Welcome to Nova! An Introduction for Speakers of English

Esperanto?

You may have heard of Esperanto. A constructed language created by one man in 1887 to foster understanding and cooperation between the peoples of the world. It became widely popular until the idea of understanding and cooperation became itself taboo. Two World Wars, a Cold War, and untold human misery saw to it that for the first hundred years of its existence, Esperanto became marginalized.

Enter the Internet and the 21st century. Conlangs (constructed languages) are a thing, these days, and people delight in learning Klingon (Star Trek), Dothraki (Game of Thrones), Sindarin (Lord of the Rings). Esperanto is also a conlang, but unlike the three mentioned before (and untold others), its main purpose is to connect people that don’t speak a common language. It aims to do so by being easier to learn than other languages and by trying to be neutral. While the former class of conlangs is called “artlangs,” Esperanto’s class is the “auxlangs” or auxiliary languages.

There are many other auxlangs besides Esperanto, and there are more conlang classifications besides the two mentioned. In this sea of languages, though, Esperanto is distinguished. Not only is it one of the oldest conlangs, it is also by a huge margin the largest one. The combined speakership of all other conlangs is only a fraction of Esperanto’s. Millions of people all over the world learn and speak this language. Esperanto sites number in the thousands, and an active community of artists, poets, scientists, and geeks of all kinds made themselves at home in the language.

Why Don’t You Speak It?

Millions of people in a world of billions is still a small number. Your chances of opening your mouth and being understood if you speak Esperanto - anywhere in the world - are relatively slim. Of course, you wouldn’t learn a language unless you can speak it with someone, and we find ourselves with the classical problem of all networks. Just as having the first telephone in the world was completely useless, since you couldn’t call anyone until there was a second telephone somewhere, learning a language if you don’t know where to speak it is pretty pointless. Your chances of finding an Esperanto speaker anywhere in the world are thousands of times larger than finding a speaker of Sindarin, but it’s the difference between being struck by a meteor vs. being struck by lightning.

Since you are reading this, you might be thinking that English is already the common language of the world, sort of the Esperanto of today. It is true that a huge number of people speak English, and even more learn it every day. But it is also true that we may be living at the time of widest spread of English, and that from now on the universality of the language is going to wane. The most powerful countries in the world have been English-speaking for almost two centuries, but their power and influence may be slowly eroding. New cultures are emerging and English is not their native language. Their language will one day perhaps have the widespread use that English enjoys today. After all, in their time Greek, Latin, French, or Arabic were billed as the final language of humanity.

You could consider learning Esperanto as a kind of insurance. It’s easy to do, doesn’t take a lot of time, and it sort of prevents you from having to learn much harder languages, like Chinese, Arabic, Russian, or even French and Spanish. Esperanto is much easier to learn than any of them. Of course, you won’t benefit immediately from learning it, but think of how long it will take you to learn Chinese before you’d venture to China. You could learn Esperanto and ten years from now it might be the language of the day.

Why Nova?

Language evolves because societies and cultures do. When Esperanto was created, French was the international language. When Esperanto was created, women generally were considered in all ways inferior to men. When Esperanto was created, it was more common to read something than to write.

Esperanto didn’t keep up with some of these changes, because Esperanto is by nature conservative when it comes to language. You can read a work of the founder, LL Zamenhof, to this day and understand it perfectly, because nothing much about the language has changed. Sure, there are new words for new things, like the telephone, the radio, and even computers and the Internet. The grammar, spelling, base vocabulary, and sentence structure have not changed at all. That’s a good thing: since the best thing about Esperanto is that it’s easy to learn, everybody likes to make it easier to learn - for themselves. French-speakers want it to be more like French, English-speakers like to add features from English, etc.

Nova has taken hundred plus years of development of the language and found a compatible way to evolve it without drastically changing it. Everything Esperanto is also valid Nova, but Nova relaxes a lot of rules (making it harder to make mistakes), gets rid of non-standard characters (making it easier to type), and moves Esperanto gradually towards a more international environment.

