La ideo aperis ĉe mi en la plej frua infaneco.
This is the first proposition (not sentence) from L. L. Zamenhof's famous "Letter to (Nikolai Afrikanovitch) Borovko", in which he describes the mental processes that led him to Esperanto. This set of lessons will take us through that document; by the time you finish, you should have a thorough knowledge of Esperanto's structure, though perhaps not of its vocabulary (which requires more study).
Note: This is probably the toughest lesson you'll have in this series. Get through it and you will understand the ideas behind Esperanto, and all future lessons will be considerably easier (and shorter).
To read the sentence above, you have to know how the Esperanto letters are pronounced ... well, at least the ones that appear in the sentence.
The letters a e i o u are known as vowels. They differe from the other letters in that when you pronounce them, it's the general shape of the mouth and throat that are important, not so much the location of the tongue with respect to the teeth and the top or bottom of the mouth. They sound pretty much like the vowel sounds in the sentence
Pa, let me go too.
Rule: Every syllable in Esperanto has one, and only one, vowel in it.
The letter j is called a semivowel. It can appear immediately before a vowel or immediately after a vowel, but not elsewhere. It sound pretty much the same as the English y.
d p f m n l, which are called consonants and depend largely on the position of the tongue, sound very much like their American English equivalents.
ĉ, another consonant, sounds like the ch in church (but not like the ch in machine).
c, which is also a consonant, sounds like the ts at the end of rats or at the beginning of tsar. This is not a t followed by a s, but a single sound located about halfway between them ― something like an s pronounced slightly further back in the mouth, with the tongue raised to resist the flow of air forward while saying the letter.
The toughest letter here, also a consonant, is r, which should be pronounced, like the single r in Spanish, with one or two flaps of the tongue tip against the top of the mouth right behind the upper teeth. If you can't do this (but practice, practice!), simply use a standard American English r. But under no circumstances allow the r between a vowel and a consonant, or at the end of a word, to become silent, as often happens to speakers of British English (some dialects) and Bostonian. r is never silent!
There are 28 sounds in Esperanto, each of them represented by one (and only one) letter. You now know 16 of those sounds and 16 of those letters. We'll pick up the rest in later lessons. For now, rule: Every sound in Esperanto corresponds to exactly one letter, and every letter corresponds to exactly one sound. (1)
Final rule for this lesson: In any word of more than one syllable (vowel), the accent always falls on the next-to-last syllable (vowel).
Here's the sentence given above with the pronunciation written pretty much as you might try to sound it out if you knew only English. I've broken it down into syllables, and when you see a syllable written in CAPITAL LETTERS, it's the one that you should put extra stress on. Try saying it out loud:
lah ee-DEH-oh ah-PEH-rees cheh mee ehn lah play FROO-ah een-fah-NEH-tsoh.
Now try reading it aloud from the Esperanto spelling:
La ideo aperis ĉe mi en la plej frua infaneco.
Esperanto words fall into five separate categories, as follows:
(1) Numerals (one, two, three, four, etc.). There are about a dozen of these.
(2) Pronouns (I, you, he, she, it, etc.). There are a similar number of these.
(3) Correlatives (who, what, when, where, how, and their answering words). There are around fifty of these. They fall nicely into a table for which, as elsewhere in Esperanto, once you've learned the basic combination rule and a total of about 15 pieces, you can put them all together.
(4) Particles (the, and, too, on, etc.). These are simple little words, usually without endings, that serve as the glue that hold the language together. There are a hundred or so of these, and you'll just have to memorize them as they come along.
(5) Roots. These are the basic building blocks of other words. There are around 4,000 of these, officially, and another few hundred that aren't official but are commonly used. In addition, the biggest Esperanto dictionaries may contain ten to twenty thousand additional roots that have been used once or twice, or are assimilated forms of proper names from other languages, but which you don't have to know.
While the particles are the glue of the language, the roots are its core. In each lesson we'll give you the roots first, then the other words. Note: a root is not a word itself, but simply the base on which words are created. We'll show you how this happens in the grammar section.
