Esperanto

Describing Something (Lesson 9)

I did intend to talk about changing endings (one of Esperanto's most unusual, and useful, characteristics) this time, but I decided that, first, let's add one new ending to our repertoire. This is -A, which you attach to a root that shows that it is describing something. In English, we call this an adjective. In Esperanto, grammarians call it an adjektivo (which means ― you guessed it! ― adjective), but many people just call it an A-vorto (which means A-word).

What does the -A mean? Basically, that this word in some way describes the O-word (noun, name of something) to which it is somehow attached. (“Somehow”? We'll get back to that in a moment.)

Remember our sentence, from a few lessons back, “Forte pluvas”? That describes the situation. But what if you just want to describe the rain itself (pluvo)? This situation requires an adjective: forta pluvo, strong rain.

(As is typical in Esperanto, you can reverse the order of O-word and A-word without causing any change in meaning or any difficulty in understanding: pluvo forta, heavy rain. ⁽¹⁾ )

Here are a few roots that you can use to make A-words:

rapid' = moving with high speed; fast, rapid, quick
riĉ' = having lots and lots of money or other valuable considerations; rich

Try saying the following in Esperanto. Try both ways. In one or two cases, don't forget the prefix mal-.

a gray cloud
light snow
white snow
a poor man (person)
a fast(-flowing) river
a slow(-flowing) river
a bright sun
a cold wind
a dim moon

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There is one word in Esperanto ― which it seems appropriate to introduce now ― which does an awful lot of work, just as in English (except in English you have to learn several, often quite different, variations of this word). This is est', which can indicate three things (as also in English):

(1) We're attaching a description to something;
(2) We're identifying something with something else;
(3) We're showing that something is a member of something.

The most common English word is is, but we also have to know am, are, was, were, be and several others. In Esperanto, est', with an appropriate ending, does duty for all of these.

I introduce this with the adjectives because use (1) is another way of applying an A-word to an O-word. To say La pluvo estas forta is to say that The rain is heavy. Note that, in this use, the order of words doesn't matter either; you can equally well say Forta estas la pluvo. ⁽²⁾

Try the following in Esperanto:

The cloud is gray.
The snow was light.
The snow is white.
The man (person) is poor.
The river will be fast(-flowing).
The river is slow(-flowing).
The sun was bright.
The wind was cold.
The moon will be dim.

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Finally, a word (and perhaps an excercise) about changing endings.

In Esperanto, any root can take any grammatical ending, as long as this makes sense. In English, we can often do much the same thing, without endings; a word can be a noun (The book is on the table), an adjective (Book learning is a good thing) or a verb (The police will book him for DUI), depending on the context (the syntax of the sentence in question and the meaning of the words surrounding the word in question). However, for at least some words this is not feasible; you need to derive one form from another, often according to a specific set of rules and in a specific order (The two men conversed; they held a conversation; their interaction was conversational; they discussed the matter conversationally.)

Here I'll talk only about three ending changes.

(1) If the root is a description word, you can change its adjective (A-word) to a noun (O-word) and get the name of the quality described by the A-word. For instance: forte = strongly, forta = strong, forto = strength.

(2) If the root is a “thing” word, you can change its noun (O-word) to an adjective (A-word) and get a description that relates to that thing. For instance: rivero = river, rivera = having to do with, or related to, a river; riverine.

See if you can create the following expressions simply by modifying endings:

a cloudy gray
a snowy white
human poverty
riverine speed
sunny brightness
windy cold
lunar dimness

(3) Again, if the root is a description, you can attach one of our verb-endings (-AS for now, -IS for already happened, -OS for not yet happened) to it to show that this quality is manifesting itself at the time shown by the ending: La pluvo fortis = The rain was heavy. NOTE: La pluvo fortis is not quite the same as La pluvo estis forta. The second form (which, historically, is more common) means that the rain had a certain quality at the time in question: it was heavy. The first form means that the rain was doing something at the time in question: it was busy being heavy. This is a more active, obtrusive form. Unfortunately, English doesn't make such a distinction, and both forms are usually translated as ... was heavy. You should, right now, fix in your mind the simple (and often misunderstood, also among Esperanto speakers) fact that is translated as does not automatically mean means the same as.

Anyway, try the following exercises, using this new form:

The cloud is gray.
The snow was light.
The snow is white.
The man (person) is poor.
The river will be fast(-flowing).
The river is slow(-flowing).
The sun was bright.
The wind was cold.
The moon will be dim.

Have fun!

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Note

⁽¹⁾ I don't know whether I've already pointed this out or not, but I use for forta here because, relating to rain, heavy has nothing to do with weight but with intensity; heavy rain, in fact, is likely to be ignoring gravity and coming in from the side, at least if the vento, too, is forta.

⁽²⁾ Order doesn't matter for use (2), either, but for use (3) you should probably try to use the same order as in English. In the expression Leono estas besto (A lion is an animal), the only time you could reverse the sentence and still give the same meaning (“The class ‘lion’ is a subclass of the class ‘animal’”) would be if the person to whom you were speaking already knew this, in which case you wouldn't have to say the sentence in the first place.

Posted by Don Harlow at April 11, 2004 11:07 AM | TrackBack