Justin B Rye 1993–2012
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Learn Not To Speak Esperanto has moved into this ToC-ified subdirectory to allow more room for appendices.  Rather than maintain the latest revisions on both editions I've reduced its original location to a redirector.

(Latest changes asterisked)

SECTION A: OVERVIEW

A1: Contents

A2: Background

Esperanto was invented in 1887 by an oculist from Białystok, Dr Ludwig L Zamenhof (AKA Doctor Hopeful, hence the name).  Even its proponents estimate there to be barely a million Esperanto speakers in the world (largely Central/Eastern Europe); compare Albanian with about eight million, Mandarin Chinese with 1000 million, and English with (depending how you count) 500 to 1800 million.  Even Klingon appears to be outselling Esperanto round here.

Most people I know despise Esperanto, but largely for daft reasons – Everyone speaks English nowadays anyway, It sounds a bit foreign, It has no cultural identity of its own, etc.  I, on the other hand, dislike it for being:

• Just good enough to inspire anti-revisionist fanaticism!
• Just bad enough to strike the general public as risible!
• Easily improvable enough to inspire constant half-baked reforms whose inventors argue amongst themselves!

So the result of Zamenhof's labours is that it's inconceivable that any artificial Interlang, however good, could succeed.

A3: Scoring Criteria

An optimally designed world auxiliary language would be

1. Clear – i.e. all its rules would be explicitly established, so users can filter out an utterance's ungrammatical parsings.
2. Simple – involving a minimum of grammatical complexity (e.g. irregular forms, fancy inflections, or arbitrary categories like feminine).
3. International – as learnable for Tamils, Koreans, or Zulus as for the Europeans who already have so many advantages.
4. Elegant – designed to strike potential speakers as painless and natural to use.

My contention is that Esperanto contrariwise is

1. Obscure – full of assumed rules and unadvertised usages.
2. Complex – with cases, adjectival concord, subjunctives etc.
3. Parochial – designed to appeal primarily to Europeans.
4. Clumsy – full of hard sounds, odd letters, and absurd words.

It looks like some sort of wind-up-toy Czech/Italian pidgin.  And if there's one part of this world that doesn't need a local pidgin, it's Europe, which not only has (at a guess) the world's highest concentration of professional polyglots, but is also the home of the current de facto global lingua franca: English.

If Esperanto vanished from existence, nothing of value would be lost; the world shows no sign of wanting to learn a constructed international auxiliary language.  Maybe someday that'll change – but if it does, we'll have no shortage of candidates to choose from, since Esperanto has any number of better designed but less well known competitors.  (They may have fewer existing speakers, but the difference is dwarfed by the billions they'd need to gain to be accounted a success.)  Or the UN could hire a linguist or two and get a language purpose-built, the way Hollywood now routinely does for fantasy movies!

A4: Notation

I'm following linguistics convention by using <angle> and /slant/ brackets to distinguish <orthographic> and /phonemic/ analyses; and I'm now using proper Unicode IPA for phonetic symbols.  Non-linguists can read anything that's unclear as some strange noise.

Esperanto also uses some unusual characters: circumflexed consonants and a breve-marked vowel (<ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, ŭ>).  For example, the Esperanto for (accusative case) surroundings is <ĉirkaŭaĵojn>, pronounced roughly CHEER-COW-AH-ZHOYN.  However, there's an officially accepted way of avoiding these hard-to-type Unicode glyphs, so outside Section C that's the standard I'll be adopting.

A5: Disclaimer

My clarity criterion strikes some readers as unfair in its apparent assumption that the rotten self-teaching texts I've been exposed to are all the Esperanto grammar there is… so just take my rhetorical questions as attempts to hint that there are language-design questions that Zamenhof showed no sign of recognising, and which his successors prefer not to mention.  Modern Esperantists acknowledge no Standards Maintenance Authority; so on the one hand directed fundamental reforms are impossible, and on the other dialects inevitably confuse the issue.  And please bear in mind that my critique is aimed at Esperanto's pretensions as a global auxiliary language; if you're a hobbyist polyglot looking for a seventh European language to learn, feel free to waste your spare time on it.

SECTION B: PHONEMES (inventory of sounds used)

B1: Introduction

Phonemes are the mutually distinct sound elements which a particular language recognises as fundamental building blocks for word-making.  English – my dialect, anyway – has 19 vowels (mostly diphthongs), and 24 consonants (including the two affricates /dʒ, tʃ/, usually spelt <j, ch>).  For more details see my Phonemic Transcription Key page.

