Modern Evolution of Esperanto - Lexicon

Lexicon

There has been considerable debate over whether technical terminology should be taken from international usage by adopting new roots into Esperanto, or whether, in cases where the need can be met through traditional Esperanto word formation, that is the better way to go. To a large extent this is a cultural debate: Europeans who are already familiar with such "international" vocabulary often favor adopting such terms, whereas Asians who may not be familiar with them often favor replacing them. One example is the word for "computer". Early proposals for the word "computer" included komputero and komputoro, but they were eventually replaced by the internal creation komputilo, from the verb komputi "to compute" plus the suffix -ilo "instrument".

There has been some criticism of using the prefix mal- to create the antonyms of common adjectives, such as mallonga "short" from longa "long", or malmultekosta "inexpensive" from multekosta "expensive". Several dozen neologisms have been coined for these antonyms (in these cases kurta "short" and ĉipa "cheap"), often for purposes of poetry, but few have met with much acceptance. One of the few that have been is dura "hard", as the original word malmola, from mola "soft", is argued to sound too soft to mean "hard". In one case a antonymic suffix has been proposed, a laudatory -el-, which would contrast with pejorative -aĉ-: skribo "writing", skribaĉo "scrawl, scribbling", skribelo "calligraphy". Unlike aĉa, it is problematic to use the suffix -el- as a word in its own right, due to an existing preposition and prefix el.