Alphabet

Nova’s alphabet is the ASCII English version of the Latin alphabet. Each letter in this alphabet always has the same sound in Nova, so that when you see a word spelled, you always know how it is pronounced. Most of the letters have straightforward sounds: the vowels are pronounced like in Spanish, Italian, German: a like in “mud”, e like in “lead”, i like in “sea”, o like in “bob”, u like in “woof”. Most of the consonants are pronounced like in English: b as in “bat”, d as in “day”, f as in “fog”, g as in “gas”, h as in “hat”, k as in “kid”, l as in “log”, m as in “man”, n as in “no”, p as in “pig”, r as in “run” (although you can pronounce this letter like in Spanish, German, or other languages), t as in “tip”, v as in “vat”, w as in “what”.

The remaining letters are pronounced always as follows: c as in “TSar”, j as in French “Jour”, q as in “CHop”, s as in “Silence”, x as in “SHop”, y as in “Yip”

There are two more letters in Esperanto. They are spelled in Nova according to their sound values. English j as in “jungle” is spelled ‘dj’, like in Django (the movie). Yiddish h as in “Hanukkah” (the first one) is spelled ‘kh’.

The accent is always on the syllable before the last. That’s enough for you to know how any word is pronounced in Nova if you see it written. No exceptions allowed.

Grammatical Cases

One of the things that is strangely complicated for people is Esperanto’s one grammatical case. Let me explain: many languages (for instance, German, Russian, Latin, etc.) change words to indicate their function in a sentence. That is, the form of the word used in a sentence tells you what its function is. English has some of it left, since it’s derived from languages (Latin and Germanic) that have cases. For instance, the words “I” and “we” can change in a sentence to “me” and “us,” to indicate we use them as an object instead of as a subject. Esperanto does that for all nouns and pronouns, which turns out to be a constant reason for mistakes.

Basically, any Esperanto pronoun or noun becomes an object in a sentence by adding the single letter -n at the end of it. I is “mi”, you is “vi”, love is “amas”. In Esperanto, you can’t say “mi amas vi”, because both would be subjects (both mi and vi love). Instead, one of the two has to have the -n ending. “Mi amas vin” means “I love you”, while “min amas vi” means “you love me”. Because the ending clarifies who does what, you can rearrange the words in this sentence whichever way you like, it will always mean the same. “Mi amas vin” is the same as “vin mi amas” or “mi vin amas” or “amas mi vin” or “amas vin mi.”

English prefers word order to establish subject and object. In English, we typically say “I love you”, a sentence in which the subject (S) is placed before the verb (V), while the object (O) is after. This sentence structure is called “SVO”. By virtue of that, you don’t have to explain which part of the sentence has what function. That’s particularly important in English, because verbs are not necessarily distinguished from adjectives or nouns and hence some sentences would be totally confusing if you didn’t know word order matters.

The problem with Esperanto’s accusative is not theoretical but practical. For one, this is the only case in Esperanto. English has a genitive case, marked by the “apostrophe s”. Other languages have many cases (dative, vocative, etc.). Many languages have no cases at all. As a result, people frequently forget the one case in Esperanto, the accusative.

Nova doesn’t abolish the accusative, but also allows it to be dropped when a particular word order is followed. Verbs are always clearly marked as such in Esperanto. In Nova, the word (pronoun or noun or adjectival noun) immediately before the verb is the subject, the one immediately after the object of the sentence. In S-V-O parlance, you don’t have to mark the accusative in sentences of the form SVO, OSV, VOS. That means that sentences corresponding to “I love you”, “you I love” and “love you I” all mean the same thing. You can still use a different sentence structure, like VSO, but then you’d have to mark the object with an accusative.

