OCCUPY ESPER

 

Okay, I know it takes time to read something this long, but please don't let that stop you from giving it a try. Writing it wasn't exactly an instant process either and the effort has good intentions behind it.

 

I recently published a blog entry named "The Language of Hope" on the http://OccupyLosAngeles.org web site, advocating the Esperanto language and the cooperation of the many inclusive positive change movements happening around the world. 

 

http://occupylosangeles.org/?q=node/9062 

 

Thinking about the challenges involved in getting people to make the decision to begin learning a whole language for the sake of humanity reminded me of an earlier version of my Pont language which was called the Esper language. The name "Esper" literally means "Hope" and the language had been intended as a starting point for learning new languages. Learning the Esper language basically includes an understanding of the Esperanto language in the bargain, as up until I split the Esper and Pont language projects, the Esper language had been the main focus and I worked for a very long time to turn it into a simplified dialect of Esperanto, to the point where I had basically erased almost every trace of the language's unique origins. 

 

So I have decided to revive the Esper language project and share it with my fellow Occupiers and with as much of the world as I can manage to share it with. Perhaps nobody will even see this, but if anyone does and thinks what I have to say here might just be worth the long time it will take to read it, please share it with others.

 

Just how much do we really mean it when we call ourselves the 99%? Are we willing to work hard to include that many people? Do we have what it takes to be that inclusive? 

 

I'm about to ask Occupy to do something that takes real dedication. I know the dedication is out there, but I don't know if anyone will take me up on this challenge. If even one person decides to try, it may catch on like wild fire, but if I can not get a single other dedicated human being to join me on this mission then it will likely die with me some day and nobody will probably ever really know what I was attempting to offer to the world. In spite of that risk, the preparatory work has been done and I'm now asking for anyone to join me in the effort to move forward.

 

How would you like to see the Occupy movement have a part in curing the biggest communication problem in the world? That's why I have been trying to bring together the Occupy movement and the Esperanto movement. Many English speaking people think that some language with a currently very large number of speakers has the potential to allow everyone in the world to communicate with each other. The problem is that they are all too difficult for adults to learn and not everyone in the world can afford the time and resources to study something as complicated as English or Chinese. Enter the Esperanto language. Only a few million active speakers or so at this time, but intentionally designed about 125 years ago, as a powerful and yet easy to learn language, specifically for the purpose of acting as a universal second language for the world. 

 

The inventor of the Esperanto language had hoped that a universal second language which everyone could learn easily would end much of the fighting in the world by allowing people to communicate with less misunderstandings so they could work out their differences. The problem with other languages is that they are too hard for adults to learn once their brains have been conditioned for language patterns which conflict with them. The Esperanto language is much easier for adults to learn than other languages, so the relatively small number of current speakers is not really an issue. Even so, there are a few issues with teaching even the Esperanto language. The biggest one seems to be the Esperanto alphabet, which is really no harder than the English or Spanish alphabet but has letters in it that are not found on a standard keyboard. Yes, this is a serious issue, in spite of the fact that most Esperanto speakers will tell you it's not. It is a serious issue because asking someone to install a special software on their computer to be able to type in a language they are considering learning is asking a bit much, and expecting someone to accept learning alternative orthographies to work around this problem is just as bad. If the person is really motivated to learn the language, then such inconveniences are a minor nuisance, but the real problem is how to get people motivated when the first thing they see is the minor nuisance. This is where the Esper language comes in. It's really not a different language from Esperanto, but rather a dialect with its own name so that picking up materials to study one or the other should not cause any confusion. Esper is designed to be at least as powerful and flexible as Esperanto, but even easier to learn. The intention is not to make the few million current active speakers of Esperanto learn the Esper language, but rather to give the Esperanto language an easier to learn dialect so that the motivation threshold will be easier to get people to cross. Once this is accomplished, it does not really matter whether the end result is the world learning the original Esperanto orthography or the Esper orthography, and it really doesn't matter whether the world learns one dialect or the other, or both, or a blend of the two. What matters is that we recognize the fact that calling ourselves the 99% means being as inclusive as possible and there are people out there who find the language we speak too hard to learn. Are we brave enough and dedicated enough to make the effort to learn an easy language that people around the world can easily learn as well, so that the 99% can communicate with each other?

 

Here's an example of how close to identical Esperanto and Esper are.

 

Esperanto: Ni estas Okupuloj

Esper: Imi estas Okupuloy

English: We are Occu'people. (We are Occupy people.)

 

The spoken form in Esperanto and Esper are identical in this example except for the word "imi" which is formed from the word "mi" (meaning "me" or "I") rather than the word "ni" which is also supported in Esper but is considered an alternative form, and the writing differs only in this one word and the last letter of the phrase, "j" in Esperanto or "y" in Esper, each being used to represent the same sound as the letter "y" usually makes in English.

 

So you may wonder why I would suggest learning Esper if the goal is to learn Esperanto and they are both so similar. The answer is that the Esper language is actually easier to learn and has the potential to spread very rapidly if a few of us start learning and teaching it. Think of it like a brush fire, which may quickly run its course and burn out or may last for a very long time, but can spread very quickly. The Esperanto language and the 125 year old Esperanto movement are stable and have dedicated supporters. This is important, but it is not likely to allow us to see the dream of Doctoro Esperanto realized within our lifetimes at its current pace, and its very stability suggests that a sudden burst of growth is not likely to happen on its own any time soon. If any members of the 99% movement choose to start learning the Esper language and others start to see how easy it is to learn, the number of Esper speakers could grow beyond the number of current Esperanto speakers in a year or two. If that happens, perhaps some Esperanto speakers will decide to learn Esper orthography and get used to Esper's gender neutrality and other slight differences from Esperanto, and I'm quite certain that many Esper speakers will choose to make the effort to learn Esperanto orthography and conventions, but in spoken form the speakers of the two languages will recognize the words and the sounds and will understand each other with no need for a conscious effort to learn the other's dialect. In the end it is not important which ends up with more speakers. The stability of the Esperanto movement and the ideals behind it will prevail. The Esper language may allow us to see in our lifetimes what it would be like to have the dreams of Esperanto's founder realized.

