Esperantido
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Esperantido is the term used within the Esperanto and constructed language communities to describe a language project based on or inspired by Esperanto. Esperantido originally referred to the language of that name, which later came to be known as Ido. The word Esperantido is derived from Esperanto plus the suffix -ido (a descendant). Thus Esperantido literally means "an offspring of Esperanto".
Esperanto reforms
A number of esperantidos have been created to address a number of perceived flaws or weaknesses of Esperanto, or of other esperantidos.
Zamenhof himself proposed in 1894 several changes in the language. The Esperantists of the time rejected them, however. It has been suggested that Zamenhof made the changes very radical to assure their rejection and reinforce the established version[citation needed].
Ido, the foremost of the esperantidos, sought to bring Esperanto into closer alignment with Western European expectations of an ideal language, based on familiarity with French, English, and Italian. Reforms included changing the spelling by removing non-Roman letters such as ĉ and re-introducing the k/q dichotomy; removing a couple of the more obscure phonemic contrasts (one of which, [x], has been effectively removed from standard Esperanto); ending the infinitives in -r and the plurals in -i like Italian; eliminating adjectival agreement, and removing the need for the accusative case by setting up a fixed default word order; reducing the amount of inherent gender in the vocabulary, providing a masculine suffix and an epicene third-person singular pronoun; replacing the pronouns and correlatives with forms more similar to the Romance languages; adding new roots where Esperanto uses the antonymic prefix mal-; replacing much of Esperanto's other regular derivation with separate roots, which are thought to be easier for Westerners to remember; and replacing much of the Germanic and Slavic vocabulary with Romance forms, such as navo for English-derived ŝipo. An example of an Ido Pater noster is given below.
Sen:esepera was an attempt to make Esperanto's phonology (sounds) more accessible. The consonantal phonemes are limited to fourteen found in 95% of natural languages, and the only allowed consonant clusters are nasal+plosive. (Thus the esepera in its name, from Esperanto "espera".) It was created to be taught to those who are monolingual in one language with a restricted sound set.
One of the more interesting esperantidos, grammatically, is Universal. It adds a schwa to break up consonant clusters, marks the accusative case with a nasal vowel, has inclusive and exclusive pronouns, uses partial reduplication for the plural (tablo "table", tatablo "tables"), and inversion for antonyms (mega "big", gema "little"; donu "give", nodu "receive"; tela "far", leta "near"). Inversion can be seen in,
al gefinu o fargu kaj la egnifu o grafu
he finished reading [lit. 'to read'] and she started to write
The antonyms are al "he" and la "she" (compare li "s/he"), the ge- (completive) and eg- (inchoative) aspects, fin- "to finish" and nif- "to begin", and graf- "to write" and farg- "to read".
The Universal reduplicated plural and inverted antonyms are reminiscent of the musical language Solresol.
While most esperantidos aim to simplify Esperanto, Poliespo ("polysynthetic Esperanto") makes it considerably more complex. Besides the polysynthetic morphology, it incorporates much of the phonology and vocabulary of the Cherokee language. It has fourteen vowels, six of them nasalized, and three tones.
Esperanto specializations
There are various projects to adapt Esperanto to specialized uses. Esperanto de DLT is one; it was created to be an interlanguage of machine translation.
Baza is a proposal to limit Esperanto to a vocabulary of only some 400 words as an interlanguage between the various esperantidos, much as Basic English sought to limit English to 850 words.
Esperant'
There are also extensions of Esperanto which are created for amusement.
One such style, called Esperant’, is rumoured to have been started in a chat room, but it is never seen. Like other Idos, information on the idiom is rare although some aspects of its elision are adopted by some esperantists in day-to-day conversation. These features of Esperant' do not go against standard Esperanto grammatical forms and are widely understood, but others are less logical and make communication slow and disjointed.
Sentence structure
- Subject - 'O' ending is removed. Knabo becomes knab'.
- Plural - 'Oj' ending is removed and replaced with the suffix 'aro' (collection), which changes to ar'. Knaboj becomes knabar'.
- Adjectives - 'A' or 'aj' endings removed and adjectives are combined with the noun they describe. Bela knabino becomes belknabin'.
- Direct object - '-n' ending is removed and 'je' is placed before the word.
- Verbs - Verbal ending removed and used as an action-noun with 'o' ending, which is also removed.
- The verbal ending is moved to the preposition in the sentence, which then acts as a verb. If there is no preposition in the sentence, 'jen' behold is used.
Example: Some boys love the pretty girl.
Esperanto Knaboj amas la belan knabinon.
Esperant' Jenas am' de knabar' je la belknabin'.
Literally Behold the love of boys to the pretty-girl.
An example of an Esperant’ Pater noster is given below.
Esperantidos to add variety to Esperanto
Esperanto has little in the way of the slang, dialectical variation, or archaisms found in natural languages. Several authors have felt a need for such variation, either for effect in original literature or to translate such variation in national literature. Proto-Esperanto would theoretically fulfill the need for archaism, but too little survives for it to be used extensively.
In 1931 Kalman Kalocsay published a translation [1] of the Funeral Sermon and Prayer, the first Hungarian text (12th century), in which he created fictitious archaic forms as though Esperanto were a Romance language deriving from Vulgar Latin. Manuel Halvelik went further in 1969 with a book on Arcaicam Esperantom, where he laid out the grammar of a fictitious ancestor of modern Esperanto. It echos Proto-Esperanto in a more complex set of inflections, including dative and genitive cases ending in -d and -es and separate verbal inflections for person and number, as well as "retention" of digraphs such as ph and tz, writing c for [k], and the use of the letters q, y, w.
Havelik also created Popido ("Popular Idiom") to play the role of a substandard register of Esperanto that, among other things, does away with much of Esperanto's inflectional system.
Samples of Ido, Esperant', Arcaicam Esperantom, and Popido
The Esperanto Pater noster follows, compared to the Ido, Esperant’ and Arcaicam Esperantom versions. A phrase in Popido is listed below.
| Esperanto | Arcaicam Esperantom | ||
|---|---|---|---|
|
Patro nia, kiu estas en la ĉielo, |
Patrom noses, cuyu estas en chielom, | ||
| Ido | Esperant’ | ||
|
Patro nia, qua esas en la cielo, |
Nipatr’, kies est’ ĉielas, |
Sample of Popido
- redonu al tu vir si pistol
which in standard Esperanto would be,
- redonu al tiu viro sian pafilon
(give that man back his gun)
See also
- Mundolinco (the first Esperantido)
- Románico (a cross-blend of Esperanto, Ido and Interlingua)
References
- Elektronika Bulteno de EASL includes the short story La Mezepoka Esperanto from Lingvo Stilo Formo, 2nd cheap edition, Kalman Kalocsay, Budapest, Literatura Mondo, 1931.
External links
- Patro Nia -- (pictured on a wall of the Convent of the Pater Noster)
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Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia; from the article "Esperantido". Image Credit.
