Esperanto Esperanto ( or ) is the world's most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Created by the Warsaw-based ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, it was intended to be a universal second language for international communi ...

and

Novial Novial is a constructed international auxiliary language (IAL) for universal human communication between speakers of different native languages. It was devised by Otto Jespersen, a Danish linguist who had been involved in the Ido movement that ...

are two different constructed

international auxiliary languages An international auxiliary language (sometimes acronymized as IAL or contracted as auxlang) is a language meant for communication between people from all different nations, who do not share a common first language. An auxiliary language is primaril ...

. 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.

Alphabet and pronunciation

Both Esperanto and Novial are written using versions of the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the o ...

. The Esperanto alphabet has 28 letters: 22 without

diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacriti ...

s and 6 with diacritics unique to Esperanto: ''ĉ'', ''ĝ'', ''ĥ'', ''ĵ'', ''ŝ'' and ''ŭ''. Novial uses the standard 26 letters of the Latin alphabet with no diacritics. In Esperanto one letter corresponds to one

phoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...

and one phoneme to one letter: there are no digraphs. Novial has 3 digraphs: ''ch'', ''sh'' and ''qu''; ''c'' and ''q'' are unique to these digraphs (except in foreign proper nouns) and permit no ambiguity; when ''s'' and ''h'' are separate phonemes this is indicated by separating with a hyphen: ''s-h''. Novial permits some 2-vowel combinations to be pronounced either as 2 separate

vowel A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (leng ...

s or as

diphthong A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech o ...

s; for example, ''au'', ''eu'' and ''oi'' may be pronounced as ''a + w'', ''e + w'' and ''o + y'', respectively, and ''ie'', ''io'' and ''ia'' as ''y + e'', ''y + o'' and ''y + a'', respectively. In handwriting neither Esperanto nor Novial presents any problem. However, the diacritics of Esperanto require special methods for typing and printing. The original method was a set of digraphs now known as the "h-system", but with the rise of computer word processing a so-called "x-system" has become equally popular. These systems are described in the article

Esperanto orthography 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 mathema ...

. However, with the advent of

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...

, the need for such work-arounds has lessened.

Personal pronouns

The

personal pronoun Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as ''I''), second person (as ''you''), or third person (as ''he'', ''she'', ''it'', ''they''). Personal pronouns may also take dif ...

s of Esperanto all end in ''i'' and some may be difficult to distinguish in a noisy environment (especially ''mi'' and ''ni''). The personal pronouns of Novial use various vowels making them more distinct, although some differ only in the initial consonant (e.g. ''nus'', ''vus'' and ''lus''). A later form of ''nus'' – ''nos'', more distinct from ''vus'' – has sometimes been used. Novial does not distinguish familiar and polite forms of “you” (e.g. French ''tu'' and ''vous''). Novial's inventor argued that such a distinction has no place in a language intended solely for international use. The distinction is available in Esperanto but is little used in practice.

¹ ''ci'' and ''thou'', while technically the familiar form of the word "you" in Esperanto and English, respectively, are almost never used. Results on Google have shown that ''ci'' is used less than half of one percent of the amount ''vi'' is in Esperanto. Zamenhof himself did not include the pronoun in the first book on Esperanto and only later reluctantly; later he recommended against using ''ci'' on the grounds that different cultures have conflicting traditions regarding the use of the familiar and formal forms of "you", and that a universal language should avoid the problem by simply using the formal form in all situations. Novial uses only ''vu'' as the singular "you". ² ''tiu'', "that person", is usually used in this circumstance, because many people find it unnatural to use "it" referring to humans.
Apart from Ĝiism and Giism, Hiism and Riism as proposed reforms replace "Fundamento"-pronouns (''ri'' instead of "li, ŝi, ĝi"; or "li" as

utrum Swedish is descended from Old Norse. Compared to its progenitor, Swedish grammar is much less characterized by inflection. Modern Swedish has two genders and no longer conjugates verbs based on person or number. Its nouns have lost the morpholog ...

and ''hi'' instead of Fundamento "li"). Other proposals are variations of those four. ³iŝi, iĝi and by extension iri are proposed neologisms

The Novial system displays a systematic correspondence between singular and corresponding plural forms (i.e. ''vu'', ''vus''; ''lo'', ''los''; ''la'', ''las''; ''lu'', ''lus''; ''le'', ''les''). Strictly speaking "we" is not the plural of "I", because "many I’s" is nonsensical. Jespersen suggested that ''nu'', the singular of ''nus'', could be used as a "royal we". The optional marking of sex in Novial, especially in the third person plural, permits greater flexibility than in Esperanto, at least in this case. Exactly the same system is applied to other pronouns and to nouns with natural sex differences.