 

I wrote the following lesson on the Esper language with the intention of it being learnable without a teacher, although I am quite willing to teach and I hope others will be also.

 

The lesson starts off by teaching the names and sounds of each letter in the Esper alphabet. The order of the letters should already be familiar to anyone who has learned to read English and the sounds represented by most of the letters will not need any special attention either. This is probably the hardest part, but you can learn it in a matter of minutes if you set your mind to it. After that, things should start to get more interesting. 

 

So, here's the lesson....

 

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La Lingvo de Esper

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The Language of Hope 

 

IMPORTANT NOTE - HAVE FUN!

 

The purpose of any language is not merely to allow translations between itself and some other language. That would be rather silly. Languages are tools of expression and communication, used to encode and transfer ideas and concepts whether abstract, logical, humorous, or otherwise. If you try to translate something from one language to another and find that you can not create a perfect translation, reflect on how poorly either language really encodes the entire thought which is meant to be conveyed and you will see why this is often the case. I'm not saying that you will get your perfect translation that way, but rather that you should better understand the limitations of the linguistic translation concept and process. For example, you may find that there is no way to write your own name in the characters of some foreign language and that even when you can write it in the characters of a language there is often a need to decide between approximating the written form or approximating the spoken form as it may prove impossible to preserve them both at the same time. Such is the nature of human languages and human communication in general, whether spoken, written, signed, or otherwise. Don't let that get in the way of learning and the enjoyment and other benefits you can experience as a result.

 

This document is intended to teach the Esper language, which in turn is intended as a learning tool and a linguistic playground. In order to not waste your time with a bunch of memorization and stuff like that, and to keep you from having to stress out over things that should be taken calmly, I want to inform anyone reading this right up front that if you read this document thoroughly you will come across many things that you don't need to know for any reason. Think of it as taking a tour of a city you're considering moving into. The tour guide may tell you about many things in the city which may help you to feel more at home there and to feel more familiar with the surroundings, but if you do decide to live there it will not keep you from finding your way around if you have failed to memorize all of the details given by your tour guide. This document will mention many details of the Esperanto and Pont languages as you learn about the Esper language. These details do not need to be memorized or even learned in order to use the Esper language, but are included as both background and preperation so that you can feel more comfortable in your linguistic exploration. The key to the Esper language is to not take it too seriously. Play with it. Make mistakes that you can find reasons to laugh about. Have fun, because that's how you reward your brain for learning things in the first place. If you forget something, don't worry about it. Read it again, or skim for overlooked details when you have the time and get curious enough to see what you missed or forgot or might understand differently in the context of what you have since learned.

 

Forward: 

 

Introducing the Esper language. Healthy exercise for the language center of your brain. If you study this set of lessons well, you're about to transform the Broca's area of the left frontal lobe of your cerebral cortex into a highly efficient linguistic processing system, while teaching your whole brain to learn better, more quickly and with less effort. Think of it as mental therapy to help you recover from the trauma of having learned a messed up language that refuses to obey its own rules.

 

I will even introduce you briefly later in this lesson to a side benefit from learning the Esper language through this method which can be used to help you memorize long numbers if you like.

 

The Esper language started out as a unique invented language, but has evolved to the point of being technically a dialect of Esperanto with strong ties to the Pont language which evolved out of the Esper language. If you become fluent in Esper, you will understand spoken Esperanto quite well and will be able to pick up the various written forms of Esperanto quite easily.

 

In the Esper language you will learn to understand an endless variety of words which you have never encountered before, the first time you encounter them, even if another Esper or Esperanto speaker just made them up, and to make up words which other people who know the language will understand right away as well. Yes it is possible to be misunderstood this way as well, but the whole idea behind having a language to play with is so that you can learn what works and what doesn't. If you don't play with it, you will be missing out on the most important and most enjoyable part of the learning experience.

 

One of the things that slows learning in adults is the repeated repeated experience of not having been able to trust what they have learned to apply outside of its original context. The problem is that this concept gets carried unreasonably far in naturally evolved languages. There is no reasonable excuse for all the exceptions to their own rules other than the fact that the languages simply were not planned well... nor in fact planned at all.

 

The Esper language is intended to teach your brain how to trust again, well enough to speed up the learning process, while not erasing the lesson that context is important. The advantage of this is that it allows the brain to deal with much larger context sets, removing the restriction of only being able to handle tiny context sets and unique individual contexts in which what it has learned is already known to be trust worthy. In other words, re-open the flood gates on the learning process that were closed by the traumatic experience of learning a messed up language that happened mostly by accident.

 

Based on the Esperanto language, with elements from the Pont language, the Esper language is intended as an early beginner's version of the Esperanto language. It can in fact be thought of as a beginner's dialect of Esperanto, but I call it a separate language because it contains simplifications which at the time of its release are not yet recognized by the Esperanto language as part of Esperanto.

 

At the time of this writing, only portions of the Pont language have been released, on a beta test basis, and it is entirely possible that the full Pont language will never be released to the public, which is why I decided to use some of what I have learned in the years spent creating it to produce this simple Esper language as an unreasonably easy introduction to the Esperanto language. The spelling system is taken directly from the Pont language, so expect a slight transitional phase when moving on to the Esperanto alphabet and it's orthographic variations. Perhaps some day if this introduction language idea takes off, the Esperanto community may choose to make the transition to the Esper and Pont alphabet so that people learning Pont or Esper will be able to literally consider themselves fluent in Esperanto upon having learned the Esper language and the form of the accusative case that is used in Esperaanto, although even then you may want to learn the various ways in which the Esperanto language has traditionally been written, in order to avail yourself of existing writings in the Esperanto language.