Article Abolition

There is an easy rule in language design: it’s easier to forget a rule than to learn one. When Esperanto started, it had both an indefinite article and a definite one. The indefinite article (in English, ‘a’) was provided by the word ‘unu’ (which means one), while the definite (think ’the’) was ’la’. The problem is that many languages don’t have any articles, and even the ones that have them don’t use them the same way. Consequently and early on, Esperanto dropped the indefinite article. “A cat” went from being “unu kato” to simply “kato”. Oddly enough, not many cried about the loss.

The definite article is more of a loss, because it is sometimes very meaningful. In particular, languages that have it generally use it to indicate something specific even though they frequently disagree over what is specific. For instance, “The Lord of the Rings” implies that there is only ONE lord of these rings, that it’s a well-known entity, and that these two facts are generally known. Still, many languages do without this article, and because it causes problems for speakers of these languages, in Nova it is abolished. If you need to express the function generally used by the definite article, in Nova you use a qualifier like ’that’ or ‘only’.

Adjective Disagreement

English is a blissful language, in that it doesn’t have many of the complications of other languages. That is odd, in that the base languages from which English emerged have those complications, but English emerged unencumbered. Many languages, for instance, have agreement between adjectives and nouns. If a noun is plural (say dogs), the adjective has to be plural, too. If you have one loud dog, then you would have many louds dogs. Obviously, that’s not even correct English, but for reasons, Esperanto has the same complication.

Some languages use markers for the plural. There might be a word that indicates a nearby word is pluralized, something like “many dog”. In Esperanto, as in English, the plural is marked by a suffix. -s in English, as we saw, and -j in Esperanto. A lot of people complain about the plural -j in Esperanto and would rather have the English or Spanish -s. Frankly, that never causes friction when you speak Esperanto, because it’s the first thing you learn or so and it is very regular. What is less regular and causes many mistakes is the fact that the adjectives need the same -j at the end in Esperanto as the nouns. If your dog is a ‘hundo’ (think hound) and the voice is ’laŭta’ (loud, pronounced like English ’lout-ah’), then many of them are “laŭtaj hundoj”.

In Nova that’s simplified. Only one word in a chain of adjectives and noun has to be marked plural for all of them to be plural. That goes far beyond what English does: because the word ‘all’ already implies the plural, in Nova the noun that follows can stay singular. “All dogs” becomes “omniu hundo”.

Table Words!

That word we just had, ‘omniu’. It belongs to a class of words like ’everyone’, ‘all the time’, but also ’this’ and ’that’ or ‘who’ and ‘when’. The general form (in Nova) is ‘function’ + ‘marker’ + ’type’ (FMT), but you can’t generally tell from a language that there is a common nature, and there generally isn’t a common form for all of them. It is easy to tell from ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘why’ that there is some sort of logic here. The initial ‘wh’ introduces a question marker, and the ending indicates what type of question. It is clear that ‘anyway’ and ‘anytime’ are related, and that the difference is between ‘way’ or manner, and ’time’.

Esperanto looked at this class of words and decided to make them into one giant table. Instead of being one list of random, more or less related words and turns, it’s one rational table with entries that are easy to put together. They all look like the FMT structure outlined before: the marker is always the letter -i-, while the function and type parts differ consistently. The question words all start with k-, for instance. The time words all end in -am. That’s enough for you to say that ‘kiam’ is the question word for time, which in English is ‘when’.

T- is the function for a demonstrative. The demonstrative for time in English is ’then’, and in Esperanto it’s ’tiam’. The type marker for manner in English is ‘-way’, in Esperanto it’s -el. You are far enough to know that therefore ’tiel’ in Esperanto has to mean ’this way’, although the English version is now two words. Anyway is in the same mold, and the corresponding function part in Esperanto is … empty. Iel then means ‘some way’.

So far, so good. But English is not systematic about these things. ‘How’ is the question word for manner, but doesn’t really look like the “wh-” sequence we saw. In Esperanto, that’s different: You know the question function is marked by k-, you know the manner type is marked by ‘-el’, so you automatically know that ‘kiel’ has to be the question word for manner, “how.”

