Is Esperanto then an isolating language?
VI. VARIOUS LANGUAGE PLANES
In fact, it is not possible to classify Esperanto without distinguishing at least three planes: intrinsic, intermediate and extrinsic. To define to which plane one or another language trait belongs, we shall use the following criterion: a given trait is considered as belonging to the extrinsic plane if a change can be introduced in it without giving to the speakers, generally, the feeling that the language is altered in its essence or in its identity; it is considered as belonging to the intrinsic plane if a change in it creates the feeling that the language has been fundamentally altered.
From this point of view, the quality of the sounds is an extrinsic trait. No one feels the language very different depending upon whether a speaker has an Italian or a Danish accent in Esperanto. In both cases, Esperanto remains Esperanto. In the same way, English remains English, whether it is spoken with a British, Indian or American accent. To substitute one word for another does not call forth a sense of an important change either. We do not have the feeling that we are speaking a different language if we switch from
“My father did not want her friend to use his novel automobile” to
“My dad did not wish her pal to use his brand new car”.
The given arrangement of sounds that expresses a concept we can therefore regard as an extrinsic trait.
When we reach the level of word order, the impression that we are changing the language becomes more acute. If I say My father wanted not that her friend use the car brand new, I arouse a sense of strangeness. But nevertheless this change does not render the language completely foreign. It remains English, even though perhaps poetic or archaic. We have reached a more interior plane than that of the sound system or the roots, but we are not yet at the kernel. Syntax is somewhat closer to the center. The phrase My father he wanted not that her friend she used of the brand new car sounds more foreign than the other just presented.
And yet we do not have the same impression that the language has been attacked in its very identity as we would encountering such phrases as I’s fatherman ha-unwill she’s friendman go-use he’s new-new earthing or Fatherem no willis friendha usu newan caron. These sentences are no longer English, despite the fact that nearly all the roots have been preserved and that the phonetic system need not be changed to pro-nounce them. Why? Because this time we have assaulted the intrinsic plane, that of fundamental grammatical conception. The verb system, the possessive adjectives and other traits are quite different from even archaic, poetic, regional or mildly foreign English.
Proof that this plane is more fundamental than that of the forms of words we can take from the following point: the average speaker of English feels that a phrase as My moffy did not sut her shramp to gose the insable flar, although incomprehensible — it means nothing — might nevertheless be some kind of English or of English slang (in other words, it does not attack the identity of the language), whereas the sentence presented above Fatherem no willis friendha…) strikes even those who can decipher it as belonging to another linguistic universe.
Accordingly, we can distinguish the following language planes:
1) The kernel or intrinsic (fundamental, essential) plane: the basic type of grammar and of derivation, i.e. the manner in which the relations between words are indicated (e.g. which determines which), the details about this or that nuance (whether a thing is singular or plural, whether it is completed or continues, etc.), and the relations between the concepts (for example between ‘brother’ and ‘brotherly’, between ‘avoid’ and ‘unavoidable’, or among ‘hair’, ‘split’ and ‘hairsplitter’);
2) the intermediate plane: syntax and customary word order;
3) the extrinsic plane: the actual forms of words and the system of sounds.
VII. WHERE DOES ESPERANTO FIT?
The Intrinsic Plane
As far as its core is concerned, Esperanto is an isolating language. It completely fulfils the structural criterion defined above: in variance of morphemes. Variations such as direkc/direkt or frag/frak make up only an exceedingly small proportion of what is said and written in Esperanto (between 0.1% and 0.3% of the sample studied by us). Further, these are not cases of a single morpheme occuring in various shapes, as with French directeur/diriger. This is shown by the fact that every Esperanto root can give rise to an entire series of new derivatives. Thus from direktor ‘director’ we get direktori, ‘to act as a director’, direktorigi ‘to appoint as director’, direktorado ‘the exercising of the functions of a director’, which are not at all synonyms with direkti ‘to direct’, direktigi ‘to make somebody direct something’, direktado ‘the act of directing” and the like, from direkt. These are therefore cases of roots which are obviously related in terms of etymology but which are, structurally speaking, distinct morphemes.
The idea that Esperanto is an isolating language is supported by the many basic features it shares with Chinese. (Since this text is meant for laymen, the linguistic facts are couched in terminology which is familiar to Westerners. It should be borne in mind that these terms, historically anchored as they are in the Indo-European understanding of language, are not fully adequate to describe the structures of other types of languages. The use of terms like “preposition” or “adverb”, for example, must not be taken to mean that Esperanto and Chinese have prepositions and adverbs the way Western languages do.)
1) The Esperanto “affixes” are actually full-fledged words. In this respect Esperanto is somewhat more isolating than Chinese is. Many Chinese affixes take on a new meaning when used alone. For example, the Chinese suffix -jia means ‘specialist’ in compounds:
| shēngwùxué | biology |
| shēngwùxuéjiā | biologist |
| kèxué | science |
| kèxuéjiā | scientist |
| zhèngzhì | politics |
| zhèngzhìjiā | politician |
But jiā means ‘family, home’ when used alone. Many Chinese affixes cannot be used independently at all. For example the syllable nü designates human females, but requires completion to stand as a word. ‘Woman’ is nüren (from rén ‘human being’) or nür or nüz (formed with noun formatives -r or -z). The suffix -huà, like the English -ation refers to a process. It occurs in lādīnghuà, ‘romanization’ (from Lādīng ‘Latin’), but, like -ation, it cannot stand alone.
2) The Esperanto relation between possessive adjectives and personal pronouns has an exact counterpart in Chinese:
| wŏ | (mi) | I | wŏde | (mia) | my |
| tā | (li) | he | tāde | (lia) | his |
This is no mere surface detail or coincidence, but on the contrary follows directly from the basically isolating nature of both languages. Neither agglutinative nor inflectional languages show this feature, which would not conform to their spirit.