 

 

Whether or not to make this simple lesson in the "Esper" or "Simplified Esperanto" language was a difficult decision. Afterall, the Esperanto language is already very easy to learn. Please consider this language to be an introduction to Esperanto and nothing more. In the unlikely event that so many people learn this extremely simple "Esper" language as to convince the Esperanto community to adapt one or more features of the "Esperanto" language based on it, then the Esperanto language will simply have gotten even easier to learn, and there will be less to learn in making the transition from Esper to Esperanto. The Esper language is not intended to take on the role that Esperanto was designed for, as an international second language. Although it obviously could serve such a purpose, the Esperanto movement has taken a century and a quarter to build up the few million speakers it is presently estimated to have, and starting over at this point would make little or no sense. The intention is to strengthen the Esperanto language by encouraging more people to begin the process of learning it, but even if you only go as far as to learn the Esper language, you will likely be able to hold conversations in Esperanto, and you will have given your brain some healthy exercise. If anyone chooses to write songs or poetry or anything else in the Esper language, the author of such works may choose to honor my wishes or not, but my intention is that such writings should be considered merely additional "Esper" practice material to help others become more comfortable with the basic structure of the Esperanto language before tackling the transition from the Esper language to the full Esperanto language. Any Esperanto word  stems you hear (or convert from their Esperanto spelling) may be used as part of the Esper language, and for your own sake you may choose to use some familliar word stems from another source language such as your first language, to fill the gaps in your vocabulary for the sake of being able to practice more with your friends and family who are likely to know those same word stems. Keep in mind though that it is a good idea to replace such borrowed word stems with Esperanto word stems as soon as possible in order to keep from getting too comfortable with them in an Esperanto  context, in case such a stem may have a different meaning in Esperanto than the way you understand it as taken from the chosen source language.

 

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The Esper Alphabet -

 

Even though the shapes of written or printed Esper letters are the same as those used in the English alphabet or those of other languages which use letter found in the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, and even though the letters of the Esper alphabet are arranged in the same "alphabetical order" as those of the English alphabet, you should try not to think of the Esper alphabet and the English alphabet as being the same thing. Written languages and their associated spoken languages are generally to some extent encodings of each other and to some extent separate languages. The alphabet or writing symbols for each language consists of written symbols for expressing the written form of that language or encoding the spoken form into writing. 

 

Depending on the particular languages involved, the exact relation between a written language's alphabet and any spoken dialect of that language may vary significantly. 

 

In the Esperanto language for example, the spoken words are mainly direct encodings of words from the written Esperanto language which inherited some of it's written word stems from other spoken languages and most of its written word stems from other written languages, with additional words formed from such written word stems in combination with written affixes including the role endings which mark the intended part of speech served by a particular written word. Since the spoken Esperanto language is mainly a direct decoding of the written Esperanto language, when a new word is brought into the Esperanto language it is generally first made to conform to the Esperanto orthography and then the resulting written form is used to determine the spoken form of the word.

 

As in the case of the Pont language, the Esper language uses a written form which is mainly an encoding of its spoken form. I say mainly because spoken words tend to evolve more quickly than written words and as a result the written words being decoded into spoken form will tend to slow the evolution of the spoken form of the language as if the spoken form were based on the written form even though the direct relation between the two is actually the other way around. In fact it can be said that each form is a direct encoding of the other, but the reason I say that the written form is an encoding of the spoken form is that when a new word is brought into the Esper language, for example, it should be first made to conform to the Esper phonetic system and then the resulting spoken form used to determine the written form of the word. This allows spoken Esperanto words to be migrated very easily into the Esper language and the Pont language since they contain all of the sounds of the Esperanto language, plus one, within their shared phonetic system.

 

The only different between the Pont alphabet and the Esper alphabet is that the names of the letters in the Pont alphabet all end in the "o" sound with the exception of the vowel names, as is the case in the Esperanto alphabet. 

 

The Esper alphabet, rather than having four unique exceptions amongst it's letter names, is grouped into five sets of letters which can be thought of as mini-alphabets. 

 

For easy learning, the names of the Esper letters are grouped according to the vowel at the start of each group in the Esper alphabet. There are four letters with names which end in the "a" sound as in the English word "father", followed by four letters which end in the "e" sound as in the English word "end" or "pen". Then there are three groups of six letters each. The first group of six letters have names ending in the sound of "i" as found in the English word "machine" or "king", or end in the so-called "short i" sound in the English words "pin" and "thick", or anything in between. The choice is yours, but try to be consistent, or at least aware that inconsistency might make it harder to understand you. The second group of six letters all have names ending in the sound of "o" as in the English word "both" or "go". The last group of six letters have names ending in the "u" sound of the English word "flute" or the "oo" sound of the English word "moon". Each mini-alphabet within the Esper alphabet has letter names ending with the sound of the vowel found at the beginning of that particular mini-alphabet. 

 

As an aid to learning for those who are unfamiliar with the order of the full alphabet used, or those who wish to learn the Esper letter names a few at a time, the Esper alphabet can be taught one mini-alphabet at a time and then strung together. Each mini alphabet in turn may easily be broken into two or three sets of two or three word names each with rhyming word names for very easy memorization.

 

The beginning sound of the name of each consonant is simply the sound of that consonant itself. The spoken name of each consonant letter is just the consonant sound followed by the sound of the vowel which starts the group it is found in within the Esper alphabet. The written name of each consonant letter is simply that letter followed by the vowel found at the beginning of it's mini-alphabet. The five vowels which start the five mini-alphabets each have names which match the sounds they make when used in words.

 

The phonetic sound made by each Esper letter when used to spell a word is simply the first sound of the name of that letter. There are no exceptions, no silent written letters, and no unwritten sounds in spoken words. To the best of the speaker's ability, a letter should not change sounds based on any particular sound occurring directly before or after it, and if any such change is found by the speaker to be unavoidable then special care should be taken to assure that the produced sound is as similar as possible to the sound made by the same letter in other combinations and not easily mistakable for the sound of a different Esper letter. For example, many speakers of certain dialects of the English language generally pronounce "tr" the same way as they would pronounce "chr" making it impossible for someone new to their language to be sure which was meant. If you can recognize such a thing happening with any particular combination of letters, then you should have an idea what to avoid letting happen to your own speech in the Esper language. Generally correcting such things in a naturally evolved language tends to make one sound to native speakers like a foreigner and is often considered incorrect or poor pronunciation or speaking with a strong accent. Such is not the case with Esperanto, Esper, or Pont.

