Proto-Esperanto

Proto-Esperanto (Esperanto: Pra-Esperanto) is the modern term for any of the stages in the evolution of L. L. Zamenhof's language project, prior to the publication of Unua Libro in 1887.

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.

On December 17, 1878 (about one year before the first publication of Volapük), Zamenhof celebrated his 19th birthday and the birth of the language with some friends, who liked the project.

W is used for v. Otherwise, all modern Esperanto letters are attested apart from those with diacritics (ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, ŭ).

Mi povas de cent viaj leteroj konkludi, kiel sciigoj de tiu-ĉi speco devas vundi vian fratan koron; mi kvazaŭ vidas vin jam ... By this time the letter v had replaced w for the [v] sound; verbal inflection for person and number had been dropped; the nominal plural was -oj in place of -es (as well as adjectival -a and adverbial -e); and the noun cases were down to the current two (though a genitive -es survives today in the correlatives).

The accusative case suffix was -l, but in many cases was only used on pronouns: In addition to the stronger Slavic flavor of the orthography compared to the modern language (ć, dź, h́, ś, ź for ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ŝ, ĵ ), the present and past imperfective verb forms still had final stress: The pronouns ended in a nominal o (or adjectival a for possessives: mo "I", ma "my"), but there were other differences as well, including a conflation of 'he' and 'it': In addition, there was indefinite o 'one'.

For example, aŭti to listen (for), aŭdi to hear; trofi to look for, trovi to find; prufi to argue (a point), pruvi to prove.

In 1887 Zamenhof finalized his tinkering with the publication of the Unua Libro (First Book), which contained the Esperanto language as we know it today.