B2: Clarity

Natural languages have rules determining what sounds are accepted as forms of what phoneme.  For instance, in English /t/ may be an aspirated alveolar plosive, a glottal stop, or even a tap; in Spanish /t/ is usually an unaspirated dental plosive, and the tap is heard as an R-sound.  Esperanto speakers show no agreement about whether it even has such rules.  (And the ones writing to me seem particularly unwilling to agree on whether inter-word glottal stops are compulsory, optional, or prohibited.)

B3: Simplicity

First, why is the inventory so irregular?  There's no single-phoneme /dz/, so why is /ts/ necessary?  Why /oi/ but not /ou/?  And second, why does it need so many consonants?  The worldwide average is to have about two dozen consonant phonemes, and plenty of languages get by with fewer – for example:

B4: Internationalism

Compare the Esperanto inventory with the following:

The only phonemes Zamenhof left out of Esperanto are the ones that are hard to recognise as such – the soft (palatalised) consonants, nasal vowels, and /dz/!  And note that I say Eastern Polish; this isn't just his natural Slavonic bias, it's the Białystok dialect!

B5: Elegance

Complaints about the ugly strings of affricates etcetera are always brushed off as a matter of taste.  But surveys say distinctions like /v/-versus-/w/, /ts/-versus-/tʃ/, /z/-versus-/ʒ/, /h/-versus-/x/ are statistically rare, so it's the people who find Esperanto's sounds strange and awkward who are being objective!

B6: Miscellaneous

This crazed inventory is a splendid demonstration of Dr Z's linguistic incompetence; he couldn't see past the spelling rules of the first language he learned to write with the Roman alphabet!

SECTION C: ORTHOGRAPHY (grapheme system)

C1: Introduction

A grapheme is a contrastive unit in a spelling system.  Not surprisingly, Esperanto spelling is much better than English (in which <gh> is famously unruly – see my own Spelling Reform page); it can even be charted in a strict one-to-one correspondence with its phonemic inventory:

But not content with being phonemic (one phoneme: one grapheme), Esperanto also claims to be phonetic (one sound: one letter), which is (a) pointless and (b) infeasible.

C2: Clarity

Does Esperanto allow any variation in its sounds?  Are we to believe that the <n> in <ŝnuro> (rope) is acoustically and articulatorily identical to the one in <fingro> (finger)?  If so, Esperanto must be damned tricky to pronounce.  Or do Esperanto <l>s vary subtly like the ones in <athletes' schools>, and its <t>s like those in <too strict>?  What rules govern (e.g.) strings of voiced and unvoiced sounds, like the <kv> in <kvar> (four) and the <kz> in <ekzisti> (to exist)?  And is the word <naŭa> ninth pronounced /naw a/ or /na wa/?

C3: Simplicity

The system is bizarrely irregular.  Why is there a semivowel grapheme U-breve but no I-breve?  (Clue: compare Belorussian!)  Why S-circumflex but no Z-circumflex?  Why is the affricate G-circumflex paired up not with K-circumflex but with C-circumflex?  Why is the velar fricative H-circumflex dressed up as a form of the glottal approximant H?  And above all, why distinguish between /\ and \/ diacritics like this?

C4: Internationalism

Writing <c, oj, eŭ, ŝ> in preference to, say, <ts, oy, ew, x> is a blatant display of parochial spelling traditions.  Most of the world's typewriters have a W key; none have a C with a circumflex accent.  No, not even in Croatia; you're thinking of hooks and acutes!

C5: Elegance

The problems with these diacritics were obvious enough to force a concession: we are permitted to resort to the digraphs <ch, gh, sh, jh, hh(?!)>, plus unadorned <u> – hence <chirkauajhojn>.  Many Esperantists advocate other ASCIIifications such as <cxirkauxajxojn>, but I'll stick with the less offputting version.

C6: Miscellaneous

Just to show how easy it is, here is an alternative system with no diacritics (all compound phonemes become compound graphemes):

Thus <ĉirkaŭaĵojn> becomes <txirkawajoyn>.  (I've heard from a good few independent inventors of schemes like this – it's a no-brainer.)  But I could hardly stop there; the nearest half-way sane version is <kirkuajo>!

