Esperanto grammar

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Esperanto is a constructed auxiliary language with an agglutinative morphology, no grammatical gender, and simple verbal and nominal inflections. Although it is billed as an international language, Esperanto syntax, vocabulary, and semantics are thoroughly European. Verbs are inflected for four moods, of which the indicative has three tenses, and are derived for several aspects, but do not agree with the grammatical person or number of their subjects. Nouns and adjectives have two cases, nominative/oblique and accusative/allative, and two numbers, singular and plural, whereas personal and demonstrative pronouns also have a genitive. Adjectives generally agree with nouns in case and number. In addition to indicating direct objects, the accusative/allative case is used with nouns, adjectives and adverbs to show the destination of a motion, or to replace certain prepositions; the nominative/oblique is used in all other situations. The case system allows for a flexible word order that reflects information flow and other pragmatic concerns, as in Russian, Greek, and Latin.

A logical structure makes 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 speakers of different language backgrounds. The grammar is very nearly regular, the parts of speech have distinctive word endings (-o for nouns, -a for adjectives, etc.), and the derivational morphology is so straight-forward that new words may be coined on the spot and readily understood, allowing speakers to make do with a much smaller vocabulary than in most other languages.

Script and pronunciation

The script is modeled after the Czech alphabet, but with circumflexes instead of hačeks on the letters ĉ, ŝ; Westernized ĝ, ĵ in place of Slavic dž, ž; and ĥ rather than ch. The letter ǔ was taken from the Belarusian Łacinka alphabet. These accented letters have simple ASCII conversions. (See Esperanto orthography.)

The consonantal phonemes are similar to those of Polish or especially Belarusian, except for palatalization; and the vocalic phonemes are also those of Belarusian, minus the less easily distinguished diphthongs such as oǔ. (See Esperanto phonology.)

The Italian language is suggested as the model for Esperanto pronunciation.

The article

Esperanto has a single definite article, la, which is invariable. It is similar to English the.

La is used:

For identifiable, countable objects,

mi trovis botelon kaj deprenis la fermilon (I found a bottle and took off the lid).

For representative individuals,

la gepardo estas la plej rapida de la bestoj (The cheetah is the fastest of the beasts)

la abeloj havas felon, sed ili ne taŭgas por karesi (Bees have fur, but are not good for petting).

For ethnic adjectives used as the names of languages,

la angla (English: lit., "the English [language]").

For independent possessive pronouns,

la mia bluas, la via ruĝas (mine is blue, yours is red).

The article is also used for inalienable possession of body parts and kin terms, where English would use a possessive pronoun,

ili tranĉis la manon (they cut their hands [one hand each])

The article la, like the demonstrative adjective tiu (this, that), nearly always occurs at the beginning of the noun phrase, but this is not required by the grammar, and exceptions occur in poetry.

There is no grammatically required indefinite article: homo means either human being or a human being, depending on the context, and similarly the plural homoj means human beings or some human beings. The words iu and unu (or their plurals iuj and unuj) may be used somewhat like indefinite articles, but they're closer in meaning to "some" and "a certain" than to English "a".

Parts of speech and their word endings

The grammatical suffixes -o, -a, -e, and -i indicate that a word is a noun, adjective, adverb, and infinitive verb, respectively. Many new words can be derived simply by changing these suffixes, just as -ly derives adverbs from adjectives in English: From vidi (to see), we get vida (visual), vide (visually), and vido (sight).

The nominal suffix -o with a nominal root is redundant, but with an adjectival or verbal root it indicates an abstraction: parolo (an act of speech, one's word) from paroli (to speak); belo (beauty) from bela (beautiful). Likewise, the adjectival suffix -a is redundant with adjectives, but not with nominal or verbal roots: reĝa (royal), from reĝo (a king); parola (spoken). The various verbal endings mean to be with an adjectival root: beli (to be beautiful); and with a nominal root mean to act as the noun, to use the noun, etc., depending on the semantics of the root: reĝi (to reign). There are relatively few inherently adverbial roots, so most words ending in -e are derived. Often with a nominal or verbal root, the English equivalent is a prepositional phrase: parole (by speech, orally); reĝe (as a king, royally); bele (beautifully).

A suffix -j following the noun or adjective suffixes (forming a diphthong) makes the word plural. Without the plural suffix, a countable noun is understood to be singular. Direct objects take an accusative case suffix -n, which goes after any plural suffix. (The resulting -ojn rhymes with English coin, and -ajn with fine.)

