Grammar

How Esperanto Works

One of the cornerstone ideas behind Esperanto is that one needn’t have a separate word for every possible noun, verb, and adjective in human language, but can build an infinite number of words from just a small number of roots and affixes, mixing and matching them like Lego bricks.

For example, from the root bel- (“beautiful”):

The Lego-ness of the language is such that the derivational affixes themselves (the yellow and green bricks in the example above) are often used as separate words, much like “ism” is in English:

This makes word-building on the fly a fairly simple matter — but not always a simple as it seems. For example, consider the root paf- (“shoot”):

One would surmise from this that -o names the action, -ad- prolongs the action, and -il- names the instrument. But now look at klab- (“bludgeon”):

Why does klabo name the instrument, you might ask, and not klabilo? If klabado indicates prolonged or repeated action, what’s the suffix for a single strike with a klabo?

The reason for the different treatment of paf- and klab- is that klab- is by default a noun root referring to the instrument, whereas paf- is by default a verb root referring to the action. One can make klab- a verb by changing -o to -i, but one can’t make the action of klabi into a noun by changing the -i back to -o; one must preserve the “verbness” by adding a verbal suffix.

The suffix -ad-, which indicates repetitive action, is the only such suffix available in Esperanto; for a single stroke of a klabo, one must make a compound word like klabofrapo “a club-strike”. (Someone once proposed -im- to indicate a single action, as in martelimo “a hammer strike”, but that seems to have never caught on.)

The importance of knowing to which grammatical class a root belongs applies to all words in Esperanto, not just the odd one here and there. Unfortunately, a root’s grammatical class is rarely obvious; for that, the novice will need a dictionary before the mixing and matching can begin.

Speaking Esperanto

Alphabet

The Esperanto alphabet contains 28 letters — 5 vowels and 23 consonants:


When writing in media that cannot accommodate circumflexes and breves (oldschool message boards and such), the custom nowadays is to transcribe them with a following x: la cxehxa regxo ludas sxakon jxauxde instead of la ĉeĥa reĝo ludas ŝakon ĵaŭde.

Note that each consonant should be pronounced separately, even when the same consonant is doubled:


Similarly, every vowel in Esperanto constitutes a separate syllable, even adjacent vowels:



Diphthongs

In English, some vowels can combine with other vowels to form sounds pronounced as a single (or close to single) syllable, as in coin and couch. These combination vowel sounds are called diphthongs. In Esperanto, vowels never combine with other vowels, but with the consonants j or ŭ to produce one of eleven diphthongs — six “falling” (aj, ej, oj, uj, aŭ and eŭ) and five “rising” (ja, je, ji, jo, and ju)*.


*The diphthongs ŭa, ŭe, etc., while theoretically possible in Esperanto, are rendered va, ve, etc., even after g and k: Vaŝingtono, gvido, kvoto. The only real exception is the exclamation ŭa!, used for imitating a baby’s cry.

Tonic Stress

Without exception, words in Esperanto are stressed on the next-to-the-last syllable, as in fortuno [for-'tu-no] and mencii [men-'ʦi-i]. While this makes proper stress easy and unambiguous, English-speakers will need to take care not to stress familiar-looking words with traditional stress: opero (“opera”) is [o-'pe-ro], not ['o-pe-ro], Anglio (“England”) is [an-'gli-o], not ['an-gli-o], for example.

Articles

An article is a kind of adjective, such as the and a, that indicates whether the thing being discussed is something specific, nonspecific, or unique.

In Esperanto, there is, strictly speaking, only one kind of article — the definite:


The Definite Article

The definite article indicates that a person or thing has already been mentioned, is common knowledge, is about to be defined, or is otherwise a specific member of a class of similar people or things. In English, the definite article is the. In Esperanto, it’s la:


As in English, the definite article can be used to indicate a single, countable noun in general, though it’s more common in English to use plural nouns with no article at all:


The definite article is used before a generic noun followed by a proper noun to indicate a unique entity:


When followed by an adjective, la can be used alone as a stand-in for a person or thing:


If the person or thing la is standing for is plural, something other than la must be pluralized, or another workaround found:


The same formula is used to express the names of languages, where those languages are associated with a particular ethnic group:


La is often — but not always — used before abstract nouns, depending on the habits of the speaker:


La is often — but not always — used to introduce a kinship relation, body part, article of clothing, or other object intimately associated with the speaker:



The Indefinite Articles

The indefinite article indicates that the person or thing being introduced is a nonspecific member of a class of similar people or things.

