Ĉu tipologiaj ŝanĝoj en Esperanto?

Abstract

In this paper, typological changes that took place, or are taking place, in Esperanto are discussed for the first time. Two varieties, namely, the one used by Esperanto’s planner Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, and the other one used in modern and contemporary Esperantist magazines, are put in comparison. Three different case studies are discussed: the order of adjective and noun in the noun phrase; the order of verb and manner adverbs in the verb phrase, and the usage of pre-nominal participial relative clauses vs the usage of the (post-nominal) relative pronoun strategy. The analysis is based on corpus-driven data, drawn from the existing literature on the topic and from corpus queries carried out by the author. Results show evidence of some changes in the typological shape of Esperanto. The reason behind these changes is also investigated; most notably, influences of English and speakers’ mother tongues, as well as natural typological drift, cannot be called into question, as far as syntactic changes are concerned. On the other hand, it seems reasonable to think that changes involving morphology – at least to some extent – are due to the tendency of Esperanto speakers to reduce the number of words and of morphemes in their sentences, fully exploiting the agglutinative morphology of the language.