DOWNLOAD the Grammar
Last update at May 11th, 2014 16:24
DOWNLOAD the Sample Lexicon
Last update at April 25th, 2014 12:11
What it is
As a fluent speaker of Esperanto, I must admit that there are several elements and features of it that I’d like to change, to improve and sometimes to slice off.
- While its easy and logical grammar is praiseworthy, the speaker has to face a poor phonology that makes the language unpronounceable and truly unrealistic.
- The alphabet uses special diacritics that create all sorts of problems to those that frequently use Esperanto on a PC.
- The standard lexicon is disgustingly Eurocentric and there’s a lot of unusable / redundant / unnecessary roots where the creator of the language himself claimed to have derivational morphology and linguistic economy as its major strong points.
- The grammar of Esperanto, especially its verbs, is a wonderful system. An ideal reform of Esperanto should leave the grammar almost untouched and focus on the “visual appeal”, instead.
- The number of roots must be reduced. I find almost laughable that roots such as arkitektur- and martel- (respectively for architecture and hammer) exist. They are easily replaceable by compounds of other roots, such as “kun-strukt-em-o” and “bat-ist-o” (These are standard, none of this was applied the changes of my reform).
- The alphabet has to be revised, removing unnecessary diacritics.
- The number of distinguishable sound is ridiculously high. There’s almost no phonemic load for <ĝ> against <ĵ>, and the letter <ĥ> is almost unused.
- uREd is less Eurocentric and its roots are focused on respect for a word’s etymological meaning. When I choose a root, I make a meticulous comparison between several languages to assure neutrality.
- The grammar features of uREd are almost untouched in terms of morphology, but allows a large number of syntactical features which are present in non-Indo-European languages.
- uREd reduces the number of phonemic sounds to 26, including the 5 vowels. <ĥ> and <ĵ> were completely removed, and the affricate <c> has been changed into a handier <th>, which is pronounced similarly to English.
- The alphabet of uREd doesn’t need additional diacritics. It uses four digraphs like <th> in place of <c>, <zh> for <ĝ>, <sh> for <ŝ> and naturally <w> for <ŭ>. The Latin-centric <j> has been replaced by a fair <y>.
- I added a certain number of phonological phenomena, to make it less boring and more like a natural language.