Esperanto grammar
Esperanto is a constructed language. It is designed to have a highly regular grammar, and as such is considered an easy language to learn.
Each part of speech has a unique suffix: nouns end with ‑o; adjectives with ‑a; present‑tense indicative verbs with ‑as, and so on.
It is possible to communicate effectively with a vocabulary of 400 to 500 "meaning words", though more exist in the language. The original vocabulary of Esperanto had around 900 meaning words, but was quickly expanded.
Reference grammars include the :eo:Plena Analiza Gramatiko|Plena Analiza Gramatiko by Kálmán Kalocsay and Gaston Waringhien, and the Plena Manlibro de Esperanta Gramatiko by Bertilo Wennergren.
Grammatical summary
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.Script and pronunciation
Esperanto uses the Latin alphabet with six additional lettersĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, and ŭand does not use the letters q, w, x, or y.Zamenhof suggested Italian as a model for Esperanto pronunciation.
The article
Esperanto has a single definite article, la, which is invariable. It is similar to English "the".La is used:
The article is also used for inalienable possession of body parts and kin terms, where English would use a possessive adjective:
The article la, like the demonstrative adjective tiu, 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 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.
Parts of speech
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 are vida, vide, and vido.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 from the verbal root paroli ; belo from the adjectival root bela ; 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, from the nominal root reĝo ; parola. The various verbal endings mean to be when added to an adjectival root: beli ; 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. There are relatively few adverbial roots, so most words ending in -e are derived: bele. Often with a nominal or verbal root, the English equivalent is a prepositional phrase: parole ; vide ; reĝe.
The meanings of part-of-speech affixes depend on the inherent part of speech of the root they are applied to. For example, brosi is based on a nominal root, whereas kombi is based on a verbal root. 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 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. On the other hand, changing the nominal root broso to a verb gives the action associated with that noun, brosi. For the name of the action, the suffix -ado will change a derived verb back to a noun: brosado. Similarly, an abstraction of a nominal root requires the suffix -eco, as in infaneco, but an abstraction of an adjectival or verbal root merely requires the nominal -o: belo. 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" or ankoraŭ "yet, still" . About a dozen other adverbs are bare roots, such as nun "now", tro "too, too much", not counting the adverbs among the correlatives.
Other parts of speech occur as bare roots, without special suffixes. These are the prepositions , conjunctions , interjections , numerals , and pronouns . There are also several grammatical "particles" that fit neatly into no category, and which must generally precede the words they modify, such as ne, ankaŭ, nur, eĉ''.
Nouns and adjectives
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.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''. 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:
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:
A predicative adjective does not take the accusative case suffix even when the noun that it modifies does:
Pronouns
There are three types of pronouns in Esperanto: personal , demonstrative , and relative/interrogative .According to the fifth rule of the Fundamento de Esperanto'':
Personal pronouns
The Esperanto personal pronoun system is similar to that of English, but with the addition of a reflexive pronoun.Zamenhof introduced the singular second-person pronoun ci to be used in translations from languages where the T–V distinction is important, and added it in the Dua Libro in 1888 clarifying that "this word is only found in the dictionary; in the language itself it is hardly ever used". It has never been widely used, even by Zamenhof himself, who didn't include it as a pronoun in the 5th rule of the Fundamento and in his 28th Lingva Respondo, published in 1908, recommended to use only vi. The normal usage is to use vi regardless of number or formality. However, especially in some circles, people have begun to use ci in practical speech.
Personal pronouns take the accusative suffix -n as nouns do: min, lin, ŝin. Possessive adjectives are formed with the adjectival suffix -a: mia, ĝia, nia. These agree with their noun like any other adjective: ni salutis liajn amikojn. Esperanto does not have separate forms for the possessive pronouns; this sense is generally indicated with the definite article: la mia.
The reflexive pronoun is used, in non-subject phrases only, to refer back to the subject, usually only in the third and indefinite persons:
The indefinite pronoun is used when making general statements, and is often used where English would have the subject it with a passive verb,
With "impersonal" verbs where there is actually no item or being that is doing an action, no pronoun is used:
The rain is falling by itself, therefore the subject pronoun is omitted.
Ĝi is mostly used with items that have physical bodies. Zamenhof proposed that this pronoun can also be used as an third-person singular pronoun, meaning for use when the gender of an individual is unknown or for when the speaker simply doesn't wish to clarify the gender. However, this proposal is not generally accepted.
In popular usage it's usually only used when referring to children:
When speaking of adults or people in general, in popular usage it is much more common for the demonstrative adjective and pronoun tiu to be used in such situations. This mirrors languages such as Japanese, but it's not a method that can always be used. For example, in the sentence
the word tiu would be understood as referring to someone other than the person speaking, and so cannot be used in place of ĝi, li or ŝi.
