Esperanto II

Esperanto II was a reform of Esperanto proposed by René de Saussure in 1937, the last of a long series of such proposals beginning with a 1907 response to Ido later called Antido 1. Esperanto II was one of several languages investigated by the International Auxiliary Language Association, the linguistic research body that eventually standardized and presented Interlingua.

The orthography and phonology were changed to eliminate diacritics and a few of the more marginal sounds: J becomes Y, Ĵ and Ĝ conflate to J, Ŭ becomes W, Ĉ becomes CH, Ŝ becomes SH, KV becomes Q, KZ and KS become X, EJ becomes E.

Several of the grammatical inflections were changed. The accusative is in -u, which replaces the final vowel of nouns, pronouns, and correlatives (ju for ĝin, tu for tion), and for the plural -n is added to both nouns and pronouns (lin "they", lina "their"). Neither suffix affects adjectives, which do not agree with their noun. The correlative series tiu, ĉiu becomes ta, cha when modifying a noun. The indefinite suffix -aŭ is replaced with adverbial -e, and the inchoative -iĝ- becomes -ev-.

A large number of small grammatical words are also replaced, such as ey for kaj "and", be for ĉe "at", and ki for ol "than". The work of the preposition de "of, by, from" is divided up into several more specific prepositions.

Additionally, the project introduced international cognates when such cognates were readily recognized; for example, skolo was used for "school" in place of standard Esperanto's lernejo (a derivation of lerni, "to learn"). Skolo has since been adopted by Esperanto in the sense of "a school of thought", which is how it is used in the passage below. Antonymic roots such as tarde for malfrue "late" and poke for malmulte "few" are used today in Esperanto poetry, though they resemble Ido and Esperanto may have acquired them from that language.