As I said last time, today we'll combine all three propositions that we've read so far into a single sentence. Here it is. Read it aloud and try to understand it.
La ideo, al kies efektivigo mi dediĉis mian tutan vivon, aperis ĉe mi en la plej frua infaneco kaj neniam min forlasadis.
The main addition here is the little expression al kies efektivigo, which the author has attached to mi dediĉis mian tutan vivon to hook it in with the rest of the sentence.
We have one more new sound this time, the one shown here by the letter g in the word efektivigo. The letter g in Esperanto is always pronounced like the English g in get. It is never pronounced like the letter g in gem. In other words, it's always hard, never soft.
Say the word efektivigo. An Anglicized spelling might be: eh-fehk-teev-EE-go.
The only new root in this lesson is precisely the one in that new word. But -- surprise, surprise! -- it's not *efektivig', but just plain efektiv' (we'll see where the -ig- came from further down).
One problem with efektiv' ― and one that you'll run across with some other commonly used Esperanto words ― is that it looks very much like the English effective, and in fact came from the same place, but it doesn't have the same meaning. The Esperanto root efektiv' has to do with reality, actuality. The adjective form efektiva means real, actual. Be sure that you understand this.
So, what about that -ig- in efektivigo?
First, a caveat. -ig- is arguably one of the two or three most important affixes in Esperanto. Learn it well. Read and reread this discussion until you understand it.
Basically, -ig- means: to cause to become whatever is in the root. -ig- is always attached to some sort of description; and it causes the situation to change from one in which something is not described in that way to one in which something is described in that way.
Take efektiva=real, actual. Attach -ig- and you get an action: cause (something) to become real or actual, to realize.
Do you understand? Try to translate these concepts into Esperanto.
What? You say that you don't know the words for caused and made? But remember that in this particular context these aren't separate words, but part of the concept embodied in -ig-.
All right, here's what you should have said:
This is what happens when you attach -ig- to a description word (adjective). What happens when you attach it to a name word (noun)? Well, pretty much the same thing. Remember how you can change endings to change meanings? You can, for instance, take infano=a child and, by changing the ending o to a, you can change the meaning from a name to a description: infana=childish, having to do with children. The suffix -ig- makes this change of meaning automatically. infano -> infana -> infanigis: Mi infanigis la ideon = I made the idea childish, juvenile.
Now comes the tough part, and I wish I could skip it right now, but there's no time like the present.
Actions in Esperanto (and also in English) come in several flavors. We've seen two of them. In one of them, the action describes something that's happening to the subject of the sentence (la ideo aperis. There's a special name for this kind of action: it's called intransitive, meaning that the action doesn't go across (trans) to someone or something else, but stays with the subject.
In the other, the action describes something that the subject of the sentence is doing to something or someone else (mi dediĉis mian tutan vivon). This type of action is called transitive, you can guess why.
These aren't, by the way, different kinds of words, just different kinds of actions. But what kinds of actions they are has some bearing on what -ig- does when you attach it to them.
When you attach -ig- to an intransitive word, it basically says: caused that action to be happening or to have happened, and ― maybe as an afterthought ― it turns the sentence into one of the second type (transitive). Consider the following examples:
So far, so good; but note that in the second example, the addition of the -ig- has indeed made the sentence transitive ― and you can tell this by the addition of a direct object, shown by the -N ending, to the sentence. Some authors like to say that every time you add -ig-, you're adding an object.
Which is fine for instransitive sentences, which have no objects; add one, and you've got one, everything in order. But what happens when you have a sentence that already has an object? How can you have two objects? Add -N to each of them, and things might get very confusing. Consider the following three examples:
Oops. Those last two examples look different, but seem to be saying the same thing. Right. They are saying the same thing ... only not quite. This is a cute method of getting around the "two objects" problem ― make one of them an -N object and the other one the object of a preposition. (je is the preposition we use when we can't quite come up with just the right one from our repertoire of other prepositions.) The only question is, which object to show with an -N and which with a preposition, and Zamenhof's answer, when someone plaintively raised this question, was: who cares? Use whichever method you want. The two sentences may mean two different things, but they are actually saying the same thing. Here are the actual meanings, in somewhat stilted English:
There are a couple of suffixes (participles) that allow you to be even more specific, if you must, but Zamenhof basically suggested that that might be overpedantic.
Reread the above section. You don't need to know all this stuff right now, but you should at some point, and ― again ― there's no time like the present.
More interesting (except to grammarians, perhaps) is the other new word kies. Kies is our second correlative, like neniam, which we met in the third lesson. Its structure is exactly the same:
Basically, as the textbooks will tell you, ki- is the start of correlatives that ask questions: the ki-words are the who, what, when, where, how (and a few others) of Esperanto. This is the story, though not the whole story, as I'll explain in a moment.
Similarly, the ending -es indicates ownership. So we have kies=whose.
As is usual in Esperanto, these pieces can be put together in different ways to get different results, but the pieces never change. (I might say "like Lego blocks", but to my generation the correct term was "Tinker-toys" ...) You now know two correlative beginnings and two correlative endings ... and two correlative words? No, actually you know four. Tell yourself the Esperanto words for:
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Did you say to yourself nenies and kiam? I certainly hope ― and expect ― that you did.
As I said, the textbooks tell you that ki- indicates that the correlative is a question word ― and that this is not the whole story. As in English, exactly the same words are used not just to start a question, but also to link one proposition to something in a sentence as a means of describing that something ― in other words, to establish a relationship (hence the "relative" in correlative). This is, in fact, probably the most important use the of these words, with their "question"-function coming in a distant second. So why do the textbooks concentrate on the latter? At a guess, two reasons: (1) it's easier to explain; (2) English-speakers, who do the same thing in their language, are expected to figure the second, and more important use, out automatically.
To show simple examples of the two uses, look at these two sentences:
In the first sentence, we're simply asking a question (and one I sometimes ask myself): Kiam mi estis juna?, When was I young?
But in the second lesson we're using kiam to use a whole proposition (mi estis juna) to describe something else ― the action aperis: kiam mi estis juna ... tells us the time at which the aperis happened.
So in our sentence we have: La ideo, al kies efektivigo mi dediĉis mian tutan vivon..., in which kies (more precisely, al kies efektivigo) serves as a link by which mi dediĉis mian tutan vivon is used to tell us something about la ideo. We could diagram that particular part of the sentence in this way:
La ideo ...
\
\
al kies efektivigo
\
\
mi dediĉis mian tutan vivon ...
where the
\ \ \
is used to tell us that the description below belongs to the word above.
(We might diagram our first, sample, link as
La ideo aperis
\
\
kiam
\
\
mi estis juna
)
Which pretty much brings us to the end of this lesson. A lot of verbiage for three little words! Read the entire sentence aloud again, and make sure that you understand it:
La ideo, al kies efektivigo mi dediĉis mian tutan vivon, aperis ĉe mi en la plej frua infaneco kaj neniam min forlasadis.
Next lesson: a whole new sentence, short and simple.
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