Radaro Report 2021-02-22

Another week, another article pondering the implications for Esperanto grammar as it relates to other living languages. Disclaimer, I’m not a linguist, simply an enthusiast of languages and linguistics.

It’s sunny, it’s time to go, there’s nothing here. Doubtlessly when you first started learning Esperanto, you learned that most phrases relating to weather don’t have the English to “it” or “there”. So, it’s “estas varme!” not “ĝi estas varma” for “it’s warm!”, when referring to weather. Taking it a step further, “there’s nothing here” isn’t “tie estas nenio tie ĉi”, but rather “estas nenio tie ĉi”. What does “it” and “there” really mean in these sentences, and why is it lacking in Esperanto?

English itself is a very… peculiar language. It has elements, such as vocabulary, from the Romance languages, and other elements from the Germanic languages, and a few other elements from less world known language branches like Celtic sprinkled here and there. The “it” and “there” are elements left over from the Germanic languages, which follow a verb second (V2) word order. For example, in German, the word order of  “I really wanted to eat that” would be “I wanted that really to eat”, where the main verb comes second in the sentence, and additional verbs or clauses come in after. The subject and its modifiers goes before the verb. But what about when there is no real subject? If you speak a Germanic language, you just tack a pronoun before the verb and no harm done.

I call them dummy pronouns, pronouns which don’t really reference anything, but you sound dumb without using them. I’m sure there is another name for these worthless relics from an age long past (but again, I’m not a professional linguist), as English isn’t a strict V2 language anymore, and adverbs typically come before the verbs. Regardless, at the end of the day, it’s interesting to see that Esperanto managed to evade such Germanic influence and do away with these “dummy pronouns”. Because of this, Esperanto offers a bit more flexibility in word order than these strict V2 languages because of it, something I’m sure L.L. Zamenhof considered during its construction.