I've always had this desire to try teaching Esperanto from the language's strengths, and not according to the pattern imposed on it by its primarily Western neighbors and ancestors.
The way I'd do this is start with the simplest way of saying something in Esperanto. In English, for instance, the basic sentence (skipping over the expletives) is: subject + verb. Even for sentences that don't really have a subject, you have to invent one. "It was raining." What was raining? The sky? The clouds? Some deity taking a leak? Nope, just "it", whatever that might be.
In Esperanto, the simplest sentence (again skipping over the expletives) is: verb. When liquid comes down from the sky you don't think sky, clouds or deities, just Pluvas (it's raining).
Of course, this, too, comes in two parts. Most words in Esperanto come in parts. Here we have something called the "root" -- pluv', a morpheme that means "water that comes down from clouds in drops" (the apostrophe is just a dictionary marker to show the end of the root) and the ending as that means "this is going on right now, as we speak". Literally, pluvas means something like "water that comes down from clouds in drops is doing its thing even now, as we speak". You may argue that "it's raining" is shorter and simpler than that, and I would agree; but I would also point out that pluvas is even shorter and simpler than "it's raining".
I learned how to do this in Teach Yourself Esperanto -- lesson six or seven, I think, or maybe even lesson eight. TYE mostly talked about weather, here, and it seemed to me then that this would be mostly applicable to weather. You could say pluvas for "it's raining", neĝas for "it's snowing" (1), tondras for "it's thundering", hajlas for "it's hailing", etc.
This really isn't too different from English (if you ignore the missing "it"), and I was content with it until one day I got a letter from my friend Mingqi in Shanghai. She had gone to some kind of meeting, and she wrote:
Plenis en la ĉambro je homoj.
Oops. Where's my subject?
A literal translation of this sentence, word for word, would be "It was full in the room with people". Our old missing subject again, but this time in a context we wouldn't use in English -- i.e., one that had nothing to do with weather.
I finally figured out that, in Esperanto, you can drop the subject anytime that the subject is really the ambience in which the action takes place. Often this is weather, but it doesn't have to be. And you can often replace something starting with "there is ..." with such a subjectless expression. For instance, you could say: Haladzas je subaĉetado en tiu parlamento (There is a miasma of bribery in that legislative body).
So if I were writing a textbook of Esperanto, I wouldn't start with "Dick runs. Jane runs. Spot the dog runs." I would start with the simplest of all Esperanto sentences -- the subjectless verb. (Maybe later I'll tell you where I'd go next.)
Esperanto has 28 letters which (more or less) stand for 28 sounds. Five of these letters are the vowels a, e, i, o, u, which represent, more or less and in the same order, the vowels in "pa, make me go too". If you pronounce these vowels as given (being careful to drop the 'y' sound from the so-called long a in make and the 'w' sound from the so-called long o in go), you will be pronouncing the vowels fairly closely.
Two of the remaining letters are the semi-consonants. These are j, which corresponds closely to the English y, and ŭ, which corresponds closely to the English w. Note that j never and nowhere sounds like the English j. Both these letters occur with accompanying vowels; when they follow a vowel, the result is something known as a diphthong. oj sounds like the oy in boy, aŭ sounds like the ow in now, etc.
The last 21 letters are the consonants. If you pronounce the following as you would in English, you will be close: b, d, f, k, l, m, n, p, t, v, z. Some of the rest also have English-language single-letter equivalents, but in English may be pronounced in several ways -- not in Esperanto. g is always hard (as in get, not as in gem). h is always pronounced (as in horse), never silent (as in hour). s is always as in hiss, never identical to z, as in his.
Pay special attention to the remaining seven letters. c has the sound made by the final ts in rats; in Esperanto, it can appear in the middle or even at the beginning of a word (as it does in some borrowed English words such as tsunami or tsetse fly). Its close relation ĉ is pronounced like the English ch in church, though not like the one in machine. The Esperanto ĝ is pronounced like the English j or the other half of the English g, as in just or gem. ĥ is the raspy sound about halfway between k and h; try to say kit, but make sure that the air grinds its way out between tongue and back of palate, not just pops out as it does with k. ĵ is the s in such unusual words as pleasure or treasure. The Esperanto r is slightly flapped with the tip of the tongue, but if you find that difficult just start out with a plain Western American r -- just so long as you actually pronounce it, don't just mute it out as some people in England and the northeast of the United States do. Finally, the letter ŝ is just the same as our sh in hush.
Words are always stressed on the next-to-last vowel (most people say "syllable", but since each vowel represents a syllable, it's perhaps easier to say it this way). So pluvas is "PLOO-vahs". If you see an apostrophe on the end of the word (falas pluv' = rain is falling), pretend that it's an unpronounced vowel (it's actually a missing -O) and leave the accent where it was ("FAH-lahs PLOOV").
You now know how to make Esperanto sounds out of Esperanto letters and Esperanto letters out of Esperanto sounds. And you now know why there are no Esperanto spelling bees; a contest in which no one can lose wouldn't be much fun, now, would it.
Posted by Don Harlow at January 31, 2004 09:25 PM | TrackBack