Comparison Between Esperanto and Interlingua - Grammar and Word Formation

Grammar and Word Formation

Both languages have a highly regular grammar without difficult conjugations or declensions. However, Interlingua lacks adjective agreement and case endings, which make its noun and adjective morphology simpler.

Interlingua draws its roots from certain "control languages": French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, English, German and Russian. It uses these languages as a means to select the words most used in these major European languages. Esperanto draws from largely the same languages, but uses agglutination more extensively. Rather than using an existing word commonly used among the major European languages, Esperanto forms its own words using its own roots. For example, the Esperanto word for "hospital" is mal·san·ul·ej·o, which breaks down into five roots: mal (opposite), san (health), ul (person), ej (place), o (noun). Interlingua tends to use words derived from natural languages instead of extensive agglutination.

The following table illustrates the difference between Esperanto and Interlingua with regards to word formation:

To the reader who speaks English or a Romance language, the words in the Interlingua column are more likely to appear recognizable. However, speakers of languages that do not have words related to those in the Interlingua column must learn the Interlingua words one at a time; the Esperanto words, however, would be simple to use because of its system of word derivation. This point underlines the fundamental differences between Esperanto and Interlingua: the latter was designed to be easily understood by speakers of European languages, whereas the former was designed for people to learn to speak more easily. (Interlingua does have, however, a more regular system of word derivation than many natural languages.)

Often, the European words on which Interlingua is based gain extensive currency in non-Western languages. Hospital, for example, appears in Celtic languages such as Irish, Scottish, Manx, and Breton; Germanic languages such as Dutch, Danish and Afrikaans; Slavic languages such as Ukrainian and Polish; Indo-Aryan languages such as Hindi, Urdu and Bengali; Altaic languages such as Mongolian, Turkmen and Azerbaijani; Austronesian languages such as Indonesian, Ilocano, Tagalog, Tetum and Chamorro; African languages such as Swahili, Kongo and Setswana; and creoles and linguistically isolated languages such as Papiamento, Albanian, Mapunzugun and Basque. In many other languages, however, the word hospital is not found, including Finnish, Arabic, Hebrew, Vietnamese and Hungarian.

Both languages attempt to be as precise as possible; that is, each strives to reflect differences in meaning using different words. Interlinguists sometimes claim, however, that Esperanto's system of word formation sometimes causes ambiguity. The Esperanto compound mal-san-ul-ej-o, literally "un-healthy-person-place-noun", implies a place for people who are unhealthy. The word means "hospital", but the compound could be construed as any place where an unhealthy person is. Interlingua's non-compound word, though possibly less neutral, thus avoids any misunderstanding. (Depending on the speaker and audience, Esperanto could also use a different word for "hospital", such as hospitalo, kliniko, lazareto, preventorio or sanatorio.)

Interlingua and Esperanto have minor differences regarding precisely how agglutinations occur. For example, Interlingua adds tense endings to the indicative form of a verb (dona → donar), while Esperanto adds them to the stem (don- → doni).