Difference between revisions of "Europic Contrast and Comparison with Esperanto"

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22nd Century Criticisms of Esperanto

  • Phonotactics: Esperanto’s liberal use of difficult-to-pronounce consonant clusters was found to be problematic for native speakers of some languages.
  • Little phonological “smoothing” of borrowings: Loanwords are ported wholesale into the language and appropriate affixes added with little thought given to how readily pronounceable they might be. This also leads to little “nativization” of words: It is often very obvious that particular words come from English (birdo ‘bird’, teamo ‘team’), or French (etaĝo ~ étage ‘floor’, viando ~ viande ‘meat’ ), or German (ŝajni ~ scheinen ‘shine’, frua ~ früh ‘early’).
  • Special Characters: Esperanto uses the characters ⟨ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, and ŭ⟩, none of which are common to any standard keyboard layouts except for Esperanto.
  • Default Masculine Gender: Esperanto nouns are masculine by default, and a suffix must be used to make them feminine. For example, patro ‘father’ plus feminine suffix -ino ‘feminine’ equals patrino ‘mother’. There is a half-assed workaround using the prefix ge- (e.g. gepatroj ‘parents’), but it only works in the plural when referring to both genders.
  • Large number of English borrowings.
  • Use of the definite article is inconsistent among languages that use it and may be difficult for native speakers of languages that lack it.
  • Inconsistency across certain parts of speech, e.g. adverbs in -e vs. adverbs in -aǔ; adjectives in -a/j/n, but definite article (arguably an adjective) has only -a, while some correlative determiners have -u/j/n; pronouns in -i/n with no morphological plural, but nouns in -o/j/n.
  • Inclusion of the Romance infinitive ending in certain verbs as part of the root, e.g. diras ‘says, iras ‘goes’, staras ‘stands’.

Primary Differences between Esperanto and Europic

Orthography

  • Only standard ASCII characters in orthography.
    • Esperanto uses the non-ASCII characters ĉ ĝ ĥ ĵ ŝ ǔ, but maintains a 1:1 phoneme:grapheme ratio.
    • Europic uses no non-ASCII characters, but uses digraphs for the affricates dj and tc.

Roots

  • Roots in Esperanto can come from any source and are not limited in length or phonology.
  • Europic roots are generally one syllable (not including possible affixes and part of speech endings); longer roots are either awkward borrowings without a unique root space of their own (e.g. palas-u ‘palace’) or toponyms, which must contain two syllables by default, e.g.:
  • There are approximately thirty thousand mono-syllabic roots available, though only a fraction of those are actually used.

¹ Canada at the beginning of the 22nd century consists only of the provinces of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario. Present-day Ontario has been divided into three provinces: Ontario (present-day southern Ontario, “the Foot”), Ottawa (the middle region east of Lake Huron and north of Ontario), and Superior (everything else, plus some of northern Minnesota.)

² Atlantica is a country made up of the former Canadian Atlantic provinces of (southern) New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland.

Verbs

  • Infinitives in -e-.
  • Tenses, moods, and aspects are formed through the use of particles. There is no “conjugation” or ablaut.
  • The verb ‘know’ is save, because Esperanto scii is just awful.

Pronouns

  • There are no gendered pronouns in Europic.
  • Europic plural pronouns are (degraded) plurals and not unique lexemes.
  • Europic maintains an animacy distinction in the third person plural.
    • Eo. ili vs. Eu. ruy (plural of he/she), suy (plural of it).
  • The first person plural has clusivity.

Nouns

  • Nouns do not inflect for case or number.
  • Plurals are (often optionally) marked by particle ya. Plural marker is never used after numbers or with other adjectives which imply plurality, e.g. kanu ya ‘dogs’, triya kanu ‘three dogs’, muja kanu ‘many dogs’.
  • There are no direct objects in Europic. There is an “accusative preposition,” na. (As a result, there is no meaningful distinction between transitive and cisitive¹ verbs, because everything that is not a subject requires a preposition.) This also results in some natural “compacting” of verbs, e.g. kle ‘come’ can also mean ‘bring’ when accompanied by a direct object (cf. Welsh dod vs. dod â).

¹ Yeah, that's right, I called them cisitive verbs. I hope somebody get Big Mad about it.

Adjectives

  • Adjectives do not agree with complements in case or number.
  • Numerals, articles, and other determiners are treated as adjectives (ending in -a).
  • Adjectives (with the exception of numbers and determiners) follow nouns.
  • Genitive phrases tend to be adjectival, including for names. (De can be used as an emergency eject button when the meaning wouldn’t be clear otherwise, or when another adjective interferes with the structure.)
  • Nouns are neutral by default, and require suffixes to be made explicitly masculine or feminine.

Adverbs

  • Adverbs in -i
  • Prepositions and particles may be considered sub-types of adverb, but may end in any vowel. Most common prepositions and particles are monosyllabic.

Other

  • Deixis has a two-way distinction indicated by particles tci (analogous to Eo. ĉi or Fr. -ci) and li (analogous to the Eo. default t-stems or Fr. -là).
  • No effort is made to avoid synonyms or to limit the size of the lexicon with antonyms using derivations like mal-. (There are affixes equivalent to mal- analogous to English un- or non-, but they are not used to form basic opposites.)
  • Lack of accusative as a marked case (see #Nouns|Nouns]] above).
    • Direct object is indicated by the preposition na.
    • Temporal use of the accusative is generally indicated by the preposition du.
    • Exclamations and interjections taking the accusative in Esperanto and indicated by -e.
  • Word source: Most Esperanto vocabulary is derived directly from English, French, German, Polish, Latin, and Greek. Europic vocabulary is still primarily European in origin, but much of it is a priori, English is deliberately avoided (though etymology often circles back in inconvenient ways), and other sources are more obscured by the manner in which roots are constructed to conform to Europic’s narrower (and arguably pleasanter) phonology.
  • Compounds: Vowels are required to form compounds. Compounds cannot result in illegal consonant clusters (e.g. Eo brak-horloĝo vs. Eu. braxkahoklu — in this case the first element of a compound noun in -u is converted to an adjective in -a.)
  • Esperanto has the mind-bogglingly useful ability to use affixes as roots, allowing for a small number of synonyms to pop up. For example, -ano indicates a member of a group, -ulo is a person, and -ido is the offspring of another noun, hence grupano is a group member, junulo is a young person, and katido is a kitten; but they can also be used on their own: ano ‘member’, ulo ‘person’, ido ‘offspring’, which are largely synonymous with membro, homo, and (slightly less directly) filo, respectively. Europic lacks this ability because part of its fundamental nature is that no words can have an initial vowel, while all suffixes begin with a vowel; instead, these are formed by adding the onset j-: janu ‘member’, joru ‘person’, jiklu ‘offspring’, &c. Initial j- only occurs on these modified affixes.
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