[gordonguthrie]

It clearly is a Western Slavonic language relexified into Romance - the orthography has the characteristic Slavic 1 symbol/1 sound and is distinctly Hussite (ie accents on a short Latin). The core case system has 4 cases (down from the 6/7 of Polish) - except with remnants of more in the Correlatives.

Modern Hebrew - created by a colleague of Zamenhof is also a Western Slavonic - except relexified into Semintic (so I believe - I have no Hebrew).

It all makes the Western Slavonics a super interesting language group...

[AprilArcus]

I think you're just saying that because of the palatal affricates, which English very notably also has. The phonemic inventory of Esperanto looks like English minus its weirdest features, i.e. the interdental fricatives and tense/lax vowel distinction.

The case system, as you describe it, sounds Germanic, not Slavic.

[jcranmer]

English doesn't really have the phonemes spelled ĥ or c in Esperanto (incidentally, these phonemes are also on the rarer side in languages--certainly rarer than aspirated k and the glottal stop, neither of which are phonemic in Esperanto or English).

[gordonguthrie]

My mum used to say to me and my brothers "what's your name Pa'erson with 2 tees" whenever we said bu'er or wa'er - I can assure you that the glottal stop is widely used in dialects on the English continuum in Scotland ;-)

[jcranmer]

Oh, glottal stops are definitely phonetic in English. But they are not phonemic.

[ferzul]

But that's an uninsightful distinction. There's no real difference between the experience of a bu'er sayer and an arabic speaker. If the sounds are noticeable to native speakers, calling them merely phonetic is simply a dubious scientific analysis not representative of the real world.

[yorwba]

There's a real difference in that for a speaker of a language where those are two allophones of the same phoneme, butter and bu'er mean the same thing; they're the same word pronounced differently. For a speaker of a language where the difference is phonemic, they're different words pronounced similarly.

That matters if a speaker of the former language tries to learn the latter. It's hard to learn to reliably make a phonetic distinction that has never mattered for comprehension before. See also Japanese speakers struggling to distinguish "rock" and "lock" in English.

[gordonguthrie]

Except that Zamenhof spoke Slavic languages as a native - and not German nor English - and specifically chose Romance languages to relexify - there is no discernable German or English influence on the language

[ferzul]

The esperanto pronouns are almost exactly like the Eng=lsh ones. Unlike most European languages, there's no distinction between singular, plural or formal 2nd person, but just an everyday 2nd person pronoun and an archaic one. And there's three pronoun genders despite not otherwise having one.

The major distinction is that, when no gender can be determined English traditionally uses the plural for humans (and some people teach the use of “him”, “her” or “him or her”), whereas Zamenhof taught the use of the neuter - although most people imitate the revisionists mentioned in brackets.

[urubu]

About one third of the original vocabulary is derived from Germanic languages (prominent examples: birdo, fajro, ŝtono, strato).

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_etymology#Source_lan...

[gordonguthrie]

And the case system differentiates between indirect objects of motion and position (like Polish) and doesn't have a genitive (which German does)

And also English has like 12-16 vowel sounds and Esperanto (like the Slavics) has half that many

[AprilArcus]

[Not trying to argue against Esperanto's Slavic influence, just having fun and being pedantic]

Yes, the fact that English has a tense/lax vowel distinction rather than long/short is very unusual.

My English dialect (Providence) has five tense-lax pairs (ɑː/æ, eɪ/ɛ, iː/ɪ, oʊ/ɔ, uː/ʊ), a central unrounded vowel (ʌ), and three diphthongs (ɔɪ, aɪ, aʊ), so arguably fourteen "vowel sounds" (General American merges ɑː and ɔ, bringing the total down to thirteen). Which is a lot, by any measure! And many European languages do have much simpler systems, famously Spanish.

However, Esperanto has its five pure vowels as well as six dipthongs (ai, ei, oi, ui, ou, eu), for a total of eleven, which is hardly "half as many"!

[squiggleblaz]

Concerning the number of vowels a language has: https://wals.info/chapter/2 does indeed class 7-14 as a lot. But it's very hard to count vowels in any kind of neutral way.

Concerning Esperanto, it only has two diphthongs - aw and ew. Aj, ej, oj and uj are actually just sequences of a vowel and consonant. For an comparison, consider is English "ye-" as in "yes" is a consonant and a vowel, but the same sound (ie-) in Spanish or Finnish is a diphthong.

What constitutes a diphthong vs a sequence is specific to an analysis of a given language. In Esperanto, we can see that "diversa sono" and "diversaj sonoj" differ just by the addition of a -j sound and we always teach that it's an affix. It isn't the deletion of the /a, o/ and its replacement by a diphthong /ai, oi/ which would destroy the simplicity of Esperanto and confuse anyone whose native language wasn't English.

Additionally, the only hole is -ij, which is missing for good phonotactic reasons - the sounds aren't distinct enough - which is extremely common and shared by a missing ji- so it can't fairly tempt us to analyse it as a diphthong.

This is in contrast to a language like English. /-j/ cannot be added after just any vowel. Moreover, whenever it occurs, it's part of the same root/morpheme as the previous vowel sound. So there's no advantage to analysing them separately (altho some people try to cut back on the number of English vowels, perhaps to only six, by counting the ones you note as ah/a, ey/e, iy/i, ow/o, uw/u, ʌ/(ʌr), oy, ay, aw - but this is normally rejected as being too weird).

English speakers often seem to teach Eo /aj, oj, uj, ej/ as diphthongs simply because of the phonetic properties of English.