Other pronouns
The demonstrative and relative pronouns form part of the correlative system, and are described in that article. The pronouns are the forms ending in -o and -u. Their accusative case is formed in -n, but the genitive case ends in -es, which is the same for singular and plural and does not take accusative marking. Compare the nominative phases lia domo and ties domo with the plural liaj domoj and ties domoj, and with the accusative genitive lian domon and ties domon.The pronoun ''ri''
Ri and ria are unofficial pronouns, that some Esperanto speakers use to refer to a single person regardless of their gender identity.Some Esperanto speakers use it only to refer to a single person whose gender identity is unknown or non-binary or to refer to unspecified person, while other Esperanto speakers use it also to refer to a person whose gender identity is purely female or purely male. E. g. Ĉiu amas ordinare personon, kiu estas simila al ri ; Alekso kaj ria amiko estas ambaŭ neduumaj. The use of the Esperanto pronoun ri is the same as the use of the English singular they and the Swedish pronoun hen.
Prepositions
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, in Esperanto all prepositions govern the nominative: por Johano. 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:
Alternatively, the accusative may be used without a preposition:
Note that although la trian is in the accusative, de majo 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 indicate the direction or goal of motion. It is especially common when there would otherwise be a double preposition:
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:
Both por and pro often translate English 'for'. However, they distinguish for a goal and for a cause : 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 by:
However, English of corresponds to several Esperanto prepositions also: de, el, and da :
The last of these, , is semantically Slavic and is difficult for Western Europeans, to the extent that even many Esperanto dictionaries and grammars define it incorrectly.
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 we get the preposition far''.
Verbs
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 ; estas muso en la domo.
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- and -iĝ- :
The verbal paradigm
The tenses have characteristic vowels. A indicates the present tense, i the past, and o the future.| Indicative | Active participle | Passive participle | Infinitive | Jussive | Conditional | |
| Past | -is | -inta | -ita | -i | -u | -us |
| Present | -as | -anta | -ata | -i | -u | -us |
| Future | -os | -onta | -ota | -i | -u | -us |
The verbal forms may be illustrated with the root esper- :
A verb can be made emphatic with the particle ja : mi ja esperas, mi ja esperis.
Tense
As in English, Esperanto present tense may be used for generic statements such as "birds fly".The Esperanto future is a true tense, used whenever future time is meant. For example, in English " when I see you" the verb "see" is in the present tense despite the time being in the future; in Esperanto, future tense is required: kiam mi vidos vin.
Esperanto tense is relative. This differs from English absolute tense, where the tense is past, present, or future of the moment of speaking: In Esperanto, the tense of a subordinate verb is instead anterior or posterior to the time of the main verb. For example, "John said that he would go" is in Esperanto Johano diris, ke li iros ; this does not mean that he will go at some point in the future from now, but that at the time he said this, his going was still in the future.
Mood
The conditional mood is used for such expressions as se mi povus, mi irus and se mi estus vi, mi irus.The jussive mood, is used for wishing and requesting, and serves as the imperative and subjunctive:
Copula
The verb esti is both the copula and the existential verb. As a copula linking two noun phrases, it causes neither to take the accusative case. Therefore, unlike the situation with other verbs, word order with esti can be semantically important: compare hundoj estas personoj and personoj estas hundoj.This is a stylistic rather than grammatical change in the language, as the more economical verbal forms were always found in poetry.
Participles
s are verbal derivatives. In Esperanto, there are six forms:- three aspects: past, present, and future
- two voices: active and passive
Adjectival participles
The basic principle of the participles may be illustrated with the verb fali. Picture a cartoon character running off a cliff. Before the character falls, they are falonta. As they drop, they are falanta. After they hit the ground, they are falinta.Active and passive pairs can be illustrated with the transitive verb haki. Picture a woodsman approaching a tree with an axe, intending to chop it down. He is hakonta and the tree is hakota. While swinging the axe, he is hakanta and the tree hakata. After the tree has fallen, he is hakinta and the tree hakita.