SECTION D: PHONOTACTICS (strings of sounds)

D1: Introduction

Phonotactics is the system of rules governing what sequences of sounds are permitted.  In English, for instance, /həŋ, viʒnz, streŋθs/ occur (<hung, visions, strengths>), while /ŋəh, ʒnzvi, stle/ are illegal.

D2: Clarity

The only hints we get about Esperanto phonotactics are bland reassurances about how euphonious it all is.  There clearly are restrictions: Esperanto has plenty of words like <shtrumpo, knabchjo, postscio> (stocking, sonny, hindsight) but none like <snouz, uahda, gvbrdgvnit> (cf. English snows, Arabic one, Georgian you tear us to pieces).  The extra /o/ sound in compounds like <dormo-chambro> bedroom is optional, but leaving such issues to Esperantists' native-language prejudices results in coinages like <antikv-scienco>, archaeology.  No, I'm not making this up…

D3: Simplicity

In this context, simplicity means learnable rules for building speakable words.  A good proportion of the world's population find any syllable more complex than consonant + vowel hard to pronounce, which limits things unreasonably.

D4: Internationalism

Zamenhof's efforts to disguise Esperanto as Italian by adding final vowels are miserably inadequate.  Italian uses closed syllables sparingly (chiefly ending in /r, l, n/); Esperanto loves them.  Italian allows few strings of consonants (mainly things like /bl, gr, sp/ and doubled letters); Esperanto permits many.  And the rigid penult-stress rule may be like Italian, but it's even more like Polish.

D5: Elegance

The whole problem is that Zamenhof mistook his own prejudices about euphony (see Appendix Y) for a globally accepted standard of phonotactic elegance.  There is no such standard; Italian is full of tongue-twisters to Japanese-speakers (<postbellico>, post-war), and vice-versa (<hyakugyoo>, a hundred lines).  Even consonant + vowel languages have words like <'aueue>, Tahitian for trouble…

D6: Miscellaneous

It's pathetic!  Zamenhof didn't just give his brainchild a bad phonotactic system; he failed to recognise it needed any!  How can it claim to be naturally euphonious when it has no regulations about euphony?

SECTION E: DERIVATION (wordbuilding)

E1: Introduction

Zamenhof put a lot of work into creating a range of uniformly applicable prefixes and suffixes, such as <-ig-> render (or cause, arrange to have done) and <-igh-> become (or do intransitively) – as in <blankigi/blankighi>, whiten (something)/whiten (= go pale).  Nonetheless, his original ideas required several amendments before they were usable, and they still look rotten to me.

E2: Clarity

These affixes are often baffling.  In <cigaredujo>, cigarette box, <-uj-> means (bulk) container.  But it also occurs in <Svedujo>, Sweden (not Swedish ghetto) and <pomujo>, apple tree (not apple barrel).  Modern Esperantists just say <Svedlando, pomarbo>.  Then there's <sendajho>, transmission, in which <-ajh-> is concrete (?) expression of; yet this is arbitrarily extended to form <majstrajho>, masterpiece and <porkajho>, pork.

E3: Simplicity

Who needs all these special affixes?  Isn't the two-word expression make white adequate?  Don't tell me we need complex affixing rules to produce indefinably subtle poetic shades of meaning; Chinese has no such rules, but is renowned for its nuanced poetry.  Besides, if we need affixes like <ek-> (suddenly), <-ach-> (contemptible) and <pra-> (ancient), why are there none meaning -ful, beloved, or -ward?  We can invent new ones, I suppose; but what determines which are prefixes and which are suffixes?

E4: Internationalism

Different languages have very different approaches to building words (see Appendix T on morphological groundplans).  Esperanto's system of chaining together strings of invariable affixes uses the same pseudo-agglutinative groundplan spearheaded by Volapük (see Appendix X), which is at least more straightforward than alternatives like the Hebrew/Arabic system of triliteral roots.  If there's a problem, it's that Dr Zamenhof seems strangely biassed against any of the range of possible affix forms spread across the globe by the classical languages.  Compare the prevalence of the abstract noun endings <-ia, -ity, -(t)ion> with Esperanto's use of <-eco>.  Those <-ion> words Esperanto does condescend to admit have to hide their family resemblance; thus <regiono>, region but <nacio>, nation.

