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An Esperantido (plural Esperantidoj) is a
constructed language 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. ...
derived from
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 communic ...
. ''Esperantido'' originally referred to the language which is now known as Ido. The word ''Esperantido'' contains the affix (''-ido''), which means a "child (''born to a parent''), young (''of an animal'') or offspring". Hence, ''Esperantido'' literally means an 'offspring or descendant of Esperanto'. A number of Esperantidoj have been created to address a number of perceived flaws or weaknesses in Esperanto (or in other Esperantidoj) by attempting to improve the
lexicon A lexicon is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word ''lexicon'' derives from Greek word (), neuter of () meaning 'of or fo ...
,
grammar In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraints, a field that includes doma ...
,
pronunciation Pronunciation is the way in which a word or a language is spoken. This may refer to generally agreed-upon sequences of sounds used in speaking a given word or language in a specific dialect ("correct pronunciation") or simply the way a particular ...
, or
orthography An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation. Most transnational languages in the modern period have a writing system, and ...
. Others were created as language games or to add variety to
Esperanto literature Literature in the Esperanto language began before the first official publication in Esperanto in 1887: the language's creator, L. L. Zamenhof, translated poetry and prose into the language as he was developing it as a test of its completeness an ...
.


Language reforms

These attempted improvements were intended to replace Esperanto. Limited suggestions for improvement within the framework of Esperanto, such as orthographic reforms and
riism (, possessive: ) is a singular third-person gender-neutral pronoun in Esperanto intended as an alternative to the gender-specific ("he") and ("she"). It is used by some speakers when the gender of a person is not known or when it is not desi ...
, are not considered Esperantidos.


Mundolinco

''Mundolinco'' (1888) was the first Esperantido, created in 1888. Changes from Esperanto include combining the adjective and adverb under the suffix ''-e'', loss of the accusative and adjectival agreement, changes to the verb conjugations, eliminating the diacritics, and bringing the vocabulary closer to Latin, for example with superlative ''-osim-'' to replace the Esperanto particle ''plej'' "most".


Reformed Esperanto

Zamenhof himself proposed several changes in the language in 1894, which were rejected by the Esperanto community and subsequently abandoned by Zamenhof himself.


Ido

Ido (1907), the foremost of the Esperantidos, sought to bring Esperanto into closer alignment with Western European expectations of an ideal language, based on familiarity with
French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
,
English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ...
, and
Italian Italian(s) may refer to: * Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries ** Italians, an ethnic group or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom ** Italian language, a Romance language *** Regional Ita ...
. Reforms included changing the spelling by removing non-
Roman Roman or Romans most often refers to: * Rome, the capital city of Italy * Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD *Roman people, the people of ancient Rome *''Epistle to the Romans'', shortened to ''Romans'', a lett ...
letters such as ''ĉ'' and re-introducing the k/q dichotomy; removing a couple of the more obscure phonemic contrasts (one of which, , has been effectively removed from standard Esperanto); ending the infinitives in ''-r'' and the plurals in ''-i'' like Italian; eliminating adjectival agreement, and removing the need for the accusative case by setting up a fixed default word order; reducing the amount of inherent gender in the vocabulary, providing a masculine suffix and an epicene third-person singular pronoun; replacing the pronouns and correlatives with forms more similar to the
Romance languages The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language ...
; adding new roots where Esperanto uses the
antonym In lexical semantics, opposites are words lying in an inherently incompatible binary relationship. For example, something that is ''long'' entails that it is not ''short''. It is referred to as a 'binary' relationship because there are two members ...
ic prefix ''mal-''; replacing much of Esperanto's other regular derivation with separate roots, which are thought to be easier for Westerners to remember; and replacing much of the Germanic and Slavic vocabulary with Romance forms, such as ''navo'' for English-derived ''ŝipo''. See the Ido ''Pater noster'' below. Ido spawned its own idos, the first being
Adjuvilo Adjuvilo is a constructed language created in 1910 by Claudius Colas under the pseudonym of "Profesoro V. Esperema". Although it was a full language, it may not have been created to be spoken. Many believe that as an Esperantist, Colas created Ad ...
(1908), which was created by an Esperantist to sow dissent in the Ido community.