There are only four roots in this relatively simple proposition. I'll give them with both their English word equivalents (which may, fairly often, resemble the Esperanto roots) and meanings. This is necessary because, commonly, English words will have more than one meaning, and the meaning is necessary to narrow it down. Note: the apostrophe after the root simply means that this is not yet a word ― an ending has to be attached to make it one.
aper': appear. Become visible out of nowhere.
fru': early. Before the appointed or expected time.
ide': idea. A concept held in the mind.
infan': child. A young person, usually of age not greater than five years (though the term can be used for older children), whose sex is indeterminate or not of interest.
See if you can pick these roots out of the proposition that we've been quoting (and, for practice, read it out loud as you do so):
La ideo aperis ĉe mi en la plej frua infaneco.
To make roots into actual words, you have to attach a grammatical ending to the end of the root in place of the apostrophe shown above. These endings determine the rôle of the word in the proposition. Such words may be the names of things (nouns), words used to show some kind of action taking place (verbs), or words that describe those nouns (adjectives) or the circumstances in which the action occurs (adverbs). These are covered by eleven separate endings, of which nine can be attached directly to the roots. We'll learn three of these in this lesson.
The first is -o. Attach it to the end of a root, and you are creating the name of something, a noun.
Take ide'. Add the -o and you have the word ideo = an idea, the name of that concept you have in your head.
Take infan'. Add the -o and you have the word infano = a child, the name of that very juvenile human being.
The attentive student may now ask: but why attach an ending? don't ide' and infan' by themselves, without an ending, already include the concept of a name? True enough. But, as we'll see below, they can also fulfill other functions; and what function they fulfill depends on the ending. So even if it seems redundant, add the ending ― it will help avoid confusion later on.
To show how this might work, take a look at the root aper'. This doesn't have the concept of a name included in it; it suggests an action, something that happens. Yet you can attach an -o to this root, as well, and you get apero = an appearance, a popping-up out of nowhere, that is, the name of the act that the root describes.
Similarly, fru' is obviously a descriptive root, telling what something is like or in what circumstances something is happening (an early bird, I ate early). Nonetheless, you can attach an -o to the end, and you get the name of the description or circumstance, of the quality that they describe: fruo = earliness, the quality of being early.
So basically you can attach the -o to any kind of root.
The second ending here is -is. When you attach this to a root, its basic meaning is: This word tells about an action that has already happened. The technical term for this is past tense of the verb, and if you're interested in such things, you may wish to remember that.
The most obvious root to attach this to, of our four, is aper'. Obviously, aperis = appeared, came into existence or visibility out of nowhere.
In Esperanto, it's also easy to attach this ending to a descriptive root such as fru'. Here we run into a problem which is common when we're looking at two languages at the same time: Language A is probably not going to be identical to Language B in the ways that it does things. When you create the word fruis, you pretty much have to translate this into English as was early, but this is not quite what it means (you say was early in another way, that we'll get to later). fruis is more obtrusive, pushy, than was early; basically, it answers the question What was going on? rather than What was something like?.
Putting -is on the name of something is less obvious in what it means. Basically, it tells you that you were doing something having to do with or behaving in the manner of the thing named by the root. For instance, ideis = was doing something with ideas, was ideating, while infanis = was behaving as a child would behave.
What this all comes down to is that, as with -o, you can attach -is to any kind of root.
Finally (at least for this lesson), we have the ending -a, which tells us that we have a word having to do with or related to the meaning of the root; in other words, describing something.
The most obvious root to attach -a to is fru', which is already a sort of description: frua = early.
You can also attach it to names.
idea = having to do with ideas, related to ideas.
infana = having to do with children, related to children, childish, juvenile.
(If you ever get heavily involved with reading and discussing poetry originally written in Esperanto, somebody will almost certainly want to discuss with you la idea fono de La infana raso de William Auld, where fono = background and raso = race, as a subspecies of a particular species.)
