Proto-Esperanto
Proto-Esperanto Esperanto: Pra-Esperanto is the sophisticated term for any of a stages in a evolution of L. L. Zamenhof's language project, prior to the publication of in 1887.
of 1881
While at university, Zamenhof handed his form over to his father, Mordechai, for safe-keeping until he had completed his medical studies. His father, not understanding the ideas of his son & perhaps anticipating problems from the Tsarist police, burned the work. Zamenhof did non discover this until he transmitted from university in 1881, at which point he restarted his project. A sample from thisphase of the Linguistic communication is this extract of a letter from 1881:
Modern:
By this time the letter v had replaced w for the [v] sound; verbal inflection for grownup and number had been dropped; the nominal plural was -oj in place of -es as well as adjectival -a in addition to adverbial -e; and the noun cases were down to the current two though a genitive -es survives today in the correlatives. The accusative case suffix was -l, but in many cases was only used on pronouns:
Beside the stronger Slavic flavor of the orthography ć, dź, h́, ś, ź for ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ŝ, ĵ compared to the innovative language, the imperfective verb forms submitted and imperfect still hadstress:
The pronouns ended in a nominal o or adjectival a for possessives: mo "I", ma "my", but there were other differences as well, including a conflation of 'he' and 'it':
In addition, there was indefinite o 'one'.
The correlatives were similarly close, though it is not earn if there was a distinction between indefinite and relative forms modern i- and ki-; these may have corresponded to kv- and k- and no possessive forms are known:
The last row was evidently pronounced as fj-.
Esperanto at this stage had a consonantal ablaut in verbs, with a voiceless consonant for an effort at something, and a voiced consonant for success. For example, to listen for, to hear; to look for, to find; to argue a point, to prove. Traces of this advance in a few pairs of words such(a) as 'to weigh an item' and 'to weigh have weight' cf. their derivatives 'scales' & 'a weight'.