In Esperanto, any common noun without a definite article is by default indefinite.


However, there is also a range of indefinite “correlative” words one can use to underscore in­def­initeness of identity (iu), type (ia), or quantity (ioma, iom da, or just da):


Note that while the absence of indefinite articles in Esperanto makes the language easier to use in many cases — especially for those whose own language doesn’t have them — one must take care not to confuse indefinite common nouns with proper nouns, especially in speech:


Nouns

A noun is any sort of person, place, or thing, and comes in two varieties: common and proper.


Common Nouns

Common nouns are generic words that identify members of a class of people, places, or things. In Esperanto, all common nouns end in -o:


The plural adds -j:


Words that are not already nouns can be made into one simply by adding -o to the root. What sort of noun they will become depends on the sort of root they are; adjectival roots become abstract nouns, verbs usually (but not always) become single instances or results of their action, while adverbs, prepositions and numbers become more or less concrete manifestations of the root:


The type of root a word has is not always obvious — from brosi, for example, one might expect broso to mean “a brush stroke”, but it actually means “a brush”, because bros- is a noun root denoting the instrument, not the action. To make brushstroke from bros-, one must add a word like tir- (“pull”) and make brostiro. On the other hand, kombo does not mean “a comb”, because komb- is a verb root denoting the action; the instrument is a kombilo.

The -o of Esperanto nouns should not be confused with the masculine -o of Spanish and Italian; every noun in Esperanto, whether it’s male, female, neuter, or epicene, ends in -o. On the other hand, words that indicate kin relationships (and traditionally all living creatures) are male by default unless suffixed with -in- or prefixed with ge-:



*Some words are ambiguously either male or epicene by default, depending on the speech habits of the speaker. One sometimes finds vir- (“man”) prefixed to such words to separate the roosters from the hens, for example, leaving koko to mean simply “chicken”.

It should be noted that ge- means “both sexes together”, and traditionally (and logically) could refer only to groups of mixed gender; one had to combine it with -an- “member” to refer to an individual (ex., gefratoj “siblings”, gefratano “sibling”). Only sometime after 1980 did the Plena Ilustrita Vortaro acknowledge the use of ge- with singular nouns to convey “one of either sex”, though it otherwise still means “both sexes together”, and is not used as a general epicene prefix for anything else. (One uses koko for “chicken”, for example, not gekoko.)*


*One can find -iĉ- proposed throughout the internet as a male suffix, which would render words that are ambiguously male or epicene unequivocally epicene (ex., amiko would only mean “friend”; “male friend” would be amikiĉo). Words like patro and edzo, on the other hand, which indicate a male by definition, would, in less radical versions of iĉismo, be unaffected, but would require the intro­duction of epicene counterparts to which one could affix gender suffixes if one wanted.
For all its popularity among neologists, however -iĉ- has yet to gain official status — and was discouraged by the Plena Manlibro de Esperanta Gramatiko until 2016, when it acknowledged -iĉ- as a popular though little used proposal.

Proper Nouns

Proper nouns name a particular person, place, or thing, and in Esperanto have posed a problem since the beginning.

At the heart of the trouble is Esperanto’s accusative ending -n, which requires that names, like any other noun, end in a vowel. The free word order possible in Esperanto makes the accusative case difficult to avoid — without it, one could not tell who is doing what to whom — which means that either all names must be forced to end in a vowel, even if only when used as the direct object, or Esperanto’s more conventional subject-verb-object default word order must be observed while using “indeclinable” names.*


*Theoretically, there’s a proposed preposition na to mark the accusative case for indeclinable nouns, as in na Pussy Riot malamas Putin “Putin hates Pussy Riot”, but I’ve never personally seen na used anywhere.

For many names, this is not an issue — most biblical and classical names, along with many familiar modern European ones, have more or less offical Esperanto equivalents; Gaius Julius Caesar, for example, is Gajo Julio Cezaro, where each name has been Esperanto-ized.

As for names without an Esperanto equivalent, those originally written in the Roman alphabet (including Latin renderings of Greek and Biblical names) are often transcribed as-is (ex. Barack Obama); those written in other alphabets are transcribed phonetically (ex., Nikita Ĥruŝĉov).