Finally, you can also attach -a to words that describe actions; the result will be a general description involving the action: apera = having to do with the action of appearing, related to the action of appearing.
To conclude this section, a general rule: Any of the nine endings that can be attached to a root can be attached to any root, as per the rules shown in the examples above.
Are you starting to make sense out of our proposition now? Read it aloud to yourself again.
La ideo aperis ĉe mi en la plej frua infaneco.
I mentioned earlier that Esperanto had around 4,000 official roots (some of which have become archaic over the past 100 years, by the way) as well as a few hundred more that are commonly used. "Wait a moment!" you may justifiably ask. "How can a language have so few words? The Oxford English Dictionary contains around a million! Isn't Esperanto, then, considerably less expressive than (for instance) English?"
Not at all. Esperanto uses a process of word-building which makes use of about forty prefixes and suffixes, which are little tiny wordlets that attach to the beginning or end of a root and modify its meaning in certain ways. This is an open-ended process, and ― theoretically, at least ― means that, no matter how small your Esperanto dictionary is, as long as it contains even one root, you will have an infinite number of words at your disposal.
In this lesson's proposition, we find only one of these affixes (affix is a general term that includes both prefix and suffix): -ec-. This says that the word is a characteristic described by the root.
Incidentally, you can find the same process in English, but unfortunately it is not terribly regular, often depends ― for reasons having to do with the history of the language ― on various affixes with the same meaning, and isn't automatically applicable to every word. For instance, -ec- in Esperanto corresponds in English sometimes to:
-hood as in childhood (Esperanto infaneco)
-ship as in friendship (Esperanto amikeco)
-ness as in goodness (Esperanto boneco)
-ity as in diversity (Esperanto diverseco)
-itude as in magnitude (Esperanto grandeco)
It wouldn't be as bad a contrast if only you yourself could choose which English suffixes to use with which roots, as you felt the need, but of course you can't; you're not allowed to say childship, friendness (though you can say friendliness, if you know enough to shove in an -ly and then change it to -li), goodity, diversitude or magnihood.
Again, you can use Esperanto affixes with any root. -ec-, for instance, can obviously be used with fru': frueco = earliness (a characteristic of something, not the more general quality fruo). Similarly, we have ideeco, referring to the characteristic of being an idea. -ec- is less commonly used with words showing actions, but apereco is completely legitimate ... if you ever need it.
Read it aloud again:
La ideo aperis ĉe mi en la plej frua infaneco.
You should have a good idea of what this sentence is saying, now. But we're still missing the glue.
How important the glue words (numerals, pronouns, correlatives and particles) are in a sentence is obvious in the above sentence. We have only four words made from root, and six glue words (one of them is a repetition).
The most obvious is la, which is repeated twice. This means the same as the English the, is used in much the same way, and essentially says: the specific example of the following name word which we are currently discussing or which is implied by our discussion. Just think of it as the same as the and you will be all right.
(the is usually called the definite article. If there is a definite article, there really ought to be an indefinite article, shouldn't there? Well, in English we have one ― a, an as in a book, an egg. Esperanto, however, doesn't. Why not? Apparently because it was not felt as being needed. One of the major functions of the English a, an is to show that a word is the name of something ― a noun. In Esperanto, that function is fulfilled by the ending -o. Any other use of the indefinite article seemed to Zamenhof so minor that he felt he could do without it. Of course, his decision may have been influenced by the fact that he grew up speaking a language ― Russian ― which had neither a definite nor an indefinite article ... in any case, if you see the word ideo without a la, it may mean either idea or an idea.)
mi is the first of our pronouns, and it simply means I. This should be an easy one to remember, since it's pronounced just the same as me, which is a variant form of I.
plej means most, as in That was the most unkindest cut of all. In fact, it also means the -est in that sentence. Essentially, you say it before a descriptive word and, if there are more than two things that can be described that way, you are saying that you are referring to the one of them to which that description is most applicable. (We often refer to this as the superlative.)
