Home > Esperanto grammar
Esperanto is an agglutinative language which has no grammatical genders and limited, regular verb conjugation. Nouns and adjectives have two cases, nominative and accusative, and two numbers, singular and plural; and nouns and adjectives must agree in case and number. Verbs do not agree with their subjects. The accusative ending can also be used to show the destination of a motion, or to replace certain prepositions when preferred. The accusative allows flexible word order like Russian, Greek, and Latin.Most of its root vocabulary is borrowed from languages of the Italic, Germanic, Slavic, and Greek divisions of the Indo-EuropeanThe Indo-European languages include some 443 ( SIL estimate) languages and dialects spoken by about three billion people, including most of the major language families of Europe and western Asia, which belong to a single superfamily. Contemporary language language family; specifically, FrenchFrench le francais la langue francaise is one of the most important Romance languages, outnumbered only by Spanish and Portuguese. French is the 11th most spoken language in the world, spoken by about 77 million people (called Francophones) as a mother to, LatinAlternative meanings: See Latin (disambiguation Latin was the language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. It gained great importance as the formal language of the Roman Empire. All Romance languages are descended from Latin, and ma, EnglishThe English language is a West Germanic language, originating from England. It is the third most common "first" language (native speakers), with around 402 million people in 2002. English has lingua franca status in many parts of the world, due to the mil, GermanGerman (called Deutsch in German in which germanisch refers to prechristian times), is a member of the western group of Germanic languages and one of the world's major languages. It is the language with the most native speakers in the European Union., Greek, PolishPolish polski jezyk polski is the official language of Poland. History Polish has been influenced by contact with foreign languages (foremost Latin, Czech, French, German, Italian, Russian and recently it has been virtually bombarded by English, especiall, and Russian.
Esperanto has a relatively regular grammar, phonetic alphabet (meaning that all words are pronounced as in written and vice versa), and very logical structure (the same words' ending for the same parts of speech, e.g. -o for nouns, -a for adjectives, etc.). All these features make Esperanto easier to learn than most of the world's languages, even for non-Europeans, though particular features may be more or less advantageous to native speakers of particular languages. The alphabet includes new letters that are not found on any national keyboard, which is overcome by use of the h-system, x-system, or UnicodeIn computing, Unicode is the international standard whose goal is to provide the means to encode the text of every document people want to store in computers. This includes all scripts still in active use today, many scripts known only by scholars, and sy. (See Esperanto orthography.) Other languages, like Chinese, have similar problems.
1 Word endings
In Esperanto, the endings -o, -a, and -e indicate noun, adjective, and adverb, respectively. When a -j follows the noun or adjective endings (forming a diphthong), it makes the word plural. Direct objects must have the -n ending, which goes after the plural ending, if any.
Adjectives must have plural ending if the noun it describes also has the plural ending. The same goes for the accusative ending. Compare "bona tagojn" (incorrect) with "bonajn tagojn" (correct). Zamenhof later regretted making that requirement. Also to Zamenhof's regret, a limited number of adverbs do not end with -e (See special Esperanto adverbs).