 

Since different people have different ideas of what a particular letter sounds like, even within a single shared language and dialect, it is possible that my descriptions I provide here will not prove sufficient by themselves. For this reason, I will give some general guidelines to follow before I describe the actual letter sounds.

 

Keep in mind that you should take care to pronounce only a single vowel sound for each vowel and a single consonant sound for each consonant, rather than anything which you could imagine being perceived as a blend of the simple sounds made by two or more letters. Pay particular attention in the case of vowels, as many accents of many langages consider particular blends of vowel sounds to be single vowel sounds. A good test is to maintain the vowel sound for a few seconds and see if it starts the same as it ends. If not, you are probably using a diphthong rather than a single vowel. Try using the Spanish or Italian language as a guide if possible. Some consonants can be tested in this way as well, although some such as plosives are impossible to maintain for an extended time.

 

In the case of plosive consonants you will not be able to maintain the sound for testing purposes, but should take care to not let them end in the sound of a letter which does not follow them. For example, the letter "t" makes a plosive sound by suddenly releasing air from the area of the tip of your tongue after having closed off air flow with the tongue positioned so that the tip of it presses against the area of the mouth where the back of your top teeth meet the gums. If you simply let the air go at that point with no vibration of your vocal chords, you should get a nice "t" sound. If you start your vocal chords vibrating before releasing the air and allow them to continue vibrating until the air has begun to be released, you should end up with a nice "d" sound instead. If once the air release begins you strongly restrict airflow allowing it to pass the tip of your tongue in the original position of the "t" sound but not to freely pass, and air is not allowed to pass along the sides of the tongue, then you will get an "s" or "z" sound following your "t" or "d" depending on whether you vibrate your vocal chords during this part of the sound production, with the "s" sound being the one where the vocal chords are not allowed to vibrate. These sounds for these letters are as found in the Esper language, but are also commonly found in other language. If you restrict airflow after the sound of the letter "t" or "d" with your tongue in the same position, but allowing air to flow out along the sides of the tongue as well, then you will get the sound of the Esper letter "j" following your "t" or "d" sound if you allow your vocal chords to vibrate durring this part of the sound production, and you will get the sound of the Esper letter "c" following your "t" or "d" sound if you do not allow your vocal chords to vibrate during this part of the sound production. Changing to or from allowing your vocal chords to vibrate during the initial air flow of a plosive consonant sound can be difficult and may require some practice, but for exactly that reason you are not likely to find many words in many languages with combinations of sounds which require such lingual gymnastics. The "ts" sound is well known to Esperanto speakers and is in fact represented in Esperanto by a single letter. The sound combination represented in Esper by "tc" is also quite common in Esperanto where it too is represented by a single letter. There are only three such sound combinations in the Esperanto language which have their own letter and the third is much less common, though by no means rare. It is represented in Esper as in Pont by "dj". Notice that in the first two cases there is no vocal chord vibration for either sound involved and for the last combination there is vocal chord vibration for both sounds. These are much easier to produce than sounds like "dc" or "tj" where the use of vocal chord vibration switches on or off immediately after or very quickly after the sudden plosive start of air flow. Don't worry in advance about each possible combination of letters which is conceivably possible. There are a total of 676 possible unique two letter sequences in an alphabet of 26 letters and it you are not likely to ever encounter all of them in actual words within a single language. Learn what you come across and just be ready to figure out a new combination if necessary.

 

As mentioned earlier, in the Pont and Esperanto languages all consonant letter names end in "o" like the o-group or "oaro" in the Esper alphabet. some of the Esper letter names are also words. For example, "mi" and "ni" are the first person singular and plural pronouns respectively from the Esperanto language, and the of those two the word "mi" is a standard Esper word as well. In Esper, the plural is formed regularly from the singular so the Esperanto word "ni" is not needed as "imi" meaning "we" or "us" is the plural of "mi" meaning "I" or "me". The Esperanto singular Esper pronoun "ni" can still be used in Esper, as a sort of alternative plural, much as the noun "popolo" meaning "people" is an alternative plural for "persono" meaning "person". Of course "ini" is the regular plural of "ni", and serves as a compound plural as such just as "popoloy" which means "peoples" and which is the standard plural of "popolo". At this point it may look like I just introduced an exception to how plurals are formed, but you will see that this is not the case. For example, the word "personoy" also means "people" and is the standard plural of "persono". As in any other language, such alternative plural words are rare. Pronouns just have their own way of forming plurals because an "iy" ending (using the letter "y" to form regular plurals) can be a little hard to pronounce, but there's no rule saying you can't use it if you want to and can figure out how to pronounce it. There is the question though of whether or not you would be understood if you chose to try it, and I would not recommend it personally, as "iy" would be a single syllable but yet would still need to be two sounds since it is made up of two letters, which may be difficult or impossible to distinguish from each other depending on your pronunciation. The simple solution to this, if you really wish to use the "y" ending to form the plural of a pronoun or any other word ending in "i", is to change the part of speech by adding a role ending to the stem. The single syllable personal pronouns and any other pronoun not formed by attaching an "i" to a word stem would simply have the new role ending attached to it, while pronouns or more generally infinitive proforms which end in "i" only because the "i" was attached to the stem, would have the "i" removed to reveal the stem of the word and then the role ending attached to the resulting stem. For example, to form a plural noun from the pronoun "mi" you would add "oy" to form "mioy" meaning "we" as a plural noun, and to form a plural noun from the personal pronoun "ali" meaning "other", as in a different person, you would add "oy" to form "alioy" meaning "others" as a plural noun as in other people. Likewise, to form a plural noun from the personal pronoun "oni" meaning "one" (in the sense of a person, not the numeric value), you could simply add "oy" to the end forming "onioy" meaning basically individual people, but you could also stem this word down by removing the "i" from the end to get the stem "on", which in Esper actually is the name of the number "one", and to that you could add the plural noun ending "oy" to get "onoy" which is a way conveying the meaning of "some individuals". The word stem "kelk" which means "some" can of course also be taken this way, but is not as specific about being a reference to the individuals. Of course, having both a prefix and ending as ways of forming plurals does mean that it is possible to form regular compound plurals from other words if you want, although I don't think I have ever heard of any other language having such a feature so I'm guessing it has not historically proven to be particularly needed.

