words). The correlatives are a highly elaborated version of
correlative systems Zamenhof knew in Romance, Germanic, and
Slavic languages. In English, for example, if we want to ask a
question about place, we start with wh-, add -ere and get “where.”
Similarly, if we want to make a demonstrative statement about
place, we start with th- and add -ere to get “there.” Esperanto has
five groups of such word beginnings, not only for interrogation and
demonstration but also for indefinites, universals, and negatives. It
also has nine groups of word endings, not only for place but also for
time, quantity, manner, possession, entity, etc. Now imagine a grid
in which the five word beginnings are arranged horizontally across
the top, and the nine word endings are arranged in a column at the
far left. Combining beginnings and endings creates the forty-five
correlatives in the table.
Zamenhof never expected his readers to memorize the lists of
correlatives, and no tables appear in the inaugural pamphlet of
1887. Only a fraction of correlatives are in frequent use; many are
used routinely, and some are rarely used. Some can be used as
pronouns, for instance, ĉiuj, which means “everybody,” or as
adverbs—tiel, meaning “in this manner.” And they are essential for
word building: for instance, tiusense, meaning “in this sense,” or
ĉiutage, meaning “everyday.” When novices find a correlative
leaping into their conversation, it’s the first intuition they have of
their competence. And the casual, comfortable use of correlatives—
in conversation and as building blocks—is a good indicator of
fluency.
* * *
Given that Esperanto was forged in Europe, designed for Europeans,
and built from European languages, the charge of Eurocentrism is
hard to deny. As we shall see in Part III, however, far from
barricading it against non-Europeans, the Eurocentrism of Esperanto
was largely responsible for its initial forays into China and Japan.
That said, not all Esperantists agree that the language, even from a
linguistic perspective, is Eurocentric; some, citing Zamenhof’s
earliest accounts of creating the language, say that it is not Indo-
European at all. Zamenhof hinted at this when he confessed that
he’d created Esperanto in “the spirit of European languages” (my
italics). In the spirit—but not in the flesh? Apparently not, since
Esperanto’s morphology, the rules by which words change according
to tense, mood, number, and gender, is signally different from that
of Indo-European languages. Esperanto roots, unlike words in Indo-
European languages, never alter their internal constituents when
they take different endings. In English, today I swim, and yesterday I
swam; but in Esperanto the root for swimming—naĝ—is always the
same, no matter when I dive into the pool. Zamenhof’s aim was to
rationalize morphology, making roots instantly recognizable and
easy to look up in a dictionary. His term for the division of words
into “immutable syllables” (morphemes) was “dismemberment”:
I introduced a complete dismemberment of ideas into
independent words, so that the whole language consists,
not of words in different states of grammatical inflexion,
but of unchangeable words [roots]. [The reader] … will
perceive that each word [root] always retains its original
unalterable form—namely, that under which it appears in
the vocabulary. 19
Esperanto Table
Thus, insofar as Esperanto glues together immutable roots, endings,
and affixes, it is an agglutinative language, like Japanese,
Hungarian, and Navajo.
But though this morphology would have been alien to most
Europeans, Zamenhof counted on his European-derived lexicon to
make Esperanto seem natural and familiar to his European readers:
“I have adapted this principle of dismemberment to the spirit of the
European languages, in such a manner that anyone learning my
tongue from grammar alone … will never perceive that the structure
of the language differs in any respect from that of his mother-
tongue.” Like Bacon and Wilkins, Zamenhof demoted words to
secondary status; Esperanto was not a “world of words,” after all,
but a world of roots, concepts, structures that became a language
when humans actively and ingeniously turned them into words. And
though Zamenhof’s roots recall Bacon’s and Wilkins’s “real
characters,” there is a crucial difference. “Real characters” were an
end in themselves, inscribing a pristine and unique knowledge of the
world; but Zamenhof’s roots were destined for the rough and tumble
of endings, juxtapositions, and linkages, for conversation and
debate. Even Esperanto words are little dialogues between roots and
their affixes.
Esperanto was invented to bring conversation to a world of
misunderstanding. It was designed so that we should not always
speak “only unto ourselves,” but to others, despite difference of
nationality, creed, class, or race. But what Zamenhof discovered,
having created a language “in the spirit of European languages,” is
that it was more than a tradukilo—“a translation device.” By using
Esperanto, he came to think in Esperanto, which had a spirit all its
own. As he wrote to Borovko in 1896:
Practice, however, more and more convinced me that the
language still needed an elusive something, a connecting
element, giving the language life and a definite, fully
formed spirit.… I then began to avoid word for word
translations of this or the other tongue and tried to think
directly in the neutral language. Then I noticed that the
language in my hands was already ceasing to be a …
shadow of this or that other language … [that it] received
its own spirit, its own life, its own definite and clearly
expressed physiognomy, independent of any influences.
The words flowed all by themselves, flexibly, gracefully,
and utterly freely, like a living, native tongue. 20
Like Mary Shelley’s Doctor Frankenstein, who took lifeless body
parts and turned them into a creature, Doktoro Esperanto took the
“dismembered” parts of other languages and created a new being
entirely. It must have been a lonely venture, being the sole speaker
of a language yet to be put before the world. But whereas Doctor
Frankenstein fled the laboratory on seeing his creature, Zamenhof
engaged his in conversation. And then it happened: entrusted with
his own thoughts, the lingvo internacia suddenly spoke in its own
voice, from its own spirit, spontaneous, animated, free. By 1887,
there was no longer any question: a child of his own brain, this
“clumsy and lifeless collection of words” had become a living
language. If there is a note of wonder in his recognition that the
language had a life apart from his own, there was also apprehension
about the life it would live in other minds, on other tongues.
Samideanoj I
NASK, or Total Immersion