Esperanto: european or asiatic language?

Comparing the pairs brief/brevity and unjust/injustice is a good way to throw the three types of variation into relief:

brief / brevity	French (inflectional)	bref / brièveté
	Hungarian (agglut.)	rövid / rövidség
	Chinese (isolating)	jiănluè / jiănluèxìng
unjust / unjustice	French (inflectional)	injuste / injustice
	Hungarian (agglut.)	igazságtalan / igazságtalanság
	Chinese (isolating)	fēizhèngyì / fēizhèngyìxìng

In French, an inflectional language, variation occurs both at the level of the root — bref changes to brièv — and at the level of the suffix. Thus one finds for example the suffix -té in one case (brièveté) and -ice in another (in-just-ice). In Hungarian, an agglutinative language, only the affixes vary: the radicals rövid and igazságtalan do not change; the suffix is the same, but it appears in two forms: -ség and -ság. In Chinese, an isolating language, no variation occurs: the radicals jiănluè and fēizhèngyì do not change, and the suffix -xìng is used in both cases and without change.

* * *

Let us now make some observations on what we have discovered. For convenience we keep the traditional terms “inflectional”, “agglutinative” and “isolating”, although they are poorly chosen and derive from an insufficient analysis of the facts. For example, Chinese is generally cited as the type case of an isolating language, but in fact it contains many morphemes which cannot be used in isolation. This is true not only of many affixes, such as the nü and hùa mentioned above, but also of many other semantemes. The morpheme fù, for example, which means ‘father’, is never used alone in ordinary language (i.e. except in proverbs, maxims, and poetic expressions); one says fùqīn ‘father’, fùmù, ‘parents’ fùxìzhìdù, ‘patriarchal system’, etc. On the other hand, Chinese constantly uses a system traditionally regarded as typically agglutinative: it adds morphemes to each other to form sometimes very long words:

tā	he
tāmen	they
tāmende	their
xīn	heart, spirit, mind
xīnlĭ	psyche
xīnlĭxué	psychology
xīnlĭxuéjiā	psychologist
zhèngyì	just
fēizhèngyì	unjust
fēizhèngyìxìng	injustice

(Chinese morphemes are used singly in the old written language, the so-called wényán. But wényán was never a spoken language, and it would be wrong to confuse it with the language customarily called “Chinese”.)

To classify a language into one of the three categories, the criterion need not apply one hundred percent. A small error must be anticipated, if for no other reason than the regular variation caused by the sound system. For example, in Chinese the suffix -ĕr added to a morpheme ending in a consonant masks that terminal consonant and sometimes modifies the preceding vowel. And when it occurs with a reduplicated root, the second appearance of the root shifts to the first tone (-) if it is not already in that tone:

màn / mànmār	slow / slowly
kuài / kuàikuār	rapid / rapidly
lĭng / lĭr	neck / collar

Sound variation in a semanteme is relatively frequent in Japanese:

kuni / kuniguni

land / all lands

We may count a language as belonging to the category in question if the criterion applies to at least ninety percent of the morphemes appearing in, say, ten minutes of ordinary conversation. We are now able to examine the three language categories in more detail.

II. INFLECTIONAL LANGUAGES

In all of these languages, roots transform both in derivations and with changes of grammatical function. Comparing them with Esperanto, in which the root never varies, makes this property of the inflectional languages clear. To underline the unchangeability of the Esperanto morphemes, we separate them with a hyphen in the following list and compare them with German, English, and Russian:

German:	denken	pens-i
	(ich) dachte	(mi) pens-is
	Gedanke	pens-o
English:	sell	vend-i
	sold	vend-it-a, vend-is
	sale	vend-o
Russian:	xodit’	ir-i
	(ja) xožu	(mi) ir-as
	xažival	ir-ad-is

The Semitic languages are also considered inflectional. But their inflectionis somewhat different: the form of the derived words changes, but the basic consonant frame remains constant. In Arabic, for example, the consonant frame KTB means “write, compose”:

KaTaBa	he wrote
KuTiBa	was written
yaKTuBu	he will write
yuKTaBu	will be written
meKTuB	written
aKTaBa	he had (something) written
KiTāB	writing, a book
KuTuB	writings, books
KāTiB	rapid / rapidlywriter
KaTB	writing (an act)

III. AGGLUTINATIVE LANGUAGES

Agglutinative languages are characterized by invariant stems to which are added suffixes which cannot be used alone and whose vowels may change depending upon the vowel types found in the roots to which they are attached. Let us take the Turkish expression kırılmadılarmı? by way of an example. It is composed this way:

    kır = break

    ıl = past passive participle, -ed

    ma = past tense

    lar = they

    mı = ?; sign of question

The word thus means ‘Weren’t they broken?’

Here are some other examples which underline the law of vowel harmony in Turkish. Depending upon whether the vowel of the root is e or a, the plural is expressed by -ler or -lar, ‘my’ by -im or -ım, and ‘to’ (direction, attribute, destiny) by -e or -a.

ev	house	at	horse
eve	to the house	ata	to the horse
evim	my house	atım	my horse
evime	to my house	atıma	to my horse
evler	houses	atlar	horses
evlere	to the houses	atlara	to the horses
evlerim	my houses	atları	my horses
evlerime	to my houses	atlarıma	to my horses