It is not _too_ surprising, since Esperanto also shares some coincidental features with Chinese -- its regularity makes the word-building process similar to Chinese. Perhaps poetically, the regularity of roots and affixes does for the arbitrariness of word-building (compared to the lexicons of European languages), what a phonetic alphabet does for the arbitrariness of writing (compared to logographic scripts used in East Asia).

Worth checking out: http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/westernlanguage...