Logantiu: Esperanto by Hindsight (a Smug Redesign)

If only Professor Zamenhof had been as enlightened as we all are in the fabulous 21st century! He would have avoided diacritical marks because computer keyboards were not going to like them. He would have devised computer-parsable word boundaries. He would have declared the default gender of nouns to be neuter instead of masculine (okay, so he caught that one at the big congress later).

The fact is, Esperanto was an amazing creation, as shown by the fact that it has survived for about a century. There are just a few things about it that bug me. So I'll "correct" them here, and call the result "Logantiu" (for "Logical Esperanto" with an appropriate grammatical ending).

Mark word boundaries

To ease learning and machine parsing, every word ends in a vowel pair; this vowel pair cannot begin with the letter u. These word-ending vowel pairs mark a word as noun, verb, etc. In addition, any suffixes added to a word stem are separated from the stem by the letter u, which forms a vowel pair with the first letter of the first suffix (any Esperanto suffixes that do not begin with a vowel are prefixed with the letter a to ensure that they do). See the sample vocabulary in the table below.

No other word-ending vowel pairs are defined so far. Doubled vowels are not permitted, except for -ii and -uu, and the vowel pairs beginning with u can and must occur only between stems and suffixes, so the remaining pairs are: -ae, -ao, -ii, -oa, -ou.

Vowel-pairs -ae, -ao, -ea, -eo, -oa, -oe, -ou may not be pronounced as diphthongs; all others may be, whether they are word-ending or stem-ending. Vowel triplets never occur in a word; therefore, a spoken vowel triplet is necessarily a word-ending vowel pair followed by a vowel that begins a word. Identical vowels spanning a word boundary must be separated by a glottal stop, which is considered to be part of the pronunciation of the first word of the two.

When vowel-pairs are pronounced as diphthongs, those beginning with i- are pronounced as though they begin with English "y"; u-, as though they begin with English "w".

No diacritics; logical letter assignment

Letter assignment is redefined along the lines of Loglan (with the exceptions of glyphs "c", "x", and "h"). See the alphabet chart below. Note that in Logantiu:

• The sound of Esperanto "c" is provided by the glyph cluster "ts".
• The sound of Esperanto "c-circumflex" is provided by the glyph cluster "tx".
• The sound of Esperanto "g-circumflex" is provided by the glyph cluster "dj".

Reduced phoneme set

Note that in Logantiu:

• Glyph "c" has no phonemic value.
• There is no phonemic engwa; the glyph "n" provides either the "n" or "engwa" phoneme as ease of pronunciation dictates.
• The sound of Esperanto "h-circumflex" is not phonemic; it is merged with "h", and the resultant sound is fairly aspirant, closer to the "h" of English "here" than that of English "how".

Thorough case marking

Every subject and object is marked with a preceding preposition. The preposition can be omitted if the meaning is clear without it and the utterance follows simple subject-verb-object word order. General-purpose prepositions are provided where grammatical clarity demands it but semantic specificity is unimportant.

Syllabic emphasis

Emphasis is optional. If used, it is on the syllable that precedes the vowel-pair ending.

Schwa buffering

Between every two adjacent consonants, an optional unwritten schwa sound may be pronounced. Doubled consonants that are not separated by schwa buffering must be pronounced as a doubly-long single consonant.

Gender neutrality

The basic root is gender-neutral. Morphemic suffixes are used to mark something as masculine or feminine, or even specifically neuter, if necessary.
 

-in	feminine
-itx	masculine
-ep	specifically neuter

Neutral and opposite markers

The suffix -av, analogous to Esperanto mal-, marks something as having an average amount or neutral degree of the measured quantity or quality. The suffix -og marks it as having the opposite of the measured quantity or quality (replacing Esperanto mal-).

Minimal grammatical forms

Adverbs have the same form as adjectives, except where they modify adjectives or other adverbs. Pronouns have the same form as nouns. Verbs are not conjugated, but take a time modifier if needed. Nouns are not declined, nor do they have number, but take a role modifier (preposition) and quantifiers (adjectives, including numbers and possessive pronouns) if needed. A commonly-used quantifier, for example, means "more than one".

Spoken punctuation

Loglan's model is followed in pronouncing punctuation. A pause has no semantic meaning.

Logical modifier placement

Modifiers (adjectives and adverbs) always follow the noun, verb, or other modifier that they modify.

Logical modifier roles

Modifiers describe attributes intrinsic to nouns or verbs; they must be expressible as predicate modifiers that follow the copula ("...is..."). For example, "skatuolio lignau" means a box that is woody, or simply "woody box". Modifiers can be used less precisely as long as listener and speaker agree to do so, implicitly or explicitly; "skatuolio lignau" could then be used to mean a box made from wood, or a box for holding wood, or a box that happens to be full of wood regardless of its intended purpose. For more flexible precision, there is a series of little words for expressing the more common complex attribute relationships ("a box for holding wood", "a society founded by masons"). Verbs cast as prepositions can also be employed to render these relationships:

Adverbs can only be used to modify modifiers: "skatuolio verdau bluhie" means a box that is bluish-green, whereas "skatuolio verdau bluhau" means a box that is both green and blue. "Parolai rapidau" means "speak quick(ly)", whereas *"Parolai rapidie" is ungrammatical.

Vocabulary

Wherever possible, Esperanto roots remain unchanged, as do most Esperanto word-building suffixes. As a rule, the two vowels of any vowel pair in an Esperanto stem or suffix are separated by h in Logantiu. An exception to this is vowel pairs in which the first vowel is a glide (Esperanto j is the only example); in this case the glide is dropped. Esperanto stems that end in vowels have a consonant added to the stem according to the following scheme:

a

=>    al

e

=>    ed

i

=>    in

o

=>    or

u

=>    um

Prefixes are all replaced with suffixes, and all suffixes must begin with a vowel.

Compound words are formed by adjoining the roots of the constituent words, adding the grammatical suffix only at the very end of the compound. If doubled consonants would be formed by this process, they are separated by the letter a.

For clarity in understanding spoken numbers, the number words are changed more significantly. Compound numbers are constructed following the Loglan model.

Proper nouns (names) have their own grammatical marker (-iu); a name whose root ends in a vowel has h added between the root and the marker. Where preference dictates, a female name can be marked with -ea, and a male name with -oe, instead of -iu; these are typically used for first or given names. In all three cases, the ending markers are not considered part of the name itself.

"Little" words — conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, and so on — are also significantly changed, to follow a more rigourous logic.

Sample vocabulary

Glyph and compound number names and pronunciation

Alphabet

Foreign letters

Numbers

Other glyphs