E5: Elegance

Clockwork morphology can produce some amusing quirks:

• accidental freaks – <chieaj>, ubiquitous (pl.); <majstrskribisto>, master-writer; <aghighi>, to age
• false resemblances – <foresta>, absent; <fosilo>, a spade; <truanta>, piercing
• overfussy distinctions – <edzighi, edzigi, edzinighi, edzinigi, geedzighi, geedzigi (sin)> all mean to marry.

And then there are ambiguities such as <kataro> = catarrh versus <kataro> = herd of cats – there are so many of these I've given them their own appendix.

Strangest of all, though, is the prefix <mal->, a meaning-reverser like Newspeak un-.  The only word for bad is <malbona>; cheap is <malmultekosta>, left is <maldekstra> and so on.  It's an imaginative vocabulary shortcut, but it's inconsistent (south should be <malnorda>), gratingly artificial (<malmalbona>, not bad?) and misleading (<malodora> isn't malodorous)!

E6: Miscellaneous

Esperanto has a special suffix to mark feminine (or to be more accurate, female) nouns: <-in-> (from German; in Romance languages that's a diminutive).  But this has no equivalent masculine marker – being male is just taken to be the default!  See Appendix O on Sexism.

SECTION F: LEXICON (vocabulary sources)

F1: Introduction

Esperanto is notable among auxiliary language schemes for having possessed a well stocked dictionary from the start, made up from words out of an assortment of European languages.  Then again it also had notably warped selection criteria, taking <tornistro> (rucksack) from Danish <tornister>; <nepre> (certainly) from Russian <nepremenno>… and so on, to form a peculiar stew of words picked for their familiarity to nineteenth-century Europeans.

F2: Clarity

In this case I'll take clarity to mean having an adequate stock of technical, poetic, and everyday words to be generally usable.  Zamenhof was if anything overzealous in this department, stuffing his basic wordlists with trivial distinctions such as <kiso> a kiss versus <shmaco> a noisy kiss, and so on; who asked for these?

F3: Simplicity

This is the inverse problem, overlooked by Zamenhof.  Language learners want to be able to start communicating with as little rote learning of vocabulary as possible.  English is rather good at this, as it is rich in metonyms – coverterms like house or clothes, usable as stand-ins for more specialised terms like palace or sou'wester as well as in self-explanatory compound words like treehouse or nightclothes.  Basic English cut its essential vocabulary to 850 words; any language designed from the ground up with lexical efficiency in mind could in principle do much better.

F4: Internationalism

Vocabulary is a relatively superficial, transient aspect of a language compared to things like syntax (speaking Pig Latin doesn't make you a polyglot); but it's the first and often the last feature of a foreign tongue that people notice, so padding out your Warsaw-centric auxiliary language with Romance dictionary entries can be an effective way of making it seem international.  Instead of this random European stew, a real world auxlang would get as much use as possible out of the two most truly global word sources:

1. Western Colonial Vocabulary: gathered and/or spread by the European imperial powers – <chocolate, hotel, kangaroo>
2. International Scientific Vocabulary: words usually built from Latin, Greek, or English roots for newly classified phenomena – <eutheria, radium, interferometry>.

(It would be even more international to accept globally recognised Chinese or Hindi words too, if only there were any… Arabic, maybe.  Or see Appendix P for some cases where there were better solutions available in Latin and Greek.)

F5: Elegance

Many Esperanto borrowings are clumsily based on spellings:

and: Esperanto <kaj> (roughly KIE)

from Mod. Greek <kai> = /ke/ (roughly KEH, though with a palatalised K)

ball: Esperanto <pilko> (roughly PEEL-COE)

from Polish <piłka> = /'pʲiwka/ (roughly PEWKA)

bird: Esperanto <birdo> (roughly BEER-DOE)

from English <bird> (BUH(R)D)

boat: Esperanto <boato> (roughly BO-AH-TOE)

from English <boat> (BOTE)

fist: Esperanto <pugno> (roughly POOG-NOE)

from Italian <pugno> = /'puɲɲo/ (POON-NYOE); cf. Spanish <puño>

Miss: Esperanto <fraulino> (roughly FROW-LEE-NO)

from (dated) German <Fräulein> = /'frɔʏlaɪn/ (roughly FROYLINE)

shame: Esperanto <honto> (roughly HONE-TOE)

from French <honte> = /ɔ̃t/ (roughly AWNGT)

thirst: Esperanto <soifo> (roughly SO-EE-FOE)

from French <soif> = /suaf/ (roughly SWAHF)

Apart from anything else, where would Esperanto be if any of these languages changed their spelling systems?

