Esperanto as naturalistic conlang?

[shinkarom]

I have a question: if Esperanto was a spoken language of a country, what sound (grammar, syntax, phonetics, etc.) changes could happen?
The effect would be like with Hebrew language.
I can't suggest anything.

[din]

If you are somehow able to make the entire population of one country speak Esperanto instead of their native tongue, obviously the language would take on some characteristics of that (former) native language.

Apart from that, there's no real answer to this question...

What exactly do you want to find out?

[Thomas Winwood]

You could look at what's happened to the language under the auspices of the thousand or so native speakers in Eastern Europe for some ideas.

• Large amounts of vocabulary have been supplanted by borrowings from other languages because Esperanto's click-together morphology proved too unwieldy: trista "sad" for malfeliĉa/nefeliĉa, ĉipa "cheap" for malmultekosta. (Malbona "bad" doesn't seem to be a problem, oddly enough.)
• The verbal system has exploded in complexity - synthetic and compound forms in all three tenses and both active and passive voices, plus a nascent mediopassive.
• The -a/-e/-i/-o/-u final vowels have taken on a life of their own only somewhat related to the syntactic categories they were developed to signal, since they can be freely swapped around between words.

[shinkarom]

din, I meant a hypothetical country without any foreign influence (maybe this definition applies more to a planet in Star Trek . That would be an episode...)
Thomas Winwood, thank you for information.

[Ser]

You could look at what's happened to the language under the auspices of the thousand or so native speakers in Eastern Europe for some ideas.

It's not really the native speakers, it's the Esperanto community. What natives write in fact isn't even necessarily correct at times......

[Melteor]

I read there was some style of writing that obviated the need for the correlatives (which was considered stilted but grammatical), but I can't find it for the life of me.

The copula + adverb (rather than adjective) construction is cool.

I hope learning it for the Pasporta Servo is going to be worth it.

You could look at what's happened to the language under the auspices of the thousand or so native speakers in Eastern Europe for some ideas....
...Large amounts of vocabulary have been supplanted by borrowings from other languages because Esperanto's click-together morphology proved too unwieldy: trista "sad" for malfeliĉa/nefeliĉa, ĉipa "cheap" for malmultekosta. (Malbona "bad" doesn't seem to be a problem, oddly enough.)

All this calquing makes Esperanto resemble la angala lingvo funny enough.

[Imralu]

I've thought about this before: eccentric trillionaire sets up a space station or colony on the moon, Mars etc. It's intended to be a kind of private utopia and Esperanto is chosen as the official language. Over time, contact with the Earth is lost and civilisation topples into a hunter-gatherer type lifestyle.

Some of the changes I've envisioned are:
- the disappearance of the distinction between nominal, verbal and adjectival roots
- /r/ > /Z/, /tr/ > /tS/, /str/ > /S/ etc.
- /kv/ > /kw/
- /j/ in coda becomes an umlaut, eg. /oj/ > /ø/, umlauting regresses backwards down the word creating a consonant harmony system similar to Finnish, with /i e/ being neutral and the "back set" /a o u/ being replaced by the front set /æ ø y/ where one is present in the word. This causes a word like /grandulo/ to be pluralised as /grændylø/.
- nasals in codas of unstressed syllables become nasal vowels.
- simplification of consonant clusters leading to many voiceless geminate consonants. Voiced consonant clusters instead cause the preceding vowel to be lengthened.
- ETC

[shinkarom]

Thanks, Imralu.
I know for sure that in any case they will do something with the word knabo (and knabino). This word seems to me the most ugly word from all the Esperanto words I know.

[Melteor]

The much derided 'mal-' prefix has an interesting precedent in the ritual conlang Damin.

[So Haleza Grise]

din, I meant a hypothetical country without any foreign influence

What were people speaking before they spoke Esperanto though? Because that will influence it.

[shinkarom]

So Haleza Grise, I repeat. I am interested in a hypothetical development where there are no other languages.
Do dialects count? Because to have a koine that was wielded from farmers', miners' and other dialects would be cool. (And remember, this is Esperanto we are speaking about. It is already created from other languages.)

