The Loom Of Language

Pioneers of Language Planning 463
an Esperanto word falls invariably on the last syllable but one, e.g.
virbovo (bull)
With many other artificial auxiliaries, Esperanto shares the dubiously
useful grammatical tnck of labelling each of the "parts of speech" with
its own trade-mark The noun singular must end m -0, tie adjective
in -a, the derived adverb in -£, the infinitive in -2 The official defence
is this. A reader can recognize at once which words express the main
theme of an Esperanto sentence and which merely express qualifications
The ubiquitous vocalic endings of Esperanto, like those of Italian,
make the spoken language sonorous and prevent accumulation of
consonantal clusters which are difficult to pronounce, e g in English
economists expect spread of slumps throughout civilized world
Zamenhof learned nothing from the obliteration of subject-object
distinction in the English and Romance noun Esperanto has an object
case-form ending in ~n both for nouns and pronouns, e g m lernas
Esperanton (we are learning Esperanto) Esperantists claim that people
who speak or write Esperanto enjoy greater freedom of word-order,
and can therefore reproduce that of the mother tongue without making
a statement unintelligible in writing. If the goat eats the cabbage, we
can also say that the cabbage eats the goat, because the n of the Esperanto
cabbage shows that it is harmless The Esperanto object case-form is
also an accusative of direction in the Latin style Instead of the pre-
position al (to) you may use the accusative and say, e g mi iras Lon-
donon (nom Londond) = I am going to London Apparently the
Esperanto for our verb go does not sufficiently express locomotion
To make the plural of an Esperanto noun we add -j to the singular,
e g kato (cat)—katoj (cats), accus katon—katcyn There is no gram-
matical gender, but for some reason difficult to fathom Zamenhof
could not break away from the institution of adjectival concord His
adjective has to trail behind it the case and number terminals of the
noun., e g nomin. bela rozo or obj belan rozon (beautiful rose)—belaj
rozoj or belajn rozojn (beautiful roses) Without regard for feminist
sentiment, names of females come from names for males by inter-
polation of -in before the trade-mark -0 of the noun, e g patro (father),
patnno (mother), frato (brother), fratmo (sister) Without deliberate
deference to feminine sentiment Zamenhof reverses the process to
manufacture the novel product fraulo (unmarried young man) by
analogy wrihfrauhno (German Fraulein = Miss)
The Esperanto verb has, like that of most of the more recent
artificial languages, a single regular conjugation, without flexion of