 

The stress in any multisyllable Esper word falls on the last syllable which is part of the word stem or part of a suffix, but not the part which indicates the word's gramatical role. The role ending attached to a word should not be stressed. However, if you are ever unsure, the place the stress on the next to last syllable to indicate that it is just meant as a word, without any indication of part of the word being a role ending. This rule is almost identical to the one used in Esperanto where the stress falls on the next to last syllable except in the case of nouns with their final "o" replaced by an apostrophe, in which case the stress falls on the last syllable as if the "o" were still there. In the Pont language the stress falls on the last syllable of whatever you consider to be the word stem. This is more subjective and I will not explain it further here. Just keep in mind that Esper is intended mainly to be as easy to learn as possible, so try to keep it simple for yourself. That means different things to different people.

 

In the Esperanto language, "li" is the masculine third person pronoun representing the same concept as the English word "he" while the plural "ili" is gender neutral. In Esper, "li" is gender neutral and "hi" means the same thing and is pronounced the same way as the English word "he", while "ci" means the same thing as the English word "she" and is also pronounced like its English counterpart. If you are a fluent Esperanto speaker, this deviation from Esperanto may seem a bit senseless, but if you are fluent in Esperanto then you probably don't have much use for a regularized introductory language intended for people to use as a starting point for learning Esperanto, unless by the time you are reading this the Esperanto language has changed to become more regular. All words which are a blend of masculine and gender neutral in the Esperanto language are strictly gender neutral in the Esper language as in the core dialect of the Pont language. I mention these details here only so that the change doesn't come as a shock when making the transition to the full Esperanto language, and for historical purposes in case these adaptations are some day embraced by the Esperanto community. Many people have felt for a very long time that the Esperanto language should make such a shift anyway in order to reduce gender discrimination, and the evolution of the Esperanto language has tended in that direction, so by the time you read this it is entirely possible that the difference will be only a historical one. Regardless, the Esper language has this difference in order to support more regular and predictable word building.

 

Since I mentioned the two gender specific Esper pronouns, I should take a moment to satisfy the curiosity of those who may wonder what happened to the rest of them. The English words "him" and "her" do not need separate translations into the Esper language as they are simply other forms of the same masculine and feminine pronouns respectively. In fact, while the English word "her" is sometimes used as a possessive, sometimes as the object of a preposition, and sometimes used as the object of a verb, the English word "him" is replaced by "his" for the possessive. In Esper, you can get away with using the same exact pronouns unchanged for all such uses if you want, by using prepositions to indicate the case. For example, "de hi" means literally "of him" and can be used to mean "his". There are also word endings which can be used to get around the need for a preposition in such cases. For example, the ending "a" is used to form an adjective as in the Esperanto language and as in Esperanto may be used to form the genitive case expressing a relation such as "cia patro" meaning "her parent" rather than having to say "patro de ci". The possessive ending "es" found in Esperanto words like "kies" meaning "whose" is generalized in Esper as in Pont to work with any word stem, so "hies" means "his", "vies" means "yours", "lies" means "his or hers", and "mies" means "mine". If you are not sure of the difference between the genitive case and a true possessive case, don't worry about it. Just use what you feel most comfortable with and learn as you go. There is much overlap in such similar part of speech definitions, especially when comparing one language to another, and an individual person's linguistic background will of course effect what is most comfortable for that individual.

 

Now, back to the alphabet.

 

The full Esper alphabet inherits its name from spoken Esperanto, and is called the "alfabeto" or the "abotso". It is made up of five mini-alphabets.

 

These mini-alphabets are called "abotsetoy" in the Esper language, the singular form of which is the word "abotseto" which roughly means "little alphabet".

 

For each letter, I will list first the upper case, and then the lower case, and then the name of the Esper letter in quotes, followed by one or more English example words. When the letters in the Esglish word which represent the given Esper letter are not an exact match, they are shown in brackets before the example words which use them to demonstrate the Epser letter's sound. Where no English word example could be found, check the note in parentheses after the given example word.

 

First, "la onef abotseto", meaning "the first little alphabet".

 

A a "A" -- father

B b "Ba" -- big boy band

C c "Ca" -- [sh]: ship shape sheep

D d "Da" -- dive dance 

 

These four letters make up a mini-alphabet by the name of the "abacado".

 

Second, "la duef abotseto", meaning "the second little alphabet".

 

E e "E" -- egg pen

F f "Fe" -- feather fence

G g "Ge" -- get got gone

H h "He" -- help hen handy

 

These four letters make up a mini-alphabet by the name of the "efegeho".

 

Third, "la trief abotseto", meaning "the third little alphabet".

 

I i "I" -- fit bit lit [ee]: peel teen feed

J j "Ji" -- [s]: leisure measure 

K k "Ki" -- king kicked kites

L l "Li" -- let learn lesson like lion

M m "Mi" -- man milk moon mouse

N n "Ni" -- now no news needed

 

These six letters make up a mini-alphabet by the name of the "ijikilimino".

 

Fourth, "la kvaref abotseto", meaning "the fourth little alphabet".

 

O o "O" -- note bones or boat no both

P p "Po" -- people practice pan party 

Q q "Qo" -- [ch] loch (air forced through the throat, as pronounced in German or Scottish)

R r "Ro" -- red road rail rocks

S s "So" -- sink ski sit sail

T t "To" -- tip top tap (note: be careful not to change this into a n English "ch" sound when used before the letter "r" like in the English word "trip". The English "ch" sound is spelled "tc" in the Esper language, as it is a semi-blended composite of the sounds of those two letters.)

 

These six letters make up a mini-alphabet by the name of the "opoqorosoto".

 

Fifth and last, "la kvinef abotseto", meaning "the fifth little alphabet".

