Los Angeles herald., 1906-06-10

knab'o boy; knab'et'o. little boy; ride
laughter; rid'et'o. smile.
On the other hand, we may want TO
intensity meaning, as when, in Eng
liSh, we employ a host of different
words such as big great, large, huge,
etc, all meaning about the same thing
in common parlance. Suppose we let
| the syllable "eg" perform this function,
then the same identical words en-
ployed above become: Bird'ego, large
bird: warm eg'a, very warm, hot; mall
'varm'eg'a, intensely cold; knab' b'eg'o,
laughter, In these few examples we
find that the child or the foreigner
must learn no less than eight different
English words of one to three syllables
and three to ten letters, all very tersely
expressed by one little uniform syllable
of two letters, viz, eg!
DR.. Zamenhof. with the most pro-
found study and rare discernment,
found it possible so to utilize some
fifty of these little monosyllables that
more than one thousand ordinary
words may be dispensed with.
One may get a perception of the vast
utility of this principle when l state
that upon the simple root sana, health
(English: sane), nearly fifty different
maisana, i'll, sick, and ending with
ne re- sanig 'ebIa, not possible to be-
restored-to health. incurable!
The second far-reaching principle
whereby the learning of Esperanto is
made a mere play-spell lies in the fact
that not a single new term Is coined
by it's learned compiler
All his terms. not merely the root
words, but likewise even the pref1Xes
and affixes, are the actual words or Nv
ing languages, selected by the follow
ing eminently judicious system of APP
portionment:
(a) Words common to the languages
of all civilized peoples were taken un-
changed
OBJ When no such word common to
all languages could be found, he took
the word common to the greatest num-
ber.
(c) He apportioned the remaining
words among the different modern
Languages in the ratio of the number of
people speaking them.
For this reason and for another
shall give little later, English, though
not DR.. Zamenhofs mother tongue
nevertheless exerts an influence so pre-
dominant over all Others that not very
incorrectly perhaps 1t may be asserted
that Esperanto is in reality modihed
English, or still better, English shorn of
it's excrescences and absurdities.
What Angio-American would not
| welcome II, with three cheers and
tiger, for this fact alone, if not an
other merit could be urged in its be-
half?
Recently in classifying an Esperanto
vocabulary | found three root words
out of every FIVE are more or less IA
miliar English terms.
Note the words l have employed
above. There is mi pronounced mel;
deziras (desire); hotelo (hoteD;
strato (very like street,; orlent'o (ori-
! ent, oriental, etc); unu (uniD; nova
| (seen in novelty); NAL, for opposite,
| compare benediction and malediction); :;
acid'a; estimi; ami; to love (seen In
amity); bird'o varma although this
| is German II is so near our warm II
cannot be mistakenly; rid'o, laughter
Occurs In rldicule, ridiculous); and so
/ might Illustrate through hundreds OF
examples -
The third great principle effecting the
| simplicity of Esperanto to degree IN
comparable i'm any other language
natural to man or ever dreamed by him
is the astonishing brevity of its gram
mar.
Here again Esperanto might be
called English shorn OF its excrescences
and of the absurdities which only these
excrescenees render necessary.
We are all familiar with the four
great subdivisions of English grammar
from time photography
and orthoepy. etymology, syntax and
prosody,
A single column of 2S Roman letters.
each letter having invariably the same