Cherpillod, André: Konciza etimologia vortaro. Rotterdam: Universala Esperanto-Asocio, 2003. 503 p. Paperback. ISBN 92 9017 082-4.

One of the watershed moments of recent Esperanto publishing (though, of course, not the watershed moment) came a decade and a half ago when André Cherpillod in France bought himself a Macintosh computer.

In the old days (the really old days) of the computer revolution, you could neither display Esperanto special characters on a screen nor print them on the inflexible typewriter-like printers of the day. ⁽¹⁾ Heck, you couldn’t even display or print the English special (lower-case) characters. But as time went on and random-access memory tended to increase, computer manufacturers started moving character generation out of firmware and into software, thus making it peculiarly amenable to intervention and modification by persons other than the manufacturer. By the time of the Mac SE, which I think is the variety that Cherpillod bought, the software font and the user-defined character map were standard on the machine; and with the advent of, first, dot-matrix printers and, later, laser and inkjet printers, it was possible to print just about anything as well. You could go beyond English upper-case letters to Esperanto special characters and even cuneiform and Klingon.

But, then as now, those who had computers but considered them little more than an electronic version of the 1906 Underwood typewriter (U.S. manufactured version) liked to argue that “computers can’t handle Esperanto’s special characters”. ⁽²⁾ Cherpillod, having discovered that computers could handle Esperanto’s special characters with relative ease, decided to prove them wrong — with a vengeance. He published a book in Esperanto — I don’t remember the title at the moment — in which he gave the equivalents of many Esperanto words in a number of ancient Middle Eastern languages — and scripts! All, of course, typeset using that (by modern standards) relatively primitive Mac SE and output on a dot-matrix printer.

Typographically, the current work is a lineal descendant of that first book; in fact, it looks as though it might have been typeset on that same SE, though Cherpillod has now apparently graduated to a laser printer. The book is, of course, in Esperanto, supersigns and all, but also includes a number of other scripts; in the discussion of “alef”, for instance, we also find both Hebrew and Phoenician script (along with Latin transliterations for those of us who are too lazy to learn other scripts). In fact, though the book is supposedly oriented towards etymology, Cherpillod regales us throughout with tables of letters and syllabaries for: Arabic, Armenian, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Ethiopian, Etruscan, Phoenician, Greek, Hebrew, Hieroglyphic, Irish Gaelic, Japanese, Georgian (Sakartvelian), Coptic, Runic, Syriac, Slavonic, Tibetan and Tifiniga (Touareg). Missing are a couple of those he used in the earlier work, i.e., if I remember correctly, cuneiform and Akkadian.

Content-wise, the book demands comparison with Vilborg’s recent five-volume Etimologia Vortaro de Esperanto. If you are looking for depth, I can unhesitatingly recommend Vilborg over Cherpillod. Cherpillod’s entries are concise (often not more than a line long) and show relationships rather than origin, or so it seems to me; Vilborg’s entries are generally long, attempt to show from which language Zamenhof originally obtained the word in question, and often reconstruct the reasoning that led Zamenhof to deviate from the “natural” form. A good example is vestiblo. Vilborg relates it to the modern languages first, only adding the Latin vestibulum as an apparent afterthought; he also explains why Zamenhof converted -ul-, standard in Latin and its successors, to a simple -l-. Cherpillod gives us the Latin form first (and, interestingly, shows how this was [probably] derived from vero-stabulum; Vilborg is less certain about this derivation), and only then shows how the Latin form was taken over into some modern European languages; nor does he indicate why the Esperanto word diverges from these with the loss of the -u-.

On the other hand, if you are looking for breadth Cherpillod is the book to have. Vilborg restricted himself to the roughly 4000 Fundamental and official roots in Esperanto; Cherpillod, on the other hand, is not so discriminating, and gives us, by his count, 15,081 Esperanto words and their close (and often distant) relations. These range from la and the standard suffixes to such stillborn fantasies as mava and poka.

Vilborg also provides comparisons with words in some other planned languages (Ido, Occidental, Interlingua, sometimes Volapük). In line with his etymological aims, Cherpillod provides no information about the first three of these, but he does include Volapük equivalents when these are sufficiently close to the Esperanto, presumably because Volapük antedates Esperanto and so could have contributed, at least slightly, to the development of its vocabulary.

What it comes down to is that the person interested in Esperanto’s etymology should have both books on his shelf. He will get more out of Vilborg, I believe, about those words that are found in Vilborg; but Cherpillod will be a valuable supplement for those words, more than ten thousand of them, that Vilborg omitted.

⁽¹⁾ This is a blatant exaggeration, of course. To take an example: my original Apple II used an encoding ship to convert keyboard scan codes to graphic entities for display on the screen, and so you could only display upper-case English characters and, of course, punctuation marks and numerals. However, by early 1978 there was already an easily available and cheap (i.e. free) program for building fonts for use on Apple’s “high-resolution graphics” screen (which, by current standards, was pretty low-resolution), and when Apple published its “DOS Toolkit Disk” in 1979 that disk already had an Esperanto font on it (in fact, one that I had devised and, in a fit of generosity, given a copy of to a Korean-American teenager at the El Cerrito Computerland store — how it worked its way from there to Apple, I never did find out). Esperanto displayed on that screen could be printed on the popular thermal printers of the day, as a screen print, though text print could not show Esperanto characters.

⁽²⁾ Few people will argue this today, and the argument has now moved to the internet, which also, it appears, can’t handle Esperanto’s twelve special characters — though it has no problem with symphonies or motion pictures.