What is the origin of the correlatives?

Question

Are the correlatives inspired from other languages, or are they made-up?

The image is a screenshot of the table at Esperanto at Stanford University: Lesson 3 Correlatives (table of words) .

Answer 1

The photo is from the Scienca Revuo vol. 3, nr-o. 12 (1952). Otherwise, I think they are inspired by Russian, but completely regular: "inspiritaj de la rusaj escepte regulaj korelativoj)", as this webpage says.

Answer 2

Ŝajnas ke plej plena priskribo de korelativoj estas en libro Etimologia Vortaro de Esperanto. Se vi komprenas la rusan en la artikolon vi eblas legi rerakonton pri korelativoj.

Answer 3

The pseudo prefixes are Indoeuropean, ki- for instance from q- which in Slavonic and Romance became k- / q- and in Germanic, Sanskrit (conjunctions only) w-. ĉi- for the French chaque.

neni- instead of a fitting ni- because of French and sound differentiation, negative ne.

The pseudo suffixes -a, -o, and even the location related adverb -e, -en are trivial. For -o one might consider Slavonic.

The suffix -es definitely is inspired by the German genitive.

The remaining suffixes are more artificial IMHO as the choices are limited for unused consonants. (One should not over-interprete similarities to national languages.) [aeo][lm] seem phonetic inspired.

For a linguistic (judging) context:

The correlatives are a nice lingual jewel in Esperanto, but also criticized by some linguists:

• entirely different frequency of usages (nenial);
• unneeded (tial = pro tio)
• introducing sometimes unneeded differentiations: kiom/kio/kiel; but hey, it allows expressing nuances rather easily;

Hence the undoing of correlatives in Ido. I do not hold the arguments for valid though.

Answer 4

Mi uzas la kvin fingrojn kiam instruas kaj memorigas la korelativojn Dikfingro = Ki... Montrofingro = Ti... Mezfingro = Ĉi... Ringofingro = I... Etfingro = Neni...