See Names in Esperanto for a list of Esperantized names.


Countries and Demonyms

The names of countries, oceans, and international rivers and mountain ranges more or less preserve their Latin (or Latinized) form, but conform to Esperanto’s orthography and have, where necessary, been altered for the sake of regularity:



* From a 19th-century acronym for “United States of North America”

In English, the name of a country’s inhabitants is sometimes the basis for the name of the country and language (e.g., “England” and “English” from the ancient Ængle), sometimes the other way around (e.g. “Congolese” from “Congo”). In the latter case, the language might instead be derived from the ethnic group whose language it is (“Spanish” in the case of Mexico), or have its own name (“Swahili” in the case of Kenya).

Esperanto follows a similar model: anglo (“an Englishman”) forms the country name by adding -io* to the root (Anglio) and the language name with la -a (e.g., la angla “the English language”), but kongano (“a Congolese”) and la kongana (“Congolese language”) are derived from Kongo by adding -an- to the root. The language of Mexico is la hispana (“Spanish”, from hispano “a Spaniard”); the language of Kenya is la svahila.


*or -ujo and sometimes -lando for orthodox Esperantists before 1975, when popular -io was officially no longer discouraged

The names of states, provinces, and cities, most of which don’t have common Latinized or Latinizable names like many countries do, are more or less treated like personal names; some larger cities and well-known states have Esperanto-ized names (ex., Nov-Jorko, Kalifornio), but most are either re-written with Esperanto’s orthography or left as-is.

Capitalization

Esperanto capitalizes the first letter of a word when:







The Accusative Case

The accusative case is an inflection used to mark a word as the object of an action or the goal of a motion.

English doesn’t have an accusative case; the object of a verb is indicated by word order, and the goal of a motion by a preposition or adverb:


Esperanto, which has a freer word order*, indicates the object of an action with -n:



When using indeclinable “foreign” words (typically personal names that don’t have a ready Esperanto equivalent), it’s usually best to stick to the usual word order.
Alternatively, there is na, a proposed prepositional form of -n coined in 1990 by Gerrit François Makkink. Useful though it might be, I’ve personally never seen it used, and mention it here chiefly because I, too, had coined na for my own use back in the mid 80s, only to find in the age of the internet that others had arrived at the same word.

This is often seen in exclamations, where a Mi deziras al vi or Mi donas al vi is elided:


The accusative ending is not used with quotations, titles of books, names of games, etc.:


To indicate the goal of a motion, Esperanto will either use al (“to”), -n, or a preposition or adverb of place in conjunction with -n:


Finally, the Esperanto accusative is also used in expressions of time, measure, and value — or as a substitute for theoretically any preposition.

Of course, actual prepositions can be used instead, but since which preposition to use in some situations varies from language to language, -n is often used as a convenient alternative:


One must be careful, however, not to use the accusative as a replacement for a preposition where it can create confusion with another use of the accusative:


(not iris en iun Blanka-Kastelon la kvinan de novembro)

Pronouns

A pronoun is a word that refers either to the participants in the discourse at hand (eg. I, you) or to someone or something mentioned in that discourse (eg., he, they, those). In Esperanto, there are six different types of pronoun: personal, reflexive, possessive, demonstrative, relative, and indefinite.


Personal Pronouns

The personal pronouns of Esperanto are much like those of English:


In practice, ci is rarely, if ever used; vi does duty for both the singular and plural, just as you does in English.

Ĝi was originally meant to refer to people whose gender is unknown or irrelevant, but nowadays refers only to animals, objects, and, occasionally, children. The original role of ĝi is sometimes given to the demonstrative pronoun tiu (“that one”) or li:*



*There are a number of proposed workarounds to the clunky “he/she” issue, ranging from the introduction of new epi­cene pronouns (e.g., gi, ri, ŝli), to the repurposing of old pronouns (e.g. making li epicene and adding hi for “he”), to the re-extension of ĝi to include adult human beings. For better or for worse, none of these have really caught on.

There is also an indefinite pronoun oni, used to refer to an unspecified person or people in general:


Note that where English uses “it” to refer to a situation or circumstance, Esperanto uses nothing at all:



Reflexive Pronouns

A pronoun that refers back to the subject of a clause (eg., English myself, themselves) is called a reflexive pronoun. In Esperanto, this is identical to the personal pronouns — except for those in the “third person” (he, she, they, etc.), all of which use si:


If one were to use a pronoun other than si in the last two examples, it would mean that the subjects hurt someone else, not themselves:


Bear in mind that si refers only to the subject of the clause that it’s in, which may or may not be the main clause of the sentence.