F6: Miscellaneous

Esperantised placenames frequently look as if they've been transliterated into Cyrillic and then back without regard for pronunciation: Washington becomes <Vashingtono>, Jamaica becomes <Jamajko>, Guinea becomes <Gvineo>…

SECTION G: CONSTITUENCY (parts of speech)

G1: Introduction

Esperanto goes way over the top in marking what part of speech each word is, via its neat but somehow risible final vowel system:

This grand scheme is based on the idea that every verb has one associated (equally basic) noun, adjective, and so on – an idea with an attractive air of symmetry and logic, but one that turns out to be fatally flawed; see Appendix U for details of the root-classes fiasco.

G2: Clarity

Non-linguists rarely understand that grammatical categories like Adjective or Preposition are based not on universal logical principles but on pragmatically constructed conventions in a given language – for instance, where English uses adjectives like <angry>, Yoruba relies on verbs like <bínú>, be-angry.  Noun is essentially universal, but Zamenhof can't take its application for granted; what do the words event, moth, gravity, day, waterfall, Esperanto have in common besides the fact they're Nouns?  (Ignore the propagandists who still claim that Esperanto roots are categoryless semantic primitives; the official grammars from the Academy of Esperanto disagree.)

G3: Simplicity

There are hordes of unnecessary exceptions and irregularities.  Numerals, prepositions, correlatives, conjunctions, modifiers, articles, and so on are all exempt; pronouns even form their own breakaway faction, consistently ending in <-i> rather than <-o> and inflecting for case but not for number.

G4: Internationalism

Esperanto's word-classes are based on the traditions of classical Latin and Greek grammars, and a poor fit for many of the languages of Europe, let alone Chinese.  Hungarians won't be used to prepositions; Germans have to learn that adverbs aren't the same as plain adjectives; and Slavs have to cope with articles…

G5: Elegance

Shoehorning words into this system can mangle them horribly.

<-a>

<boa, gala, penta, praa> = by marriage, bilious, repentant, ancient

<-e>

<die, male, obee, ree> = divinely, contrariwise, obediently, again

<-i>

<ekkrii, mini, peni, scii> = to cry out, mine, try, know

<-o>

<lego, mono, pesto, sago> = reading, money, plague, arrow

<-u>

<fluu! ghuu! skuu! instruu!> = flow!  enjoy!  shake!  teach!

G6: Miscellaneous

Esperanto is oddly happy to sacrifice recognisability in stem vowels – Asia becomes <Azio>, voice (Latin/Italian <voce>) becomes <vocho>, coffee (near-globally <kofi/café>) becomes <kafo>, etc.  If only there were fewer constituent classes to distinguish, maybe some nouns could end in <-a> or <-e>… which would also make the rhymes in Esperanto poetry more interesting!

SECTION H: VERBS (tenses, subjunctives etc.)

H1: Introduction

For details of how Esperanto verbs and participles work, see Appendix Y; it's designed to look vaguely latinate, but with its past, present, future, and subjunctive/conditional tenses and its inflecting participles it again most resembles a tidied-up version of schoolbook Polish.

H2: Clarity

Zamenhof takes categories such as Infinitive, Participle, and Subjunctive on faith as universal concepts.  Note particularly his failure to define the subtle differences between simple tenses (I saw, <mi vidis>) and compound forms (I have seen, <mi estas vidinta> – more literally I am having-seen)… an especially vexing question when passive verbs are always formed as compounds (I was/have been seen, <mi estas vidita>).

H3: Simplicity

It should be apparent to Anglophones that special suffixes for infinitives, future tenses, and subjunctives are a redundant complication.  It may be less obvious that English is itself over-complex in some ways, with its passive voice (they are regarded as a foundation, <ili estas rigardataj kiel fundamento>), vestigial subject-agreement (we are, it is – wisely dropped in Esperanto), and obligatory tense marking even where the context makes it obvious (I was born in 1967) or nonsensical (time is a dimension – cf. my guide to SF Chronophysics).  None of this is necessary; future tense for example can be shown with auxiliary verbs (will), adverbs (soon), or if you insist, optional affixes.

H4: Internationalism

One feature of verbs is present in almost all human languages, though trivialised in traditional Latin-based school grammars: aspect, the distinction between Perfective (roughly, the single event or act) and Imperfective (ongoing state or behaviour).  Esperanto's rules barely allow for aspect marking, relying on an unreliable suffix (<-ad> continual or gerund) and arguable applications of participles (e.g. <estas fermata>, which some translate as is presently closed and some as is being closed).  Left with no official system, Esperantists just stuck to their mothertongue habits, giving most modern dialects a (further) heavy Slavic influence.

