Esperanto: european or asiatic language?

3) In Esperanto, as in Chinese, the verb lacks a conjugation. Esperanto verb endings play a role analogous to the particles which colour or demarcate the time and aspect features of Chinese verbs.

4) The two languages structure the expression of negation similarly:

wŏshì	mi estas	I am
wŏbúshì	mi ne estas	I am not
kĕjiàn	videbla	visible
bùkĕjiàn	nevidebla	invisible

5) In Esperanto it is usually prepositions, rather than suffixes (as in agglutinative languages), that introduce complements. Chinese generally resembles Esperanto in this matter, and there are Chinese equivalents of such prepositions as al, kun, per, por, anstataŭ, etc. that are used as in Esperanto. (However, for time and place complements Chinese uses a postposition. Thus zhuōz-shàng, literally ‘table-above’ means ‘on the table’. This is often additionally heralded by a preposition: zài zhuōz-sháng, literally ‘at table-above’.)

6) As stated earlier, Esperanto word compounding also resembles that of Chinese, although Chinese uses the device much more extensively. Here are some more examples of morpheme-compounding which show an exact parallelism between the two languages.

Neantaŭ…ebla

vid- → neantaŭvidebla

sci- → neantaŭsciebla

sent- → neantaŭsentebla

kalkul- → neantaŭkalkulebla

Bùkĕyù…de

jiàn → bùkĕyùjiànde

zhī → bùkĕyùzhīde

găn → bùkĕyùgănde

suàn → bùkĕyùsuànde

Unfore…able

see → unforeseeable

know → unforeknowable

feel → indetectable in advance

reckon → unprecalculable

* * *

Sam…ano

urb- → samurbano

land- → samlandano

ide- → samideano

ras- → samrasano

religi- → samreligiano

Tóng…rén

chéng → tóngchéngrén

guó → tóngguórén

dào → tóngdàorén

zú → tóngzúrén

jiào → tóngjiàorén

Fellow…man

town → fellowtownsman

country → compatriot

belief → fellow believer

race → member of the same race

religion → coreligionist

No such isomorphism obtains between these and the inflectional languages. In most of the latter, many of the relevant words are missing, as we see illustrated in the irregularities in the English translations above. Those which do exist are formed irregularly, as one can see from the following:

samlaridano / tóngguórén / compatriot

samreligiano / tóngjiàorén / coreligionist.

English	fellow-citizen, compatriot	coreligionist
French	compatriote	coreligionnaire
German	Landsmann	Glaubensgenosse
Russian	sootečestvennik	edinoverec

Nevertheless, between Esperanto and other isolating languages there is also a difference: the indication of grammatical function is always obligatory in Esperanto and never so in other isolating languages. Because of this difference, and despite structural similarity, the style and overall sentence pattern of Esperanto diverge greatly from those of other isolating languages. In Chinese,

wŏ — I

wŏde — my

wŏmen — we

wŏmende — our

form a derivation table even more regular than in Esperanto. But the placement of the suffixes -de and -men is optional. Mia libro (Esperanto for ‘my book’) corresponds to either wŏde shū or wŏ shū. Sometimes an unambiguous context makes it possible to omit even the -men ending after a pronoun which, nevertheless, continues to function as a pluraclass="underline" wŏmende guó ‘our country’ can be (and usually is) clipped down to wŏ guó ‘my/our country’.

Thus the official Chinese text of the United Nations Charter begins Wŏ liánhéguó rénmín, literally ‘I United Nations people’, meaning ‘We, the peoples of the United Nations’.

This possibility of leaving grammatical function unexpressed enables isolating languages to neutralize the distinctions between passive and active, transitive and intransitive forms. More examples from Chinese:

wŏ	hái	méi	hé	jiŭ
I	yet	not-past	drink	wine

I have not yet drunk (the) wine.

(Méi is an amalgam indicating at once negation and past tense.)

Jiŭ	hái	méi	hé
wine	yet	not-past	drink

(The) wine has not yet been drunk.

In the case of wine there is no risk of confusion, but in many cases only context makes the meaning clear. The construction zhè yú bù néng chī le may mean ‘This fish can no longer be eaten’ or ‘This fish can no longer eat’.

(Ambiguities of this sort crop up often in all languages which do not clearly mark grammatical function, including English, which seems to be evolving towards a Chinese-like structure. Thus people have different interpretations of the name of the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA), an organization which played an influential part in the history of international planned languages. Some interpret it as ‘association for an international auxiliary language’; others[2] as ‘international association for an auxiliary language’. Oddly enough, such ambiguities usually go unnoticed: the first interpretation seems to have a kind of strength of obviousness which prevents consideration of the other possibilities and even the realization that they might exist.)

In general, isolating languages other than Esperanto mark tense only where the context does not indicate the time of a verb’s action. In Chinese, for instance, ordinary conversation distinguishes between

     tā lái ma? is he coming?

and

     tā láile ma? has he come? did he come?

But if there is no doubt as to when the matters spoken of came, are coming, or will come to pass, time remains unmarked:

Kŏng-zĭ	shì	Lŭguórén.
Confucius	is/was	a man from Lŭ.

Consider the verbs in the following sentence:

Yŏu	Have
yīg	a
rén	person
lái,	come,
dùi	to
tā	him
shuō:	say:
“Fūzi,	“Master,
nĭ	you
wúlùn	any
wăng	towards
nălĭ	where
qù,	go,
wŏ	I
yào	want
gēncóng	follow
nĭ.”	you”.

Here was a person who came and said to him: “Master, wherever you go, I want to follow you.”

[2]

E.g. Mr. Ric Berger in Historia del Lingua International, Morges: Editiones Interlingua, 1971, p. 2.