Esperanto: european or asiatic language?
PREFACE
The national and local languages of the world are firmly linked to specific peoples and places. But the International Language Esperanto is identified with no particular nation or geographical area.
Nevertheless, scholars, particularly those who do not speak Esperanto, occasionally express doubts about this principle, which dates from the time of Zamenhof himself, who first created the language, “If Zamenhof really knew only European languages,” they ask, “how could he avoid building European grammatical and semantic principles into his language?” Even if a scientist feels obliged to caution that there are no purely European or purely Asiatic languages, and that semantic relations between words are primarily the result of the way a language is used by speakers and not of a priori definition, this perfectly serious question still merits a considered answer.
If in fact the language created by Zamenhof were shown to be linked exclusively to Europe, its claims to linguistic neutrality would obviously be compromised. One could then truthfully assert that, although it is easier than other languages now used in international relations and therefore deserves serious consideration as an international language, nevertheless it is not a neutral medium of communication among cultures.
But the scientific test of this question lies not in the historical limits of Zamenhof’s knowledge, or in superficial characteristics of the language, but in the actual experiences of learning the language in various parts of the world and in the fundamental structure of Esperanto itself. With respect to the first problem, there exists a general knowledge about the actual learnability of Esperanto, not only in contrast to other languages, but also in comparisons among students from various parts of the world and various language groups. But there are very few truly scientific and objective studies. Such studies are urgently needed.
The second question, as to whether Esperanto is a European language in any but the most superficial ways, is a matter which has long interested scholars, but has only recently received serious attention by people with a thorough knowledge both of Esperanto and of comparative linguistics. The present study, by one of our most distinguished linguists, Claude Piron (who feels at home not only in his native French, but also, for example, in Chinese), is a pioneer work in a field still barely explored. It is not, and is not intended to be, a polished study. It is an informal address presented in Geneva, on May 15, 1976, at a weekend meeting of Esperanto speakers. Fortunately we can include the study in the present series as a first step in the identification of the full internationality of Esperanto. We hope that it may also stimulate other competent researchers to enter this important field.
I. TYPES OF LANGUAGES
Do the expressions “European language” and “Asiatic language” mean anything? In fact they do not. In Asia many languages are spoken (including Persian, Bengali, and Sinhalese) which, structurally and historically, belong to the same family as the majority of the European languages, the so-called “Indo-European” family. And in Europe millions of people speak languages (such as Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian, and Maltese) that belong to categories much more widely represented outside Europe. Generally and traditionally, languages are divided into three categories:
a) inflectional languages, such as the Indo-European and Semitic languages,
b) agglutinative languages, such as Hungarian and Turkish, and
c) isolating languages, such as Chinese and Vietnamese.
Two criteria are traditionally used to classify a language into one of these categories: first, the way in which the language in question expresses grammatical relationships and, second, the processes by which its word elements are transformed or grouped to acquire new significance or a new role in a sentence. According to a more structuralist formula, one can say that the criterion is the proportion of morphemes whose form may vary.[1]
A morpheme is defined as the smallest unit with linguistic significance. For example, the French word reverrai, ‘I shall see’, contains three morphemes: re signals repetition, ver the idea of seeing, and rai is an amalgam at the same time expressing the senses of ‘person who speaks’, ‘singular’ and ‘future time’.
The various morphemes of a language have different frequencies, of course. Of the three cited, re is more common in French than ver (and other forms of ver, such as vis, voi, voy, vu, and so on), since we find it in all sorts of words with the same sense of ‘repeat’, ‘start again’, ‘return’ and the like. And rai is commoner than re: in fact it can occur with any French verb with the three senses just mentioned for it.
The most frequent morphemes are those that signal grammatical functions. Their meaning content is very impoverished. (If I were to say, -’s has -ed me -ly! practically no information would be transmitted to you.) We call these grammatical morphemes. What are called semantemes (or lexemes) are the less common morphemes, whose meaning content is much richer. (The line “Take spade work garden,” even if not entirely clear, nevertheless transmits a considerable amount of information. We would never say such a sentence, but we use very similar structures in classified ad sections of our magazines and newspapers every day.) It is among these semantemes that we usually class the “affixes”. Affixes, according to the definition generally used in linguistics (but not really valid for the morphemes which Esperanto speakers call afiksoj), are useful for derivations and cannot be used alone. Re in the French word reverrai is an affix: it can be attached to many roots to form derivatives, but always appears linked to another semanteme and never stands alone. We can now define the three traditional categories of language this way:
1) If there is variation in the forms of all the kinds of morphemes, including semantemes other than affixes, the language is inflectional. For example,
| voir / vu / vision | to see / seen / sight |
| eu / ayant / avoir | had / having / to have |
2) If only the grammatical morphemes change form, and among the semantemes, only the affixes, then the language is agglutinative. For example, Hungarian:
| ak / ek / ok | (plural sign) |
| ház, házak | house, houses |
| ember, emberek | person, people |
| asztal, asztalok | table, tables |
| -ben / -ban | (“in”) |
| ház, házban | house, in a house |
| kéz, kézben | hand, in a hand |
| -ság / -ség | (sign of abstract quality) |
| szabad, szabadság | free, liberty |
| üde, üdeség | pure, purity |
3) If none of the morphemes vary in form, the language is isolating. For example, Chinese:
| nü | (female) |
| sījī, nüsījī | driver, female driver |
| péngyŏu, nüpéngyŏu | friend, girlfriend |
| hùa | (-ization, -ification) |
| gōngyè, gōngyèhùa | industry, industrialization |
| jiăndān, jiăndānhùa | simple, simplification |
| zhèngzhì, zhèngzhìhùa | politics, politicization |
| xìng | (abstract quality) |
| kĕnéng, kĕnéngxìng | possible, possibility |
| fŭzá, fŭzáxìng | complicated, complication |
| fŭzá, fŭzáxìngshíjì, shíjìxìng | real, reality |
[1]
The reader with a high level of linguistic competence will rightly criticize the use of only one criterion. But he should remember that this text is directed to laymen. It would not be possible in so short a compass to treat the very complex question of criteria for linguistic typology. For example, many take the prime criterion of isolation to be the fact that in an isolating language the majority of the words are monomorphemic. But if we applied this criterion, Chinese would cease to belong among the isolating languages and would become agglutinative. That would be an interesting and defensible thesis, although presumably surprising for many. But since linguists generally continue to class Chinese among isolating languages, we limit ourselves to a single, if fundamental, characteristic, enabling us to retain the traditional divisions of languages. The typological considerations presented in the present work should be regarded more as a device for clarifying the position of Esperanto in relation to other languages than as a new way of approaching the problem of typology. We are well aware that our criterion would raise difficult problems if one were to apply it, for example, to situating the Bantu languages. For the same goal of simplicity and the same limitations of time, we have not considered the so-called “polysynthetic” type, into which some American Indian languages, among others, may be classified.