Wiktionary talk:About Esperanto

Pronunciation
Apparently (according to fr:) is standard for the e, while we use. For example:



That's the, right? It rhymes with or, etc. Mglovesfun (talk) 17:20, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
 * "Ideally" Esperanto /e/ is a mid vowel ([e̞]), but as there is no further contrast with another vowel in that region and it is an International Auxiliary Language, anything from phonetic close-mid [e] to phonetic open-mid [ɛ] is considered just fine. This also why transcribing the pronunciation as phonemic /e/ is fine (usually easier to type and read). You're right in the assessment of the sound, the speaker pronounces it as [ɛ]. --JorisvS 12:21, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

X-system and H-system
Should we create entries for alternative spellings using the X-system and the H-system? (For example, mangxo and mangho for manĝo) Taliandr (talk) 01:45, 14 September 2013 (UTC)
 * If they're attested, I would say yes. If someone finds something written using one of those systems, they're going to want to look them up, and they may not know how to convert to or (even type) the correct letters. Of course, they should be "alternative spelling of" rather than full entries. That said, I don't edit Esperanto, so my opinion isn't as important as that of those who do. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:55, 14 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I think it would be better to formulate a general policy on each of these systems, rather than leaving it to the vagaries of whether each individual X- or H-spelling happens to be "attested" in the Wiktionary sense. I expect that "attestation" of an X- or H-spelled word will exist only for common words, but there's no logical reason IMHO to include these spellings for common words and not rare ones. —Ruakh TALK 03:37, 14 September 2013 (UTC)
 * We don't store random romanizations or ASCII-izations of other languages, why should we store random ASCII-izations of Esperanto? We can probably cite a lot of accentless French from Usenet; should we add it? Unlike accentless French, no Esperanto speaker, even novice, is generally going to have a problem transcribing these back into the standard form.
 * Esperanto has a clean underlying orthography with a number of different surface orthographies that are generally ASCII-izations. I'd much rather use them as citations for the underlying orthography then split them out.
 * It might be nice to link them in some fashion, but not create entries for them.--Prosfilaes (talk) 09:03, 15 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Perhaps there should be a listing of the ASCII-ized forms (without links) in the entry so that those searching for them will see them in the search results (that's presuming there isn't an entry for that spelling in other languages). Perhaps using a template like those in Han character entries, though I'm not sure if the alt-spellings would show up in searches. Chuck Entz (talk) 15:31, 15 September 2013 (UTC)
 * In case this ever gets revisited, it might be worth considering whether there exist any words that are attested only in one of the ASCII systems, and not in the "proper" orthography, and if this should mean that the "proper" form doesn't get an entry.__Gamren (talk) 22:43, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm inclined to "pool" X-system, H-system, and ˆ-system spellings to attest the proper spelling. I think this is what we've done in the past. This is different from variant spellings in most languages, in that it is completely consistent and predictable. It's kind of like pooling simplified and traditional characters to attest a Chinese word (which I assume we would also do). —Granger (talk · contribs) 06:42, 5 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Or for another example: Danish used to capitalize nouns like German, and had a digraph aa that was replaced with å; this we also pool together. I agree that X- and H-spellings should count towards attestation of the proper spelling. The case in Esperanto is even stronger, because those spellings, as I understand it, were never anything more than a technical work-around.__Gamren (talk) 14:05, 7 September 2020 (UTC)
 * This is old, but H-system should indeed be displayed, because it is a fundamental part of Esperanto. in fact, I can make a template for it. That being said, alongside the H-system form should be the literumation form of the h-system form, so as to easily separate h-system ŭ from u.
 * example: [a uo u lo o].
 * This way, the h-system ŭ is clearly marked and captured, for those on computers not able to render diacritics.
 * »X-system« however, should not even be present. it is not Esperanto. it is a reformist movement. No real life Esperantist even asked for this, and blind and deaf esperantists are probably very irritated as a result. 2600:1700:FBF0:B90:DFD9:4B3F:E189:C993 14:35, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
 * actually, the h-system literumation should be opposite way; there should be an additional h-system form of literumation of the esperanto word to clearly mark the ŭ for ASCII only computer.
 * examplely textuated. »a uo u lo o« ← »a ŭo u lo o« ← »aŭulo« . 2600:1700:FBF0:B90:FD0A:77F7:819D:611F 00:15, 25 June 2024 (UTC)

RFC discussion: October 2010–July 2015
If you’ve been using  to generate adjectival participles [-inta(j)(n)/-anta(j)(n)/-onta(j)(n)], bad news: the script was generating Verb part-of-speech headers for those endings instead of Adjective. (The good news is, I’ve fixed the bug.)

What’s worse, it seems that some time ago, Darkicebot mass produced a metric boatload of these pages, all marked with the wrong part of speech.

