Esperanto grammar

Esperanto has an agglutinative morphology, no grammatical gender, and simple verbal and nominal inflections. Verbal suffixes indicate four moods, of which the indicative has three tenses, and are derived for several aspects, but do not agree with the grammatical person or number of their subjects. Nouns and adjectives have two cases, nominative/oblique and accusative/allative, and two numbers, singular and plural; the adjectival form of personal pronouns behaves like a genitive case. Adjectives generally agree with nouns in case and number. In addition to indicating direct objects, the accusative/allative case is used with nouns, adjectives and adverbs for showing the destination of a motion, or for replacing certain prepositions; the nominative/oblique is used in all other situations. The case system allows for a flexible word order that reflects information flow and other pragmatic concerns, as in Russian, Greek, and Latin.

Esperanto uses the Latin alphabet with six additional letters – ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, and ŭ – and does not use the letters q, w, x, or y.

Zamenhof suggested Italian as a model for Esperanto pronunciation.

Esperanto has a single definite article, la, which is invariable. It is similar to English "the".

La is used:

For identifiable, countable objects:

Mi trovis botelon kaj deprenis la fermilon.

"I found a bottle and took off the lid."

For representative individuals:

La gepardo estas la plej rapida el la bestoj.

"The cheetah is the fastest of the animals."

La abeloj havas felon, sed ili ne taŭgas por karesi.

"Bees have fur, but they're no good for petting."

For adjectives used as nouns, such as ethnic adjectives used as the names of languages:

la blua

"the blue one"

la angla

"English" (i.e. "the English language")

For possessive pronouns, when definite:

La mia bluas, la via ruĝas.

"Mine is blue, yours is red".

The article is also used for inalienable possession of body parts and kin terms, where English would use a possessive adjective:

Ili tranĉis la manon.

"They cut their hands." [one hand each]

The article la, like the demonstrative adjective tiu (this, that), occurs at the beginning of the noun phrase.

There is no grammatically required indefinite article: homo means either "human being" or "a human being", depending on the context, and similarly the plural homoj means "human beings" or "some human beings". The words iu and unu (or their plurals iuj and unuj) may be used somewhat like indefinite articles, but they're closer in meaning to "some" and "a certain" than to English "a". This use of unu corresponds to English "a" when the "a" indicates a specific individual.[1]

The suffixes ‑o, ‑a, ‑e, and ‑i indicate that a word is a noun, adjective, adverb, and infinitive verb, respectively. Many new words can be derived simply by changing these suffixes. Derivations from the word vidi (to see) are vida (visual), vide (visually), and vido (vision).

Each root word has an inherent part of speech: nominal, adjectival, verbal, or adverbial. These must be memorized explicitly and affect the use of the part-of-speech suffixes. With an adjectival or verbal root, the nominal suffix ‑o indicates an abstraction: parolo (an act of speech, one's word) from the verbal root paroli (to speak); belo (beauty) from the adjectival root bela (beautiful); whereas with a noun, the nominal suffix simply indicates the noun. Nominal or verbal roots may likewise be modified with the adjectival suffix ‑a: reĝa (royal), from the nominal root reĝo (a king); parola (spoken). The various verbal endings mean to be [__] when added to an adjectival root: beli (to be beautiful); and with a nominal root they mean "to act as" the noun, "to use" the noun, etc., depending on the semantics of the root: reĝi (to reign). There are relatively few adverbial roots, so most words ending in -e are derived: bele (beautifully). Often with a nominal or verbal root, the English equivalent is a prepositional phrase: parole (by speech, orally); vide (by sight, visually); reĝe (like a king, royally).