Adjectives agree with nouns. That is, they are plural if the nouns they modify (describe) are plural, and accusative if the nouns they modify are accusative. Compare bonajn tagojn ([I wish you] good days) with incorrect ^*bona tagojn. Zamenhof later regretted making this requirement, but it allows for the free word order of adjective-noun and noun-adjective, even when two noun phrases are adjacent in subject-object-verb or verb-subject-object, etc. clauses,

la knabino feliĉan knabon kisis (the girl kissed a happy boy)

la knabino feliĉa knabon kisis (the happy girl kissed a boy).

Agreement clarifies the syntax in other ways as well. Adjectives take the plural suffix when they modify more than one noun, even if those nouns are all singular,

ruĝaj domo kaj aŭto (a red house and [a red] car)

ruĝa domo kaj aŭto (a red house and a car).

A predicative adjective does not take the accusative case suffix even when the noun it modifies does,

mi farbis la pordon ruĝan (I painted the red door)

mi farbis la pordon ruĝa (I painted the door red).

Esperanto roots have an inherent part of speech, which needs to be kept in mind. For example, brosi (to brush) is based on a nominal root, whereas kombi (to comb) is based on a verbal root. Change the grammatical suffix to -o, and their superficially similar meanings diverge: broso (a brush, the name of an instrument) vs. kombo (a combing, the name of an action). Dictionaries help here by listing the roots as broso and kombi. Changing verbal kombi (to comb) to a noun simply creates the name for the action, kombo (a combing). For the name of the tool, the suffix -ilo is used, which derives words for instruments from verbal roots: kombilo (a comb). On the other hand, changing the nominal root broso (a brush) to a verb gives the action associated with that noun, brosi (to brush). For the name of the action, the suffix -ado will change a derived verb back to a noun: brosado (a brushing). Similarly, an abstraction of a nominal root requires the suffix -eco, as in infaneco (childhood), but an abstraction of an adjectival or verbal root merely requires the nominal -o: belo (beauty). However, the seemingly redundant form beleco is also acceptable and widely used.

Additionally, most verbs are inherently transitive or intransitive. Transitivity is changed with the suffixes -igi (the transitivizer/causative) and -iĝi (the intransitivizer/middle voice):

akvo bolas je cent gradoj (water boils at 100 degrees)

ni boligas la akvon (we boil the water).

Transitivity is covert in Esperanto. That is, it is not apparent from the shape of the verb, and must simply be memorized.

A limited number of basic adverbs do not end with -e, but with an indefinite part-of-speech ending -aŭ. Most of these words are used as another part of speech in addition to being adverbs, such as hodiaŭ "today" [noun or adverb] or ankoraŭ "yet, still" [conjunction or adverb], and people would find it difficult to use an adverbial suffix consistently. Other adverbs are bare roots, such as nun "now", tro "too [much]", and many of the correlatives. (See special Esperanto adverbs).

The other parts of speech which occur as bare roots are the pronouns (mi "I"), prepositions (al "to"), conjunctions (kaj "and"), interjections (ho "oh"), numerals (du "two"), and several "grammatical particles" which don't fit neatly into any part of speech, but which must generally precede the words they modify, such as ne (not), ankaŭ (also), nur (only), eĉ (even).

Pronouns

There are three types of pronouns in Esperanto: personal (vi "you"), demonstrative (tio "that", iu "someone"), and relative/interrogative (kio "what"). Unlike nouns, pronouns take three cases: nominative/oblique, accusative, and genitive.

Personal pronouns

The Esperanto personal pronoun system is similar to that of English, but with the addition of the reflexive pronoun of the Romance languages.

		singular	plural
first-person		mi (I)	ni (we)
second-person		vi (you)
third- person	masculine	li (he)	ili (they)
	feminine	ŝi (she)
	epicene	ĝi (it, s/he)
indefinite		oni (one, "they")
reflexive		si (self)

Personal pronouns take the accusative suffix -n like nouns do: min (me), lin (him), ŝin (her). Possessive pronouns are formed with the adjectival suffix -a: mia (my), ĝia (its), nia (our). These agree with their noun like any other adjective: ni salutis liajn amikojn (we greeted his friends). Esperanto does not have a special form for "mine" etc; this sense is generally (though not always) indicated with the definite article: la mia.