[Drydic]

so these people didn't speak before they learned Esperanto?

[shinkarom]

Drydic Guy, yes.
Right now Esperanto seems too artificial. I'd like to know what changes could occur inside the language itself.
To compare: I highly doubt that famous Australian "g'day" evovlved as a result of contact with aboriginal languages. The same with my hypothetical country. They don't need other languages to change the only one they speak.

[Melteor]

I've been studying the language and there are several things about the correlatives that perplex me.
A) kio (what), tio (that), kiu (which/who), tiu (that)
--these four demonstratives words say nothing about distance; all told, that's probably okay; but IMO they are redundant, and no Esperantist will do wrong if he merely uses the latter pair in almost all cases; when he really must, there's a 3rd pair
B) kia (what kind), tia (such, that kind)
which clear up the other cases of 'what'.

The only sense in which kio/tio are useful is for learners asking for what something is...But they could just as easily ask someone to tell them what the word for something is. The most useful aspect of a distinction would be for asking 'who?' or some sort of animacy distinction, but the inclusion of 'which' in the gloss scrambles that. English gets by colloquially just fine without 'which' e.g. "What dog bit him?" so it would have been more effective to merge 'what' and 'which' and keep 'who' separate...or even just have 'who'/'what' and 'who'/'which'. In the end, you can still get by with 'Kia' tho e.g. "What kind of a person is that (tia=such a~)?" "That (tia) is a boy." "Which [person] is she (or that (tiu))?" "That (tiu) (or she) is Mary." (The pronouns are anaphoric but also kind of deictic.) This is within the grammar so it would be considered a stylistic development. 'Tio' could become a sort of deictic epicene pronoun because of its odd behavior--unlike 'that' in English it can't modify another noun...only 'tiu' and 'Tia' can, as well as their question counterparts 'kiu' and 'Kia'. In a way it resembles English 'they' syntactically and semantically because it does not match number, animacy, or gender.

There are other potential problems with the correlatives e.g. Using the same words for questions as relativizers, but I'm not sure how that will work out. People might live with it. I think tho that the overall correlative system could collapse. It's certainly one of the most challenging parts IMO and some people scrape by without knowing a good deal of it.

Note: Beginning Esperantist here.

[Hallow XIII]

I just love how as soon as the Auxlang is spoken, all of its carefully constructed regularity goes down the drain.

Lesson for aspiring Auxlangers: DON'T

EDIT: Also, shit. Future participles and a Mediopassive?

Sign me up!

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

Awesome constructions like "Mi forirontus."

I am used to all that Esperanto stuff. So much that I scare Esperantophone with my idiolect of it.

The use of -a, -e, -i, -o, -u in various ways turns Esperanto in probably the most insane language ever. Does not make it ununderstable however.

[Melteor]

Awesome constructions like "Mi forirontus."

"I would left"?

The use of -a, -e, -i, -o, -u in various ways turns Esperanto in probably the most insane language ever. Does not make it ununderstable however.

People have taken to stacking word endings, e.g. 'Vivuo', the phenomenon of saying 'vivu!' (Live!), and keeping the original languages vowel ending e.g. Manga-o, despite Zamhenhof asking people to replace their ending.

I was surprised to find out that 'dankon' and 'saluton' come from "I say a thank-you" and "I say a greeting" respectively, with the performative being dropped...so it's just "a thank-you" and "a greeting" in the accusative case.

[Hallow XIII]

Awesome constructions like "Mi forirontus."

I am used to all that Esperanto stuff. So much that I scare Esperantophone with my idiolect of it.

The use of -a, -e, -i, -o, -u in various ways turns Esperanto in probably the most insane language ever. Does not make it ununderstable however.

The way it looks in the blog post, on nouns the -e has basically become the Latin ablative.

[tezcatlip0ca]

Awesome constructions like "Mi forirontus."

"I would left"?

No, something like "I would have been going to leave".

[Hallow XIII]

Awesome constructions like "Mi forirontus."

"I would left"?

No, something like "I would have been going to leave".

Esperanto: Redefining fusion.