To fix this mess, we're gonna need a bigger bot. — Robin 01:49, 4 October 2010 (UTC)
 * What exactly makes Esperanto participles count as adjectives but participles from other language count as verbs? --Yair rand (talk) 02:07, 4 October 2010 (UTC)
 * That's what I was gonna say. Convince us you're right. Mglovesfun (talk) 13:09, 4 October 2010 (UTC)
 * In Esperanto the final letter(s) of the word unambiguously determine the part of speech. Adjectives always end in -a, and a word ending in -a is always an adjective. So there can be no confusion. —CodeCat 15:49, 4 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Sorry, for non-Esperantists, the participle markers in Esperanto are -int- (past), -ant- (present), and -ont- (future), which are then followed by a part of speech ending, -a (adjective), -o (noun), -e (adverb). An example of each sort of participle, with suffixes indicated:
 * vojaĝ·i = to travel
 * vojaĝ·ant·a famili·o = a family that is traveling
 * vojaĝ·ant·o = one who is traveling
 * vojaĝ·ant·e mi serĉ·as bov·in·o·j·n = travelingly (while traveling), I look for cows.
 * They are formed from verbs, but their part of speech is explicit; they are not verbs. - Robin 15:20, 5 October 2010 (UTC)
 * This seems to be the same case as English. "traveling" (like "vojaĝanta") is a participle that functions like an adjective, yet it is labeled as a verb. How are Esperanto participles different? (I actually don't understand at all why all participles are labeled as verbs, but if we're going to have them labeled like that we might as well be consistent about it...) --Yair rand (talk) 17:32, 5 October 2010 (UTC)
 * "Verbs functioning as adjectives", that’s an English mindset where verbs can't lose their verbness even when they turn into adjectives.
 * Esperanto is like a world of roots which only gain a part of speech from an ending:
 * vid·o (noun: sight) vid·a (adjective: visual)  vid·e (adverb: visually, by sight)       vid·i (verb: to see)
 * reĝ·o (noun: king)  reĝ·a (adjective: royal)   reĝ·e (adverb: in the manner of a king)  reĝ·i (verb: to be king, reign)
 * Unlike English, if you know the word for "sight", you also know the word for "visual" and "see"; the root "vid" can become any part of speech. It’s entirely determined by that last letter.
 * So vojaĝ·ant·o isn't a verb acting like a noun, it is a noun, turns whatever you attach it to into a fully-fledged noun. — Robin 07:19, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

Still a problem. There are tons of adjective forms with a "Noun" L3 header. -- Prince Kassad 18:03, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
 * are there still entries that need cleaning-up or have they all been cleaned up by now? - -sche (discuss) 04:12, 7 March 2015 (UTC)


 * are there still entries of this sort that need cleaning-up or have they all been cleaned up by now? - -sche (discuss) 17:17, 3 July 2015 (UTC)


 * As far as I can tell they have been cleaned up. If we want to be sure, someone could write a script to look through all Esperanto entries and check whether the POS header matches the last letters of the word. But after looking through a few, I don't see any with the wrong POS. —Mr. Granger (talk • contribs) 23:26, 3 July 2015 (UTC)
 * I did a check myself, and it does look from [//en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=ripro%C4%89otajn&action=history this] like QuasiBot cleaned up the affected entries. - -sche (discuss) 04:46, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

“Borrowed” versus “Derived” in Esperanto etymologies?
I see cases of Esperanto etymologies using der and others using bor. If you're going to give a "deep" etymology (e.g., "Borrowed from Latin vesper, from Proto-Indo-European *wekʷsperos."), then der will come up—though I'd argue Esperanto shouldn't give deep etymologies. But as the immediate (first) extraction, I don't think any Esperanto word can be said to have "derived" from another language's—it's all borrowings. My understanding (and I'm a syntactician, not a historical linguist, so it could be badly mistaken) is that Esperanto, as a planned language, doesn't "derive" from any language.

Yet there are many entries (for instance,, which I just paraphrased from)—that do use der and not bor. Am I mistaken in what these two terms mean, or in how Esperanto's lineage is considered?

If not, I would propose that cases like be standardized to use bor, and not der, for the first extraction. Is there a proper place to do so? --TreyHarris (talk) 16:45, 1 February 2021 (UTC)


 * I'd say that certain planned languages, like Latino sine Flexione, very clearly do derive from other languages, in this case Latin. In the case of Esperanto, it's fuzzier. I can't find my copies of Vilborg's Etimologia vortaro de Esperanto, but there is a pretty clear set of languages used by Zamenhof to build Esperanto's vocabulary: French, Italian, German, English and Latin. There's a few words outside of that, like (sausage; we have it from Russian, Vilborg, IIRC, points to the Polish) and  (from the Greek), and Russian seems to have had a much larger impact on word meanings than orthography. Anyway, there's a core set of languages that Esperanto was in a sense derived from, and it might be helpful to distinguish that core from one-off borrowings.--Prosfilaes (talk) 23:58, 3 February 2021 (UTC)