Esperanto: The World's Most Popular Constructed Language, Part 3

Over the past two days we've looked at the creation and history, and then the application and usage of Esperanto. Now that we've set the scene, we'll be having a look at how Esperanto is put together.

As a conlang, Esperanto can't really be classified as belonging to any other language families. Instead, Esperanto is classified as an International Auxiliary Language. Though the language was heavily influenced by Indo-European languages, taking on the phonemic properties of Slavic languages and the lexicon of Romance and Germanic languages, Esperanto has drawn heavy criticism for being too Eurocentric.

La Espero, a poem known as the
"hymn of Esperanto".

When speaking Esperanto, the stress is usually on the penultimate syllable, much like Italian and in poetry. The phonology is particularly interesting as the relationship between letters and phonemes is direct, meaning that every letter used in Esperanto has only one phoneme that it could represent. This was particularly important to Esperanto's creator, L. L. Zamenhof, who declared the rule as "one letter, one sound".

The phonology is also very similar to Polish and Belarusian, which is wholly unsurprising given that Zamenhof himself was born in Bialystok, where most of the population spoke Yiddish and were either Poles or Belarusians.

The relation between letters and phonemes is as closely related to the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) as possible. The language currently features 23 consonants, 5 vowels, 2 semi-vowels, and 6 diphthongs. This is reasonably low given that, depending on the dialect, English speakers can have up to 20 vowel sounds.

Having covered the phonology of Esperanto, tomorrow we'll be continuing our evaluation of Esperanto by looking at the Esperanto grammar and lexicon.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Sounds Good To Me: The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

A standardised representation of oral languages? Get out of town!

How do you write down a word so that everyone in the world knows how to pronounce it? Using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), of course. If you spend a lot of your time in bars, you may know that IPA also stands for India Pale Ale. We're not talking about those today, unfortunately.

Sorry to get your hopes up...
we're referring to the other IPA. 

We're talking about the use of symbols and characters to represent any given sound that you can make with your throat, tongue, teeth, mouths or lips. Burps excluded... grow up!

The function of the IPA is to represent every possible phoneme. This is referred to as a featural alphabet. Sounds great! How does it work?

In terms of appearance, think of the Latin alphabet... what happens if you start using some Greek symbols too? Well, you'd be almost there... just add some punctuation and turn everything upside-down and inside-out. Voilà!

In the 19th century, some bloke called Henry Sweet proposed the Romic Alphabet be the phonetic alphabet to rule them all. It was eventually developed into the International Phonetic Alphabet we know and love today.

There is a certain issue with the IPA. It maps sounds, not words... so what if you say something differently because of your accent? It can't account for that, so you'd need to write the word out for each accent... some people do, but there are so many accents and variants of every language that it takes ages to do.

IPA transcriptions of the word "international" for two dialects
of English: Received Pronunciation and General American.

Usually words are referred to by their standard pronunciation, which is probably the vaguest description you could give. It's definitely a good starting block though.

There's even a symbol for the "I-don't-care-about-pronouncing-this-vowel-vowel", which they call the schwa. We prefer our name for it. Check out the schwa in all its glory as the second to last symbol in both transcriptions of the word "international" above.