 

U u "U" -- [oo]: boot moon noob

V v "Vu" -- victory drive vibes

W w "Wu" -- water wonderful wookie

X x "Xu" -- [th]: think thin thank with

Y y "Yu" -- yet yes yam yours yellow youth yeti 

Z z "Zu" -- zebra zoo zipper zap zulu Zamenhof (Okay, this last one's not English, but it is the surname of the inventor of Esperanto, so I had to include it as the last entry, of course.)

 

These six letters make up a mini-alphabet by the name of the "uvuwuxuyuzo".

 

The order of the five mini alphabets that make up the full Esper alphabet are, the "abacado", the "efegeho", the "ijikilimino", the "opoqorosoto", and then the "uvuwuxuyuzo".

 

Here are five statements in Esper about the names of the five little alphabets. If you don't fully understand them at this point, that's okay. You will be able to soon.

 

"La onef abotseto estas la abacado."

 

"La duef abotseto estas la efegeho."

 

"La trief abotseto estas la ijikilimino."

 

"La kvaref abotseto estas la opoqorosoto."

 

"La kvinef abotseto estas la uvuwuxuyuzo."

 

Did you understand those five sentences? The second one says that the second little alphabet is the "efegeho". There is no translation of this word into English, as it is simply the name of that particular little alphabet, derived from the letters the little alphabet contains. Can you figure out the other four sentences now?

 

Here are five more statements about the little alphabets.

 

"La abacado havas la literoy a, ba, ca, kay da."

 

"La efegeho havas la literoy e, fe, ge, kay he."

 

"La ijikilimino havas la literoy i, ji, ki, li, mi, kay ni."

 

"La opoqorosoto havas la literoy o, po, qo, ro, so, kay to."

 

"La uvuwuxuyuzo havas la literoy u, vu, wu, xu, yu, kay zu."

 

Do you think you understand them pretty well? The first of those five says that the "abacado" has the letters "a", "b", "c", and "d". The names of the letters are spelled out, although they could have been handled without spelling them out just as I did here in this explanation of what the sentence says. Can you understand all five now? Again, don't worry if you can't. You can go back and review to see if you missed something, or you can continue from here and make sense of it as you go.

 

The adjective "tuta" means "whole" or "total". I'm telling you that now, so that you know it when you see it in the following rather long sentence which I'm hoping you will be able to both pronounce and understand by the time you have gotten this far.

 

"La abacado havas la literoy a, ba, ca, kay da."

 

"La tuta abotso havas la literoy a, ba, ca, da, e, fe, ge, he, i, ji, ki, li, mi, ni, o, po, qo, ro, so, to, u, vu, wu, xu, yu, kay zu."

 

Can you figure out what this next sentence says without me telling you? It isn't entirely made up of words that have been explained, but I am hoping you can understand enough to guess the two new words.

 

"La abotso de Espero enhavas dudek ses literoy."

 

Here are some hints in case you're having any trouble with it. If I am not mistaken, there should be three new words. One of them starts with a prefix meaning "in" and the rest of that word should be familliar. Also, think about what you know of number names in the Esper language so far and how the Esper language allows words to be constructed from known parts. At least one part of one of the remaining two new words should already be known, if you can figure out how to extract it from the right ordinal number name.

 

-----------------------------------

 

Now that you know how to pronounce each letter, no matter where it is found in a word, you can begin reading Esper words. 

 

So let's get to some interjections that you can use all by themselves. You'll be taking words aport and building new ones from them soon, but this short list should give you some practice material for reminding your brain to think about the new language you're learning.

 

"salutaw" = hello, salutations

"adiaw" = goodbye, farewell

"bonvenaw" = "welcome"

"bonvolaw" = please

"dankaw" = thank you, thanks, "thank", "thanking"

"nedanindaw" = you're welcome, "not thankworthy", not a bother

"damnaw" = "damn!"

"sinyoraw" = ladies & gentlemen, person or people, to whom it may concern

"sufaw" = sufficiently, enough, that'll do

 

"tcaw" = bye, ciao

"atc" = no-good!

"aq" = oh!, ow!

"fi" = shame

"ha" = ah

"ho" = oh

"hove" = oh woe

"hu" = boo!, attention!

"hura" = hooray!

"ya" = indeed

"nu" = well

"oho" = aha

"okey" = okay

"cc" = shh

 

It's questionable whether "cc" can accurately be called a word, but I want you to learn to play with the language and have fun with it.

 

Notice that the first few interjections end in "aw" which is pronounced about like the "ow" in the English word "cow". In most cases this is a sort of generic part of speech ending which can be tagged onto any word stem to show that the stem was intentionally left without a clearly defined grammatical role or relation to other parts of speech.

 

For example, if you wanted to say good bye to someone in an informal way that means something more like "until later" then you could say to the person "djis" which simply means "later" or you could qualify it as an interjection or ambiguous part of speech by instead saying "djisaw" which basically means the same thing but may sound a bit more formal.

 

Since any word stem in Esper can be used with or without a role ending to indicate a specific intended part of speech, I want to mention now that the Esper language inherits its parts of speech from the Pont language, which in turn inherited them from an earlier version of Esper, which in turn inherited them from Esperanto, so there is not an exact one to one correspondence between role endings in Esper and part of speech endings in Esperanto, but the transition to Esperanto should still be an easy one. The difference is mainly there to help give learners a way of thinking about and mnemonically storing each part of speech role.

 

For example, if I take the "aw" off of "djisaw" and replace it with "wi" then it is explicitly shown to be a grammatical preposition, although prepositions are used without explicit representation as such in Esperanto and will often be used in their unmodified stem form in the Esper language as well for this reason. However, so that you can see what it looks like to use a preposition with and without the preposition ending, here are some examples.

 

"revid" = later, "re-see"

 

Note that just saying "revid" to mean "later", or "until later" or "see you later" is implying the word "djis" which means later. It would not make much sense to imply that you would see someone again later, although you could say "revid" when you actually DO see a person again, to mean something like "I'm happy to see you" or "I'm surprised to see you". In the Esper language the idea of implied meaning is accepted as a part of the way communication works, which is important for a language intended as a starting point for learning since it allows more to be said with a smaller vocabulary while one has to get by without yet knowing words for every concept to be communicated.

