Proto-Esperanto

Proto-Esperanto (Esperanto: Pra-Esperanto) is the modern term for any of the stages in the evolution of L. L. Zamenhof's language project, prior to the publication of Unua Libro in 1887.

This article is about early versions of Esperanto. For a fictional ancestor language to Esperanto, see Arcaicam Esperantom.

Proto-Esperanto
Pra-Esperanto
Created by	L. L. Zamenhof
Date	1878–1881
Setting and usage	international auxiliary language
Users	None
Purpose	constructed language international auxiliary language Proto-Esperanto
Writing system	Latin
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
Glottolog	None

The Lingwe uniwersala of 1878

As a child, Zamenhof had the idea to introduce an international auxiliary language for communication between different nationalities. He originally wanted to revive some form of simplified Latin or Greek, but as he grew older he came to believe that it would be better to create a new language for his purpose. During his teenage years he worked on a language project until he thought it was ready for public demonstration. On December 17, 1878 (about one year before the first publication of Volapük), Zamenhof celebrated his 19th birthday and the birth of the language with some friends, who liked the project. Zamenhof himself called his language Lingwe Uniwersala (Universal Language).

W is used for v. Otherwise, all modern Esperanto letters are attested apart from ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, ŭ. Known verb forms are present -á, imperative -ó, infinitive -are.[1] Nouns were marked by -e in the singular and -es in the plural; the article was singular la and plural las. It appears that there was no accusative case, and that stress was as in modern Esperanto, except when marked, as in -á and -ó.

Only four lines of the Lingwe uniwersala stage of the language from 1878 remain, from an early song that Zamenhof composed:

	Malamikete de las nacjes,		Enmity of nations,
	Kadó, kadó, jam temp' está;		Fall, fall, the time has come! [lit. "already it is time!"];
	La tot' homoze in familje		All humanity in a family
	Konunigare so debá.		Must unite.

In modern Esperanto, this would be,

Malamikeco de la nacioj,

Falu, falu, jam temp' estas;

La tuta homaro en familion

Unuiĝi [= kununuigi sin] devas.

Jam temp' está remains an idiom in modern Esperanto, an allusion to this song.

The Lingvo universala of 1881

While at university, Zamenhof handed his work over to his father, Mordechai, for safe-keeping until he had completed his medical studies. His father, not understanding the ideas of his son and perhaps anticipating problems from the Tsarist police, burned the work. Zamenhof did not discover this until he returned from university in 1881, at which point he restarted his project. A sample from this second phase of the language is this extract of a letter from 1881:

Ma plej kara [ami] miko, kvan ma plekulpa plumo faktidźas tiranno pu to. Mo poté de cen taj brivoj kluri, ke sciigoj de [tuc fuc] fu-ći specco debé[j] blessi tal fradral kordol; mo vel vidé tol jam ...

Modern: Mia plej kara amiko, neniam mia senkulpa plumo fariĝus tirano por vi. Mi povas de cent viaj leteroj konkludi, kiel sciigoj de tiu-ĉi speco devas vundi vian fratan koron; mi kvazaŭ vidas vin jam ...

(My dearest friend, never (lit. 'when') would my innocent pen become a tyrant for you. From a hundred of your letters I can conclude that announcements of this kind must wound your brotherly heart; I [can] already see you thus...)

By this time the letter v had replaced w for the [v] sound; verbal inflection for person and number had been dropped; the nominal plural was -oj in place of -es (as well as adjectival -a and adverbial -e); and the noun cases were down to the current two (though a genitive -es survives today in the correlatives). The accusative case suffix was -l, but in many cases was only used on pronouns:

Ful-ći rudźo e ful-ći fiaro debá kini la princaŭ (Tiun-ĉi rozon kaj tiun-ĉi najtingalon devadis ricevi la princino) 'The princess needed to receive this rose and this nightingale'.

Beside the stronger Slavic flavor of the orthography (ć, dź, h́, ś, ź for ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ŝ, ĵ) compared to the modern language, the imperfective verb forms (present and imperfect) still had final stress:

present tense -è, imperfect -à, preterite -u, future -uj, conditional -as, jussive -ó, and infinitive -i.

The pronouns ended in a nominal o (or adjectival a for possessives: mo "I", ma "my"), but there were other differences as well, including a conflation of 'he' and 'it':

1881 pronouns	singular	plural
1st person	mo	no
2nd person	to	vo
3rd masc./neut.	ro	po
3rd feminine	śo
3rd reflexive	so

In addition, there was indefinite o 'one'.

The correlatives were similarly close, though it is not clear if there was a distinction between indefinite and relative forms (modern i- and ki-; these may have corresponded to kv- and k-) and no possessive forms are known:

	-o	-u	-a	-e	-al	-el	-am	-om
ti-	fo	fu	fa	fi	fej	fe	fan
ki- / i-	kvo, ko	kvu, ku	kva			kve, ke	kvan, kan	kom
ĉi-	ćio	ćiu		ćii			ćian
neni-	fio	fiu					fian

The last row was evidently pronounced as fj-.

Esperanto at this stage had a consonantal ablaut in verbs, with a voiceless consonant for an attempt at something, and a voiced consonant for success. For example, aŭti to listen (for), aŭdi to hear; trofi to look for, trovi to find; prufi to argue (a point), pruvi to prove. Traces of this remain in a few pairs of words such as pesi 'to weigh (an item)' and pezi 'to weigh (have weight)' (cf. their derivatives pesilo 'scales' & pezilo 'a weight').[2]

Transition to the modern Esperanto of 1887

Zamenhof refined his ideas for the language for the next several years. Most of his refinements came through translation of literature and poetry in other languages. The final stress in the verb conjugations was rejected in favour of always stressing the second-last vowel, and the old plural -s on nouns became a marker of finite tenses on verbs, with an imperfect -es remaining until just before publication. The Slavic-style acute diacritics became circumflexes to avoid overt appearances of nationalism, and the new bases of the letters ĵ, ĝ (for former ź, dź) helped preserve the appearance of Romance and Germanic vocabulary.

In 1887 Zamenhof finalized his tinkering with the publication of the Unua Libro (First Book), which contained the Esperanto language as we know it today. In a letter to Nikolai Borovko he later wrote,

I've worked for six years perfecting and testing the language, when in the year 1878 it had already seemed completely ready to me.

— Zamenhof

Later proposals by Zamenhof

By 1894, several proposals of changes on Esperanto had appeared. Zamenhof was pressured to answer and presented a reformed version himself. The changes were not well received by the community and were later rejected by Zamenhof.

Further reading

• Gaston Waringhien, in his book Lingvo kaj Vivo (Language and Life), analyzed the evolution of the language through manuscripts from 1881, 1882, and 1885.

See also

• Arcaicam Esperantom – a constructed fictitious 'archaic' version of Esperanto.

References

1. Zamenhof appears to have not distinguished acute and grave accents in his orthography (Kiselman 2010:53).
2. Kiselman (2010:64–65)

External links

• Christer Kiselman, 2010. 'Variantoj de esperanto iniciatitaj de Zamenhof'. In Esperanto: komenco, aktualo kaj estonteco, UEA. Compares the variants of 1878, 1881, 1887, 1894, and 1906.