H5: Elegance

The actual forms of these inflections (<-os>?  <-inta>?) are unconvincing.  Worst of all is <-u>, the imperative.  Most languages, for obvious reasons, arrange it so that commands can be given via the most basic verbal stem available, not a special, uniquely inflected form!

H6: Miscellaneous

Zamenhof also adopts a Slavic approach to tenses in quoted speech: where English reports we are! either directly as they said `We are!' or indirectly as they said that they were, Esperantists and Slavs have to say (in effect) they said that they are (tenses direct, everything else indirect).  There are some fairly knotty problems being ignored in Esperanto's use of reflexive pronouns and an active/passive distinction, too; for more details on this see Appendix Q.

SECTION I: NOUNS (case, number etc.)

I1: Introduction

Esperanto nouns inflect both for number and for case; i.e., more than is considered necessary in most European languages.  Compare the English sentence yesterday you hit the three white sheep (case, tense, and number left to wordorder and context) with the Esperanto version: <hierau vi frapis la tri blankajn shafojn> (case, tense, and number redundantly expressed by suffixes).

I2: Clarity

Esperantists never attempt to explain what cases or plurals are for.  The former is extremely tricky; but even the latter is hardly cut-and-dried.  Why are zero seconds, one point zero seconds plural?  Indeed, what's the point of pluralising two seconds?  Why are rice, wheat singular, while nuts, oats are plural?

I3: Simplicity

Obligatory inflections are a bad idea.  Couldn't Esperanto emulate Japanese, which essentially does without plurals (one ninja, two ninja…), or Tagalog, which marks number only if it seems relevant (using a separate regular plural-marker word)?

The same applies to case (if not more so).  The Esperanto <-n> suffix is not only compulsory on verb objects, but appears on time expressions, directional adverbs, complements, and goals of motion – hence <Lundon rajdu chevalon norden dek mejlojn en Londonon!>, On Monday, ride a horse northward ten miles into London!.  And yet… some kinds of noun phrase (infinitives, numerals, many people = <multe da homoj>, etc.) can't be marked for case, and they seem to get along perfectly happily without.

I4: Internationalism

Languages disagree not only on how to indicate which of a sentence's components is the subject (Russian gives nouns fusional endings, Japanese has particles after noun phrases, Swahili uses verb marking, and Chinese relies on word order), but even on how to define this notion of Subject; see Appendix R.  For now I'll point out that the informal English phrase It's me! may make poor Latin, but it's fine Turkish.

I5: Elegance

Why <-j>?  It might be recognisable to the Italians (one percent of the world's population) who use <-i> as a regular plural marker, or even the Slavs (five percent) who use <-и>*; but compare <-s>, used throughout Central/Western Europe (Spain, Germany, France, the UK…) and their colonies: forty percent of the human race!  Meanwhile, <-n> as an object marker seems to be based on one piece of German morphology; <-m> might have been better.  And come to think of it, did Zamenhof ever explicitly forbid the suffixing order <shafonj>, or is this left to common sense?

I6: Miscellaneous

If nouns were formed from participles regularly, the word for one currently hoping – and for the language – would be <esperantulo> (though that tense-marking's a century out of date now anyway).  For more on <-n> after prepositions, see L2.  Incidentally, I get a lot of complaints from Esperantists who imagine it's inconsistent to want both expressive clarity and grammatical simplicity; apparently they can't imagine distinguishing (e.g.) singular from plural without there being special extra rules to make number-agreement a compulsory part of the morphological system…

SECTION J: PRONOUNS (and demonstratives)

J1: Introduction

See Appendix Y for Esperanto's selection of pronouns.  The system should be familiar to Anglophones, with its single word for we (whether inclusive or exclusive), single word for you (whether familiar singular or polite plural), and compulsory distinction in the singular (only) between he, she, and it.

J2: Clarity

Few languages distinguish as we do between a/some fish and the fish, and explaining the point of this distinction is well nigh impossible.  Consider also the unpredictable (to English-speakers) way that Esperanto <la> occurs in ten past one, <dek minutoj post la unua>; God bless you, <la dio benu vin>; bird migration is remarkable, <la birdmigrado estas mirinda>.

