Modern evolution of Esperanto
The main change in the language has been a great expansion of the vocabulary, largely driven by translations of technical jargon, which is explicitly allowed for by Boulogne.
[1] 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.
In one case an antonymic suffix has been proposed, a laudatory -el-, which would contrast with pejorative -aĉ-: skribo "writing", skribaĉo "scrawl, scribbling", skribelo "calligraphy".
In most other cases, ĥ has been replaced with k, as in kemio for ĥemio "chemistry"; the only words which commonly retain it are ĉeĥo "Czech", eĥo "echo", and ĥoro (or koruso) "chorus", though it continues to be used in the transcription of foreign names.
In traditional Esperanto, double consonants may occur across morpheme boundaries, as in mallonga (mal-longa) "short", but are not found within roots.
Most words introduced with double letters (including tĉ and dĝ) have since been modified, for example Buddo → Budao "Buddha".
Many Esperantists also use -io in place of -ujo, the original suffix for countries named after their inhabitants, so that Anglio "England" is found alongside the more traditional Anglujo.
The other official addition is a suffix -enda indicating that something must be done (pagenda "payable (by)"); this was originally introduced as part of the Ido reform.
Originally all members of a profession, such as dentisto "a dentist", all people defined by a characteristic, such as junulo "a youth" and Kristano "a Christian", all ethnicities, such as anglo "an Englishman", and all verbal participles used for humans, such as kuranto "a runner", were masculine unless specifically made feminine with the suffix -ino; currently only some twenty words, mostly kinship terms, remain masculine.
[4] A parallel change is the introduction of a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun to cover "s/he", but there was little agreement as to what this should be until finally most people settled on ri.
[5] The debate partially centered on whether the essential difference between the suffixes was one of tense or aspect, but primarily followed the conventions of speakers' native languages.
