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".
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[edit] 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.
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.
Praktika Esperanto was inspired by Ido, but had less sweeping goals: Making the verb endings (-as, -is, -os, -us) more easily differentiated in normal speech, removing non-Roman letters whenever practical; and adding new roots where Esperanto added mal- to another word.
Sen:esepera went in another direction. Not only was the morphology changed, but the phonology was also overhauled to make it 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.
Most esperantidos attempt to bring the language closer to a particular ethnic language or region. One of the very few that instead aims to make it more universal is Bonjang, which takes much of its vocabulary from Malay, Tagalog, Mandarin, and Swahili. It is difficult to recognize that the language is even related to Esperanto. For example,
- Ya yotang ginzim umba vampun yo mungkeng kasum,
is, in Esperanto,
- La kato granda ĉasas rapide la muson malgrandan,
(The large cat quickly chases the small mouse).
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.
[edit] 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.
[edit] 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.
[edit] 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.
[edit] Personal Esperantidos
Finally, there are projects designed to give Esperanto greater variety, such as "dialects" or pseudo-historical forms, usually for literary purposes. Two of the more notable are Popido and Arcaicam Esperantom, both created by Manuel Halvelik. Popido, or "Popular Idiom", is intended to be a substandard "dialect" of Esperanto, that, for example, does away with much of Esperanto's inflectional system. Arcaicam Esperantom is a fictitious "archaic" version of Esperanto that "retains" a more complex inflectional system (dative and genitive cases in -d and -es, verbal inflections for person and number, etc.), as well as orthographic digraphs ph, tz, etc., hard c for [k], and the letters q, y, w.
[edit] 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)
[edit] External links
- Patro Nia -- (pictured on a wall of the Convent of the Pater Noster)
