Esperanto

Talking About the Weather (Lesson 1)

I've always had this desire to try teaching Esperanto from the language's strengths, and not according to the pattern imposed on it by its primarily Western neighbors and ancestors.

The way I'd do this is start with the simplest way of saying something in Esperanto. In English, for instance, the basic sentence (skipping over the expletives) is: subject + verb. Even for sentences that don't really have a subject, you have to invent one. "It was raining." What was raining? The sky? The clouds? Some deity taking a leak? Nope, just "it", whatever that might be.

In Esperanto, the simplest sentence (again skipping over the expletives) is: verb. When liquid comes down from the sky you don't think sky, clouds or deities, just Pluvas (it's raining).

Of course, this, too, comes in two parts. Most words in Esperanto come in parts. Here we have something called the "root" -- pluv', a morpheme that means "water that comes down from clouds in drops" (the apostrophe is just a dictionary marker to show the end of the root) and the ending as that means "this is going on right now, as we speak". Literally, pluvas means something like "water that comes down from clouds in drops is doing its thing even now, as we speak". You may argue that "it's raining" is shorter and simpler than that, and I would agree; but I would also point out that pluvas is even shorter and simpler than "it's raining".

I learned how to do this in Teach Yourself Esperanto -- lesson six or seven, I think, or maybe even lesson eight. TYE mostly talked about weather, here, and it seemed to me then that this would be mostly applicable to weather. You could say pluvas for "it's raining", neĝas for "it's snowing" ⁽¹⁾, tondras for "it's thundering", hajlas for "it's hailing", etc.

This really isn't too different from English (if you ignore the missing "it"), and I was content with it until one day I got a letter from my friend Mingqi in Shanghai. She had gone to some kind of meeting, and she wrote:

Plenis en la ĉambro je homoj.

Oops. Where's my subject?

A literal translation of this sentence, word for word, would be "It was full in the room with people". Our old missing subject again, but this time in a context we wouldn't use in English -- i.e., one that had nothing to do with weather.

I finally figured out that, in Esperanto, you can drop the subject anytime that the subject is really the ambience in which the action takes place. Often this is weather, but it doesn't have to be. And you can often replace something starting with "there is ..." with such a subjectless expression. For instance, you could say: Haladzas je subaĉetado en tiu parlamento (There is a miasma of bribery in that legislative body).

So if I were writing a textbook of Esperanto, I wouldn't start with "Dick runs. Jane runs. Spot the dog runs." I would start with the simplest of all Esperanto sentences -- the subjectless verb. (Maybe later I'll tell you where I'd go next.)

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⁽¹⁾ If I'm going to give you words in Esperanto, let me give you a quick overview of the pronunciation. Read closely.

Esperanto has 28 letters which (more or less) stand for 28 sounds. Five of these letters are the vowels a, e, i, o, u, which represent, more or less and in the same order, the vowels in "pa, make me go too". If you pronounce these vowels as given (being careful to drop the 'y' sound from the so-called long a in make and the 'w' sound from the so-called long o in go), you will be pronouncing the vowels fairly closely.

Two of the remaining letters are the semi-consonants. These are j, which corresponds closely to the English y, and ŭ, which corresponds closely to the English w. Note that j never and nowhere sounds like the English j. Both these letters occur with accompanying vowels; when they follow a vowel, the result is something known as a diphthong. oj sounds like the oy in boy, aŭ sounds like the ow in now, etc.

The last 21 letters are the consonants. If you pronounce the following as you would in English, you will be close: b, d, f, k, l, m, n, p, t, v, z. Some of the rest also have English-language single-letter equivalents, but in English may be pronounced in several ways -- not in Esperanto. g is always hard (as in get, not as in gem). h is always pronounced (as in horse), never silent (as in hour). s is always as in hiss, never identical to z, as in his.

Pay special attention to the remaining seven letters. c has the sound made by the final ts in rats; in Esperanto, it can appear in the middle or even at the beginning of a word (as it does in some borrowed English words such as tsunami or tsetse fly). Its close relation ĉ is pronounced like the English ch in church, though not like the one in machine. The Esperanto ĝ is pronounced like the English j or the other half of the English g, as in just or gem. ĥ is the raspy sound about halfway between k and h; try to say kit, but make sure that the air grinds its way out between tongue and back of palate, not just pops out as it does with k. ĵ is the s in such unusual words as pleasure or treasure. The Esperanto r is slightly flapped with the tip of the tongue, but if you find that difficult just start out with a plain Western American r -- just so long as you actually pronounce it, don't just mute it out as some people in England and the northeast of the United States do. Finally, the letter ŝ is just the same as our sh in hush.

Words are always stressed on the next-to-last vowel (most people say "syllable", but since each vowel represents a syllable, it's perhaps easier to say it this way). So pluvas is "PLOO-vahs". If you see an apostrophe on the end of the word (falas pluv' = rain is falling), pretend that it's an unpronounced vowel (it's actually a missing -O) and leave the accent where it was ("FAH-lahs PLOOV").