J3: Simplicity

Couldn't Esperanto do without articles, and treat pronouns and so on as regular nouns?  Or if the pronouns really need their own system, complete with possessive adjectives <mia, lia> (my, his) etc., why does the interrogative pronoun have to mess things up with <kia> = what sort, <kies> = whose (a Lithuanian-style genitive)?

J4: Internationalism

Esperanto's words for who, what are <kiu, kio>, which act both as question words and as relative pronouns – a trademark misfeature of the European languages that's responsible for such unnecessary ambiguities as Did you ask the man who did it?  Compare, say, Hindi, where question-words begin with <k-> but their relative-clause equivalents have <j->.

J5: Elegance

Notice that <kiu, kio> aren't listed among the pronouns; instead they're in a separate irregular subfamily, the so-called correlatives.  These are words for a mixed bag of concepts like every-thing, what-kind, no-where, some-time, that-many; they naturally form a table with columns like every- (= <chi->) and rows like -where (= <-e>), intersecting at every-where (= <chie>).  But the grid has no columns for else-(where), any-(way), or this-(time), and no rows for (some)-degree, (how)-often, or (which)-direction; such coinages require arbitrary botch-ups, so triplets like when, then, now become <ki-am, ti-am, nun>.  A more open system (where e.g. anything is simply any thing) would make the whole table unnecessary.

J6: Miscellaneous

These word-forms may not display much regularity, in the sense of behaving like normal nouns, but they do score highly for uniformity, in the sense of did you say <li estas>, <ni estos>, or <mi estus>?

SECTION K: ADJECTIVES (and numerals)

K1: Introduction

Esperanto adjectives end in a superficially latinate <-a>, then add inflections to agree with the noun they modify.  If there's any logic behind this, wouldn't it imply you need to put similar markers on <la>?  That's how things work in the natural languages Zamenhof was copying here: if agreement belongs anywhere, it's on articles.

K2: Clarity

What kinds of word go in this things-ending-in-<a> category?  Third, but not three; many and any kind of, but not every; his and one's, but not whose… if only Zamenhof had ever heard of determiners, a lexical class covering things like articles, pronouns, and correlatives, maybe the categories wouldn't have ended up such a mess.

K3: Simplicity

Above all, why oh why did Zamenhof give his simple international language obligatory case-and-number concord?  The Esperanto for the houses are new is <la domoj estas novaj> – which is on the fussy end of the scale even by European standards.  Compare French <les maisons sont nouvelles>, where the plural agreement is silent; German <die Häuser sind neu>, where the predicate shows no concord; or Russian <doma novi>, which while it does have agreement at least compensates by letting you leave out the verb.  Even Volapük didn't get it this wrong – <doms binom nulik>!

K4: Internationalism

English may depend on an Adjective to say the new houses, but many languages go about things differently.  Arabic uses appositional nominals (the-new-things the-houses); Japanese prefers things that morphosyntacticians analyse as stative verbs (being-new house).

K5: Elegance

The basic number-terms <tri, trio, tria> (three, threesome, third) are a crowded jumble, making a mockery of the regular root/noun/adjective pattern they imitate (note for instance that both <tri> and <tria> can occur as either argument or modifier).  Knock-on effects include the baroque selection of number-related suffixes needed for <trioble, trifoje, triope> (triply, three times, in threes).

K6: Miscellaneous

Why, other than because of European tradition, do we need a one-word label for 10³ (thousand = <mil> instead of ten hundred) but not for 10⁴ (myriad) or 10⁵ (lakh); and a label for 10⁶ (million = <miliono>) but not for 10⁷ (crore) or 10⁸ (a Japanese oku)?  If Esperanto was built around the S.I. system of prefixes this might make sense, but there's no sign Zamenhof ever heard of kilo- etc.  Indeed, <pico> is the Esperanto for pizza!

SECTION L: ADVERBS (and prepositions)

L1: Introduction

These categories are less reliable than most people assume.  Latin may have had distinct Adverbs and Prepositions, but Vietnamese uses neither (it just needs flexible adjectives and verbs); even many English words (like, except) are hard to pigeonhole.  Yes, most adverbs are simply verb modifiers like fast; but this hardly covers cases like extremely.

L2: Clarity

Esperanto's <-n> ending simply replaces some prepositions, modifies the meanings of others, and never associates with the rest.  Zamenhof didn't just mix these prepositional functions confusingly into his case system, he also made them officially vague – see Appendix Y!