The meanings of part-of-speech affixes depend on the inherent part of speech of the root they are applied to. For example, brosi (to brush) is based on a nominal root (and therefore listed in modern dictionaries under the entry broso), whereas kombi (to comb) is based on a verbal root (and therefore listed under kombi). Change the suffix to -o, and the similar meanings of brosi and kombi diverge: broso is a brush, the name of an instrument, whereas kombo is a combing, the name of an action. That is, changing verbal kombi (to comb) to a noun simply creates the name for the action; for the name of the tool, the suffix -ilo is used, which derives words for instruments from verbal roots: kombilo (a comb). On the other hand, changing the nominal root broso (a brush) to a verb gives the action associated with that noun, brosi (to brush). For the name of the action, the suffix -ado will change a derived verb back to a noun: brosado (a brushing). Similarly, an abstraction of a nominal root (changing it to an adjective and then back to a noun) requires the suffix -eco, as in infaneco (childhood), but an abstraction of an adjectival or verbal root merely requires the nominal -o: belo (beauty). Nevertheless, redundantly affixed forms such as beleco are acceptable and widely used.

A limited number of basic adverbs do not end with -e, but with an undefined part-of-speech ending -aŭ. Not all words ending in -aŭ are adverbs, and most of the adverbs that end in -aŭ have other functions, such as hodiaŭ "today" [noun or adverb] or ankoraŭ "yet, still" [conjunction or adverb]. About a dozen other adverbs are bare roots, such as nun "now", tro "too, too much", not counting the adverbs among the correlatives. (See special Esperanto adverbs.)

Other parts of speech occur as bare roots, without special suffixes. These are the prepositions (al "to"), conjunctions (kaj "and"), interjections (ho "oh"), numerals (du "two"), and pronouns (mi "I"—The final -i found on pronouns is not a suffix, but part of the root). There are also several grammatical "particles" that fit neatly into no category, and which must generally precede the words they modify, such as ne (not), ankaŭ (also), nur (only), eĉ (even).

A suffix -j following the noun or adjective suffixes -o or -a makes a word plural. Without this suffix, a countable noun is understood to be singular. Direct objects take an accusative case suffix -n, which goes after any plural suffix. (The resulting sequence -ojn rhymes with English coin, and -ajn rhymes with fine.)

Adjectives agree with nouns. That is, they are plural if the nouns that they modify are plural, and accusative if the nouns that they modify are accusative. Compare bona tago; bonaj tagoj; bonan tagon; bonajn tagojn (good day/days). This requirement allows for free word orders of adjective-noun and noun-adjective, even when two noun phrases are adjacent in subject–object–verb or verb–subject–object clauses:

la knabino feliĉan knabon kisis (the girl kissed a happy boy)

la knabino feliĉa knabon kisis (the happy girl kissed a boy).

Agreement clarifies the syntax in other ways also. Adjectives take the plural suffix when they modify more than one noun, even if those nouns are all singular:

ruĝaj domo kaj aŭto (a red house and [a red] car)

ruĝa domo kaj aŭto (a red house and a car).

A predicative adjective does not take the accusative case suffix even when the noun that it modifies does:

mi farbis la pordon ruĝan (I painted the red door)

mi farbis la pordon ruĝa (I painted the door red).

There are three types of pronouns in Esperanto: personal (vi "you"), demonstrative (tio "that", iu "someone"), and relative/interrogative (kio "what"). According to the fifth rule[2] of the Fundamento de Esperanto:

5. The personal pronouns are: mi, "I"; vi, "thou", "you"; li, "he"; ŝi, "she"; ĝi, "it"; si, "self"; ni, "we"; ili, "they"; oni, "one", "people", (French "on").

— L. L. Zamenhof, Fundamento de Esperanto (1905)

Although Esperanto word order is fairly free, prepositions must come at the beginning of a noun phrase. Whereas in languages such as German, prepositions may require that a noun be in various cases (accusative, dative, and so on), in Esperanto all prepositions govern the nominative: por Johano (for John). The only exception is when there are two or more prepositions and one is replaced by the accusative.

Prepositions should be used with a definite meaning. When no one preposition is clearly correct, the indefinite preposition je should be used:

ili iros je la tria de majo (they'll go on the third of May: the "on" isn't literally true).

Alternatively, the accusative may be used without a preposition:

ili iros la trian de majo.

Note that although la trian (the third) is in the accusative, de majo (of May) is still a prepositional phrase, and so the noun majo remains in the nominative case.