Saussure

René de Saussure René de Saussure (17 March 1868 – 2 December 1943) was a Swiss Esperantist and professional mathematician (he defended a doctoral thesis on a subject in geometry at the Johns Hopkins University in 1895 and until 1899 he was professor at the Ca ...
(brother of linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure Ferdinand de Saussure (; ; 26 November 1857 – 22 February 1913) was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is wide ...
) published numerous Esperantido proposals, starting with a response to Ido later called ''Antido 1'' ("Anti-Ido 1") in 1907, which increasingly diverged from Esperanto before finishing with a more conservative Esperanto II in 1937. Esperanto II replaced ''j'' with ''y'', ''kv'' with ''qu'', ''kz'' with ''x'', and diacritic letters with ''j'' (''ĵ'' and ''ĝ''), ''w'' (''ŭ''), and digraphs ''sh'' (''ŝ''), ''ch'' (''ĉ''); replaced the passive in ''-iĝ-'' with ''-ev-'', the indefinite ending ''-aŭ'' with adverbial ''-e'', the accusative ''-on'' on nouns with ''-u'', and the plural on nouns with ''-n'' (so ''membrun'' for ''membrojn'' "members"); dropped adjectival agreement; broke up the table of concords, changed other small grammatical words such as ''ey'' for ''kaj'' "and", and treated pronouns more like nouns, so that the plural of ''li'' "he" is ''lin'' rather than ''ili'' "they", and the accusative of ''ĝi'' "it" is ''ju''.


Romániço

Romániço (1991) is an Esperantido that uses only
Romance language The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language ...
vocabulary. Its name derives from the
Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...
word ''romanice'', an adjective meaning "in a Romance language". Unlike
Interlingua Interlingua (; ISO 639 language codes ia, ina) is an international auxiliary language (IAL) developed between 1937 and 1951 by the American International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA). It ranks among the most widely used IALs and is t ...
, it uses the immediate source forms of words in modern Romance languages, so its spellings resemble Latin in most cases. It replaces all of Esperanto's non-Romance vocabulary and some of its grammar with Romance constructions, allows a somewhat more irregular orthography, and eliminates some criticized points such as case, adjectival agreement, verbal inflection for tense and mood, and inherent gender, but retains the ''o, a, e'' suffixes for parts of speech and an agglutinative morphology. Additionally, Romániço uses the digraphs ''çh'' (''ĉ''), ''kh'' (''ĥ''), ''sh'' (''ŝ''), and ''th'' (no Esperanto equivalent; represents a
voiceless dental fricative The voiceless dental non-sibilant fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. It is familiar to English speakers as the 'th' in ''think''. Though rather rare as a phoneme in the world's inventory of languages, it is en ...
or an aspirated
voiceless alveolar plosive The voiceless alveolar, dental and postalveolar plosives (or stops) are types of consonantal sounds used in almost all spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiceless dental, alveolar, and posta ...
).


Esperanto sen Fleksio

''Esperanto sen Fleksio'' (Esperanto without inflexion), proposed under this name by Richard Harrison in 1996 but based on long-term complaints from Asian Esperantists, is an experimental and unfinished proposal for a morphologically reduced variety of Esperanto. The main changes are: *Loss of the
plural The plural (sometimes list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated pl., pl, or ), in many languages, is one of the values of the grammatical number, grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than the ...
(the suffix ''-j),'' except in the new plural definite article ''laj'' (short for ''la jo'') and possibly in a plural accusative preposition ''naj''; singular number is marked by ''unu'' or ''la'', plural by the new words ''jo'' and ''laj'' (''la jo'') (and maybe ''naj'') *Replacement of the
accusative case The accusative case ( abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: 'me,' 'him,' 'her,' 'us,' and ‘t ...
(the suffix ''-n)'' with either subject–verb–object word order or with a new preposition ''na'' for other word orders *Loss of verb tense: past, present, and future are all subsumed under the
infinitive Infinitive ( abbreviated ) is a linguistics term for certain verb forms existing in many languages, most often used as non-finite verbs. As with many linguistic concepts, there is not a single definition applicable to all languages. The word is de ...
ending ''-i'', though the imperative, conditional, and a single active and passive participle (''-anta'' and ''-ita'') remain *Shift from copula-plus-adjective to verb, for example ''boni'' instead of ''esti bona'' In an earlier version, the letter ''ŭ'' was replaced with ''w'', but the more recent version uses the same alphabet as regular Esperanto.


Poliespo

While most Esperantidos aim to simplify Esperanto, '' Poliespo'' (" polysynthetic Esperanto", ) makes it considerably more complex. Besides the polysynthetic morphology, it incorporates much of the phonology and vocabulary of the
Cherokee language 200px, Number of speakers Cherokee or Tsalagi ( chr, ᏣᎳᎩ ᎦᏬᏂᎯᏍᏗ, ) is an endangered-to- moribund Iroquoian language and the native language of the Cherokee people. ''Ethnologue'' states that there were 1,520 Cherokee speak ...
. It has fourteen vowels, six of them
nasalized In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is . In the Internationa ...
, and three tones.