You now know how to make Esperanto sounds out of Esperanto letters and Esperanto letters out of Esperanto sounds. And you now know why there are no Esperanto spelling bees; a contest in which no one can lose wouldn't be much fun, now, would it.

Learning Esperanto

How to learn Esperanto?

The traditional method for learning a language is to sit down in a class, with a teacher. Unfortunately, Esperanto classes are few and far between; even in an area where there may be more than one going on at the same time (e.g. the Bay Area of California), there may be quite a bit of travel involved, as well as some restrictions (the regular class at U.C. Berkeley, though theoretically open to the public, is generally reserved primarily for students at the university, for instance).

Luckily, unlike most other languages, Esperanto doesn't really require either a teacher or a class; you can learn this language on your own. Unfortunately, again, finding a textbook -- at least in your friendly neighborhood bookstore -- is not always easy. Of the four that I can think of offhand, none is currently available in the United States through regular distribution networks: Step By Step in Esperanto (Butler), published by the Esperanto League for North America, is available from ELNA or by special order from your bookstore; Beginner's Esperanto (Conroy), which was not a very good self-teacher anyway, has gone out of print; Teach Yourself Esperanto (Cresswell & Hartley), probably and deservedly the most popular English-language Esperanto textbook, is no longer available in this country except through ELNA (it has to be ordered from England); and Esperanto - Learning and Using the International Language (Richardson) is currently out of print, though a new edition is at the printer's, and should be available (from ELNA) shortly, and shortly after that through special order from your bookstore.

But -- let me state a heresy here -- Esperanto textbooks, perhaps unlike those of other languages, contain an unconscionable amount of padding. My own feeling is that you don't need a textbook to learn the language, just a quick schema of how the language works, a dictionary of sorts, and some reading material to get you started. You can find the schema and plenty of reading material on-line. You can find dictionaries, too, but I'd really recommend getting something in paper, and I'll give you a couple of recommendations below.

In the meantime, start by visiting the following three pages, reading them thoroughly, and perhaps printing them out:

http://www.webcom.com/donh/Esperanto/rules.html

This is a list of the so-called "16 rules of Esperanto grammar". Once you understand these, and how they are used, you will have 90% of what you need to know about Esperanto's morphology. Much of the other 10% can be found at

http://www.webcom.com/donh/Esperanto/correlatives.html

These are the "who, what, when, where, how, why, etc." of Esperanto, the only significant subsystem of the language not touched on by the 16 rules. With these two pages, you should have no trouble following the structure of written Esperanto, if not its content. For a bit more information on content, go to

http://www.webcom.com/donh/Esperanto/affixes.html

which will show you how to build words in Esperanto, using the three dozen or so prefixes and suffixes that the language makes great use of.

Beyond this, you can start immediately by accessing various on-line dictionaries of Esperanto (but you have to be very careful about these; far too often they're just word lookup lists which operate under the assumption that there's a one-to-one mapping between Esperanto words and English words -- which is simply not true). I'd recommend, for starters, the following two works to keep beside you on your desktop.

The Esperanto Association of Britain recently published a mini-dictionary for five dollars. You can get this from ELNA. It contains more than two thousand words and their equivalents, and should be far more than you need for basic conversational or writing ability.

You should also have a dictionary that shows words in Esperanto and their meanings, also in Esperanto, so that you don't get confused by English "equivalents". The standard is the Nova Plena Ilustrita Vortaro de Esperanto (New Complete Illustrated Dictionary of Esperanto), which unfortunately costs more than a hundred dollars and contains lots and lots of words which, if you're lucky, you'll never have any need for. Many people make do with the old Plena Vortaro de Esperanto (Complete Dictionary of Esperanto), which is half a century out of date (but that's not too much; the only thing you might really miss are the computer terms) and costs around $30-40. But I would recommend Wouter Pilger's Baza Esperanta Radikaro, which costs about ten dollars and contains several thousand basic roots and their definitions in really basic Esperanto.

Another possible approach to the language is to get hold of a "key", which is a tiny little booklet containing Esperanto grammar and a minimal Esperanto-English vocabulary. Keys were originally devised around the start of the 20th century for correspondence; somebody who wanted to write a letter (say, a business letter) to somebody in another country would write the letter in Esperanto, toss the key into the envelope along with the letter (the keys are so tiny that they added little to the cost of postage), and send the letter; presumably the person at the other end would use the key to decipher the letter. There are cases, attested to, in which the recipient replied in Esperanto, apparently having learned at least the basics of the language from the enclosed key. The Universala Esperanto-Asocio now appears to be looking at the possibility of using such "keys" for introducing Esperanto into areas where it is relatively unknown (their first new key, one for Turkish, appeared on the internet the other day, and should be out in a paper edition shortly). If you're interested in this possibility, check with ELNA; you can get an English-language key from them for less than a dollar, and they have a matching English-Esperanto vocabulary pamphlet for about the same price. Warning: to read this thing properly, you'll probably want to have a reader's magnifying glass, unless you have really good eyes.