A frequent use of the accusative is in place of al (to) to indicate the direction or goal of motion (allative construction). It is especially common when there would otherwise be a double preposition:

la kato ĉasis la muson en la domo (the cat chased the mouse in [inside of] the house)

la kato ĉasis la muson en la domon (the cat chased the mouse into the house).

The accusative/allative may stand in for other prepositions also, especially when they have vague meanings that add not much to the clause. Adverbs, with or without the case suffix, are frequently used instead of prepositional phrases:

li iris al sia hejmo (he went to his home)

li iris hejmen (he went home)

Both por and pro often translate English 'for'. However, they distinguish for a goal (looking forward in time, or causing: por) and for a cause (looking back in time, or being caused by: pro): To vote por your friend means to cast a ballot with their name on it, whereas to vote pro your friend would mean to vote in their place or as they asked you to.

The preposition most distinct from English usage is perhaps de, which corresponds to English of, from, off, and (done) by:

libro de Johano (John's book)

li venis de la butiko (he came from the shop)

mordita de hundo (bitten by a dog)

However, English of corresponds to several Esperanto prepositions also: de, el (out of, made of), and da (quantity of, unity of form and contents):

tablo el ligno (a table of wood)

glaso da vino (a glass of wine)

listo da kondiĉoj de la kandidatoj (a list of conditions from the candidates)

The last of these, da, is semantically Slavic and is difficult for Western Europeans, to the extent that even many Esperanto dictionaries and grammars define it incorrectly.[10]

Occasionally a new preposition is coined. Because a bare root may indicate a preposition or interjection, removing the grammatical suffix from another part of speech can be used to derive a preposition or interjection. For example, from fari (to do, to make) we get the preposition far (done by).

All verbal inflection is regular. There are three tenses, all of which are in the indicative mood. The other moods are the infinitive, conditional, and jussive. No aspectual distinctions are required by the grammar, but derivational expressions of Aktionsart are common.

Verbs do not change form according to their subject. I am, we are, and he is are simply mi estas, ni estas, and li estas, respectively. Impersonal subjects are not used: pluvas (it is raining); estas muso en la domo (there's a mouse in the house).

Most verbs are inherently transitive or intransitive. As with the inherent part of speech of a root, this is not apparent from the shape of the verb and must simply be memorized. Transitivity is changed with the suffixes -ig- (the transitivizer/causative) and -iĝ- (the intransitivizer/middle voice):

akvo bolas je cent gradoj (water boils at 100 degrees)

ni boligas la akvon (we boil the water).

Participles are verbal derivatives. In Esperanto, there are six forms:

• three aspects: past (or "perfective"), present (or "progressive"), and future (or "predictive")

times

• two voices: active (performing an action) and passive (receiving an action)

The participles represent aspect by retaining the vowel of the related verbal tense: i, a, o. In addition to carrying aspect, participles are the principal means of representing voice, with either nt or t following the vowel (see next section).

A statement is made negative by using ne or one of the negative (neni-) correlatives. Ordinarily, only one negative word is allowed per clause:

Mi ne faris ion ajn. I didn't do anything.

Two negatives within a clause cancel each other out, with the result being a positive sentence.

Mi ne faris nenion. Mi ja faris ion. It is not the case that I did nothing. I did do something.

The word ne comes before the word it negates:

Mi ne skribis tion (I didn't write that)

Ne mi skribis tion (It wasn't I who wrote that)

Mi skribis ne tion (It wasn't that that I wrote)

The latter will frequently be reordered as ne tion mi skribis depending on the flow of information.

"Wh" questions are asked with one of the interrogative/relative (ki-) correlatives. They are commonly placed at the beginning of the sentence, but different word orders are allowed for stress:

Li scias, kion vi faris (He knows what you did.)

Kion vi faris? (What did you do?)

Vi faris kion? (You did what?)

Yes/no questions are marked with the conjunction ĉu (whether):

Mi ne scias, ĉu li venos (I don't know whether he'll come)

Ĉu li venos? (Will he come?)