 

"revidaw" = later, "re-see" (interjection)

"revido" = later, "re-see" (noun)

"djis" = "until"

"djiswi" = "until" (prep) 

"djis revid" = see you later, "until re-see"

"djis revido" = see you later, "until re-see"

"djiswi revido" = see you later, "until re-see"

"djiswi la revido = see you later, "until the re-see"

 

Now that you have an idea how the word building system works, let's move on to some more substantial examples.

 

To start with, lets use the word stem "esper" which means "hope" and can be used as a word without any modification, but lacks information to tell the recipient whether you meant it as a verb, a noun, or whatever. All word stems in the Esper language can be used in this way, although you are encourages to form less ambiguous words from the stem as soon as you feel confident enough to do so. In the Esperanto language when you use a word stem that is usually found only as part of a fully qualified composite word, the convention is to place an apostrophe where the word ending would otherwise go, to indicate that the part of speech ending has been left off. Doctor Zamenhof mentioned this method specifically for truncating nouns for use in such things as lyrics and poetry in order to have more flexibility in rhyming and timing. In the Esper language this may be taken to the extreme so that you can play with the language as you learn it, but keep in mind that the goal is to learn clear communication and a word which can be taken as pretty much any part of speech can potentially lead to misunderstanding. However, it's better when learning to have use of an ambiguous word that gets across part of what you want to say than to have no way of communicating the thought at all.

 

For example, if I wanted to say "I hope" then I could start by simply replacing the English words with the Esper words for the comcepts of "I" and "hope" forming the phrase "mi esper" which could hardly be mistaken for much else.

 

To clarify that phrase, you can attach the present tense verb ending "as" to form the phrase "mi esperas" which is the exact same thing as "esperas mi" because the order of the verb and its subject is not important since you can tell which is which from the present tense "as" ending.

 

Any word stem which would make any sense at all as a verb can be affixed with the "as" ending to mark it as a present tense verb, regardless of the subject. In other words, the form of the verb does not change based on who or what does the action or assumes the state specified by the verb. To put that in less linguistic terms, if you want to say "you hope", then just replace the pronoun and you get "vi esperas". To say "we hope" use the pronoun plural form on "mi" which is "imi" and you get "imi esperas".

 

An indefinite mode verb or infinitive is formed from a word stem by suffixing the "i" ending in Esper, as in Esperanto. In the Pont language this ending is generalized to the point of forming an infinitive proform so that any descriptive word stem may be used in the infinitive form either as a verb or as a personal pronoun, for example. In Esperanto there is a small finite set of personal pronouns. In Esper this Pont method of producing endless proforms or pronouns is supported, but not encouraged if you can get by without it simply because it's just one more thing to learn. Since the Esper language is intended for learning, use what seems to work for you, but here is a list of personal pronouns and their suggested meanings in Esper so that you have a starting point:

 

"mi = "I" or "me"

 

"vi" = "you"

 

"li" = "he" or "she" or "it" or "him" or "her" or simply the singular form of "they"

 

"hi" = "he" or "him"

 

"ci" = "she" or "her"

 

"dji" = "it"

 

"oni" = "one's self" as in "se oni ne kuras" to mean "if one doesn't run" or "if one is not running"

 

"si" = reflexive pronoun which refers to the subject of the sentence.

 

From any of these pronouns a plural can be formed by attaching the letter "i" to the beginning as a prefix.

 

In addition to the personal pronouns, there are also proforms used to form correlatives such as question and answer words and many other related words.

 

"i" = indeterminate

 

"ki" = question

 

"ti" = specified

 

"di" = devine

 

"neni" = nullified

 

"ayni" = indiscriminate

 

"ali" = alternative

 

"kiti" = clarification

 

"ji" = this 

 

"zi" = inclusive 

 

Note that in it's stem form, the spoken Esperanto word for this would be spelled "tci" in Esper, but that would also represent the spoken Esperanto word for "here". In the Esper language, since all Esperanto words are supported, this meaning can of course be used, so be prepared to hear it from Esperanto speakers. However in order to avoid confusion this meaning of the word stem "tci" is not an official part of the Esper language. Instead, when used, this meaning is assigned to the prefix "tci" which is pronounced and spelled the same way but is recognized by being attached to the beginning of a word rather than standing as a word in its own right. This way it can still be used in combination with other words to indicate something at the local time or place or in any proximate context as it would in Esperanto. For example, "tcitie" would mean literally "this place" and would express the meaning of "here" in the sense of "this specific location". However, in the Esper language one can avoid this confusion altogether by using "ji" for "this" and "zi" for "all" and deriving words from these roots instead. This way "jiey" represents "here" as it literally means "this place", and "jiam" means "now" as it represents "this time". If you do decide to use the spoken Esperanto forms of these word elements, keep in mind the following. If you say "tci ti" to mean "inclusive specified" or something like that, it is a good idea to place added stress on the word "tci" in order to distinguish it from "tciti" where the stress would fall on the end of the word stem. Otherwise the two sound alike and the meaning may become ambiguous. This ambiguity comes from spoken Esperanto and is preserved in the Esper language to keep from deviating too far from Esperanto unnecessarily. The key is to simply be aware and go with what makes sense, although what would NOT make sense may in fact make for good humor, if you happen to like that sort of thing as most people do. The written form in Esperanto is not the same unless the Pont or Esper orthography is used. In Esperanto the Esper word "tci" would be written in the original orthography as "ci", and hopefully the "^" over the "c" won't get lost at some point in the editing of this document as it gets edited. Such letters are affectionately called "letters with hats" and in my observation have been the biggest problem holding back the Esperanto language, although many people have told me that they are no problem at all, but this does not seem to invalidate the many accounts of people giving up on the language early in their studies because of issues related to its original orthography or initial confusion over the various orthographies devised to work around the use of such accented letters. This same Esperanto word may be written in such orthographies as "cxi", which is probably the most common alternative, or as "c'i", or "'ci" or "c-i" or "c^i" or "^ci" or the original work-around suggested by the inventor of the Esperanto language himself, which would be "chi", or any of several obscure alternatives. Of these, I would only suggest learning the "x" convention at first since you are less likely to encounter the others often and should be able to work them out pretty easily when you do, but the Esper language will let you learn spoken Esperanto without having to worry about it at all, and the transition to any of the written Esperanto orthographies should be an easy one at any point in time that you decide to take that step. The "x" convention simply allows you to place an "x" after a letter rather than put a hat on it. Since the Esperanto language does not use the letter "x" to represent any specific sound of its own, this convention tends to be prefered over the originally proposed "h" method. The Esper language (or the Esper dialect of Esperanto, if you prefer to think of it that way) does not have such letters so there is no need to work around them, and the Esper letter "x" represents a sound which does not exist in Esperanto. This addition of a single sound comes from the Pont language and may seem rather trivial but actually is rather substantial when considered in the context of word building. In contrast, the 28 letters of the Esperanto language give slightly more flexibility than the 26 letters of written Esper or Pont, but this added flexibility has not been taken advantage of, likely due to the fact that it would inflict ambiguity on the spoken counterparts of such written words since three of the letters with hats represent blends which are in many accents indistinguishable from a particular unique pair of letters corresponding with each of those three. I point this out not to discourage the learning of Esperanto orthography but rather to prepare you a bit for when you decide to learn it and to help you understand exactly why I the Esper and Pont language do not simply use Esperanto orthography. The existence of a 26th unique sound in the Pont and Esper languages compared with the 25 unique sounds of the original Esperanto orthography does not introduce any potential ambiguity into the written forms of Pont or Esper words as there is an exact one to one correspondence between letters and sounds. There is however the fact that the vowels "i" and "u" each have consonant counterparts which in some accents may be identical or nearly identical to the sounds of those two vowels. In such cases, you can still distinguish between those two vowels and their corresponding consinants "y" and "w" by the fact that each vowel is given its own syllable whereas the consonants simply blend with other consonants or vowels near them with no separate syllable being produced by their existence in a word. English speakers may readily recognize how this works with the consonant vowel blend in the spoken forms of the English words "yippee" and "woozy" respectively. If your particular dialect of English does not make this distinction clear then I can only apologize for not having thought of a better example for you, and hope that the concept has nonetheless been clearly conveyed.

