[Corpora-List] Esperanto is more similar to Italian than Latin

[John F. Sowa]

 > from the phonostatistical point of view Esperanto is more similar
 > to Italian than Latin. Why so? We thought it must be Latin.
 > Can you explain?

As Yorick Wilks explained, Esperanto is an artificially constructed
language from multiple sources, Romance, Germanic, Slavic, and Greek --
all of which are IndoEuropean.

In terms of vocabulary, Latin would be the ultimate source of most
of the vocabulary, but the actual words chosen have a high overlap
with the modern Romance languages and English (which in vocabulary
is more Romance than Germanic).

In trying to classify its structure, the vocabulary is less important
than the syntax.  English syntax, for example, is more Germanic than
Romance.

Since Esperanto relies more heavily on prepositions than on case
endings, it would be closer to modern Romance languages than to
Latin.  But since it has case endings on nouns and adjectives, it
would be closer to modern Slavic and Germanic languages than to
the Romance languages.

The least controversial way to classify Esperanto would be as
an artificial language whose vocabulary and syntax have been
drawn from several Indo-European sources.

John Sowa




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