Adjectival participles agree with nouns in number and case, just as other adjectives do:
Compound tense
Compound tenses are formed with the adjectival participles plus esti as the auxiliary verb. The participle reflects aspect and voice, while the verb carries tense:- Present progressive: mi estas kaptanta, mi estas kaptata
- Present perfect: mi estas kaptinta, mi estas kaptita
- Present prospective: mi estas kaptonta, mi estas kaptota
The tense and mood of esti can be changed in these compound tenses:
Although such periphrastic constructions are familiar to speakers of most European languages, the option of contracting into a verb is often seen for adjectival participles:
The active synthetic forms are:
| Simple verb | Progressive | Perfect | Prospective | |
| Present tense | mi kaptas | mi kaptantas | mi kaptintas | mi kaptontas |
| Past tense | mi kaptis | mi kaptantis | mi kaptintis | mi kaptontis |
| Future tense | mi kaptos | mi kaptantos | mi kaptintos | mi kaptontos |
| Conditional mood | mi kaptus | mi kaptantus | mi kaptintus | mi kaptontus |
Infinitive and jussive forms are also found. There is a parallel passive paradigm. A few of these forms, notably -intus and -atas, entered common usage, but most of them are very rare because they are difficult to understand.
Nominal participles
Participles may be turned into adverbs or nouns by replacing the adjectival suffix -a with -e or -o. This means that, in Esperanto, some nouns may be inflected for tense.A nominal participle indicates one who participates in the action specified by the verbal root. For example, esperinto is a "hoper", or one who had been hoping.
Adverbial participles
s are used with subjectless clauses:Conditional and tenseless participles (unofficial)
Occasionally, the participle paradigm will be extended to include conditional participles, with the vowel u. If, for example, in our tree-chopping example, the woodsman found that the tree had been spiked and so couldn't be cut down after all, he would be hakunta and the tree hakuta.This can also be illustrated with the verb prezidi. Just after the recount of the 2000 United States presidential election:
- then-president Bill Clinton was still prezidanto of the United States,
- president-elect George W. Bush was declared prezidonto,
- the previous president George H. W. Bush was a prezidinto, and
- the contending candidate Al Gore was prezidunto.
Negation
A statement is made negative by using ne or one of the negative correlatives. Ordinarily, only one negative word is allowed per clause:Two negatives within a clause cancel each other out, with the result being a positive sentence.
The word ne comes before the word it negates:
The latter will frequently be reordered as ne tion mi skribis depending on the flow of information.
Questions
"Wh" questions are asked with one of the interrogative/relative correlatives. They are commonly placed at the beginning of the sentence, but different word orders are allowed for stress:Yes/no questions are marked with the conjunction ĉu :
Such questions can be answered jes or ne in the European fashion of aligning with the polarity of the answer, or ĝuste or malĝuste'' in the Japanese fashion of aligning with the polarity of the question:
Note that Esperanto questions may have the same word order as statements.
Conjunctions
Basic Esperanto conjunctions are kaj, kun,aŭ, nek, se, ĉu, sed, anstataŭ, krom, kiel, ke. Like prepositions, they precede the phrase or clause they modify:However, unlike prepositions, they allow the accusative case, as in the following example from Don Harlow:
Interjections
s may be derived from bare affixes or roots: ek!, from the perfective prefix; um, from the indefinite/undefined suffix; fek!, from feki.Word formation
Esperanto derivational morphology uses a large number of lexical and grammatical affixes. 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- regularly corresponds to several dozen English words: see, 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.Numbers
Numerals
The cardinal numerals are:These are grammatically numerals, not nouns, and as such do not take the accusative case suffix. However, unu is sometimes used adjectivally or demonstratively, meaning "a certain", and in such cases it may take the plural affix -j, just as the demonstrative pronoun tiu does:
In such use unu is irregular in that it doesn't take the accusative affix -n in the singular, but does in the plural:
but
Additionally, when counting off, the final u of unu may be dropped, as if it were a part-of-speech suffix:
Higher numbers
At numbers beyond the thousands, the international roots miliono and miliardo are used. Beyond this there are two systems: A billion in most English-speaking countries is different from a billion in most other countries. The international root biliono is likewise ambiguous in Esperanto, and is deprecated for this reason. An unambiguous system based on adding the Esperanto suffix -iliono to numerals is generally used instead, sometimes supplemented by a second suffix -iliardo:Note that these forms are grammatically nouns, not numerals, and therefore cannot modify a noun directly: mil homojn but milionon da homoj.
Compound numerals and derivatives
Numerals are written together as one word when their values are multiplied, and separately when their values are added. Ordinals are formed with the adjectival suffix -a, quantities with the nominal suffix -o, multiples with -obl-, fractions with ‑on‑, collectives with ‑op‑, and repetitions with the root ‑foj‑.The particle po is used to mark distributive numbers, that is, the idea of distributing a certain number of items to each member of a group. Consequently, the logogram @ is not used :
Note that particle po forms a phrase with the numeral tri and is not a preposition for the noun phrase tri pomojn, so it does not prevent a grammatical object from taking the accusative case.
