What strikes Slavs as obvious in this is inscrutable to the Germanic speaker. German er ging ‘he went/he was going’, like Esperanto li iris, translates Russian on šël, French il allait, Spanish andaba (action regarded as repeated or continuing) as well as it does Russian on pošël, French il alla, Spanish anduvo (a precise, one-shot, definite action). Consequently, Germanic-language Esperanto-speakers fail to find in the phrase estis subskribata the feeling of extendedness in time, in duration, which it conveys to the Slavs.
As for Romance speakers, they find this shade of meaning less foreign than the Germanic speakers do, since they have it in their conjugation; but in their languages it never affects participles, so that it is hard for them simply to follow the system which comes naturally to the Slavs. As a result, passive participles now constitute a point of tension in the language, and the usage is not too coherent here. One often notices Westerners using -ita participles in situations where the action is clearly a repeated one.
Let us now turn to some examples of the “law” in effect,
• In the sound system, the use of /kv/ where Romance languages have /kw/ or /k/ (a feature characterizing most but not all Germanic languages).
• Distinction between ‘her’ and ‘his’ (Esperanto ŝia and lia), unlike Romance languages. (French son livre, Spanish su libro, can both mean either ‘his book’ or ‘her book’.)
• Habit of placing the attribute before its head. In a Romance language one would never speak of a terrible, for me intolerable situation (Esperanto: terura, por mi neelportebla situacio); the adjectives would come after the noun. (Interestingly enough, in Zamenhof’s usage the attributive adjective generally follows the Polish and not the Russian model. For international language, for example, Zamenhof tends to say lingvo internacia, corresponding to Polish język międzynarodowy, rather than internacia lingvo, corresponding to Russian meždunarodnyj jazyk.)
• In the sound system, the voiceless consonants are unaspirated: /p, t, k/ are pronounced as in Polish and Italian, not as in English, German, and the Scandinavian languages.
• The Esperanto prefix mal-, used for the derivation of antonyms, was probably selected in preference to Latin in- and dis- or to Germanic un-(or on-) because, although it helps form many derivatives in Romance languages, where it specifically means ‘bad’, it also occurs as a Slavic prefix with the sense of ‘little’:
| French | Esperanto | English |
|---|---|---|
| malheureux | malfeliĉa | unhappy |
| maladroit | mallerta | clumsy |
| malpropre | malpura | dirty, untidy |
| malgracieux | malafabla | grouchy |
| Russian | Esperanto | English |
| malen’kij | malgranda | small |
| malo | malmulte | little (not much) |
| malodušie | malkuraĝo | timidity |
| malosil’nyi | malforta | weak |
The use of the Esperanto negative prefix ne-, we note in passing, is also Slavic:
| Esperanto | English | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Russian | nevidimyj | nevidebla | invisible |
| French | invisible | ||
| German | unsichtbar |
• Negative form of verb. The Esperanto structure (ne + verb) follows the model of all Slavic languages and of all Romance languages except French. It does not occur anywhere in the Germanic languages.
VIII. CONCLUSIONS
The problem of where to place Esperanto in the vast gamut of human languages is not easily solved. We have approached it here essentially from the point of view of the intrinsic structure. This has yielded the conclusion that Esperanto is basically an isolating language.
With respect to the origin of lexical material, we would have to classify it between the Romance and Germanic families, with predomi-nance of the Romance element. The two most closely connected languages would then be English and Romansh.
A criterion focusing on style and syntax would accentuate the Slavic quality of the International Language. But we have also noted that Esperanto borders on the agglutinative type in many ways.
The problem turns out to be especially complex because of two factors. On the one hand Zamenhof probably wanted to construct a highly coherent system, and the invariance of the morphemes most likely owes more to this intention than to any wish to follow a Creole or Chinese model. However, we cannot exclude the hypothesis that he might have been affected by an awareness that in the typical intercultural situation, when two people know just a few basic elements of a common language and try to get across to each other, they end up spontaneously transforming this poorly known language into a sort of isolating language.
Since Zamenhof himself had a command only of inflectional languages, their influence, though contrary to the basic principles chosen for the linguistic instrument which he forged, dominated his way of writing and speaking the newly built language, and the model offered to the public was subject to internal strains right from the start.
On the other hand, the isolating structure of Esperanto and its extreme regularity were sharply criticized by sophisticated people in Western Europe, leading Zamenhof more and more to mix the initial language with elements more consonant with the major Western structures; hence the existence of doublets like redaktisto/redaktoro ‘editor’, redaktejo/redakcio ‘editorial office’, etc. This tendency seems to contradict his early ideas, judging from the remark made in the fifteenth rule of the Fundamento (Fundamentals) to the effect that for the so-called “international words” one should follow a policy of taking only the root and then constructing the derivatives according to the autonomous rules of Esperanto itself.