Syntactic and Lexical Changes in Esperanto: A Quantitative and Corpus-Based Survey

Esperanto is unique among the world’s communicative languages in that, rather than being the culmination of hundreds of years of natural language change and evolution, it arose as the result of a conscious human pln. From a certain point of view, this makes it also uniquely interesting for the historical linguist. Despite its relative youth (it was developed only 130 years ago), Esperanto already demonstrates many of the patterns of historical changes that are typical among natural languages. Indeed, because of its youth, Esperanto may offer an unparalleld opportunity to watch the early stages of language development in process. This paper details a corpus study of historical changes in Esperanto. Journal articles freely available for use on the internet from 1922, 1957, and 2001 were processed using a Python script. Specific changes predicted are those consisted with a code/signal processing view of language. In particular, it was expected that the so-called “unofficial” suffixes would drop from the language, that derived wordforms for highly frequent words would give way to loanwords, that adverbial forms would become less frequent, and that relative clauses would begin to give way to Japanese-style adjectival modifier phrases. Excepting the prediction that adverbial forms would become less frequent, all of these changes were, in fact, observed.