Esperanto

The Invitation

I've been entering some old (1991 and thereabouts) short stories from the column Por komencantoj in the magazine El Popola Ĉinio onto the internet, and I was really astonished by the large number of verbs ending in -iĝis and the rare number of "compound forms" in estis -ita, which would primarily be used for those raised in a European language for the same thing. Which one should we use and what's the difference?

Simply put, both of these, when applied to verbs, reproduce in Esperanto something we in the Western languages are pleased to call the "passive voice." But in fact "passive voice" means two quite different things, which we have somehow (since the time of the Greeks, I think) conflated.

Consider the sentence: "He was invited to the party by his friend." You see an action taking place here. Joe and his friend meet in the park, and the friend invites Joe to a party.

Now consider the sentence: "They were waiting for him because he was invited to the party." This one implies not an action but a state — no one was inviting Joe, that had already been done, and he was in a state of having been invited at some earlier time.

We call both these things the "passive," and because we have only one way of expressing them ("was invited"), we tend to think of them as the same thing.

In Esperanto, things are a little different. "Participles" like the words that end in -ita always show a state (though they may imply that a state change took place earlier). On the other hand, the -iĝis show a change of state from one situation to another. So when you're trying to show the change of state, the Chinese way is more appropriate:

Li invitiĝis al la festo de sia amiko.

On the other hand, if you're trying to show an already established state, then the European way is the way to go:

Ili atendis lin, ĉar li estis invitita al la festo.

Most commonly, however, I think we should pay attention to the Chinese way of doing this, if only because it is so often overlooked by Westerners speaking Esperanto when it is the correct form to use.

Posted by Don Harlow at December 31, 2006 07:54 AM | TrackBack