The reflexive pronoun is used, in non-subject phrases only, to refer to back to the subject, usually only in the third and indefinite persons,

li lavis sin (he washed [himself])

li manĝis sian panon (he ate his [own] bread)

compare li manĝis lian panon (he ate his [someone else's] bread).

The indefinite pronoun is used when making general statements, and is often used where English would have the subject it with a passive verb,

oni diras, ke ... (they say that ... [or] it's said that ...)

Zamenhof proposed an informal second-person singular pronoun ci (thou), parallel to most European languages, but it is rarely used.

Ĝi is to be used with animals and objects. However, Zamenhof also prescribed it as the epicene (gender-neutral) third-person singular pronoun, for use when the sex of an individual is unknown. However, it is generally only used for children,

La infano ploras, ĉar ĝi volas manĝi (the child is crying, because it wants to eat).

When speaking of adults or people in general, it is much more common to see the demonstrative adjective and pronoun tiu used in such situations.

Other pronouns

The demonstrative and relative pronouns form part of the correlative system, and are described in that article. They're the forms ending in -o (simple pronouns) and in -u (adjectival pronouns). Their accusative is formed in -n, but the genitive is in -es.

Prepositions

Although Esperanto word order is fairly free, prepositions must come at the beginning of a noun phrase. Whereas in languages such as German, prepositions may require a noun to be in various cases (accusative, dative, etc.), in Esperanto all prepositions govern the nominative: por Johano (for John). The only "exception" is when a preposition is replaced by the accusative.

Prepositions should be used with a definite meaning. When no one preposition is clearly correct, the indefinite preposition je should be used,

ili iros je la tria de majo (they'll go on the third of May: the "on" isn't literally true).

Alternatively, the accusative may be used without a preposition,

ili iros la trian de majo.

Note that although la trian (the third) is in the accusative, de majo (of May) is still a prepositional phrase, and so the noun majo remains in the nominative case.

A frequent use of the accusative is in place of al (to) to indicate the direction or goal of motion (allative case). It is especially common when there would otherwise be a double preposition,

la kato ĉasis la muson en la domo (the cat chased the mouse in [inside] the house)

la kato ĉasis la muson en la domon (the cat chased the mouse into the house).

The accusative/allative may stand in for other prepositions as well, especially when they have vague meanings that don't add much to the clause. Adverbs, with or without the case suffix, are frequently used in place of prepositional phrases,

li iris al sia hejmo (he went to his home)

li iris hejmen (he went home)

Occasionally a new preposition is coined. As a bare root may indicate a preposition or interjection, removing the grammatical suffix from a another part of speech can be used to derive a preposition or interjection. For example, from fari (to do, to make) we get the preposition far (done by), a more precise substitute for de (of, by, from).

Verbs

All verbs have regular inflections. Three tenses together form what is called the indicative mood. The other moods are the infinitive, conditional, and jussive. No aspectual distinctions are required by the grammar, but derivational expressions of Aktionsart are common.

Verbs do not change form according to their subject. I am, we are, and he is are simply mi estas, ni estas, and li estas, respectively. Impersonal subjects are not used: pluvas (it is raining); estas muso en la domo (there's a mouse in the house).

The verbal paradigm

The tenses have characteristic vowels. A indicates the present tense, i the past, and o the future.

	Indicative	Active participle	Passive participle	Infinitive	Jussive	Conditional
Past	-is	-inta	-ita	-i	-u	-us
Present	-as	-anta	-ata
Future	-os	-onta	-ota

The verbal forms may be illustrated with the root esper- (hope):

esperi (to hope)

esperas (hopes, is hoping)

esperis (hoped, was hoping)

esperos (shall hope, will hope)

esperu (hope!)

esperus (were to hope, would hope)

A verb can be made emphatic with the particle ja (indeed): mi ja esperas (I do hope), mi ja esperis (I did hope).

Mood

The conditional mood is used for such expressions as se mi povus, mi irus (if I could, I would go) and se mi estus vi, mi irus (if I were you, I'd go).

The jussive mood, called the volitive in Esperanto, is used for wishing and requesting, and serves as the imperative. It covers some of the uses of the subjunctive in European languages,

Iru! (Go!)

Mi petis, ke li venu. (I asked him to come.)

Li parolu. (Let him speak.)

Ni iru. (Let's go.)

Benu tiun domaĉon (Bless this mess.)

Mia filino belu! (May my daughter be beautiful!)

