Bridge of Words

Still, the early practice of cobbling words together instead of borrowing them inoculated the infant language from the antibodies of the world's dominant languages. These days, when so-called "international" words are invariably drawn from English, the Akademio de Esperanto has rigorously resisted the anglicization of Esperanto. The Internet, for example, is not interneto but interreto, using the Esperanto word for "net" (reto); a computer is a komputilo, using the Esperantic suffix for a tool or device; a website is a retejo, a "net-place"; and to browse or surf is retumi, which means "to do something on the net." Several words are now in use for a flash drive: memorbastoneto (memory stick), poŝmemorilo (pocket memory device), memorstango (memory rod), and most simply, storilo (storage device). And there is another reason for preferring Esperantic coinages to international borrowings: such coinages do for Esperanto what idiomatic phrases do for national languages— turn a language into a sociolect, which fosters community. No wonder, then, that Esperantists get a charge out of decoding these clumsy, agglutinative words, such as polvosuĉilo (a "dust sucker," aka vacuum cleaner) or scivolemo ("the inclination to want to know," aka curiosity), or akvoprenilo ("a device for taking out water," aka hydrant). The bulb that flicks on when an Esperantist encounters or generates an unfamiliar word yields both light and warmth.

What leaves many novices to Esperanto cold, however, is Zamenhofs system of correlatives, also known as tabelvortoj (table words). The correlatives are a highly elaborated version of correlative systems Zamenhof knew in Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages. In English, for example, if we want to ask a question about place, we start with wh-, add -ere and get "where." Similarly, if we want to make a demonstrative statement about place, we start with th- and add -ere to get "there." Esperanto has five groups of such word beginnings, not only for interrogation and demonstration but also for indefinites, universals, and negatives. It also has nine groups of word endings, not only for place but also for time, quantity, manner, possession, entity, etc. Now imagine a grid in which the five word beginnings are arranged horizontally across the top, and the nine word endings are arranged in a column at the far left. Combining beginnings and endings creates the forty-five correlatives in the table.

Zamenhof never expected his readers to memorize the lists of correlatives, and no tables appear in the inaugural pamphlet of 1887. Only a fraction of correlatives are in frequent use; many are used routinely, and some are rarely used. Some can be used as pronouns, for instance, ĉiuj, which means "everybody," or as adverbs—tiel, meaning "in this manner." And they are essential for word building: for instance, tiusense, meaning "in this sense," or ĉiutage, meaning "everyday." When novices find a correlative leaping into their conversation, it's the first intuition they have of their competence. And the casual, comfortable use of correlatives— in conversation and as building blocks—is a good indicator of fluency.

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Given that Esperanto was forged in Europe, designed for Europeans, and built from European languages, the charge of Eurocentrism is hard to deny. As we shall see in Part III, however, far from barricading it against non-Europeans, the Eurocentrism of Esperanto was largely responsible for its initial forays into China and Japan. That said, not all Esperantists agree that the language, even from a linguistic perspective, is Eurocentric; some, citing Zamenhofs earliest accounts of creating the language, say that it is not Indo- European at all. Zamenhof hinted at this when he confessed that he'd created Esperanto in "the spirit of European languages" (my italics). In the spirit—but not in the flesh? Apparently not, since Esperanto's morphology, the rules by which words change according to tense, mood, number, and gender, is signally different from that of Indo-European languages. Esperanto roots, unlike words in Indo- European languages, never alter their internal constituents when they take different endings. In English, today I swim, and yesterday I swam; but in Esperanto the root for swimming—naĝ—is always the same, no matter when I dive into the pool. Zamenhof's aim was to rationalize morphology, making roots instantly recognizable and easy to look up in a dictionary. His term for the division of words into "immutable syllables" (morphemes) was "dismemberment":