If I were going to create a language, I’d want it to be, well, Esperantish. Regular grammar, exceptions a non-event, logic and flexibility equally prevalent. And … there’s something else that I would want too; a great first impression.

Esperanto has that. What do I mean? Think about it. What’s the first encounter you ever have with Esperanto? Think. And again. Please.

Correct! The name itself, simply enough. It’s a nice name. It sounds both exotic and welcoming in equal measure. It looks nice in print. Take a glance again:

There, doesn’t that look gorgeous?

Contrast that with the name of its contemporary; Volapük. VolaYuck more like. That looks downright sinister to me. Esperanto makes me think of a Summer day spent drinking lemonade in a field. Volapük strikes me as the name to give an animal that eats its young. See? First impressions count.

Then there’s the fact that Esperanto actually means something. “One who is hopeful”. That’s superb. If you can find someone that has a bit of knowledge of Volapük, that person will counter that the name of their chosen international language also has a meaning. It does: “World’s speak”. That’s not bad. Maybe a tad too martial for my liking, but relatively appropriate for a planned second language for all humanity.

Anyway, the point of this little offering of mine isn’t to bury Volapük or any other language. I wouldn’t appreciate people assaulting ours, so I won’t do it to theirs.

No, dear reader, this article is about that core element of language - words. Specifically, favourite words.

How does this link into those irregular introductory paragraphs? Simple. Esperanto is one of my favourite words. It looks beautiful. It sounds melodious. It has a wonderful meaning. Volapük, to my idiosyncratic tastes at least, boasts none of these attributes.

Anyway, it would be a short article if I left it at those two contributions. So, in the interest of providing a lengthier-yet-entertaining read, I spoke with the members of the JEB committee and asked them to make their own contributions. Here’s what was said; starting with favourite words and concluding with displeasing ones.

The original e-mail was sent at 10:05. The first answer came back at 10:18 from Rolf. Uncharacteristic promptness! Yes it was, although there was no real cause for surprise; I merely logged out after sending the e-mail, handed the laptop to the hungover wretch sitting a couple of metres away from me and instructed him to “Check your mails, son!”

Suitably embittered by the sore head that he was nursing, he sent back a very curt reply, and one after my own heart, I must admit: krokodili. (To crocodile; this is used to refer to an Esperantist or somebody in the company of Esperantists who speaks in his own native tongue.) “IT’S A STUPID WORD USED MAINLY BY STUPID PEOPLE!” Hear hear, I’ll raise a glass to that.

That started the torrent. In they came, thick and fast. Mikeo, in keeping with his Mr Nice Guy persona, offered palpo (a gentle touch or an instance of caressing), matched by Clare’s fidela (faithful) because “The first words I ever saw in Esperanto were ‘Amiko fidela estas trezoro plej bela’ (‘A faithful friend is a most beautiful treasure’); they meant a lot. Without doubt, for me they are the most beautiful words in the language and fidela is the word which makes it for me.”

Other people offered words on the strength of their appearance. Daniel’s favourites were grumbli and kloplodi because they “look cool”. There were a couple more too: “When I first started, farti and ŝati (pronounced shat-tee) were funny too!” It might be of interest to Daniel to know the following then:

Daniel’s by no means the first to notice that farti sounds a little familiar to English ears. Zamenhof himself was made aware that there was a little embarassment caused by use of the word to such a point that he published a letter in the 1907 edition of “The British Esperantist”: “Because the word farti is very unpleasant to English ears, I would advise that we replace it by stati (to be in a state), especially in England. For example, “Kiel vi statas?” (”What state do you find yourself in?”) in place of “Kiel vi fartas?” (literally “How are you fareing?” but used in Esperanto as the common way of asking “How are you doing?”).

See, even in laid-back articles like this one, you can still find a little nugget to learn. Anyway, back to the matter at hand.

Hannah also piped in with a contribution based on a word “sounding nice”: erinaco. Well, this thing does look cute (even if it eats slugs), and erinaco is a cute-sounding name to give it.