Aspect

Although verbal aspect is not grammatically required in Esperanto, the Slavic aspectual system survives in two Aktionsart affixes, perfective ek- and imperfective -adi. Compare,

Tiu ĉi ekinteresis min kaj montris al mi, ke ... (This caught my interest and showed me that ...)

and

Tiu ĉi interesis min (This interested me).

Various prepositions may also be used as Aktionsart prefixes, such as el (out of), used to indicate that an action is performed to completion or at least to a considerable degree. In,

Germanan kaj francan lingvojn mi ellernadis en infaneco (I learned French and German in childhood),

the verb el-lern-ad-is is past tense (-is), on-going/imperfective (-ad-), and performed to significant completion (el-). Such distinctions are notoriously difficult to render in English, but perhaps a circumlocution may help: In childhood, I spent time soaking up German and French. Here spend time —ing corresponds roughly to -adi, and the up of soak up [originally also a preposition] conveys some of the meaning of el-.

The participles (below) may also be used for aspectual distinctions.

The copula

The verb esti (to be) is both the copula and the existential ("there is") verb. As a copula linking two noun phrases, it does not cause either to take the accusative case. Therefore, unlike the situation with other verbs, word order with esti can be semantically important: compare hundoj estas personoj (dogs are people) and personoj estas hundoj (people are dogs).

It is becoming increasingly common to replace esti-plus-adjective with a verb: la ĉielo estas blua or la ĉielo bluas (the sky is blue). This is a stylistic rather than grammatical change in the language, as the more economical verbal forms were always found in poetry.

Participles

Participles are verbal derivatives. In Esperanto, they retain the tense of the verb in their vowel. They may be active (performing an action) or passive (receiving an action).

Adjectival participles

The basic principle of the participles may be illustrated with the verb fali (to fall). Picture Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff. Before gravity kicks in (after all, this is a cartoon), he is falonta (about to fall). As he drops, he is falanta (falling). After he impacts the desert floor, he is falinta (fallen).

Active and passive pairs can be illustrated with the transitive verb haki (to chop). Picture a woodsman approaching a tree with an axe, intending to chop it down. He is hakonta and the tree is hakota. As he swings the axe, he is hakanta and the tree hakata. After the tree has fallen, he is hakinta and the tree hakita.

Compound tense

Compound tenses are formed with the adjectival participles plus esti (to be) as the auxiliary verb,

Present progressive: mi estas kaptanta (I am catching), mi estas kaptata (I am caught)
Present perfect: mi estas kaptinta (I have caught), mi estas kaptita (I have been caught)
Present predictive: mi estas kaptonta (I am going to/about to catch), mi estas kaptota (I am going to be/about to be caught)

These are not used as often as their English equivalents. For "I am going to the store", you would normally use the simple present mi iras in Esperanto.

The tense and mood of esti can be changed in these compound tenses,

mi estis kaptinta (I had caught)

mi estus kaptonta (I would be about to catch)

mi estos kaptanta (I will be catching).

The option of replacing esti + adjective with a verb holds for adjectival participles, with the verbal suffix reflecting the tense of the auxiliary,

mi estas kaptinta or mi kaptintas (I have caught)

mi estis kaptinta or mi kaptintis (I had caught).

Adjectival participles agree with nouns, as any other adjectives do,

ili ŝparis la arbojn hakotajn (they spared the trees that were to be chopped down).

Adverbial participles

Participles may be turned into adverbs or nouns by replacing the adjectival suffix -a with -e or -o. This means that, in Esperanto, some nouns may be inflected for tense.

Adverbial participles are used with subjectless clauses,

Kaptinte la pilkon, li kuris golen (Having caught the ball, he ran for the goal).

Nominal participles

A nominal participle indicates one who participates in the action specified by the verbal root. For example, esperinto is a "hoper" (past tense), or one who had been hoping. (In the early years of the language, such forms were assumed to be masculine, but that is no longer the case.)

Conditional participles

Occasionally, the participle paradigm will be extended to include conditional participles, with the vowel u (-unt-, -ut-). If, for example, in our tree-chopping example, the woodsman found that the tree had been spiked and so couldn't be cut down after all, he would be hakunta and the tree hakuta.

This can also be illustrated with the verb prezidi (to preside). Just after the recount of the 2000 US presidential election,

Clinton was still prezidanto,

George W. Bush was declared prezidonto,

George H.W. Bush was the last prezidinto, and

Gore was prezidunto (The Man Who Would be King — that is, if the recount had gone differently).

