La ideo aperis ĉe mi en la plej frua infaneco.
Mi dediĉis mian tutan vivon.
La ideo neniam min forlasadis.
Please read the above aloud. You should have no trouble with the pronunciation (there are no new sounds or letters in this lesson). You should also understand the first two lines without having to think of their English equivalents. If not, go back and look at lesson 1 for the first line or lesson 2 for the second line.
Now let's consider the third line:
La ideo neniam min forlasadis.
There's only one new root in this lesson:
las' = to leave, to put (presumably permanent) space between two things. (Note: las' also has to do with allowing something to happen.)
We'll see how it works in a few moments.
Try reading the line one more time:
La ideo neniam min forlasadis.
Does it make any sense to you yet?
Answer to the question we asked in the note towards the end of the last lesson: when you tack the -N onto mi in Esperanto, you get min, which means me.
A totally new word ― and new kind of word ― is neniam. This is the first of our correlatives. Correlatives are made up of two parts ― a prefix that ends with -i- and a suffix that follows that -i-. The correlatives have to do with the question words who, what, when, where, how, why, etc. The prefix tells whether we're asking a question, pointing out a specific answer, making a negative answer, etc. (there are five possibilities), and the suffix tells us whether the word has to do with things, time, method, reason, etc. Neniam, for instance, starts with neni-, which tells us that this is a negative correlative; the -am on the end tells us that it has to do with time. The English negative word is not and the English basic time word is ever, so we can translate this word as not ever, or never.
Since there are five prefixes and nine suffixes among the correlatives, how many correlative words do you think you can form in Esperanto?
Finally, we have the particle for. For simply means away, at a (great) distance. You can use it by itself (e.g. Mia vivo estas for de la infaneco ― do you understand that? estas = is, de = of or from), but in this lesson it is used as a prefix. Particles can often be used as prefixes (as here) or even as ordinary roots, taking the same endings as regular roots. How, for instance, do you think you would translate la fora infaneco, where for takes the adjective ending -A?
In this case, for is attached to las' as a prefix: forlasis, left at a great distance.
This still leaves one minor problem with this word: why is it forlasadis instead of forlasis?
Read the sentence aloud one more time:
La ideo neniam min forlasadis.
If you have guessed that -AD- in forlasadis is a suffix, like -EC- in the first lesson, you're right. -AD- is attached to an action of some sort to show that that action is continuous or (in the case of short, sharp, one-time acts) repetitive. In this case, forlasis is a basic one-time action. A suicide (if he could talk after he was dead) might say: Mi forlasis mian vivon. After all, he only did it once.
Zamenhof, here, is saying that the non-leaving of him by the idea was something ongoing, something that endured, something he put up with forever. Hence the suffix -AD-. Note: in this particular case, you might want to just omit the -AD-, since the neniam imparts the same idea. That's pretty much up to you.
Read aloud once more:
La ideo neniam min forlasadis.
Finally, word-order. We've talked about the subject (the one who is doing something), the verb (which shows what's being done) and the direct object (who it's being done to). In English, we distinguish the subject from the direct object by putting the subject before the verb and the direct object after the verb. In Esperanto we distinguish between the subject and the direct object by putting an -N on the end of the direct object but not on the end of the subject. What this means is that, in Esperanto, you don't have to put the subject, the verb and the direct object in some particular order; you can reorganize them to suit yourself. In this sentence, the order is: subject (La ideo), direct object (min), verb (forlasadis).
Why did Zamenhof choose this particular order for this particular sentence? I don't know. Maybe he just felt that it sounded better. This is a good reason, in some cases, for changing the word order.
Now reread the three sentences:
La ideo aperis ĉe mi en la plej frua infaneco.
Mi dediĉis mian tutan vivon.
La ideo neniam min forlasadis.
Zamenhof didn't actually write these three sentences as three simple sentences, but as one single complex sentence. In the next lesson we'll see how to put two of them together.