Esperanto/Lesson 4

 Previous lesson — Main page — Next lesson In this lesson we will learn about how you can derive new words in Esperanto.

Part-of-speech endings
We have seen that in Esperanto nouns end in -o, verb infinitives in -i, adjectives in -a, and adverbs in -e.

Derivation
Esperanto has been designed to be a language comprised of root words that can be used in conjunction to create countless words. Individual roots remain unchanged. One way to derive new words is by simply changing the ending of the word. For example, laca ('tired') can become laci ('to be tired'); hundo ('dog') can become hunda ('dog-like').

Despite this, one of the forms is the basic or fundamental form, with the others derived from it. For example, laca is the basic word, not laci, and hundo is the basic form, not hunda. There are three types: objects and abstractions (with the basic form in -o), actions (with the basic form in -i), and characteristics (with the basic form in -a). Note that nouns end with the letter 'o', adjectives end with 'a' and adverbs end with 'e'. Often, it is clear to which type a root belongs, but this is not always the case (for example, kombi means 'to comb' and kombo means 'combing', not 'a comb'. Below are several examples, with the base form in bold.

Examples
Some of the below have rather complicated meanings that are more easily and clearly expressed in other ways, and will therefore be very uncommon. They are nevertheless grammatically correct. The idea of the table below is to introduce the principle of creating new words by changing the ending.

esti + adjective?
Words such as laci mean more or less the same thing as "esti + adjective" (i.e. laci = esti laca). There exists a difference: If identifying a more-or-less unchanging characteristic, then "esti + adjective" is used; if the characteristic is of a more temporary nature "stem + -i" is used. We will go into this distinction in a later lesson.

Compounds
Aside from deriving one part of speech from another, new words can be formed by putting two or more words together. The first word usually drops its part-of-speech ending, unless the resulting word would be difficult to pronounce: dormi + ĉambro → dormĉambro (bed room, lit. sleeping room); birdo + kanto → bird(o)kanto (bird song). The effect of the order of the compounded words is the same as in English, compare kantobirdo (songbird). This way, one can quickly multiply the number of concepts one can refer to. Conjugation such as pluralization (-j) or objectification (-n) is unchanged and is appended to the final -o or -a (e.g. dormĉambroj, kantobirdoj).

al
We have already seen the word al to refer to a destination, for example in "Mi iros al la parko.", where it is translated as "to". Like English "to", al is also used indicate the indirect object of a verb.

Note that in English "to" is sometimes left out. In Esperanto it must always be used.

Vocabulary
Here are more words to play with and memorize.

Exercises
Let's play some more with the affixes from the previous lessons:
 * Go through the words in this lesson and tack on mal-, -ulo, and -ino. What do they mean? (answers)

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