In fact, Esperanto’s table of ‘korelativoj’ (the word used in Esperanto) is one of its best features. It makes it so easy to just know a word without having to look it up, to know its meaning or to build it from pieces, it’s a shame the whole language can’t be that way.

Still, the table has a few issues. Most of them have to do with the fact it’s too small. Some of them with the fact the prefixes and suffixes are largely arbitrary and somewhat confusing. Nova ‘fixes’ that by expanding both functions and types, and by making both more predictable and ‘guessable.’

For instance, the type for ’time’ in Esperanto is ‘-am’. There is no reason for that, it’s largely arbitrary, a choice made because no other word in Esperanto ends in -am. In Nova, the corresponding type is marked by the ending -tempe, from the Esperanto/Nova word ’tempo,’ which means time. Kitempe = kiam = when. Perhaps the most confusing pair in Esperanto is ‘-al’ and ‘-el’, corresponding to cause and manner, respectively. Kial means ‘why’, while kiel, ‘how’. Learners generally find that confusing (surprise!) as there is no logic behind the assignment. In Nova, -al is replaced by -kauze, while -el by -maniere or the English-ish -voye. Kial becomes kikauze, kiel, kivoye. Definitely easier to tell apart.

That all wouldn’t be worth a lot, but by using functions and types borrowed from the corresponding words, Nova opens up a lot of ‘correlatives’ that Esperanto has to work around or doesn’t have, at all.

Gender

Languages have all sorts of approaches to the issue of gender. Some languages distinguish between grammatical and personal gender - words can have a gender, and people and pronouns their own. In Italian, for instance, nouns that end in -o are usually masculine, while words that end in -a are usually feminine. This is independent of biological or personal gender, and even related languages can assign different genders to the same word. In Italian, again, ‘il mare’ is masculine. The same word in French, ’la mer’ is feminine. Both mean, ’the sea,’ which doesn’t have an inherent gender.

English doesn’t have that distinction and all words belong to one class that is a-gendered. English, though, has personal gender, which is expressed in gendered words and endings, as well as in pronouns. Esperanto is similar to that, although it borrowed its personal gender system from German more directly.

Basically, personal gender shows up twofold. In one case, a word can be present in a male, a female, or a neutral form. In the second case, some pronouns can refer to a male, a female, or a neuter. In English, words for animals are frequently tri-gendered: chicken is neutral, hen is female, and cock or rooster male. For humans, there sometimes are different words for female and male titles (king and queen), more often the female word is derived from the male word (duke and duchess). Pronouns of the third person singular come in male and female version (he and she, respectively). There is a neuter pronoun, it, but it isn’t usually used for people.

English has been grappling for some time with the lack of a third person neutral pronoun, one that indicates members of both and either genders and of neither. In older times, the male pronoun (and version of a word) would be both used to indicate males only, but also to include males and females indiscriminately. Nowadays, we sometimes use the pronoun ’they’ (third person plural) to indicate both genders, and have started asking people what pronouns they want to be used for them, specifically.

Esperanto, as mentioned, is similar to English. Words have no grammatical gender (who needs that complication?), but you can indicate the gender of an animate object. The German model works by assuming that everything is male, and if it is female, you add an ending . In Esperanto, that’s -ino, which is from German -in. There is no corresponding male ending, because the word by itself is presumed to be masculine. If you mean someone of either gender, you also use the masculine form.

Except. If you are talking about animals, like the chicken above. In that case the neutral form only means “either sex”, the female form uses the suffix -ino, and the male form the pseudo-prefix vir-. It’s pseudo, because vir- is not universally used as a male prefix (since the word without prefix usually means male). Chicken = koko; hen = kokino; rooster = virkoko.

With humans, things get complicated. Say, the word for father, which is is ‘patro’. The word for mother is then ‘patrino’. The word for parent is ‘gepatro’. Where did that come from? Well, when you specifically mean ‘both genders,’ you can use an additional prefix, ge-. So in animals, the neutral form is neutral. In humans, the neutral form is masculine. Titles of nobility behave like humans, titles of professions like general words (a-gendered or masculine, depending on context).

Similarly, there are three third person pronouns: a masculine (li), a feminine (ŝi), and a neutral (ĝi). The masculine has a double function as the default, like in professions. If you don’t know the gender of the person you are referring to, you use ‘li’.

The important thing is that this distinction makes (made) perfect sense in a world where genders are segregated, separated, and with inherently different roles. In a world where genders have equal rights and responsibilities, the distinction is largely artificial, similar to different pronouns based on height, skin color, or age. We don’t have those because those qualities are inessential, and increasingly we are seeing that the distinction between genders is not inherent and essential. It sometimes needs to be mentioned, but not by default.

Nova, in that respect, does entirely away with the asymmetry. All nouns apply to all people, things, and animals equally, and are without gender implication. If a distinction based on gender needs to be made, a suffix is used. The Esperanto suffix -ino is kept for the female version of an anything, while the new suffix -uqo is used for the male version. For the pronouns, li keeps its neutral form (applies to both genders), while the old pronoun ‘ŝi’ (English she) is complemented by the pronoun ‘gi’. The use of the gendered pronouns is discouraged greatly.

To a veteran Esperantist, the change is somewhat jarring. A ‘patro’ used to be a father and now is just a parent. A father is now a patruqo. A mother was and is a patrino. When you are referring to parents, you generally don’t need to know if it’s a father or a mother nowadays - both have the same rights (and some children have two of the same gender, or of a third gender, or of none at all - if there is more than a parent, or even one). It takes some getting used to the fact that a redjino (redjo - king) is not the wife of a king (a queen consort), but a female king (a queen regnant). Fairy tales will have to be slightly modified, as the typical queen there is now a _redjedzo _(the spouse of a king, of which either could be female or male or any gender in-between and beyond).

What is important in this change is that it mirrors a change in society AND simplifies the language. With equality between the genders and the advent of non-binary genders, a distinction based on either or both makes little sense. At the same time, the new system is much more rational and has no exceptions, which was a problem with the old system.

By Verb

Adverbs in European languages have two very different roles. In one role, they are “the adjectives to verbs.” You are beautiful, but you walk beautifully. The -ly indicates that the qualifier is meant to stand by a verb instead of a noun. Similarly, the word “similarly” at the beginning of this sentence has the ending -ly, but it doesn’t qualify any verb. Instead, it is meant to qualify the entire sentence. English distinguishes between both types of adverbs by (if you paid attention) sentence order. In general, the second type of adverb is first or last in the sentence and separated from it by a comma. Think of the difference between the sentences “you can’t see clearly” and “clearly, you can’t see.” In the first case, clearly modifies the verb (you can see, just not clearly), in the second, the entire sentence (you can’t see at all, and that part is clear).

Esperanto is an odd duck. It handles adverbs like English, by marking adjectives with a different ending (-a for adjectives, -e for adverbs). Adverbs can both mean ‘qualifier of verbs’ and ‘phrase modifiers’ like in English. But sentence order doesn’t make a difference in Esperanto, so that placing the adverb on one side of the sentence instead of the other doesn’t make a difference. An English-speaker would understand, but someone from a different language background might not. The two sentences above are vi vidas klare, and Esperanto has no way of indicating the difference marked in English.

Nova changes that, in that the first type of adverb is marked as an adjective. Adjectives in general stand near the words they modify, so that it generally isn’t a problem to mark a verbal adjective versus a noun adjective. Sentence-modifying adverbs continue to be marked with a final -e. The sentence above now can either be vi vidas klara, or vi vidas klare. Those two versions mirror the English versions differentiated by comma.