L3: Simplicity

Esperanto grammar favours a proliferation of adverbs.  Whistling in whistling, I left is not allowed to be a mere adjective <fajfanta> describing the subject; no, it's <fajfante mi foriris>.  Worse yet, since Esperanto weather phrases involve no nouns at all, they can't have adjectives either; it's warm becomes <estas varme> (is, warmly!).  Or so my old primer claims; modern Esperantists, I'm glad to hear, simply go for <varmas> (is-warm).

L4: Internationalism

Many languages go without the category Adverb, making do with adjectives and phrasal expressions (quickly = fast or at speed).  What might seem more surprising to Europeans is how few languages have the category Preposition.  Where Yiddish expresses the phrase jump onto a box via a preposition (slightly assisted by casemarking), Vietnamese uses modified verbs (jump-ascend box); Finnish has hyper-specialised cases (jump box, with box in the allative!); and Panjabi goes for postpositions (jump box onto).

L5: Elegance

These words are a strange mix.  Prepositions can end in consonant clusters (like all Esperanto roots, but without the usual disguise of a tacked-on vowel), leading to sequences like <post Kristnasko>, after Christmas.  On the other hand there are twenty-odd random adverby particles and things that form a sort of semi-developed word-class with the distinctive ending <-au> (<ambau, kontrau, preskau> = both, against, almost).

L6: Miscellaneous

English prepositions are a bit un-European in their willingness to appear with no following object noun (cf. our transitive verbs: Appendix Q).  This blurs the line between Preposition (I walked along the road) and Adverb (I walked along), and allows English to form phrases outlawed by Esperanto grammar (e.g. that's the road I walked along)!

SECTION M: SYNTAX (sentence structure)

M1: Introduction

Zamenhof's efforts to explain the rules of Esperanto grammar (see Appendix Y) focussed almost exclusively on derivational and inflectional morphology (i.e. word-building and word-endings).  The nearest they get to syntax is implicit word-order rules.  Unsurprisingly, Esperanto's phrase structure rules and so on turn out to be hardly distinguishable from the ones Zamenhof grew up with – they're pretty good simple ones, but it's sheer blind luck…

M2: Clarity

We know sentences are usually Subject-Verb-Object, possessives go Property-Of-Owner and adjective phrases are Adjective-Noun; but that's about all we learn.  Esperantists boast of the way the final vowels make individual nouns readily identifiable; what they fail to mention is that free word order turns all the higher structure of noun phrases, subclauses, and so on into a matter of guesswork.

M3: Simplicity

Many languages, especially in Europe, have sets of sentences related via order-shuffling rules (transformations) such as English question-inversion (I have; have I?).  That's one Esperanto doesn't share (<mi havas; chu mi havas?>); which just makes it more baffling that it does insist on correlative extraction, moving words like who, where, why to the start of their clause, and not permitting the Unextracted column in the following table any more than English does:

M4: Internationalism

Some of Esperanto's word-order conventions are no more than optional defaults; others (although taken for granted in grammars) are unbreakable.  Yesterday you hit the three white sheep may legally become <la tri shafojn blankajn vi frapis hierau>, but it's never <blankajn la vi hierau tri frapis shafojn>!  Even the dislocation of only English allows in I only ate one is forbidden for <nur>.  The following obvious order rules demonstrate classically European default assumptions:

• Articles precede nouns and their adjectives – the new house is never <nova domo la>
• Prepositions precede their noun phrases – on a table is never <tablo sur>
• Verbs (even if themselves infinitivised) precede the infinitives they subordinate – to want to try to start is never <komenci peni voli>.

M5: Elegance

Excess inflections such as case might at least lead to extra flexibility in word order; and Esperantists consider this an aid to stylistic elegance.  But wouldn't it be easier as well as more flexible to use topic-marker particles to assign emphasis?  Instead, Tibetan-speaking learners of Esperanto (with no guide to what stylistic effects are produced by what order-shift) have to learn to treat word order as essentially meaningless.

M6: Miscellaneous

The question-forming particle <chu> is a neat idea (though maybe a bit redundant, when interrogative intonation or punctuation will do – you agree?).  But its form is copied from its source, the Polish <czy> (or Ukrainian <chi> or even Belorussian <ci>), rather than resembling the question words like <kio>.

See Contents for list of Appendices
starting with the FAQ