Such questions can be answered jes (yes) or ne (no) in the European fashion of aligning with the polarity of the answer, or ĝuste (correct) or malĝuste (incorrect) in the Japanese fashion of aligning with the polarity of the question:

Ĉu vi ne iris? (Did you not go?)

— Ne, mi ne iris (No, I didn't go); — Jes, mi iris (Yes, I went)

— Ĝuste, mi ne iris (Correct, I didn't go); — Malĝuste, mi iris (Incorrect, I did go)

Note that Esperanto questions may have the same word order as statements.

Basic Esperanto conjunctions are kaj (both/and), kun (with), aŭ (either/or), nek (neither/nor), se (if), ĉu (whether/or), sed (but), anstataŭ (instead of), krom (besides, except for), kiel (like, as), ke (that). Like prepositions, they precede the phrase or clause they modify:

Mi vidis kaj lin kaj lian amikon (I saw both him and his friend)

Estis nek hele nek agrable (it was neither clear [sunny] nor pleasant)

ĉu pro kaprico, ĉu pro natura lingvo-evoluo (whether by whim, or by natural language development)

Li volus, ke ni iru (he would like us to go)

However, unlike prepositions, they allow the accusative case, as in the following example from Don Harlow:

Li traktis min kiel princon (He treated me like a prince: that is, as he would treat a prince)

Li traktis min kiel princo (He treated me like a prince: that is, as a prince would treat me)

Interjections may be derived from bare affixes or roots: ek! (get going!), from the perfective prefix; um (um, er), from the indefinite/undefined suffix; fek! (shit!), from feki (to defecate).

Esperanto derivational morphology uses a large number of lexical and grammatical affixes (prefixes and suffixes). These, along with compounding, decrease the memory load of the language, as they allow for the expansion of a relatively small number of basic roots into a large vocabulary. For example, the Esperanto root vid- (see) regularly corresponds to several dozen English words: see (saw, seen), sight, blind, vision, visual, visible, nonvisual, invisible, unsightly, glance, view, vista, panorama, observant etc., though there are also separate Esperanto roots for a couple of these concepts.

Comparisons are made with the adverbial correlatives tiel ... kiel (as ... as), the adverbial roots pli (more) and plej (most), the antonym prefix mal-, and the preposition ol (than):

mi skribas tiel bone kiel vi (I write as well as you)

tiu estas pli bona ol tiu (this one is better than that one)

tio estas la plej bona (that's the best)

la mia estas malpli multekosta ol la via (mine is less expensive than yours)

Implied comparisons are made with tre (very) and tro (too [much]).

Phrases like "The more people, the smaller the portions" and "All the better!" are translated using ju and des in place of "the":

Ju pli da homoj, des malpli grandaj la porcioj (The more people, the smaller the portions)

Des pli bone! (All the better!)

Esperanto has a fairly flexible word order. However, word order does play a role in Esperanto grammar, even if a much lesser role than it does in English. For example, the negative particle ne generally comes before the element being negated; negating the verb has the effect of negating the entire clause (or rather, there is ambiguity between negating the verb alone and negating the clause):

mi ne iris 'I didn't go'

mi ne iris, mi revenis 'I didn't go, I came back'

ne mi iris or iris ne mi 'it wasn't me who went'

mi iris ne al la butiko sed hejmen 'I went not to the shop but home'.

However, when the entire clause is negated, the ne may be left till last:

mi iris ne 'I went not'.

The last order reflects a typical topic–comment (or theme–rheme) order: Known information, the topic under discussion, is introduced first, and what one has to say about it follows. (I went not: As for my going, there was none.) For example, yet another order, ne iris mi, would suggest that the possibility of not having gone was under discussion, and mi is given as an example of one who did not go.