Finally, we have two prepositions. Prepositions sup>(2) generally precede a name (noun) and show that it has some kind of descriptive relationship to another word; in other words, they allow that noun to act as an adjective or an adverb. There are endings that allow this, too, and I recommend using them (for instance the -a to show that a name is functioning to describe something), but prepositions are really, really nice for complicated constructions in which the name is surrounded by lots of descriptors of its own.
Most Esperanto prepositions ― there is one exception, which we'll discuss later ― have well-defined meanings, and can't be used outside those meanings ― unlike English and some other languages, in which, again for historical reasons, various prepositions can be used in various ways. We have two in this lesson.
ĉe means, essentially: closely associated with, usually geographically. It comes from the French chez. In English, we usually translate it as at (though at does not always mean ĉe), but in our lesson proposition we might better translate it as to (but to would only rarely be translated as ĉe).
en means surrounded by; it usually refers to a point in space or time that has certain limits. The usual English translation is in ― usual warnings about translation apply.
One more time, read aloud and make sure you understand it:
La ideo aperis ĉe mi en la plej frua infaneco.
How do you put it together?
As with many propositions, this one is very simple. There is a thing (name, sometimes called the subject), ideo, which is (or was) doing something (the verb), aperis: La ideo aperis. Very important tangential observation: In Esperanto, these two parts of a sentence, the so-called subject and the so-called verb, are not fixed in that order. You don't have to say La ideo aperis; you can just as well, and legitimately, say Aperis la ideo. Which order you choose may well depend on what follows.
Zamenhof here chose to answer two questions, as well. Where did the idea appear? The answer is ĉe mi. When did the idea appear? The answer is en la plej frua infaneco. So he wrote: La ideo aperis ĉe mi en la plej frua infaneco.
He could have turned the whole sentence around. To do this, you probably want to keep those two prepositions closer to the verb than to the subject, since it's the verb they are attached to (they show the conditions where and when something happened), and to do this you'd have to pub them before the verb: Ĉe mi en la plej frua infaneco aperis la ideo. But, of course, that was an option he didn't select.
La ideo aperis ĉe mi en la plej frua infaneco. Read aloud. Got it? Understand it? A lot of verbiage for one little ten-word proposition. Luckily, you've now read it, and we can dispense with a lot of the explanations in future lessons.
Next time (try it now):
Mi dediĉis mian tutan vivon. Two new letters, one new ending, three new roots, no new particles. See you soon.
(1) We'll skip over questions of sound spectra and allophonic sounds at this point, because they're totally irrelevant to learning the language. One point: because there are so (relatively) few sounds in Esperanto compared to English, accents aren't as much a problem in understanding what somebody else is saying; you have much more room for error, so don't worry if you feel that you're not getting it quite right.
(2) Japanese readers will want to identify these with postpositions, which fulfill much the same rôle in Japanese but generally follow their objects ― hence the prefix post.
Belega metodo!
Posted by: Iu homo at March 29, 2005 04:19 AM
This is the kind of introduction to Esperanto I find the most useful! It reminds me in some ways the brilliant book 'Homeric Greek' by Pharr, where the reader is taught Greek through the reading of the Iliad, the 600 or so first true verses! (And no, I am not comparing Homere to Zamenhof in any way!)
For the self-studying, analytical type of mind, I think this the very best method and the constructive nature of Esperanto makes it all the more suitable. Before working my way through the sooner or later unavoidable and for me quite boring drills that will eventually model the needed linguistic reflexes (most teaching books do just that), I need to taste, or rather chew some portion of good writing, and only the resulting lingering will tell me if the language is for me worth the learning effort. And if not, I only gained some more linguistic culture that will help my understanding of others languages.
With very little initial linguistic background, one can actually do that through the reading of grammar books (I could testify it works well with many languages, including Esperanto), but it is far more enjoyable and unfortunately seldom possible to do it through interesting writings.
Thank you very much for that very good work!
Amike salutas vin.
Lionel Vidal