So far, that’s just marking one type of adverb differently. This has one important function: it removes the need to learn when to use verbal and when to use noun modifiers, especially in sentences that involve state. Think of the difference between “He thinks beautifully” versus “He looks beautiful.”

There is a more important reason for the change, though. Languages that use prepositions generally have a relatively small stock of them and use them with flexible meaning. Which preposition to use in what context is something that each language handles differently, using a series of complicated rules known mostly to native speakers. Esperanto is no different, and the correct use of prepositions pretty complex. The language came up with an interesting workaround, indicating that you can use a special preposition, ‘ye’, when you don’t know what the correct proposition would be. That only works if you are missing only one preposition. If you had a sentence with two of those, nobody could understand what you mean.

In Nova, adverbial forms are used for that purpose. Since adverbs don’t modify verbs any longer, their presence inside a sentence only modifies groups of words. That can be used to create ad hoc prepositions when a different one is not known.

Esperanto already uses adverbs in a similar function, but adorns them with a preposition. The construct ‘adverb + preposition + noun phrase’ is used in this case. An example would be the sentence, “li puniĝis fare de urba polico,” which means “he was punished by urban police.” In the sentence, ‘li’ is the pronoun (he), ‘puniĝis’ the verb (passive in the English translation), ‘fare’ the pseudo-preposition (from ‘fari’, to do), ‘de’ the actual preposition (literally, of), ‘urba polico’ the noun phrase (adjective urba and noun polico).

In Nova, the preposition is discarded as useless and the sentence becomes “li punidjis fare urba polico”. The more literal translation would then be, “he (or she) was punished by the doing of the urban police.”

Formally, in Nova each preposition is just a short form of an adverbal long preposition. ‘Pri’ is about, while the word for topic is ’temo’. So a speaker of Nova can generally replace ‘pri’ with ’teme’ for the same meaning. Further than that, in Nova ’teme’ is considered the primary preposition, while ‘pri’ is just its short form. In this case the ‘short form’ is not much shorter than the long form, but because it’s rooted in a known word the long form is still clearer in meaning.

This is not just useful in case a preposition is unknown, that is a form of ignorance. It is also useful when the correct preposition would have to be used more than once in a sentence and clarification is required. For instance, the correct preposition to use for the agent in passive form sentences is ‘de’ and the sentence about the urban police would also be correct as “li puniĝis de urba polico.” ‘De’ also means of, so you could say instead “li puniĝis de polico de urbo”. Here it is unclear whether the person was punished by the police or the city, and only word order allows a reasonable approximation. Esperanto by nature resists word order logic, and in more complex sentences this falls apart entirely. For instance, it is perfectly reasonable to place one of the prepositional phrases before the verb or the pronoun: “de urbo li punidjis de polico.” Now it’s completely unclear what is meant.

In Nova, the adverbial preposition is used to clarify transparently. With both prepositions replaced (only one replacement is needed), the sentence could become, “li punidjis fare polico have urbo.” Because of the nature of adverbial constructs, they modify the words before them in meaning, so ‘fare’ modifies ‘punidjis’ and ‘have’ modifies ‘polico’. The sentence now literally means, “He was punished by the doing of police belonging to the town.”

Short

If you look at many of the rules above, they have two things in common. They shorten the language and simplify it. Dropping articles, removing accordance of adjectives and substantives, removing the accusative, getting rid of spurious extra prepositions in adverbial constructs - that all makes it easier to avoid mistakes, but also shortens the language.

Nova loves short, because the shorter a sentence, the less likely you are to make a mistake. The important thing here is that Nova considers common short forms to be a core part of the language, not just lazy forms. For instance, the ‘correct’ Esperanto conjunction ‘and’ is ‘kaj’. It’s from Greek, and would be spelled ‘kay’ in Nova. In Esperanto, the abbreviation for kaj is the letter k, which is totally fine once you get used to it. In Nova, though, the abbreviation chosen is the letter y from the end of kay, and it is considered the normative form. That is, in Nova it is unusual to spell out the whole word ‘kay’ and the short form ‘y’ is generally used.