Note that the conditional forms are not officially recognized, but their regular derivation means that they're readily understood — even if they're rarely needed.

Tenseless participles

The three indicative forms of prezidi above may be subsumed under the term prezidento (president), if the speaker doesn't wish to specify the tense.

The tenseless -ent- form is an extension of the original participial paradigm, which is now asymmetric in that there is no regular passive equivalent to -ent-, since -et- is the diminutive suffix. Instead, the middle voice suffix -iĝi is used. There was heated debate for several decades as to whether "I was born in 19xx" should be mi estis naskita or mi estis naskata, with the French and Germans generally holding opposite opinions. Today, people avoid the problem of overly specifying the tense by saying mi naskiĝis (I was born).

Negatives

A statement is made negative by using ne or one of the negative (neni-) correlatives. Only one negative word is allowed per clause:

Mi ne faris ion ajn. I didn't do anything.

*Mi ne faris nenion ajn (I didn't do nothing) would be considered nonsensical.

The word ne comes before the word it negates, with the default position being before the verb:

Mi ne skribis tion (I didn't write that)

Ne mi skribis tion (I didn't write that) [It wasn't me who wrote that]

Mi skribis ne tion (I didn't write that) [It wasn't that that I wrote]

Questions

"Wh" questions are asked with one of the interrogative (ki-) correlatives. They commonly are placed at the beginning of the sentence, but different word orders are allowed for stress:

Kion vi faris? (What did you do?)

Vi faris kion? (You did what?)

Yes/no questions are asked with the conjunction ĉu (whether):

Mi ne scias, ĉu li venos (I don't know whether he'll come)

Ĉu li venos? (Will he come?)

Such questions can be answered jes (yes) or ne (no) in the European fashion of aligning with the polarity of the answer, or ĝuste (correct) or malĝuste (incorrect) in the Japanese fashion of aligning with the polarity of the question:

Ĉu vi ne iris? (Didn't you go?)

— Ne, mi ne iris (No, I didn't go); — Jes, mi iris (Yes, I went)

— Ĝuste, mi ne iris (Correct, I didn't go); — Malĝuste, mi iris (No, I did go)

Mis (derived from the prefix) will occasionally be seen for malĝuste.

Conjunctions

Basic Esperanto conjunctions are kaj (both/and), aŭ (either/or), nek (neither/nor), se (if), ĉu (whether/or), sed (but), anstataŭ (instead of), krom (besides, in addition to), kiel (like, as), ke (that). Like prepositions, they precede the phrase or clause they modify:

Mi vidis kaj lin kaj lian amikon (I saw both him and his friend)

Estis nek hele nek agrable (it was neither clear [sunny] nor pleasant)

ĉu pro kaprico, ĉu pro natura lingvo-evoluo (whether by whim, or by natural language development)

Li volus, ke ni iru (he would like us to go)

However, unlike prepositions, they allow the accusative case, as in the following example from Don Harlow:

Li traktis min kiel princon (He treated me like a prince: i.e., as he would a prince)

Li traktis min kiel princo (He treated me like a prince: i.e., as a prince would)

Interjections

Since interjections have no part-of-speech suffix, they may be derived from bare affixes or roots: ek! (get going!), from the perfective prefix; um (um, er), from the indefinite/undefined suffix; fek! (shit!), from feki (to defecate).

Word formation

Main article: Esperanto word formation

Esperanto derivational morphology uses a large number lexical as well as grammatical affixes (prefixes and suffixes). These, along with compounding, decrease the memory load of the language, as they allow for the expansion of a relatively small number of basic roots into a large vocabulary. For example, the Esperanto root vid- (see) regularly corresponds to several dozen English words: see (saw, seen), sight, blind, vision, visual, visible, nonvisual, invisible, unsightly, glance, view, vista, panorama, observant etc., though there are also separate Esperanto roots for some of these concepts.

Numbers

Numerals

The cardinal numerals are:

nul (zero)

unu (one)

du (two)

tri (three)

kvar (four)

kvin (five)

ses (six)

sep (seven)

ok (eight)

naŭ (nine)

dek (ten)

cent (one hundred)

mil (one thousand)

These are grammatically numerals, not nouns, and as such do not take the accusative case suffix. However, unu (and only unu) is sometimes used adjectivally or demonstratively, meaning "a certain", and in such cases may take the plural affix -j, just as the demonstrative tiu does: unuj (certain ones). Additionally, when counting off, the final u may be dropped: Un'! Du! Tri! Kvar!

