Esperanto is the most commonly used artificial language. It was created by Polish physician Ludwig L. Zamenhoff and was first presented in 1887. The name of the language comes from the pseudonym (“Doktoro Esperanto”) used by the author in his first textbook.
Esperanto can be learned considerably quicker than a typical natural language. The grammar is extremely regular, yet not primitive. There is only one paradigm for nouns and one paradigm for verbs. There is a simple relation between written and spoken text. The word order is “free”, allowing topic-focus articulation.
Construction of Esperanto
About 70% of Esperanto vocabulary come from Romance languages, about 20% from Germanic languages and English and some part from Slavic languages. The word-building is very rich and highly regular.
The estimates of the numbers of Esperanto speakers range from 1 to 10 millions[1]. There is about 1 000 of native speakers. Several tens of thousands of books have been published in Esperanto (original and translated), and there are many periodicals.
The invented language that found a second life online.
More than 100 years after it was invented, Esperanto is spoken by relatively few people. But the internet has brought new life to this intriguing, invented language.
Many would tell you, Esperanto is a failure. More than a century after it was created, its current speaker base is just some two million people – a geeky niche, not unlike the fan base of any other obscure hobby.
How is Esperanto evolving in modern times?
Generally, just like any language- anyone can make up a word, other people can decide to use the word or not depending on whether they like it. The Akademio’s job is just to officially acknowledge the words that are generally used and known.
Esperanto is a normal language and does evolve. Even the Fundamento did not prevent that from happening, and there are a few cases in which words did “change meaning over time”. With this answer I do not aim to cover the entire subject, but rather give one particular example that I find personally interesting.
The famous song “Dek Bovino”j used the verb muĝi extensively. In the lyrics, it has the meaning “to moo”, probably from influence of the French mugir and the English moo, which sounds like the first syllable of the word. Most Esperantists I know think muĝi means “to moo”, perhaps because of Dek Bovinoj.