Esperantidoj for amusement

There are also extensions of Esperanto created primarily for amusement.


Universal

One of the more unorthodox Esperantidoj, grammatically, is ''Universal'' (1923–1928). It adds a
schwa In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa (, rarely or ; sometimes spelled shwa) is a vowel sound denoted by the IPA symbol , placed in the central position of the vowel chart. In English and some other languages, it rep ...
to break up consonant clusters, marks the accusative case with a nasal vowel, has inclusive and exclusive pronouns, uses partial
reduplication In linguistics, reduplication is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word (or part of it) or even the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change. The classic observation on the semantics of reduplication is Edwa ...
for the plural (''tablo'' "table", ''tatablo'' "tables"), and inversion for
antonym In lexical semantics, opposites are words lying in an inherently incompatible binary relationship. For example, something that is ''long'' entails that it is not ''short''. It is referred to as a 'binary' relationship because there are two members ...
s (''mega'' "big", ''gema'' "little"; ''donu'' "give", ''nodu'' "receive"; ''tela'' "far", ''leta'' "near"). Inversion can be seen in: ::''Al gefinu o fargu kaj la egnifu o grafu.'' ::He finished reading lit''._'to_read'.html" ;"title="'lit''. 'to read'">'lit''. 'to read'and she started to write. The antonyms are ''al'' "he" and ''la'' "she" (compare ''li'' "s/he"), the ''ge-'' (completive) and ''eg-'' (inchoative) aspects, ''fin-'' "to finish" and ''nif-'' "to begin", and ''graf-'' "to write" and ''farg-'' "to read". The ''Universal'' reduplicated plural and inverted antonyms are reminiscent of the musical language
Solresol Solresol ( Solfège: Sol- Re-Sol), originally called Langue universelle and then Langue musicale universelle, is a constructed language devised by François Sudre, beginning in 1827. His major book on it, ''Langue Musicale Universelle'', was pub ...
.


Esperant'

''Esperant'' () is a style of speech that twists but does not quite violate the grammar of Esperanto. The changes are morphological: * The nominal suffix ''-o'' is removed, as in poetry. ''Knabo'' becomes ''knab'.'' * The plural ending ''-oj'' is replaced with the collective suffix ''-ar-.'' ''Knaboj'' becomes ''knabar'.'' * Adjectives lose their ''-a'' suffixes and combine with their head nouns. ''Bela knabino'' becomes ''belknabin'.'' * In direct objects, the accusative suffix ''-n'' is replaced with the preposition ''je.'' ''Knabon'' becomes ''je knab'.'' * Verbs become nouns, and their erstwhile tense and mood suffixes move elsewhere: **This may be an adverb or
prepositional phrase An adpositional phrase, in linguistics, is a syntactic category that includes ''prepositional phrases'', ''postpositional phrases'', and ''circumpositional phrases''. Adpositional phrases contain an adposition (preposition, postposition, or ci ...
: ''donu hodiaŭ'' becomes ''hodiaŭu don','' and ''estas en la ĉielo'' becomes ''est' ĉielas.'' **If the verb contains a valency suffix, this may detach from the verb: ''fariĝu'' becomes ''iĝu far'.'' **If none of these options is available, ''jen'' may be used as a placeholder: ''amas'' becomes ''jenas am'.'' The choice of where the tense suffix ends up is largely a stylistic choice. * Subjects of the erstwhile verb take the preposition ''de'' if nouns, or become possessives if pronouns: ''knabo amas'' becomes ''am' de knab','' and ''kiu estas'' becomes ''kies est'.'' * The article ''la'' becomes ''l'' whenever the preceding word ends in a vowel. Example: :Boys love the pretty girl. :Esperanto: Knaboj amas la belan knabinon. :Esperant': Jenas am' de knabar' je l' belknabin'. Literally, "Behold love of group of boys to the prettygirl." See the Esperant' ''Pater noster'' below.


Esperanto specializations

There are various projects to adapt Esperanto to specialized uses. '' Esperanto de DLT'' (1983) is one; it was an adaptation of Esperanto as a pivot language for
machine translation Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT (not to be confused with computer-aided translation, machine-aided human translation or interactive translation), is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates ...
.


Esperantidoj used in literature

Esperanto has little in the way of the
slang Slang is vocabulary (words, phrases, and linguistic usages) of an informal register, common in spoken conversation but avoided in formal writing. It also sometimes refers to the language generally exclusive to the members of particular in-gr ...
,
dialect The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena: One usage refers to a variety of a language that is ...
ical variation, or
archaism In language, an archaism (from the grc, ἀρχαϊκός, ''archaïkós'', 'old-fashioned, antiquated', ultimately , ''archaîos'', 'from the beginning, ancient') is a word, a sense of a word, or a style of speech or writing that belongs to a hi ...
s found in natural languages. Several authors have felt a need for such variation, either for effect in original literature, or to translate such variation from national literature.


