Esperanto

Last update: 26/09/19

A popular constructed-language, specifically an international auxiliary language initially published in 1887. It was designed by L. L. Zamenhof, a Jewish Polish man that wanted to unite the world through an easy-to-learn, common language. It's a language that was designed to evolve with its speakers, and has seen various changes over the years. It's like linguistic Lego, and has an interesting history.

Most of its vocabulary was created from European languages, but communities outside of Europe have added their own terms. Keep in mind this was designed by one guy in 1887. The grammar is flexible: It has a simple conjugation system, mostly free word order, and is agglutinative.

Its success was impacted by wars and French supremacists. You will never guess why Hitler banned it.

Some grammar

Examples

Ruĝa pomo.

Red apple.

Because the word order is free, you can swap the words around and it will still make sense.

Pomo ruĝa.

Apple red. (Red apple.)

This word order is used in Spanish for example, and makes it more intuitive for Spanish speakers.

Mi manĝas ruĝan pomon.

I eat [a] red apple.

There's no "a" or "an" in Esperanto.

This sentence has a verb (eat/manĝas) in it, so -n is added to the object, showing what is getting "verbed". This is considered the hardest rule for English speakers to grasp, so it's all easy sailing from here.

Mi ruĝajn pomojn manĝas.

I red apple eat. (I eat [a] red apple.)

The last sentence reworded in subject-object-verb order. This is why the -n rule exists: It allows sentences to be rearranged, making the language easier for speakers of non-subject-verb-object languages.

There are other rules of course, but that's the gist of it.

Changes

Gender Reform

This is a common modern reform. While the language lacks grammatical gender, feminine words have to be specified with an affix, unlike masculine words. With the gender reform, masculine and feminine forms have to be specified with an affix.

A new pronoun, ri was added as an alternative to ĝi, the neutral pronoun. Ĝi was defined as applying to sentient beings, but because the only use in official materials were on children, some Esperantists treat it similarly to the it pronoun in English. I believe children are sentient, so I just use ĝi unless specified.

Ĥ to K

Ĥ is pronounced similarly to K. It's the "ch" sound in echo. To make things easier, some Esperantists have stopped using Ĥ completely, replacing it with K.

Links

Study

No need to read all of these, skim until something sticks.

Informative

Communities

Dictionaries and text search

Immersion

There are uploads of audiobooks on various video sites, search for "sonlibro."

History

Text files

Fun to look back on. Some of these have encoding errors, so characters such as ĝ display improperly.