La ideo aperis ĉe mi en la plej frua infaneco.
Mi dediĉis mian tutan vivon.
Read both the above sentences aloud. Do you thoroughly understand the first one? If not, go back and check out the previous lesson.
There are only two new letters/sounds in this lesson: t and v. These are both pronounced very much as they are in American English: the t in talk and the v in valley. A pseudo-English spelling of the new sentence would be:
mee deh-DEE-chees MEE-ahn TOO-tahn VEE-vohn.
Read the sentence again:
Mi dediĉis mian tutan vivon.
Three new roots are found in this sentence:
dediĉ' = dedicate, assign all of something. In the sentence, you find dediĉis. You should know what this means from the previous lesson. Questions: what do you think dediĉo means? What about dediĉa?
tut' = whole, entire, all of something taken as a single unit. From this and from the -a in the previous lesson, you should know what tuta means. How about la tuto? You probably will never use tutis, but could you figure out a meaning for this word?
viv' = live, life, the state in which the blood is flowing and the brain is working. Again, given the previous lesson, you should be able to figure out what vivo means. What about viva? How would you translate vivo dediĉa? What does the word vivis mean? What does la infano vivis mean?
Read again. How much of this sentence do you understand at this point?
Mi dediĉis mian tutan vivon.
Consider the pronoun mi (I), which we learned in Lesson 1. What do you think you get when you add an -A to the end? Well, when you attach this letter to a pronoun, the letter means basically belonging to. So mia means my or mine. The same rule will apply when we get to other personal pronouns.
What does mia tuta vivo mean?
Read again:
Mi dediĉis mian tutan vivon.
What does that -N do?
This is one of the most important functions in Esperanto grammar ― and arguably the most difficult for English speakers to handle correctly. Perhaps a bit of preliminary explanation is in order.
There are really three types of sentence in Esperanto: the sentence in which something happens; the sentence in in which someone (or something) does something that affects only him (or it); and the sentence in which someone (or something) does something to someone (or something) else. Our first sentence (La ideo aperis...) was of the first type. The idea appeared; there was no direct effect on anyone or anything else. Our new sentence, however, is of the third type: Mi dediĉis ... something.
In the third type of sentence, in English we show what is doing the dedicating and what is being dedicated by position in the sentence; the first of these (the subject) comes before the verb and the second (the direct object) comes after: I have dedicated my whole life. In Esperanto, we can use the same word order (as the writer did here), but we don't have to, and the reason is that the distinction is made differently; in Esperanto we show the direct object of the action by tacking that -N onto the end, and so the word order is less important. One can as easily say: Mian tutan vivon mi dediĉis, and it will be just as comprehensible.
One other thing you should observe here: when you tack the -N onto the name of the object, you have to tack it onto all the little -A words that describe it as well. This use of adjective agreement in Esperanto is also considered (theoretically, at least) to be problematic for English speakers, but I don't remember anybody who ever had any trouble with it, so don't lose any sleep over it.
Rule: to show the direct object, and any of its descriptive words, add -N to the ending -O or -A.
(Note: this applies to other words as objects as well. For instance ... you know that I is mi in Esperanto. The direct-object variant of I in English is me. What do you think it is in Esperanto?)
Once more, say ― and understand ― the following:
La ideo aperis ĉe mi en la plej frua infaneco. Mi dediĉis mian tutan vivon.
Next time: La ideo neniam min forlasadis. One new word root, one new particle (and a new use for particles), one new suffix, and an introduction to the correlative table.