Be that as it may, another factor made its presence felt: the “substratum”. The community which adopted Esperanto speaks, for the most part, inflectional languages, and consequently is unfamiliar with or dislikes the latent potential of isolating languages, with the result that it tends to solve problems of expression (particularity of terminology) along lines which may be viewed as antithetical to the basic spirit of the language. Zamenhof’s vocabulary, especially in the texts of the early years, is much more “Chinese” than that of most later writers. Thus Zamenhof used to say ununombro ‘singular’ (an exact counterpart to Chinese dānshù from dān ‘single’ and shù ‘number’) where later grammarians introduced the term singularo.
Given a heterogeneous substratum, the language has been pulled and stretched by divergent tendencies. The vocabulary shows a tension between, on the one hand, a “naturalistic” tendency, which shows up in many places in the Plena Ilustrita Vortaro (Complete Illustrated Dictionary) — a tendency to borrow profusely from Greek and Latin, more or less respecting their spelling systems (leading to words like relegacii and ekshibicio)—and on the other hand an “Esperantist simplicity”, i.e. an inclination to use short roots (like rilegi and ekzibo) and to exploit Esperanto’s derivational and compounding possibilities instead of intro-ducing neologisms.
The grammar shows another tension: that between “conservatism” (for example in a refusal to use the form ĝis kiam ‘until when’ for ‘until’ or the form sen …/ ‘without …ing’) and “boldness” i.e. a wish to exploit as completely as possible the latent possibilities of the language, whatever the usage in Zamenhof’s day may have been. Examples of the latter include introduction of participles ending in -unta and -uta and abbreviation (on the part of Lanti, among others) of the traditional forms such as junulino or malsanulino to junino or malsanino. Many other examples readily come to mind.
An individual may, of course, be conservative on one point and bold on another. At first sight it would appear that the majority of the Esperanto-speaking public leans towards the “conservative” end, while authors, especially poets, prefer to be “bold”.
It is to a large extent in these tensions that Esperanto’s qualities as a living language are rooted. From a structuralist perspective, it is fascinating to observe the evolution of this extraordinary phenomenon. We find here a structure created by a single person but eluding his control and obeying laws whose existence he, the author, was unaware of. We find it turning into the locus of a remarkable dialectic in the hands of an international community constituting a true diaspora. And no authority, even if prestigiously termed an Academy, can ever freeze the conflicting tendencies toward assimilation and conformity which force the linguistic structure to adjust to the community that uses it, and in turn force the community to adjust to a linguistic structure whose laws are stronger than the community itself.