Compare:[16]

Pasintjare mi feriis en Italujo

'Last year I vacationed in Italy' (Italy was the place I went on holiday)

En Italujo mi feriis pasintjare

'I vacationed in Italy last year' (last year was when I went)

En Italujo pasintjare mi feriis

'In Italy last year I went on vacation' (a vacation is why I went)

En Italujo pasintjare feriis mi

(I am the one who went)

Esperanto's vocabulary, syntax, and semantics derive predominantly from Indo-European national languages. Roots are typically Romance or Germanic in origin. The semantics shows a significant Slavic influence.

It is often claimed that there are elements of the grammar which are not found in these language families. Frequently mentioned is Esperanto's agglutinative morphology based on invariant morphemes, and the subsequent lack of ablaut (internal inflection of its roots), which Zamenhof himself thought would prove alien to non-Indo-European language speakers. Ablaut is an element of all the source languages; an English example is song sing sang sung. However, the majority of words in all Indo-European languages inflect without ablaut, as cat, cats and walk, walked do in English. (This is the so-called strong–weak dichotomy.) Historically, many Indo-European languages have expanded the range of their 'weak' inflections, and Esperanto has merely taken this development closer to its logical conclusion, with the only remaining ablaut being frozen in a few sets of semantically related roots such as pli, plej, plu (more, most, further), tre, tro (very, too much), and in the verbal morphemes ‑as, ‑anta, ‑ata; ‑is, ‑inta, ‑ita; ‑os, ‑onta, ‑ota; and ‑us.

Other features often cited as being nonstandard for an Indo-European language, such as the dedicated suffixes for different parts of speech, or the -o suffix for singular nouns, actually do occur in Indo‑European languages such as Russian.[19] More pertinent is the accusative plural in -jn. Esperanto is superficially similar to the non‑Indo‑European Hungarian and Turkish languages—that is, it is similar in its mechanics, but not in use. None of these proposed "non-European" elements of the original Esperanto proposal were actually taken from non-European or non-Indo-European languages, and any similarities with those languages are accidental.

East Asian languages may have had some influence on the development of Esperanto grammar after its creation. The principally cited candidate is the replacement of predicate adjectives with verbs, such as la ĉielo bluas (the sky is blue) for la ĉielo estas blua and mia filino belu! (may my daughter be beautiful!) for the mia filino estu bela! mentioned above.

The Pater noster, from the first Esperanto publication in 1887, illustrates many of the grammatical points presented above:

Patro nia, kiu estas en la ĉieloj,

sanktigata estu Via nomo.

Venu Via regno,

fariĝu Via volo,

kiel en la ĉielo, tiel ankaŭ sur la tero.

Nian panon ĉiutagan donu al ni hodiaŭ.

Kaj pardonu al ni niajn ŝuldojn,

kiel ankaŭ ni pardonas al niaj ŝuldantoj.

Kaj ne konduku nin en tenton,

sed liberigu nin de la malbono.

(Ĉar Via estas la regno kaj la potenco

kaj la gloro eterne.)

Amen.

The morphologically complex words (see Esperanto word formation) are:

sanktigata
sankt-	-ig-	-at-	-a
holy	causative	passive participle	adjective
"being made holy"

fariĝu
far-	-iĝ-	-u
do	middle voice	jussive
"be done"

ĉiutagan
ĉiu-	tag-	-a	-n
every	day	adjective	accusative
"daily"

ŝuldantoj
ŝuld-	-ant-	-o	-j
owe	active participle	noun	plural
"debtors"

liberigu nin
liber-	-ig-	-u	ni	-n
free	causative	jussive	we	accusative
"free us"

la malbono
la	mal-	bon-	-o
generic article	antonym	good	noun
"evil"

• Esperanto Grammar (by Don Harlow)
• Esperanto Grammar (by Jirka Hana)
• An Elementary Esperanto Primer (by Daniel M. Albro)
• Plena Manlibro de Esperanta Gramatiko ("A Complete Handbook of Esperanto Grammar", by Bertilo Wennergren)
• Detailed Lernu! Grammar of Esperanto (written by Bertilo Wennergren)
• Esperanto Grammar with Exercises (by Lingolia)
• Esperanto features in the Conlang Atlas of Language Structures.