Suppression!

Zamenhof's knowledge of several languages, and especially English and Russian, made him aware of the essential prerequisites of an international, planned language and also of what pitfalls he needed to avoid.

1. There would be no grammar, in the accepted sense of the word. Like the English language, there would be no inflexions, conjugations of verbs or declension of nouns.

2. Everybody must be able to speak it easily. In other words, unlike the English language, it would be completely phonetic: each letter would have only one sound, and that sound able to be easily pronounced by anybody in the world.

3. The amount of vocabulary learning would be reduced by an enormous degree by the use of "affixes" - in other words, small building blocks of language which could be added to other building blocks in a completely consistent way.

4. The basis of the language would be these unchanging building blocks which Zamenhof called "radikoj," or roots. A few simple rules would be formulated but these rules would be applied with utter consistency. The new language would be regular, logical and predictable.

On these four cornerstones, Zamenhof was able to build a living language and to describe it in only 16 short rules. These rules and some additional explanation of them can be found here.

The Sixteen Rules

(Under the heading "Esperanto Access," first select "The Language" and then scroll down the resulting frame until you find "Sixteen Rules.)

Let me give you some idea of how these clever ideas work in practice. Let's take, for example, the root "san," which expresses the idea of health. From this one root we can form the words:

sano (health); sana (healthy); sane (healthily); sani (to be healthy); malsano (illness); malsanulo (a sick person); malsanulino (a sick lady); malsanulejo (a hospital); saniga (healthy); sanigado (hygiene); sanigejo (a sanitarium); sanigilo (a remedy); and so on and so on.

(I have a 500-word story in Esperanto and you only need to know 98 roots to understand it. It has been estimated that 2,800 Esperanto roots are sufficient to provide the equivalent of 10,000 words.)

2,800 might still seem a big number to memorize, but Zamenhof based much of the vocabulary of his language on words derived from Latin so that they would be easily recognised by people of many nationalities. See how many of these Esperanto nouns you can identify at sight.

TABLO, KATO, LEONO, BICIKLO, PATRO, LUNO, SUNO, RESPONDO, DEMANDO, LANDO, INFANO, AMIKO.

(Were you able to guess all twelve?)

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