Once again, read the following three propositions out loud. Make sure that you can understand them without translatint them into English. If you have trouble with any of them, go back and look at Lesson 1 for the first line, Lesson 2 for the second line, or Lesson 3 for the third line.
La ideo aperis ĉe mi en la plej frua infaneco.
Mi dediĉis mian tutan vivon.
La ideo neniam min forlasadis.
Now we're going to combine two of these propositions into a simple (but somewhat more complex) sentence. Read it aloud and see if you understand it.
La ideo aperis ĉe mi en la plej frua infaneco kaj neniam min forlasadis.
First, we have one new letter/sound in this lesson: the letter 'k' which is pronounced (suprise!) just like the 'k' in English. We find it here in the word kaj, which we'll get to in a moment, and where it's followed by -aj, which, being a combination of the a in father and the j which is pronounced like the English y, sounds like the word eye or the ie in lie. (In English, there are a number of ways of spelling this diphthong ― consider the igh in right or, more simply, the i in the identically-pronounced word rite. In Esperanto, it's always aj.)
The little particle kaj, which means pretty much the same as the English and, is called a conjunction, which is Latin for "joining together". kaj does just that. In the simplest case, it can join two words of the same type together. Consider the following two possibilities:
La ideo kaj la infano aperis.
La infano aperis kaj vivis.
In the first sentence, it joins together two different things that appeared (popped up out of nothing). In the second case, it takes one of those things and tells which two actions it performed.
Our sentence is actually the same as the second of these; it's just that the actions in question are described in a somewhat more complicated way. We might diagram the whole sentence as follows:
aperis ĉe mi en la plej frua infaneco
/
/
La ideo -- kaj
\
\
neniam min forlasadis.
So, hopefully you understand this little word kaj (and), which is about all there is in this lesson. Read the following sentence again, and be sure that you understand it.
La ideo aperis ĉe mi en la plej frua infaneco kaj neniam min forlasadis.
Which leaves one proposition that we've already covered. How does it relate to this sentence? We'll see in the next lesson, when we combine all three into a more complex (but not very complicated) sentence.
Posted by Don Harlow at February 5, 2005 08:44 PM | TrackBack