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- Author: Walter J. Clark
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Take an instance or two. In the Prayer Book occurs the phrase "Fulfil, O Lord, our desires and petitions." At Sunday lunch a mixed party of people, after attending morning service, were asked how they would render into Esperanto the word "desires." They nearly all plumped for deziraĵo. Now, the Esperanto root for "desire" is dezir-. By adding -o it becomes a noun = the act of desiring, a desire. By adding the suffix -aĵ, and then -o, it becomes concrete = a desire- (i.e. desired) thing, a desire. A reference to the dictionary showed that the English word "desire" has both these meanings, but none of these people had a sufficiently accurate idea of the use of language to realize this. It was only when a gentleman passed his plate for a second helping of beef, and was asked which he expected to be fulfilled—the beef, or his aspiration for beef—that he, under the stimulus of hunger, adopted the rendering dezir‑o, thereby saving at once his bacon and his additional beef.
It is not of course necessary for people to define pedantically to themselves the meaning of every word they use, but surely it must conduce to clear thinking to use a language in which you are perpetually called upon, if you are writing seriously, to make just the mental effort necessary to think what you do mean.
Again, consider the use of prepositions. This is, in nearly all national languages, extremely fluctuating and arbitrary. Take a few English phrases showing the use of the prepositions "at" and "with." "At seven o'clock"; "at any price"; "at all times"; "at the worst"; "let it go at that"; "I should say at a guess," etc. "Come with me"; "write with a pen"; "he came with a rush"; "things are different with us"; "with a twinkle in his eye"; "with God all things are possible," etc. Try to turn these phrases into any language you think you know; the odds are that you will find yourself "up against it pretty badly." The fact is, that prepositions are very frequently used on no logical plan, not at all according to any fixed or universal meaning; all that can be said about them in a given phrase is that they are used there because they are used. To remember their equivalents in other languages hard memory work and much phrase-learning is necessary. In Esperanto all that is necessary is: first, to become clear as to the exact meaning; secondly, to pick the preposition that conveys it. There is no doubt, as the Esperanto prepositions are fixed in sense, on the "one word one meaning" plan. The point is, that there is no memory searching, often so utterly vain, for there are few people indeed who can write a few pages of the most familiar foreign languages without getting their prepositions all wrong, and having "foreigner" stamped large all across their efforts. In Esperanto, provided you have a clear mind and know your grammar, you are right. No arbitrary usage defeats your efforts and makes discouraging jargon of your literary attempts.
This training in clear thought, the first requisite for all good writing, is surely sound practical pedagogics. By the time you can give up conscious word-building in Esperanto, and use words and phrases by rote, you have done enough bracing thinking to teach you caution in the use of the ready-made phrase and horror of the vague word.
Fools make phrases, and wise men shun them. Here is a phrase-free language: need we shun it?
(a) Word-building
The following tables are meant to give some idea of the number and variety of different ideas that can be expressed by a single Esperanto root, with the addition of affixes (prefixes and suffixes). By reading the English, French, and German columns downwards, the reader will see how many different roots and periphrases these languages employ in order to express the same ideas.
As the affixes have fixed meanings, they only have to be learnt once for all, and many of them (e.g. -ist, -in, re-) are already familiar. When once acquired, they can be used in unending permutation and combination with different roots and each other. The tables below are by no means exhaustive of what can be done with the roots san- and lern-. They are merely illustrative. By referring to the full table of affixes the reader can go on forming new compounds ad libitum: e.g. san‑o, san‑a, san‑e, san‑i, saneco, sanilo, sanulo, malsane, malsani, saneti, malsaneti, sanadi, eksani, eksaniĝi, saninda, sanindi, sanindulo, sanaĵo, sanaĵero, sanilo, sanigilo, sanigilejo, sanigilujo, sanigilisto, malsanemeco, remalsano, remalsanigo, sanila, malsanulino, sanistinedzo, sanilingo, sanigestro, sanigestrino, sanigema, sanega, sanigega, gesanantoj, saniĝontoj, sanigistido, sanigejano... and so on (kaj tiel plu).
(b) Participles and Auxiliaries
The following table illustrates the perfect simplicity and terseness of the Esperanto verb.
Every tense, active and passive, is formed with never more than two words. Every shade of meaning (continued, potential, etc., action) is expressed by these two words, of which one is the single auxiliary esti (itself conjugated regularly). The double auxiliary—"to be" and "to have"—which infests most modern languages, with all its train of confusing and often illogical distinctions (cf. French je suis allé, but j'ai couru), disappears. Contrast the simplicity of amota with the cumbersome periphrasis about to be loved; or the perfect ease and clearness of vi estus amita with the treble-barrelled German Sie würden geliebt worden sein.
This simplicity of the Esperanto verb is entirely due to its full participial system. There are six participles, present, past, and future active and passive, each complete in one word. The only natural Aryan language (of those commonly studied) that compares with Esperanto in this respect is Greek; and it is precisely the fulness of the Greek participial system that lends to the language a great part of that flexibility which all ages have agreed in admiring in it pre-eminently. Take a page of Plato or any other Greek author, and count the number of participles and note their use. They will be found more numerous and more delicately effective than in other languages. Esperanto can do all this; and it can do it without any of the complexity of form and irregularity that makes the learning of Greek verbs such a hard task. Bearing in mind the three characteristic vowels of the three tenses—present -a, past -i, future -o (common to finite tenses and participles)—the proverbial schoolboy, and the dullest at that, could hardly make the learning of the Esperanto participles last him half an hour.
It would be easy to go on filling page after page with the simplifications effected by Esperanto, but these will not fail to strike the learner after a very brief acquaintance with the language. But attention ought to be drawn to one more particularly clever device—the form of asking questions. An Esperanto statement is converted into a question without any inversion of subject and verb or any change at all, except the addition of the interrogative particle ĉu. In this Esperanto agrees with Japanese. But whereas Japanese adds its particle ka at the end of the sentence, the Esperanto ĉu stands first in its clause. Thus when, speaking Esperanto, you wish to ask a question, you begin by shouting out ĉu, an admirably distinctive monosyllable which cannot be confused with any other word in the language. By this means you get your interlocutor prepared and attending, and you can then frame your question at leisure.
Contrast Esperanto and English in the ease with which they respectively convert a statement into a question.
English : You went—did you go?
Esperanto : Vi iris—ĉu vi iris?
This particle may be considered the equivalent of the initial mark of interrogation used in Spanish, and serves to remove all complications in connexion with word order.
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