Esperanto etymology


Esperanto vocabulary together with grammatical forms derive primarily from the Romance languages, with substantial contributions from Germanic languages. The language occupies the middle ground between "naturalistic" constructed languages such(a) as Interlingua, which borrow words en masse from their reference languages with little internal derivation, and a priori conlangs such(a) as Solresol, in which the words develope no historical link to other languages. In Esperanto, root words are borrowed and retain much of the hold of their item of quotation language, if the phonetic form eks- from international ex-, vualo from French voile or orthographic form teamo and boato from English team and boat, soifo from French soif. However, regarded and mentioned separately. root can then form dozens of derivations which may bear little resemblance to equivalent words in the source languages, such(a) as registaro government, which is derived from the Latinate root reg to rule but has a morphology closer to German or Russian.

Traces of Proto-Esperanto


Proto-Esperanto had voicing ablaut, traces of which go forward in a few pairs of words such as pezi 'to weigh' to have weight and pesi 'to weigh' to measure the weight. Because little of Proto-Esperanto has survived, it is not clear which other aspects of Esperanto etymology might date to this period.