Jen estis homo, kiu venis kaj diris al li: «Mastro, kien ajn vi iros, mi volas sekvi vin».
Compare the compulsory expression of tense (in italics) in the English and Esperanto versions. The tense indications are completely absent in the Chinese original.
In fact, the need to use verb endings in impersonal forms, in Esperanto, reminds one of Japanese, a language which is usually regarded as agglutinative.
In some respects Esperanto resembles the agglutinative languages. But since the crucial test for being agglutinative — variability of shape of affixes or grammatical morphemes — yields negative results, one must consider Esperanto basically non-agglutinative. Yet the exceptional visibility of the grammatical structure of the sentence is a feature which brings Esperanto closer to agglutinative than isolating languages.
In the Japanese sentence
watakushi-wa isha-o denwa-de yobimas
‘I call the doctor by telephone’,
the entire grammatical “skeleton” of the sentence leaps to the eye (-wa marks the subject, -o the object, -de the instrument, -imas a present-tense verb).
(Japanese is usually classified as an agglutinative language. Although most of its grammatical morphemes are invariant, it does pass our test, since there are two “conjugations”, two categories of verbs with different endings. Besides, Japanese has some irregular verbs, although not enough of them to warrant its inclusion in the class of inflectional languages. As in Esperanto, the verb in Japanese has endings which contain markers of time and mode but not person. On the other hand the Japanese verb differs from its Esperanto counterpart in several ways, above all in that it shows a dimension of politeness. Thus for example Esperanto manĝas ‘eat(s)’ corresponds to Japanese taberu if an intimate acquaintance is spoken to, but it corresponds to Japanese tabemas if one is speaking, in a main clause, to a distant person. Further, Japanese verb endings incorporate the expression of negation: koroshita ‘killed’, korosanakatta ‘didn’t kill’, compared with Esperanto mortigis and ne mortigis, respectively. As a third difference, the personal pronoun is often understood, as in a telephone conversation sequence:
| Doko-ni imas ka? | Where is/are/am? |
| Uti-ni imas. | Home is/are/am. |
The conversation partners rely on the context of the situation to make it clear that the question is “where are you?” and that the answer is “I am home.”)
Esperanto is Indo-European only in its extrinsic aspects. Neverthe-less it shares one fundamental intrinsic trait with many languages of the Indo-European family: the need for the adjective and some pronouns, in the plural and in the “accusative”, to agree with the words which bind them. However, in view of the complete regularity of the Esperanto system, it would be wrong to regard the plural and objective endings as inflectional. This remark is all the more valid because the relevant grammatical markers (j, n) merely attach to the word: they never take the place of another ending or induce modification of the stem[3].
Although Esperanto shares many features with Indo-European languages, it is, then, fundamentally, non-inflectional in structure. In fact, the special character of Esperanto consists in its combination of two principles: complete autonomy and invariance of lexical and grammatical morphemes (a major trait of isolating languages) and readily perceptible grammatical analysis (which is to some extent a characteristic of agglutinative languages). The Esperanto phrases mia sonĝo ‘my dream’, mi sonĝas ‘I am dreaming’ and sonĝa mondo ‘a dream world’ expressly indicate the grammatical role of the concept sonĝ-, whereas-in English and French phrases, even the verb or noun function of the word dream and rêve must be guessed from the context (’I dream/my dream’, je rêve/mon rêve).
Only very seldom do Esperanto sentences contain elements whose role is not immediately apparent. One of the rare structures to harbour an occasional ambiguity is the compound word: son-ĉasisto can mean ‘hunter of sounds’ or ‘one who hunts by means of sounds’. Such ambiguities also crop up in agglutinative languages, which excel in grammatical clarity.
The Middle Plane
At the middle plane Esperanto is indubitably Slavic. It exhibits many Slavic characteristics:
1) in word order and style (the normal word order of Esperanto texts tends to resemble Slavic word order):
Esperanto: mi lin vidis/mi vidis lin (I saw him)
Russian: ja ego uvidel/ja uvidel ego.
(The Western European languages assign their pronouns a definite, unalterable place.)
Esperanto: kiel vi fartas? (literally: how you do?)
Russian: kak vy poživaete?
English: how are you?
Esperanto: kion li legas? (literally: what he reads?)
Russian: čto on čitaet?
English: what is he reading?
(The Western European languages tend to position their pronouns after the verb in such sentences.)
2) in syntax:
a) sequence of tenses
Esperanto: mi pensis, ke pluvas
Russian: ja dumal, čto dožd’ idët
English: I thought it was (literally: is) raining;
b) obligatory reflexive
Esperanto: ŝi amas sian edzon
Russian: ona ljubit svoego muža
English: she loves her (own) husband
(in contrast to:)
Esperanto: ŝi amas ŝian edzon
Russian: ona ljubit eë muža
English: she loves her (someone else’s) husband;
c) a distinction in grammatical form between modifying and predicative complements
Esperanto: la kuracisto trovis la sanan infanon — la kuracisto trovis la infanon sana
Russian: vrač našel zdorovogo rebenka — vrač našel rebenka zdorovym
English: the doctor found the healthy child — the doctor found the child healthy;
d) use of adverbial form with infinitival or clausal subject
Esperanto: laboro estas necesa — labori estas necese
Russian: rabota nužna — rabotat’ nužno
English: work is necessary — to work is necessary (literally: necessarily);
e) infinitive as prepositionless complement of noun
Esperanto: la deziro venki
Russian: želanie pobedit’
English: the desire to win;
f) asymmetry or constraints placed on the use of prepositions followed by infinitives
While Esperanto allows us to say antaŭ ol foriri ‘before leaving’, it usually avoids post ol foriri ‘after leaving’, preferring the forms foririnte ‘having left’ or post foriro ‘after departure’. In Russian they say prežde čem ujti ‘before leaving’, but not posle čem ujti ‘after leaving’ preferring instead ušedši ‘having left’ or posle uxoda ‘after departure’. Compare this with the symmetry of the English forms just quoted or, for example, with Spanish: antes de salir and despues de salir. (Note that the redundant occurrence of ol ‘than’ in antaŭ ol foriri, literally ’before than to leave’ — it would have been just as clear to say antaŭ foriri — comes by way of literal translation from the Russian prežde čem ujti, which shows the same čem (Esperanto: ol) as the expression bol’še čem on ‘bigger than he’ (Esperanto pli granda ol li.) In Esperanto we say por transdoni ‘in order to transmit’ but not pro transdoni ‘because of to transmit’, and in Russian čtoby peredat’ but not iz-za peredat’. In Spanish, on the other hand, there is para transmitir and por transmitir.
[3]
In this regard Esperanto differs significantly from the Esperanto-derived project Ido. The transition in Esperanto from