Word-play featured in a few of the offerings too. Hannah was amused by neĉesejo, it being a rethink of necesejo. (Necesejo (‘the place for the necessary’) is Esperanto slang for a toilet. Replace the c with ĉ and you get the meaning ‘the place where you just can’t put an end to it’.)

My first favourite was based on this too. I love that you can take the word diskuto (a discussion) and swap just one letter to get the opposite meaning, disputo (an argument), so the imaginary dis(k/p)uto was ventured.

My second was inspired by the grammar nut in me; estonteco (future). I already loved the idea that whatever problems today brings, tomorrow’s another day. My love for this word was compounced exponentially though because - and I apologise for my geekiness - “I’m a fan of the grammatical bits that are involved in its construction (copula declined to future active form with an additional suffix appended to serve as an indicator of abstraction) and also the whole idea of “future”; forget what went wrong today, look forward to tomorrow.”

OK, normal service has resumed, you can all wake up now. And feel sorry me too, of course.

There were several categories of words that people didn’t like. Some, as we’ve seen from Rolf’s initial outburst, stem from misuse of a word. I, for example, am not the world’s greatest fan of using samideano (person having the same idea) as an alternative to Esperantist, because I believe that it deindividualises. There are a multitude of reasons why we learnt Esperanto, and we are all humans with varying beliefs and characteristics. “Heterogenity is the seasoning of existence”, or something like that. Similarly, Mikeo voiced his displeasure at the use of propagandi when people speak about promoting Esperanto because of the negative connotations that some of use find in the word, especially considering that the word promocii (to promote [an event or similar]) exists.

Other sources of complaint were that some words cause ambiguity because they’re not necessarily precise enough compared to the word-rich English dictionary. Hannah cited malĝentila, since it runs the whole gamut from meaning a little impolite or unkind all the way to thoroughly nasty.

The final reasonings can be told much more humorously. I happened to say “I bet Petra hates translokiĝi (to relocate) because it usually means that she’s chatted to some idiot during an international event, and now he’s just decided that he loves her and is planning on moving to England to be with her!” She replied in the affirmative, but happened to append that “The words dediĉo (commitment) and edzo (husband) are pretty low on my list as well … mainly when said by a certain male from the Midlands.” That’s me told then
Last but in no way least comes Clare. She chose the word maldekstra (the direction ‘left’. ‘Mal-’ means ‘the opposite of’, ‘dekstra’ means the direction ‘right’, so ‘left’ is literally ‘the opposite of right’.) Now there’s already the ‘fairness’ issue at hand here; why should ‘right’ be given its own status but not ‘left’? But for our Clare, there’s an even bigger problem to confront. For a start, she “can never remember whether dekstra means left or right. As Tim can testify, I have slight issues (Tim’s note: “slight” is not the word!) telling the difference between left and right at the best of times, so the concept of maldekstra is majorly confusing. First, I have to work out what dekstra means (left or right), then I have to take the opposite of it … then I have to work out which direction it’s in anyway!”

Poor Clare. I’ve actually been holding something away from her anyway. I told her that there’d be a little something of a surprise for her in the newsletter but wouldn’t tell her what it would be. It’s the second of this article’s trivia points:

There is actually an alternative to maldekstra. It’s in the Plena Illustrita Vortaro, so it’s official. The word is liva. It’s majorly unknown (since it’s not taught in correspondance courses) but I can assure that it is in use. Sten Johansen found 60 uses of it on the internet (compared with 680 for maldekstra).

So that’s the end of our little sojourn into the kingdom of words. It should be of great reassurance to see that words can inspire different passions in all of us. And that’s something that I neglected to mention in the introduction; if I were creating my own language, I’d want it to be expressive and emotive. As those of us who speak it know, there’s no denying that such is the case for Esperanto, as I hope I’ve succeeded in demonstrating.

Thanks for reading. If you’ve any comments or contributions to make for a future version, by all means drop me some comments or track me down in the forums.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 9:45 pm and is filed under Articles, English. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.