Higher numbers

As in English, there are several systems for numbers above a million. A British billion and a US billion are different (10¹² vs 10⁹), and Esperanto biliono is likewise ambiguous. However, there is a third, unambiguous system:

10⁶: miliono

10⁹: miliardo (or mil milionoj)

10¹²: duiliono

10¹⁵: duiliardo (or mil duilionoj)

10¹⁸: triiliono

10²¹: triiliardo (or mil triilionoj)

etc.

Note that these are not numerals but nouns, and behave as such.

An additional unambiguous system is provided by the international set of metric prefixes, and occasionally the nonce numerals meg (miliono) and gig (miliardo) are derived from them.

Compound numbers and derivatives

Numerals are written together as one word when their values are multiplied, and separately when their values are added (dudek 20, dek du 12, dudek du 22). Ordinals are formed with the adjectival suffix -a, quantities with the nominal suffix -o, multiples with -obl-, fractions with -on-, collectives with -op-, and repetitions with the root -foj-.

sescent sepdek kvin (675)

tria (third [as in first, second, third])

trie (thirdly)

dudeko (a score)

duobla (double)

kvarono (one fourth, a quarter)

duope (by twos)

dufoje (twice)

The particle po is used to mark distributive numbers, i.e., the idea of distributing a certain number of items to each member of a group. Consequently the logogram @ is not used (except in email addresses, of course),

mi donis al ili po tri pomojn or pomojn mi donis al ili po tri (I gave them three apples each).

Note that particle po forms a phrase with the numeral tri and not with a noun phrase *tri pomojn, so it does not prevent a grammatical object from taking the accusative.

Comparisons

Comparisons are made with the adverbial correlatives tiel ... kiel (as ... as), the adverbial roots pli (more) and plej (most), the antonym prefix mal-, and the preposition ol (than):

mi skribas tiel bone kiel vi (I write as well as you)

tiu estas pli bona ol tiu (this one is better than that one)

tio estas la plej bona (that's the best)

la mia estas malpli multekosta ol la via (mine is less expensive than yours)

Implied comparisons are made with tre (very) and tro (too [much]).

Phrases like "The more people, the smaller the portions" and "All the better!" are translated using ju and des in place of "the":

Ju pli da homoj, des malpli grandaj la porcioj (The more people, the smaller the portions)

Des pli bone! (All the better!)

Sample text

The paternoster, from the first Esperanto publication in 1887, illustrates many of the grammatical points presented above, and should be readable without translation,

Patro nia, kiu estas en la ĉielo,

sanktigata estu via nomo.

Venu via regno,

fariĝu via volo,

kiel en la ĉielo, tiel ankaŭ sur la tero.

Nian panon ĉiutagan donu al ni hodiaŭ.

Kaj pardonu al ni niajn ŝuldojn,

kiel ankaŭ ni pardonas al niaj ŝuldantoj.

Kaj ne konduku nin en tenton,

sed liberigu nin de la malbono.

(ĉar via estas la regno kaj la potenco

kaj la gloro eterne.

Amen.)

The morphologically complex words (see Esperanto word formation) are,

sanktigata – sankt-ig-at-a (holy-causative-passive participle-adjective) "made holy"

fariĝu – far-iĝ-u (do-middle voice-jussive) "be done"

ĉiutagan – ĉiu-tag-a-n (every-day-adjective-accusative) "daily"

ŝuldantoj – ŝuld-ant-o-j (owe-active participle-noun-plural) "debtors"

liberigu – liber-ig-u (free-causative-jussive) "free [us]"

la malbono – la mal-bon-o (generic article + antonym-good-noun) "evil"

External links

A fairly good overview of Esperanto's grammar and word-building system can be gained by viewing "The Sixteen Rules of Esperanto" (http://www.webcom.com/~donh/Esperanto/rules.html), "The Esperanto Correlatives" (http://www.webcom.com/~donh/Esperanto/correlatives.html) and "Word Building With Esperanto Affixes" (http://www.webcom.com/~donh/Esperanto/affixes.html)

Also see Jiri Hana's Master thesis overview of Esperanto:

"Esperanto Grammar" (http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~hana/esr/grammar/EsrGrammar-Title.html)be:Граматыка эспэранта

fi:Esperanton kielioppi fr:Grammaire de l'espéranto lt:Esperanto gramatika zh:世界语语法

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Categories: Esperanto | Grammars of specific languages