, which borrow words en masse from their source languages with little internal derivation, and a priori conlangs such as Solresol, in which the words have no historical connection to other languages. In Esperanto, root words are borrowed and retain much of the form of their source language, whether the phonetic form or orthographic form. However, each root can then form dozens of derivations which may bear little resemblance to equivalent words in the source languages, such as registaro (government), which is derived from the Latinate root reg but has a morphology closer to German or Russian.
Esperanto is a constructed international auxiliary language designed to have a simple phonology. The creator of Esperanto, L. L. Zamenhof, described Esperanto pronunciation by comparing the sounds of Esperanto with the sounds of several major European languages.
The original word base of Esperanto contained around 900 root words and was defined in Unua Libro, published by L. L. Zamenhof in 1887. In 1894, Zamenhof published the first Esperanto dictionary, Universala vortaro, which was written in five languages and supplied a larger set of root words, adding 1740 new words.
An Esperantido is a constructed language derived from Esperanto. Esperantido originally referred to the language which is now known as Ido. The word Esperantido contains the affix (-ido), which means a "child, young or offspring". Hence, Esperantido literally means an 'offspring or descendant of Esperanto'.
Mundolinco is a constructed language created by the Dutch author J. Braakman in 1888. It is notable for apparently being the first Esperantido, i.e. the first Esperanto derivative.
Esperanto and Ido are constructed international auxiliary languages, with Ido being an Esperantido derived from Esperanto and Reformed Esperanto. The number of speakers is estimated at 100 thousand to 2 million for Esperanto, whereas Ido is much fewer at 100 to 1 thousand.
Esperanto and Novial are two different constructed international auxiliary languages. Their main difference is that while Esperanto is a schematic language, with an unvarying grammar, Novial is a naturalistic language, whose grammar and vocabulary varies to try to retain a "natural" sound. Demographically, Esperanto has thousands of times more speakers than Novial.
Dua Libro de l' Lingvo Internacia, usually referred to simply as Dua Libro, is an 1888 book by L. L. Zamenhof. It is the second book in which Zamenhof wrote about the constructed language Esperanto, following Unua Libro in 1887, and the first book to be written entirely in the language.
Like natural languages, the constructed language Esperanto contains profane words and indecent vocabulary. Some of this was formulated out of the established core vocabulary, or by giving specific profane or indecent senses to regularly formed Esperanto words. Other instances represent informal neologisms that remain technically outside the defined vocabulary of the language, but have become established by usage.
Adolf Holzhaus was an Esperantist and historian of the Esperanto movement. Between 1959 and 1985, he compiled biographies of the lives of Esperanto creator L. L. Zamenhof and his family, Esperanto pioneer Wilhelm Heinrich Trompeter, and others. He edited and published documents on the history of Esperanto, including Zamenhof's Hillelism and "Provo de gramatiko de novjuda lingvo kaj alvoko al la juda intelektularo".
La Esperantisto, stylised as La Esperantisto., was the first Esperanto periodical, published from 1889 to 1895. L. L. Zamenhof started it in order to provide reading material for the then-nascent Esperanto community.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to Esperanto:
There are two conventional sets ASCII substitutions for the letters in the Esperanto alphabet that have diacritics, as well as a number of graphic work-arounds.
Abram Antoni Kofman, also known as Abraham S. Kofman, was a Russian-Jewish accountant, and poet and translator in several constructed languages. From Odesa, Russian Empire, Kofman learned Esperanto in 1889 and was an early supporter of the language's adoption. He was one of the first Russian Jews to write poetry in Esperanto and has been described by several as a "pioneer". His work appeared in several Esperanto-language magazines and early anthologies, including the Fundamenta Krestomatio. He was the translator of several sections of the Hebrew Bible in both Esperanto and its daughter language, Ido. He was the first Ancient Greek–Esperanto translator, producing a rendition of parts of the Iliad starting in 1895.