Marking gender

The system of sex marking for Esperanto nouns is frequently criticised for being asymmetric and male biased. In contrast Novial has one symmetric, unbiased system for both nouns and pronouns which marks either male, female,

epicene Epicenity is the lack of gender distinction, often reducing the emphasis on the masculine to allow the feminine. It includes androgyny – having both masculine and feminine characteristics. The adjective ''gender-neutral'' may describe epicenit ...

or inanimate.

Verbal systems

The grammars of Novial and Esperanto differ greatly in the way that the various tenses, moods and

voice The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal tract, including talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, shouting, humming or yelling. The human voice frequency is specifically a part of human sound production in ...

s of

verb A verb () is a word (part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descri ...

s are expressed. Both use a combination of

auxiliary verb An auxiliary verb (abbreviated ) is a verb that adds functional or grammatical meaning to the clause in which it occurs, so as to express tense, aspect, modality, voice, emphasis, etc. Auxiliary verbs usually accompany an infinitive verb or a p ...

s and verb endings. However, Novial uses many more auxiliary verbs and few endings, while Esperanto uses only one auxiliary verb and a greater number of verb endings. In Novial all verb forms are independent of person (1st, 2nd or 3rd persons) and number (singular or plural). In Esperanto verb forms are independent of the person but compound tenses, with

participle In linguistics, a participle () (from Latin ' a "sharing, partaking") is a nonfinite verb form that has some of the characteristics and functions of both verbs and adjectives. More narrowly, ''participle'' has been defined as "a word derived from ...

s, require the participle (which is an adjective) to agree with the subject of the verb in number (singular or plural). The

continuous tense The continuous and progressive aspects (abbreviated and ) are grammatical aspects that express incomplete action ("to do") or state ("to be") in progress at a specific time: they are non-habitual, imperfective aspects. In the grammars of many ...

s are less common in both Esperanto and Novial than in English. In the following table endings are separated from stems by hyphens. Alternative forms with the same meaning are in brackets. In the Esperanto forms (j) indicates agreement when the subject of the verb is plural.

Active voice

Passive voice

The difference between the passive of becoming and the passive of being is not always immediately obvious to English speakers because their forms can often be the same. However, in English the passive of becoming is often expressed with the verb ''get'' in the sense of ''become'' as well as with the verb ''be''.

Passive voice of becoming

Esperanto uses an appropriate form of the

''esti'' (''to be'') followed by a passive participle (present, past or future according to sense). With many verbs Esperanto may, instead of the passive voice, use the suffix ''-iĝ-'' to form an intransitive verb of becoming, which is conjugated in the active voice (see table below). Novial uses the auxiliary verb ''bli'' (''to get, become, be'' from the equivalent auxiliary verb ''bli'' in Scandinavian languages) followed by the root form of the verb. The various tenses and moods are expressed regularly using the other auxiliary verbs ''ha'', ''had'', ''sal'', ''saled'' and ''vud'', the word order corresponding to the English.

Passive voice of being

The passive voice of being is generally expressed in English with an appropriate form of the verb ''to be'' followed by the past participle. It is formed in the same way in Esperanto and Novial. Note that in contrast to the passive of becoming, in the Novial passive of being the auxiliary verb is followed by the past participle, which ends in ''-t''.

Word formation

In Esperanto, most words are created from a set number of roots, endings, and affixes. This allows for a comparatively low number of words to be extended to a described vocabulary, resulting in easy learning. However, some argue that results in heavy reliance on common affixes. For example, Esperanto notoriously relies heavily on the prefix ''mal-'' to form the opposite of an adjective or verb. The equivalent prefix in Novial, ''des-'', is used to a much lesser degree.

Language sample for comparison

Here is

the Lord's Prayer The Lord's Prayer, also called the Our Father or Pater Noster, is a central Christian prayer which Jesus taught as the way to pray. Two versions of this prayer are recorded in the gospels: a longer form within the Sermon on the Mount in the Gosp ...

in both languages:

External links

''Fundamento de Esperanto''

Otto Jespersen's 1928 book which introduced Novial. Contains discussion of earlier auxiliary languages including Esperanto.

By Henry Jacob, 1943, Comparative Texts comparing Esperanto, Novial, Ido, Occidental, Latino sine flexione, Esperanto and English.

By Henry Jacob, 1947. A detailed comparative study of interlinguistics with full grammatical details of five systems of demonstrated usefulness, Esperanto, Ido, Occidental, Novial, and Latino sine flexione.

By Friedrich Auerbach, 1930 (in Novial).
Comparison
of Esperanto and Novial at the

Conlang Atlas of Language Structures A constructed language (sometimes called a conlang) is a language whose phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, instead of having developed naturally, are consciously devised for some purpose, which may include being devised for a work of fiction. ...

. {{Constructed languages Esperanto Novial Comparison of constructed languages