* An infinitive verb or a participle with a complement counts as a separate clause.

Possessive Pronouns

Possessive pronouns show what belongs to whom, and in Esperanto simply add -a to the personal pronouns:


The reflexive is sia, the indefinite onia.



Demonstrative Pronouns and Adjectives

Esperanto has two demonstrative adjectives, tiu (“that”) and tia (“such”), which are used to indicate a specific entity or type of entity observed by the speaker. To indicate something close at hand, one adds ĉi:


All three words can be used without change as pronouns for the nouns they refer to:


When tiu is changed into a noun (by adding -o to the root), it means not only “this/that thing” but “this/that business or fact”.



Relative & Interrogative Pronouns

Relative pronouns refer to an expressed or implied person or thing in another clause; they correspond with English who, what, and which:


Like in English, Esperanto relative pronouns are also used as interrogative pronouns, that is, pronouns used in questions:


Interrogative pronouns generally come first in a sentence, but beyond this the word order of Esperanto sentences need not alter when made into questions, as it often does in English sentences:



Indefinite Pronouns

Indefinite pronouns are those that do not refer to any definite entity in particular, corresponding to English someone, something, nobody, nothing, everyone, everything (iu, io, neniu, nenio, ĉiu, ĉio):


Adjectives

Adjectives are words that attribute a quality to a person or thing. In Esperanto, all adjectives end in -a:


As in some other European languages, adjectives in Esperanto must agree with the nouns they modify in both number and case — that is, if a noun has a plural -j and/or an accusative -n, so must its adjectives:


Words that aren’t already adjectives can be made into them simply by changing their endings to -a. What sort of adjectives they will become depends on the sort of root they have; adjectivized verbs tend to mean “that which -s”, adverbs of time mean “occurring on”, numbers become ordinals, prepositions “located”, and nouns any number of meanings, depending on the context:


While the function of adjectives is to describe nouns, they can also be used as stand-ins for nouns:



The Placement of Adjectives

Generally speaking, adjectives in Esperanto come before the people or things they describe, except for emphasis or stylistic flourish:


However, adjectives that have a complement must come after the person or thing being described in order to make sense:



Degrees of Comparison

“All animals are equal,” declares the ever-amended constitution in Animal Farm, “but some animals are more equal than others”. Such comparisons (equal and unequal) are expressed in Esperanto in much the same way as they are in English:


As might be expected from a planned language, there are no irregular or synthetic comparatives, as there are in English and other languages:


Adverbs

Adverbs are words that say something about the time, place, manner, or degree regarding a verb, adjective, or another adverb. Some words are adverbial by nature, like now, very, and too in English; some are created from other sorts of word by adding -e to the root, much like those created by adding -ly in English:


Questions

Oftentimes in English, a yes-or-no question can be expressed simply by raising the pitch of one’s voice at the end of a sentence:


In Esperanto, such questions are always begin with ĉu (“whether”), even in subordinate clauses:


Other sorts of questions, those asking “who”, “what”, “where”, “when”, etc., are introduced by the appropriate question word:


Prepositions

A preposition is a word that expresses a relationship between one noun or noun phrase and another word or element in the same sentence:


In Esperanto, prepositions never end a sentence, as they often do in English:


There is also an “anything” preposition in Esperanto, je, which has no definite meaning of its own but is used when no other preposition seems appropriate:


There are two “back-up” prepositions in Romániço. The first, je, indicates the recipient of an action (the “direct object”) in ambiguous sentences, as when the usual subject-verb-object word order is inverted:


Je is also useful with verbs made into nouns:


When describing a change in location, if the preposition used doesn’t by itself indicate it, one adds -n to the object of the preposition:


Prepositions can be changed into other parts of speech by the addition of suffixes if the meaning allows:


One can technically use any preposition before infinitive verbs, though tradionally this only true of anstataŭ, krom, por, and, in the present era, sen. When using other prepositions, infinitives are (or were) often turned into nouns, preceded by a conjunction, or rephrased altogether.


