The result was that about two-thirds of this original vocabulary is Romance, and about one-third Germanic, including a pair of roots from Swedish: The main languages contributing to Zamenhof's original vocabulary wereĪnd German, the modern languages most widely learned in schools around the world at the time Esperanto was devised. Some appear to be compromises between the primary languages, such as tondri (to thunder), per French tonner, Italian tuonare, German donnern, and English thunder. A large number are what might be called common European international vocabulary, or generic Romance: Roots common to several languages, such as vir- "man", found in English words such as virile, and okul- "eye", found in oculist. Zamenhof took most of his Esperanto root words from languages of the Italic and Germanic families, principally Italian, French, German, Yiddish, and English. However, each root can then form dozens of derivations which may bear little resemblance to equivalent words in the source languages, such as registaro (government), which is derived from the Latinate root reg (to rule) but has a morphology closer to German or Russian. In Esperanto, root words are borrowed and retain much of the form of their source language, whether the phonetic form (eks- from international ex-, vualo from French voile) or orthographic form (teamo and boato from English team and boat, soifo from French soif). The language occupies a middle ground between "naturalistic" constructed languages such as Interlingua, which borrow words en masse from their source languages with little internal derivation, and a priori conlangs such as Solresol, in which the words have no historical connection to other languages. Esperanto vocabulary and grammatical forms derive primarily from the Romance languages, with substantial contributions from Germanic languages.
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