Proto-Esperanto
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As a child, Zamenhof had the idea to introduce an international auxiliary language for communication between different nationalities. He originally wanted to revive some form of simplified Latin or Greek, but as he grew older he came to believe that it would be better to create a new language for his purpose. During his teenage years he worked on a language project until he thought it ready for public demonstration. On December 17, 1878 (about one year before the first publication of Volapük), Zamenhof celebrated his birthday and the birth of the language with some friends, who liked the project. Zamenhof himself called his language Lingwe Uniwersala ("world language").
While at university, Zamenhof handed his work over to his father, Mordechai, for safe-keeping until he had completed his medical studies. His father, not understanding the ideas of his son and perhaps anticipating problems from the Tsarist police, burned the work. Zamenhof didn't find out about this until 1881, at which point he had to create a new version of his language.
The Lingwe uniwersala
We now have only four lines of the Lingwe uniwersala stage of the language from 1878, from an early song that Zamenhof composed:
| ''Malamikete de las nacjes, | Enmity of nations, | ||
| ''Cadó, Cadó, jam temp' está; | Fall, Fall, it is time!; | ||
| ''La tot' homoze in familje | All humanity in a family | ||
| ''Konunigare so debá. | Must unite. |
In modern Esperanto, this would be,
- ''Malamikeco de la nacioj,
- ''Falu, falu, jam temp' estas;
- ''La tuta homar' en familion
- ''Kununuigi sin devas.
The Lingvo universala
Zamenhof restarted his project after his return from university, and refined his ideas for the language for the next several years. Most of his refinements came through translation of literature and poetry in other languages. An early sample from this second phase is this extract of a letter from 1881:
- Ma plej kara miko, kvan ma plekulpa plumo faktidźas tiranno pu to. Mo poté de cen taj brivoj kluri ke sciigoj de fu-ći specco debé blessi tal fradal kordol ...
- (My dearest friend, how my most guilty pen has become a tyrant for you. From a hundred of your letters I can conclude that announcements of this kind must wound your brotherly heart ...)
The verbal conjugation was present tense -é, past -u, future -uj, conditional -á, jussive -ó, and infinitive -e or -i.
The pronouns ended in a nominal o (and an adjectival a for possessives), but there were other differences as well, including gender in the third-person plural:
| 1881 pronouns | singular | plural |
| 1st person | mo | no |
| 2nd person | to | vo |
| 3rd masculine | ro | po |
| 3rd feminine | śo | o |
| 3rd reflexive | so | |
Later the final stress in the verb conjugations was rejected in favour of always stressing the second-last syllable, and the old plural -s became a marker of finite tenses. The Slavic-style acute diacritics became circumflexes to avoid overt appearances of nationalism, and the new bases of the letters ĵ, ĝ (for Slavic ź, dź) helped preserve the appearance of Romance and Germanic vocabulary.
In 1887, Zamenhof published the Unua Libro ("First Book"), which contained the Esperanto language as we now know it. In a letter to Nikolai Borovko he later wrote,
- I've worked for six years perfecting and testing the language, when in the year 1878 it had already seemed completely ready to me.
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