The traditional workarounds for preventing infinitives from being the objects of prepositions don’t always make consistent sense — one says antaŭ ol -i but never post ol -i, for example — but because prepositions are also used as prefixes to verbs, such workarounds can be helpful to avoid ambiguity:


Verbs

Words that express any sort of action, state, or occurrence are called “verbs”, and there’s usually at least one in any complete sentence:



Past, Present, and Future Action

There are three basic “tenses” available to Esperanto verbs — past, present, and future — each expressing action happening at different times relative to the speaker:


The Present Tense

Verbs that express action that one has begun but not yet completed (those in the present tense) are marked by the suffix -as:


Note that the form of the verb does not change depending on who is performing it, as it does in English:



The Past Tense

Verbs that express something that happened prior to the moment one is speaking (those in the past tense) are marked by the suffix -is:



The Future Tense

Verbs that express something that will happen after the moment one is speaking (those in the future tense) are marked by the suffix -os:



Hypothetical Action

The past, present, and future tenses all express actions that actually did, do, or will take place, and collectively make up what grammarians call the “indicative mood”. But there’s also a way to express hypothetical action that probably won’t take place, called the “conditional mood”, which in Esperanto is expressed by -us:



Desired Action

Verbs expressing something requested are marked by the suffix -u:



Reported Action: The Sequence of Tenses

In English, when one reports what someone else says or feels, the tense of the quoted action changes depending on the tense of the main verb:


In Esperanto, the tense of the quoted material stays the same as if it were quoted directly:



Infinitives

When expressing the basic idea of an action without binding it to any particular tense or subject, English either uses the word to followed by the simple form of the verb or attaches -ing to it, as in “I like to dance” or “I like dancing”. In Esperanto, the same idea is expressed by adding -i to the root of the verb:


While there’s nothing technically wrong with using infinitives after prepositions, it may be less jarring for some to express the same idea as an adverb instead:



Impersonal Action

English often uses the pronoun it when there’s no obvious subject for a sentence, as in “It is freezing in here” and “It would be great if you could come in on Saturday”. Esperanto expresses the same idea by using no pronoun at all.



*Adjectives describing an impersonal “it” in an English sentence are adverbs in Esperanto, since they describe only the verb.

English “there is”, “there are”, “here is”, etc., is rendered the same way:


except when one wants to call attention to the subject, in which case Esperanto uses jen:


Participles

Adjectives created from verbs are called “participles”. Most modern European languages, including English, recognize two kinds of participle — those expressing action currently being performed by the nouns they modify, and those expressing completed action, whether being performed by or on the nouns they modify:


In Progress


Completed

In Esperanto, too, there are two basic types of participle: “active” (those being performed by the nouns they modify) and “passive” (those being performed on the nouns they modify by someone or something else). However, both types come in three distinct forms — one to express completed action, one for action in progress, and one for action yet to come:

Active


Passive


Participles as Adverbs

A participle can also be used as an adverb by changing the final -a to -e. In this form it tells when or why something happens:


In English, when adverbial participles have their own subjects, they form a “nominative absolute”, that is, an independent part of a sentence that describes the main subject and verb. (Ex., The president impeached, his party set about blocking witnesses.) In Esperanto, however, adverbial participles cannot have their own subject, and nominative absolutes must be rendered as subordinate clauses:



Participles as Nouns

By changing the final -a to -o, a participle can be used as a noun. In this form it expresses a person or thing that performs an action, or on whom it is performed:



Compound Verbs

Simple verbs in English and Esperanto show not only when the action took place (tense), but the degree of the action’s completion (aspect). For example, the simple past tense generally shows completed action (mi skribis leteron), the present tense action in progress (mi skribas leteron), and the future tense action that will be completed later on (mi skribos leteron). With compound verbs, one can express any degree of completion in any tense:


 

Note that there is no pluperfect tense in Esperanto, so to convey that one of two actions in the past precedes the other, one needs to use adverbs of time like jam antaŭe (jam alone, usually translated as “already”, can also mean “starting now” or “starting then”):


Compound tenses are much more common in English than in Esperanto, which generally uses them only to underscore the time and completeness of one action in relation to another (akuzi and eniri in the previous example) or to emphasize the agent of a passive action (Kongreso in akuzata de la Kongreso). Otherwise, where English uses a compound verb, Esperanto uses a simple one.


Note that when action in the past continues into the present, the simple present is used, usually in conjunction with a start time.