A different shortening is the word ‘un’ from Esperanto ‘unu,’ one. The short form is used because all other digits are one syllable long, and counting in Esperanto requires an extra pause for the one (like in English seven).

What is important is that these short forms are considered equal to their long forms in the language, not just lazy variants or novelty items.

Ending

One of the wonderful things about Esperanto is its regular derivation system. There are prefixes and suffixes for all sorts of things and you can build your own words from existing ones without even have to consult a dictionary. If it makes sense, Esperantists will not think twice about it. In fact, finding novel ways to say things by derivation is one of the sources of wonder in Esperanto. For instance, the suffix -aĉ indicates something inferior or bad. Vetero is weather, so veteraĉo is bad weather. Well, someone came up with the word, malaĉa, which literally means, “the opposite of bad,” to mean something not bad at all. The word didn’t come with Esperanto, it doesn’t exist in any commonly spoken “international” language. It was an act of poetic creation by someone in the Esperanto community.

Nova recognizes the beauty of this system and wants to augment it by adding new suffixes and prefixes. The three main areas in which this expansion happens are: (1) reduction of word stock - where an affix is used to reduce a class of similar words; (2) clarification of word type - where an affix is used to describe the class to which a word belongs; (3) modernization - when an affix is used to remove a word that is obsolete and has changed in meaning.

An example of the first kind is the suffix -osmo, which is used to indicate a public event in honor of something. For instance, naski is “to bring to life”, so a naskosmo is a birthday (celebration). A ball is a “dance celebration,” that is a dancosmo. A funeral is then a ‘mortosmo’. Esperanto uses different words for each of these, ‘naskotago’, ‘balo’, ‘funeralo’ respectively.

For the second type, let’s consider the suffix -anjo. It specifies something you can eat, a delicacy. A taco, for instance, is a takanjo. A biscotti a biskotanjo. The importance of this ending is twofold: (1) it clarifies that the thing mentioned is something you can eat, and (2) it removes ambiguity, since foods usually have specific names from specific languages and might conflict with a different word from another langauge. In this case, the word ‘tako’ is already present in Esperanto as the name of a currency.

For the third type, we’ll reuse one of the words above. The new term ‘dancosmo’ means dance ball, which in Esperanto is balo. Sadly, that makes the word balo unavailable for the ball as in the round thing you kick around, which in Esperanto is the Slavic-derived ‘pilko.’ That is totally fine, only that many sports are internationally known by a name that ends in -bal… Like futbal, or volleyball. Since there is a separate word for the dance ball, Nova can resuse the word balo to mean a spherical ball and make obsolete the word for a dance event.

Reflection

When an action is performed by a subject back on the subject, we have a reflexive form. Languages vary in their handling of reflexive forms greatly, from Latin, which uses a special verb form (super-complicated) to English, which affixes -self to the pronoun. “I love myself” is a reflexive sentence, or “he couldn’t hear himself over the noise.”

Esperanto uses a different form, shared with Romance languages, in which reflexive action is indicated by using the same pronoun unmodified. That is the case except for the third person, for which there is a special pronoun. Instead of ’li,’ ‘ŝi,’ or ‘ĝi,’ the pronoun ‘si’ is used. “I love myself” becomes “mi amas min” (same pronoun), with the object -n. But “he loves himself” is not “li amas lin,” instead it is “li amas sin”. This is true in the singular and plural: “they love themselves” is “ili amas sin.”

That’s all good, but it confuses some people. In a sentence with multiple ‘he’, people don’t know whether to use ‘si’ or ’li.’ Also, people whose language doesn’t have the same distinction for the third person easily make mistakes.

