Comparison between Esperanto and Interlingua
Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto, was motivated by several strands of nineteenth-century idealism, ranging from Comtean positivism to utopian internationalism.
Esperanto, in his view, was a theoretically neutral instrument for communication, which could serve as a vehicle for idealistic values, initially Zamenhof's philosophy of homaranismo, later the interna ideo (internal idea) of achieving "fraternity and justice among all people" (Zamenhof) through the adoption of Esperanto.
Among later Esperantists, this philosophy has tended to reinforce a set of propositions about the language: By the mid-twentieth century, when Gode led the development of Interlingua, the ideals underlying Esperanto had come to seem naive.
This implied, in his view, that a world language on the Esperanto model was either impossible or, worse, achievable only through totalitarian coercion.
For example, Interlingua has geisha (from Japanese 芸者), sheik (from Arabic شيخ), and kayak (from Inuit ᖃᔭᖅ); in Esperanto, these words are written gejŝo, ŝejko, and kajako.
Interlingua does not have that as a design aim, thus most of its compound and "primitive" (non-compound) words also exist in its source languages.
Interlingua draws its roots from certain "control languages": French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, English, German and Russian.
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).
Highly agglutinated constructions are greatly frowned upon by Interlinguists, as the regular form of the word (i.e. "hospital") is far more understandable to most people.
(Depending on the speaker and audience, Esperanto could also use a different word for "hospital", such as hospitalo, kliniko, lazareto, preventorio or sanatorio.)
The orthography of Esperanto is inspired by the Latin alphabets of Slavic languages, and is almost completely phonemic (one sound, one letter).
6 letters (ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, ŭ) have different pronunciations from their unmarked counterparts (c, g, h, j, s, u).
They replace the diacritics by a subsequent H or X, respectively; for example, ĉ would be spelled ch in the H-system and cx in the X-system.
Interlingua flows regularly from its Romance, Germanic, and Slavic source languages, and thus it possesses their expressiveness.
Esperanto supporters contend that, by its liberal use of affixes and its flexible word-order, is equally as expressive as Interlingua or indeed any natural language, but is more internationally neutral.
While acknowledging that the basis of Esperanto is a product of rational construction, not historical evolution, they argue that, after the prolonged usage of more than 100 years, it too has become a living human language.