Transitive and Intransitive Action

When a person or thing directs action toward another person or thing, the action is said to be “transitive” (i.e., it transits its action onto something else). For example, pay (a fee), watch (a movie), say (the truth). The person or thing being acted on (in the previous examples, fee, movie, and truth) is called the “direct object”.

When the action is not directed toward something else, like be, sit, and recline, it is said to be “intransitive”.

In English, many verbs are both transitive and intransitive, depending on the context:


Intransitive


Transitive

In Esperanto, a verb is either transitive or intransitive, never both. To make an intransitive verb transitive, one can add -ig- to the root; to make a transitive verb intransitive, one can add -iĝ- to the root:


Intransitive


Transitive

However, some intransitive verbs can have an object if that object is a noun version of the verb:


or a specific example of the same:


Note, too, that one can use a transitive verb without an object, so as to emphasize only the idea of the action itself:


Numbers

The basic, “cardinal” numbers of Romániço are:


But for the last two in this list, these words are all roots, and are used without further modification before nouns to convey quantity:


Miliono and miliardo use da:


One can combine the roots to produce numbers greater than ten, writing such combinations as separate words by powers of ten:



*Mil, miliono, and upward are written as separate words, so ducent (“two hundred”), but du mil (“two thousand”).

For numbers greater than a billion, one can add -iliono (a million to the power of x) or -iliardo (a thousand times a million to the power of x) to the numbers one through ten:


Numbers can be made into nouns denoting groups or sets by adding -o. In these cases, numbers greater than ten are written as one word:



Ordinal Numbers

Ordinal numbers are those that express a thing’s position in a series, such as first, second, third. In Esperanto, ordinals are formed by adding -a or -e to the equivalent cardinal number:


When asking for something requiring an ordinal number, one uses kioma, which means “which one of the series?”:



Fractional Numbers

Fractional numbers are those that express a value that is not a whole number, eg. half, a fourth, etc. In English, as in many European languages, these are mostly indistinguishable from ordinal numbers (eg., the fifth Beatle vs. a fifth of the Beatles), but in Esperanto are marked by the suffix -on-:



Multiplicative Numbers

Multiplicative numbers are those like English double, triple, and quadruple. In Esperanto, they are formed from the cardinal numbers by adding -obl-:



Distributive Numbers

Distributive numbers are formed from cardinal numbers by adding -op-, which means “x at a time:



Arithmetic

Some common operations in arithmetic:



Time

Time in Esperanto is expressed in terms of which hour it is (first, second, third, etc.) and the minutes or fraction of an hour before or after the hour in question:


Affixes

In order to reduce the number of words one would have to learn in order to speak the language, much of Esperanto’s vocabulary is composed of a comparatively small stock of root words that can be combined with an even smaller group of familiar affixes to create new words as needed.

Note that what constitutes an affix in Esperanto is largely a matter of dictionary tradition at this point, as most non-technical affixes are also roots (e.g. mal- “un-”, malo, “opposite”).


Official Prefixes



















Official Suffixes































































Unofficial Suffixes














































































Compound Words

Sometimes it’s convenient to render a phrase like saber of light or barroom sport of tossing dwarves as a single word like lightsaber or dwarf-tossing. Such words are called compound words.

Despite alleged monstrosities like Finnish lento­kone­suih­kutur­biini­moot­toria­pume­kaanik­koa­liup­see­riop­pilas and German Schützen­graben­vernich­tungs­auto­mobil, compounds are often shorthand renderings of even longer constructions in Esperanto, like harbroso (“hairbrush”) from broso por haroj.

Broadly speaking, there are four different types of compound word in Esperanto — copulative, appositional, endocentric, and exocentric. In all cases, words are joined together by putting them next to one another, and, euphony permitting, by dropping the termination of the first word(s):


Compound words generally consist of a head (a word that expresses the basic meaning of the whole compound) and one or more modifiers. (E.g., handbrake consists of the head brake, the basic meaning of the compound, and hand, describing the sort of brake it is.)

In Germanic languages, the head usually comes last in a compound, but this varies from language to language — and often within the same language (e.g., English lockpick and pickpocket, Spanish chupacabra and fazferir). Esperanto uses the model of Greek and Latin derived international compounds, where the main element, if any, comes last (e.g., astronaut “star-sailor”, anthro­pophage “man-eater”).