Dialects

Occasionally, reform projects have been used by Esperanto authors to play the role of dialects, for example standard Esperanto and Ido to translate a play written in two dialects of Italian.


La Sociolekta Triopo

Halvelik (1973) created ''
Popido An Esperantido (plural Esperantidoj) 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 (' ...
'' ("Popular Idiom") to play the role of a substandard
register Register or registration may refer to: Arts entertainment, and media Music * Register (music), the relative "height" or range of a note, melody, part, instrument, etc. * ''Register'', a 2017 album by Travis Miller * Registration (organ), th ...
of Esperanto that, among other things, does away with much of Esperanto's inflectional system. For example, standard Esperanto :'' Redonu al tiu viro lian pafilon.'' :"Give that man back his gun." is in Popido, :''Redonu al tu vir la pistol.'' ("la" is the Popido equivalent of "lia"; the article in Popido is "lo") In 1969, he published part I of the Sociolekto Triopo, Arkaika Esperanto to serve as equivalent to
Middle English Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old Englis ...
,
Middle High German Middle High German (MHG; german: Mittelhochdeutsch (Mhd.)) is the term for the form of German spoken in the High Middle Ages. It is conventionally dated between 1050 and 1350, developing from Old High German and into Early New High German. Hig ...
and the like. A
slang Slang is vocabulary (words, phrases, and linguistic usages) of an informal register, common in spoken conversation but avoided in formal writing. It also sometimes refers to the language generally exclusive to the members of particular in-gr ...
completes the trio, called Gavaro.


Archaism and Arcaicam Esperantom

Proto-Esperanto would theoretically fulfill the need for archaism, but too little survives for it to be used extensively, though Geraldo Mattos made some sonnets. Several items of the lexicon have become archaic. Search for words marked as archaic (). In 1931 Kalman Kalocsay published a translation
Elektronika Bulteno de EASL
' includes the short story from , 2nd cheap edition, Kalman Kalocsay, Budapest,
Literatura Mondo ''Literatura Mondo'' (''Literary World'') was a literary Esperanto periodical and publishing house in Budapest, Hungary between 1922 and 1949. It became the focal point of the so-called Budapest School of Esperanto literature. It was founded by ...
, 1931.
of the
Funeral Sermon and Prayer The Funeral Sermon and Prayer ( hu, Halotti beszéd és könyörgés) is the oldest known and surviving contiguous Hungarian text, written by one scribal hand in the Latin script and dating to 1192–1195. It is found on f.154a of the Codex Pr ...
, the first Hungarian text (12th century), in which he created fictitious archaic forms as though Esperanto were a Romance language deriving from
Vulgar Latin Vulgar Latin, also known as Popular or Colloquial Latin, is the range of non-formal registers of Latin spoken from the Late Roman Republic onward. Through time, Vulgar Latin would evolve into numerous Romance languages. Its literary counterpa ...
. Manuel Halvelik went further in 1969 with a book on . Initially he studies the problem of introduced archaism and mentions earlier trials such as André Cherpillod's 1998 translation of a 1743 French treatise on defecation using non-standard spellings with , , , , Ottó Haszpra's translation with accents and
geminated In phonetics and phonology, gemination (), or consonant lengthening (from Latin 'doubling', itself from '' gemini'' 'twins'), is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct fr ...
consonants, Lastly, he lays out the grammar of a fictitious ancestor of modern Esperanto. It echoes Proto-Esperanto in a more complex set of inflections, including
dative In grammar, the dative case ( abbreviated , or sometimes when it is a core argument) is a grammatical case used in some languages to indicate the recipient or beneficiary of an action, as in "Maria Jacobo potum dedit", Latin for "Maria gave Jacob ...
and
genitive case In grammar, the genitive case ( abbreviated ) is the grammatical case that marks a word, usually a noun, as modifying another word, also usually a noun—thus indicating an attributive relationship of one noun to the other noun. A genitive can a ...
s ending in and and separate verbal inflections for person and number, as well as "retention" of digraphs such as and , writing for , and the use of the letters , , , .


Comparison of Esperanto, Internasia, Ido, ''Esperant, and ''Arcaicam Esperantom''

The Esperanto
Pater noster 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 ...
follows, compared to the Internasia, Ido, ''Esperant'' and ''Arcaicam Esperantom'' versions.


See also

*
Gender reform in Esperanto 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. In the text below, when a proposed word or usa ...


References

{{Constructed languages International auxiliary languages Constructed languages