Fast Typing

Some years ago Dr. Ron Glossop and I exchanged two or three letters on the subject of the alphabet and technology. More specifically, it was Dr. Glossop's thesis that, to take advantage of modern computer technology, the Chinese would have to abandon their traditional writing system and adopt the Latin alphabet a la pinyin. My argument was that technology was made for man, not man for technology, and that the Chinese would solve any problems that Western computers might cause them in their own way, not by adopting someone else's customs.

Time, I think, has shown me right. In October the Chinese became the third nation to put a man into orbit -- and they did it with computers that operated in Chinese glyphs, not Latin letters. But I had a bit of an advantage on my side; a decade before my discussion with Dr. Glossop, I'd already seen early PC clones (the "Great Wall" desk computer) operating in a store in Beijing, in Chinese. Even in the United States, there were, as early as around 1980, hardware cards for the Apple II series to allow that computer to operate in Chinese.

Nonetheless, Dr. Glossop's arguments had validity, and perhaps deserve revisiting. Basically, at the time I calculated that an experienced Chinese typist could input data through a properly-designed Chinese keyboard at least as fast as an experienced English typist. On the other hand, an English speaker who had never seen a keyboard would be almost as much at sea as a Chinese speaker who had never seen a keyboard. The real advantage that an alphabet-based writing system has at the keyboard over a glyph-based writing system comes somewhere in between those two extremes. A language written with only fifty-two signs ⁽¹⁾ is, for the relatively untrained novice, far more susceptible to keyboarding ("hunt-and-peck") than a language written with several thousand signs. A newbie typist in English will be far more capable and versatile at his keyboard than the newbie typist in Chinese. ⁽²⁾

I raise the question because, at some point in the not-too-distant past, it struck me that the difference in terms of immediate usability between an alphabetic and an ideogrammatic language was in some ways analogous to that between Esperanto and traditional "ethnic" languages.

Zamenhof's concept of "dismemberment", when taken to its logical conclusion, meant that each "word" in the language is comprised of a series of morphemes, each of which has a specific and invariable meaning; and the meaning of the word in question is the sum of the meanings of its morphemes. This is very analogous to the alphabetic concept that the sound of a word is the sum of the sounds of the letters of which it consists.

In other languages -- let us take English as an example -- if this concept ever existed, it has been badly mauled by time and history. There are specific morphemes in English, presumably with specific meanings, but their use depends not just on their meaning but on history and context.

Let's take an example -- the Esperanto ending -E which is used to form adverbs. ⁽³⁾ There's a corresponding English ending: -LY. The difference is that the Esperanto -E can be added to all roots to form adverbs. The English -LY can primarily be added to roots of Latin origin (any budding etymologists out there?). Rarely is it added to Germanic roots (The boy waddled fatly through the door ?), and for some it is simply impossible, because of the relict adjective ending -LY from words which in German end in -LICH (e.g. friendly, likely, the semi-archaic goodly). In fact, for words like friendly I can't think of an adverb; you have to create a prepositional phrase (in a friendly way). ⁽⁴⁾

At a somewhat higher level, consider the adjectives deep and profound. In Esperanto these are both rendered by the adjective profunda. Does this make English somehow richer than Esperanto? Maybe. But it also makes it seriously less learnable. If you learn English, you have to learn that deep and profound are interchangeable with respect to abstract ideas (a deep concept is pretty much the same as a profound concept), but not when it comes to physical reality (you can say a deep well but never a profound well). In Esperanto, you can say both profunda ideo and profunda puto, without having to worry about the context.

What this means is that, once you know the (relatively few) rules of Esperanto, every item you learn in the language multiplies your competence in speaking or writing. In English and other traditional languages, every item you learn simply adds to your competence.

A hundred years of experience has shown that the virtuoso speaker of Esperanto can do much the same things with the language that the virtuoso speaker of English can do. In this, Esperanto is in no way superior to the traditional languages. Similarly, the pre-beginner of Esperanto is at as much of a loss to make his way in the language as the pre-beginner in English. The main advantage of Esperanto lies in between those two extremes, as it does for the alphabetic typist.

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⁽¹⁾ Contrary to popular belief, English has fifty-two, not twenty-six, written letters. Most keyboards keep the number of keys down by using a "prefix key" (the "shift key") to allow the twenty-six "capital" letters to be typed.

⁽²⁾ English, with its numerous spelling problems, is perhaps not the best language to compare with Chinese in terms of the advantages of alphabetization. However, traditionally a person who is old enough to approach a keyboard will also have already mastered most of the problems of English spelling. How true this may be in the current era, when some children learn to keyboard a computer before they learn to talk, is not clear to me.

⁽³⁾ There are half a dozen or so particles, mostly having to do with time, which can be used without the ending -E: ĵus, jam, morgaŭ and the like. The purist can, however, always attach a redundant -E if he wishes, without rendering himself less than fully comprehensible; listeners will rarely fault him for this, and some may even admire his courage ...

⁽⁴⁾ In Esperanto, by contrast, it's not uncommon to compress relatively simple prepositional phrases into one-word adverbs ... ending, of course, in -E.

Esperanto

A weblog in which to enter my occasional thoughts about Esperanto.