Comparisons
Comparisons are made with the adverbial correlatives tiel... kiel, the adverbial roots pli and plej, the antonym prefix mal-, and the preposition ol :Implied comparisons are made with tre and tro.
Phrases like "The more people, the smaller the portions" and "All the better!" are translated using ju and des in place of "the":
Word order
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 :However, when the entire clause is negated, the ne may be left till last:
The last order reflects a typical topic–comment order: Known information, the topic under discussion, is introduced first, and what one has to say about it follows. 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:
The noun phrase
Within a noun phrase, either the order adjective–noun or noun–adjective may occur, though the former is somewhat more common. Less flexibility occurs with numerals and demonstratives, with numeral–noun and demonstrative–noun being the norm, as in English.Adjective–noun order is much freer. With simple adjectives, adjective–noun order predominates, especially if the noun is long or complex. However, a long or complex adjective typically comes after the noun, in some cases parallel to structures in English, as in the second example below:
Adjectives also normally occur after correlative nouns. Again, this is one of the situations where adjectives come after nouns in English:
Changing the word order here can change the meaning, at least with the correlative nenio 'nothing':
With multiple words in a phrase, the order is typically demonstrative/pronoun–numeral–:
However, the article la precedes a noun phrase:
In prepositional phrases, the preposition is required to come at the front of the noun phrase, though it is commonly replaced by turning the noun into an adverb:
Constituent order
within a clause is generally free, apart from copular clauses.The default order is subject–verb–object, though any order may occur, with subject and object distinguished by case, and other constituents distinguished by prepositions:
The expectation of a topic–comment order apply here, so the context will influence word order: in la katon ĉasis la hundo, the cat is the topic of the conversation, and the dog is the news; in la hundo la katon ĉasis, the dog is the topic of the conversation, and it is the action of chasing that is the news; and in ĉasis la hundo la katon, the action of chasing is already the topic of discussion.
Context is required to tell whether
means the dog chased a cat which was in the garden, or there, in the garden, the dog chased the cat. These may be disambiguated with
and
Of course, if it chases the cat into the garden, the case of 'garden' would change:
Within copulative clauses, however, there are restrictions. Copulas are words such as esti 'be', iĝi 'become', resti 'remain', and ŝajni 'seem', for which neither noun phrase takes the accusative case. In such cases only two orders are generally found: noun-copula-predicate and, much less commonly, predicate-copula-noun.
Generally, if a characteristic of the noun is being described, the choice between the two orders is not important:
However, la vento sovaĝa estas is unclear, at least in writing, as it could be interpreted as 'the wild wind is', leaving the reader to ask, 'is what?'.
Attributive phrases and clauses
In the sentence above, la hundo ĉasis la katon, kiu estis en la ĝardeno 'the dog chased the cat, which was in the garden', the relative pronoun kiu 'which' is restricted to a position after the noun 'cat'. In general, relative clauses and attributive prepositional phrases follow the noun they modify.Attributive prepositional phrases, which are dependent on nouns, include genitives as well as la kato en la ĝardeno 'the cat in the garden' in the example above. Their order cannot be reversed: neither *la de Johano libro nor *la en la ĝardeno kato is possible. This behavior is more restrictive than prepositional phrases which are dependent on verbs, and which can be moved around: both ĉasis en la ĝardeno and en la ĝardeno ĉasis are acceptable for 'chased in the garden'.
Relative clauses are similar, in that they are attributive and are subject to the same word-order constraint, except that rather than being linked by a preposition, the two elements are linked by a relative pronoun such as kiu 'which':
Note that the noun and its adjacent relative pronoun do not agree in case. Rather, their cases depend on their relationships with their respective verbs. However, they do agree in number:
Other word orders are possible, as long as the relative pronoun remains adjacent to the noun it depends on:
Clause order
allow flexible word order, but tend to be iconic. For example, inthe inference is that the cat fled after the dog started to chase it, not that the dog chased a cat which was already fleeing. For the latter reading, the clause order would be reversed:
This distinction is lost in subordinate clauses such as the relative clauses in the previous section:
In written English, a comma disambiguates the two readings, but both typically have a comma in Esperanto.
Non-relative subordinate clauses are similarly restricted. They follow the conjunction ke 'that', as in,
Non-Indo-European aspects
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, 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. 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, tre, tro, 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. 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 for la ĉielo estas blua and mia filino belu! for the mia filino estu bela! mentioned above.
Sample text
The Pater noster, from the first Esperanto publication in 1887, illustrates many of the grammatical points presented above:The morphologically complex words are: