Esperanto
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| Esperanto | |
| Spoken in: | most countries of Earth |
| Timeline/Universe: | international auxiliary language |
| Total speakers: | unknown (estimated ca. 1 million) |
| Genealogical classification: | A posteriori
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| Basic word order: | SVO |
| Morphological type: | agglutinating |
| Morphosyntactic alignment: | accusative |
| Created by: | |
| L. L. Zamenhof | 1887 |
Esperanto is the world's most popular international auxiliary language, spoken by an unknown number of people (estimates vary a lot, but 1 million is probably in the right ballpark) all over the world. The name derives from the author L. L. Zamenhof's pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto 'Dr. Hopeful'; he himself named it La Internacia Lingvo 'The International Language'.
Phonology
Consonants
The 22 consonants are:
| Bilabial | Labio- dental |
Alveolar | Post- alveolar |
Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n | ||||||||||||
| Plosive | p | b | t | d | k | ɡ | ||||||||
| Affricate | ts | tʃ | dʒ | |||||||||||
| Fricative | f | v | s | z | ʃ | ʒ | x | h | ||||||
| Trill | r | |||||||||||||
| Approximant | l | j | ||||||||||||
Vowels
| Front | Back | |
|---|---|---|
| Close | i | u |
| Mid | e | o |
| Open | a | |
Stress
Stress in Esperanto words always falls on the penultimate syllable.
Morphology
Esperanto morphology is perfectly regular and agglutinating, but not rich. Nouns end in -o, to this are added the endings -j for plural and -n for accusative:
Adjectives are inflected the same way, except that they end in -a rather than -o. The definite article is always la; there is no indefinite article. The personal pronouns are:
The demonstrative and relative pronouns are called "correlatives" in Esperanto grammar, and align in a famous table:
The inflection of the verb is summed up in the following chart:
Examples:
SyntaxEsperanto's basic word order is SVO, prepositional, with modifiers following the noun, but its noun case marking and adjective agreement makes any word order possible. Generally, Esperanto syntax follows Standard Average European patterns. Reception among conlangersThe feelings of conlangers toward Esperanto are divided. Some acknowledge it as elegant, but many feel that they could do better and criticize it for its Standard Average European structure.
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