Beyond this, compound words in Esperanto may observe additional rules, depending on which category they fall into:


Copulative and Appositional

These include words that denote the sum of all the elements (ex. bittersweet, from bitter and sweet) and words where the elements provide different descriptions for the same thing (ex. hunter-gatherer, from hunter and gatherer).

Such compounds are made by simply by joining two similar words (two adjectives of taste in the case of bittersweet, two nouns of occupation in the case of hunter-gatherer) in the usual way:


There appears to be no consensus as to whether such combinations constitute true compound words or not, and therefore whether or not to inflect each element in them separately — that is, whether to say nigrablankaj instagramoj or nigraj-blankaj instagramoj. For the time being, both are correct.


Endocentric

These are compounds where the first element denotes a special type of the last element (ex. railroad is a special type of road), and they include several sub-categories:


Noun, Verb or Phrase + Noun, Adjective, or Verb

These compounds begin as a noun, adjective, or verb followed by a prepositional phrase, like boat (propelled) by steam. They then attach the object of the preposition (in this example, steam) as a prefix to the first word, creating steamboat:


If the first element of a compound is effectively an adverb (proteinriĉa, pistolbati) and the ending isn’t or can’t be elided, the first element is written as a separate word: (proteine riĉa, pistole bati). See below.


Adjective or Adverb + Noun or Verb

This is a somewhat restricted category in Esperanto; blackboard is pronounced differently from black board in English, but that doesn’t happen in Esperanto. For an adjective or adverb to be the first element in a compound, it has to have an elidable ending. Otherwise, it’s a separate word.



Determinative Adjective or Preposition + Adverbialized Noun

When an adjective that indicates which and not what kind or a preposition is combined with a noun, the resulting compound can only exist as an adverb or adjective — ĉiu tago (every day) can become ĉiutage, for example, but as a noun remains ĉiu tago, not ĉiutago, a word that wouldn’t logically mean anything.



Preposition + Verb

When a preposition is combined with a verb that can take an object, the preposition is often treated as an adverb with an elided -e and the object of the compound is the object of the original verb:


When the combination of preposition and verb imply motion toward something, that something, depending on the speaker’s preference, may or may not be preceded by another preposition, usually the same one used as the verb’s prefix. If this additional preposition does not itself imply motion, then the thing being moved toward becomes the verb’s object and takes the -n termination:


Unfortunately for the learner, not all such compounds make literal sense. This is especially true when the first element is pri (“about”, “concerning”) or el (“out of”), which sometimes retain their literal meaning in a compound, as in:


but very often take on special roles given their analogous prepositions in other languages. In these cases, pri serves to swap the indirect object with the direct object, and el more or less means “thoroughly” or “to completion”:


Occasionally el will also stretch the meaning of the compound’s head, effectively making the compound a new word that must be learned separately:



Exocentric

Exocentric compounds differ from other sorts in that they denote something unexpressed by any single element in the compound. For example, silverback denotes not a type of back, but a male ape characterized by a silver back, and before-tax denotes not a type of tax, but profits reckoned before taxes.

Esperanto forms exocentric compounds in much the same way English does, except that compounds beginning with numbers or adjectives usually end in -ulo when used as nouns (ex., grizhara “grey-haired”, but grizharulo “grey-haired man”), effectively making them endocentric, not exocentric.

One should be cautioned that in compounds where the ending of the first element can’t be elided or doesn’t exist, the compound’s elements can be mistaken for separate words when spoken (ex. tripartaj diinoj “tripartite goddesses” vs. tri partaj diinoj “three partial goddesses”, subtaso “saucer” vs. sub taso “under a cup”). And as with endocentric compounds, if the first element is an adjective or adverb, either its ending must be elided or the element written as a separate word.


Exocentric compounds beginning with a number are sometimes rendered synecdochically, but this isn’t recommended: unuokulo, dumastoj.

Word Order

Esperanto’s usual word order is more or less as in English — the person or thing performing the action (the subject) comes first, then the action itself (the verb), followed by the person or thing acted on (the object). Adjectives come before the nouns they describe, contrary to Romance practice:


When an adjective is part of a compound verb, it often comes after an adverb or pronoun object, if only to break up the clunkiness:


However, if one wants to emphasize part of a sentence, one can put that part first, or, if the thing to be emphasized is the subject, introduce it with esti:


One can sometimes change the word order to simulate that of a translated original: