Proto-Esperanto
| Proto-Esperanto | |
|---|---|
| Pra-Esperanto | |
| Created by | L. L. Zamenhof |
| Date | 1878–1881 |
| Setting and usage | international auxiliary language |
| Users | None |
| Purpose |
constructed language
|
| Latin | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
| Glottolog | None |
Proto-Esperanto (Esperanto: Pra-Esperanto) is the modern term for any of the stages in the evolution of L. L. Zamenhof's language project, prior to the publication of his Unua Libro in 1887.
As a child, Zamenhof had the idea to introduce an international auxiliary language for communication between different nationalities. He originally wanted to revive some form of simplified Latin or Greek, but as he grew older he came to believe that it would be better to create a new language for his purpose. During his teenage years he worked on a language project until he thought it was ready for public demonstration. On December 17, 1878 (about one year before the first publication of Volapük), Zamenhof celebrated his birthday and the birth of the language with some friends, who liked the project. Zamenhof himself called his language Lingwe Uniwersala ("world language").
W is used for v. Otherwise, all modern Esperanto letters are attested apart from ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, ŭ. Known verb forms are present -á, imperative -ó, infinitive -are. Nouns were marked by -e in the singular and -es in the plural; the article was singular la and plural las. It appears that there was no accusative case, and that stress was as in modern Esperanto, except when marked, as in -á and -ó.
Only four lines of the Lingwe uniwersala stage of the language from 1878 remain, from an early song that Zamenhof composed:
In modern Esperanto, this would be,
Jam temp' está remains an idiom in modern Esperanto, an allusion to this song.
While at university, Zamenhof handed his work over to his father, Mordechai, for safe-keeping until he had completed his medical studies. His father, not understanding the ideas of his son and perhaps anticipating problems from the Tsarist police, burned the work. Zamenhof did not discover this until he returned from university in 1881, at which point he restarted his project. A sample from this second phase of the language is this extract of a letter from 1881:
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