Nova Stilo: 5. Table Words

One of the best inventions of Esperanto was the regularization of the “correlatives” into a table. Words like who, where, when are clearly related to this and that and how in some form. Esperanto puts these words into a table that makes it both easy to know what one of those words means when seeing it for the first time, and to figure out the word without learning it.

Let us start with an example: “tio” means “that” as in “that thing over there.” It is composed of three parts: the letter t-, the middle -i-, and the final -o. t- indicates specificity, the middle -i- indicates the word class (“a table word”) and the -o ending that it’s about a thing. Knowing that the ending -u refers to a person, we now know that the word “tiu” means “that person over there.” Similarly, knowing that the prefix ĉ- indicates universality, we can guess correctly that ĉio means “everything”. You probably inferred by now that ĉiu must mean “everyone!”

Nova Stilo: 7. Adverbs

In many languages, adverbs have two very different functions that put them in conflict with each other. One function is to be an adjective to verbs, from which they originally get their name. The other is to modify entire sentences or sentence parts. You can see the difference in the sentences, “He laughed happily” vs. “Happily, he laughed.” In the first case, it’s the laughing that is happy. In the second, it’s the circumstance. On the other hand, in other languages, the same word is used for proper adverbs and adjectives.

Nova Stilo: 8. Abbreviations

Nova’s general attitude towards language is, “If you can understand it without confusion, it’s probably right.” We have seen this in action when dropping the accusative, plural endings, and the preposition after an adverb. It’s more general than that and encompasses a series of shorthands and abbreviations throughout the language.

The most visible and frequent example of it is the common form of the word, “and.” While the Esperanto version “kaj” is usually abbreviated with the first letter k, in Nova the last letter is used. Since j is written y in Nova, “this and that” is “ĉi tio kaj tio” in Esperanto and “hio y tio” in Nova. Of course, while it’s just an abbreviation, y is also the word for and in Spanish, but that’s mostly a coincidence.

Nova Stilo: 9. Additions

As we have seen in the article on correlatives, the basic idea in Nova is to take what is best about Esperanto and make it even better. Among the best ideas of Esperanto is its set of regular prefixes and suffixes the greatly simplify the vocabulary. Two really good examples of this are descendants and professions, respectively marked by the suffixes -id and -ist.

In the case of the former, a plethora of words indicating the offspring of especially animals are replaced (in Esperanto) by the name of the animal with the suffix -id. A kitten is a katido, because a cat is a kato. You can guess that a ĉevalido is a foal, while a chick is a kokido. A puppy is a hundido, a calf a bovido and so on. This works also with animals whose offspring doesn’t have a special name in English. A spider crawling, whatever its real name, is an araneido in Esperanto.

Nova Stilo: Introducing Nova

Hello beautiful people and thanks for stopping by! This post is to introduce Nova, a new style of Esperanto that tries to address the most common criticisms to this most widespread of conlangs.

If you know Esperanto or of it, you may know it has been spoken by millions of people (literally) for over a hundred years. It is a marvelous invention that stood the test of time, with a rich culture of writing and song, with a vibrant community of people the world over.