Nova changes that by using the reflexivity marker ‘mem.’ That word comes from Esperanto, where ‘mem’ is an intensifier of the reflexive. This is meant as a bridge between languages that have modal reflexivity (that is, the verb captures the idea) and those that have pronoun reflexivity. Mem never changes with person, plural, or case, but can be adjectivized. “Li amas mem” means he loves himself, and “ni amas mem” correspondingly that we love ourselves.

Similarly, the particle ‘unalie’ indicates reciprocal action. “Ili salutis unalie” means they greeted each other.

Dictionary

A final problem with Esperanto cannot be addressed as a general rule, but is a strong focus of Nova - piecemeal. While Esperanto tries to be as international as possible, it was modeled after a set of languages from a specific part of the globe, leaving all others out. There barely are any words from non-European languages in Esperanto, and that’s a shame. Also, Esperanto has sounds that many languages do not have or distinctions between sounds unknown to some languages.

This is a general problem for all international languages. Reducing the number of sounds (the phonology) to that of sounds universally available means having a very small number of them, which in turn makes words long and unrecognizable. Toki Pona, a wonderful language designed for minimalism, decides that’s fine and does without a lot of the sounds that Esperanto has (despite the creator, Sonja Lang, being a great Esperanto speaker!). You can see that in the name of the language itself: toki pona is an approximation with the sounds available of ’talki bona’, or talk good. The same happened with the precursor of Esperanto, Volapük, whose name you might not realize is from vol- for world and -pük for speak.

The problem of international language design is that it needs to pair the recognizable with the simplified. You can simplify as much as you like, until people stop recognizing what you have as a language. Sometimes that’s very subtle - for instance, the logical language Lojban suffers from the strangest problem: lack of capital letters. It’s already hard to recognize words in a language you are not familiar with, but if the sentences are all written in lowercase, then it starts giving a dissociative vibe. Of course, writing only in lowercase letters is not a real problem. But it makes things look strange, and combined with the fact the words are unfamiliar, makes it hard to accept the language.

Esperanto has a similar problem in the modified letters it uses, which is one of the reasons why Nova did without. You would think adding a little hat (a circumflex) over some letters would not be a big deal, but it really turns some people off. Again, lots of languages have their own little hats, but they are not languages that are supposedly easy to learn.

Many international languages, then, prefer to simplify phonology at the risk of losing recognizability. Esperanto doesn’t care and has a pretty complex set of sounds, and combines them in ways that can be very hard to pronounce. An example might be the word for monster, which is ‘monstro,’ in which you find four consonants in sequence ‘-nstr-’. Esperanto also has some sounds that some languages don’t have at all, like the aforementioned ‘ĥ’ which English doesn’t have. Finally, Esperanto distinguishes between sounds that other languages don’t distinguish, like the r-l pair (some Asian languages) or ‘b-v’ (Spanish).

Nova’s solution to the problem is to add words that shadow the existing Esperanto words. These new words (neologisms) can either be easier to pronounce (mostro instead of monstro), can avoid letters that are hard to pronounce (koruso instead of ĥoro), or remove ambiguity between pairs of words that are distinguished only by indistinguishable sounds (baro - varo, one being an obstacle, the other being ware).

These neologisms are generally taken from languages other than European ones whenever feasible. If a non-European word becomes sufficiently recognizable, its Esperanto spelling can replace an existing Esperanto root. It is important, though, that the meaning of the new word mirror all or part of the meaning of the word it replaces and not be used with a different nuance. Otherwise, the language would forever grow in vocabulary and turn hard to learn.

The stated goal is complex: reduce pairs of words hard to distinguish while keeping them recognizable. Reduce the number of words entirely to keep the vocabulary small. Still, keep the ability to express yourself in Nova without adding a structure translation layer in your head. Esperanto is successful because it doesn’t require people to change the way they think, and Nova decidedly wants to keep that and expand on that idea.