Esperanto Grammar - Non-(Indo-)European Aspects

Non-(Indo-)European Aspects

There is very little about Esperanto that is not European in origin. Although it is billed as a neutral international language, its vocabulary, syntax, and semantics derive predominantly from European national languages. Roots are typically Romance or Germanic in origin. The semantics shows a significant Slavic influence.

It is often claimed that there are elements of the grammar which are not found in these language families. Frequently mentioned is Esperanto's agglutinative morphology based on invariant morphemes, and the subsequent lack of ablaut (internal inflection of its roots), which Zamenhof himself thought would prove alien to European speakers. Ablaut is an element of all the source languages; an English example is song sing sang sung. However, the majority of words in all European languages inflect without ablaut, as cat, cats and walk, walked do in English. (This is the so-called strong–weak dichotomy.) Historically, many European languages have expanded the range of their 'weak' inflections, and Esperanto has merely taken this development closer to its logical conclusion, with the only remaining ablaut being frozen in a few sets of semantically related roots such as pli, plej, plu (more, most, further), tre, tro (very, too much), and in the verbal morphemes -as, -anta, -ata; -is, -inta, -ita; -os, -onta, -ota; and -us.

Other features often cited as being nonstandard for a European language, such as the dedicated suffixes for different parts of speech, or the -o suffix for singular nouns, actually do occur in European languages such as Russian. More pertinent is the accusative plural in -jn, which is derived through leveling of standard European grammatical structures. The Esperanto nominal–adjectival paradigm as a whole is taken from Greek: Esperanto nominative singular muzo (muse) vs. Greek mousa, nominative plural muzoj vs. Greek mousai, and accusative singular muzon vs. Greek mousan. (Latin and Lithuanian had very similar setups, with in the plural and a nasal in the accusative.) However, Esperanto does not have a discrete accusative plural suffix analogous with Greek mous-ās; rather, it compounds the simple accusative and plural suffixes: muz-o-j-n. This morphology does not occur as more than a marginal element in any of Esperanto's source language families, and is formally similar to European but not Indo-European Hungarian and Turkish—that is, it is similar in its mechanics, but not in use. None of these proposed "non-European" elements of the original Esperanto proposal were actually taken from non-European or non-Indo-European languages, and any similarities with those languages are accidental.

East Asian languages may have had some influence on the development of Esperanto grammar after its creation. The principally cited candidate is the replacement of predicate adjectives with verbs, such as la ĉielo bluas (the sky is blue) for la ĉielo estas blua and mia filino belu! (may my daughter be beautiful!) for the mia filino estu bela! mentioned above. This is a regularization of existing grammatical forms and was always found in poetry; if there has been an Asian influence, it has only been in the spread of such forms, not in their origin. Such usage is not entirely unknown in Europe: Latin has an analogous folium viret for folium viride est (the leaf is green) and avis rubet for avis rubra est (the bird is red).

Perhaps the best candidate for a "non-European" feature is the blurred distinction between roots and affixes. Esperanto derivational affixes may be used as independent root words and inflect for part of speech like other roots. This occurs only sporadically in other languages of the world, Indo-European or not. For example, ismo has an English equivalent in "an ism", but English has no adjectival form ("ismic"?) equivalent to Esperanto isma. For most such affixes, natural languages familiar to Europeans must use a separate root, such as English "member" for Esperanto ano, "quality" for eco, "tendency" for emo, etc.