 

It is not necessary to worry about the translation of the exact word that you would use for something in another language such as English when constructing a sentence in the Esper language. In fact, this is true of human communication language in general. For example, in the case of the English words "all" or "any" they both convey the meaning of including the total of something. This is why I used the word "inclusive" to describe this facet of the word stem "zi". The fact that this stem has an alternative meaning is bothersome, but is allowed in the Esper language in order to avoid having the meanings fail to match their Esperanto counterparts. In the Pont language this has been addressed, but I will not go into details about that here. With this ambiguity, the phrase "tci tci" could therefore be taken to mean "everything here" or "right here" or "absolutely everything", so unless context strongly suggests otherwise the raw word stem "tci" should be taken in Esper to mean "here" as it does in spoken Esperanto, and words formed from it are taken to  means "here" and the prefix "fortunately there are less ambiguous ways to say such things. 

Specifically, "ji tiey" or "tiey ji" or the single word "jitiey" means "right here" whereas "zi tiey" or "tiey zi" or the single word "zitiey" means "everything here". 

There is no rule in Esper saying NOT to form plurals of these additional proforms by prefixing them with "i" but doing so may be of questionable value. Again, this is meant as a learning language so do what makes sense to you.

 

It should be noted that "itci", the plural of the proform "tci" COULD also be considered a plural form of the spoken Esperanto word for "here", but since that probably wouldn't make much sense, it would more likely be interpreted as meaning the same thing as the English word "all" which is basically the plural of the English word "every". You can also of course form a fully qualified adjective by attaching "a" to the stem of any word, and proforms are no exception, so outside of context to say otherwise, "tcia" would mean "every" and the plural "tciay" would mean "all". Keep in mind that it is not required to form the plurals of adjectives in Esper like it is in Esperanto when used with an expressed or implied plural noun. However, it is allowed, and is encouraged in any case where not doing so could allow an adjective to be mistaken as modifying the wrong noun, and also encouraged if a person feels comfortable with it or would like to get used to such a convention as further preparation for transition to the Esperanto language where noun adjective agreement is required for both number and case. Neither Esper nor Pont, nor Esperanto requires adjective noun agreement for gender, although both Pont and Esper allow it for those who feel comfortable with it. Again, if you are learning Esper as a step toward Esperanto, it is a good idea to lean in that direction and opt for not using gender markings with adjectives to agree with the noun gender. It's perfectly fine on the other hand you wish to express that a particular adjective is meant in a masculine or feminine way, such as to say "beletina" for "pretty" or "beletitca" for "handsome", from the stem "bel" meaning beautiful, the diminuitive "et" suffix, the "in" or "itc" suffix to mark masculine or feminine respectively, and of course the "a" ending to mark the role of adjective. In fact, you can even have noun adjective "disagreement" if you want, just like you can in English in those rare cases where an adjective has a gender implied or assumed in any way, to say something like a pretty man or a handsome woman. The difference between doing this in Esper and doing it in English is that in Esper such things are expressed through regular word formation rather than implied based on familiar connotation of a word, which reduces the chances of misunderstanding.

 

As with other word stems, this short list can be used to create a HUGE number of useful words, so if it seems like quite a bit to learn just take your time and play with them for a while. Enjoy your new linguistic toys. 

 

For example, let's take the word "di" which is a bit ambiguous and unpolished. This is the way I think of word stems. Like raw gems which haven't yet been made to shine and still have their full potential because nothing has been chiseled off, ground off, broken off, or worn away. Each such gem has unique potentials and not all of them will produce something useful when cut the same way, but unlike precious gems found in some cave, these raw gems are free and you can break as many as you like in the process of learning which specific cuts and mountings can produce what kinds of beautiful linguistic jewelry. For example, here are a few words which can be formed from the "di" word stem, along with rough translations into the English language:

 

dia = divine, majestic, god-like, heavenly, wonderful, perfect, godly

 

diale = for divine reasons, for a majestic reason, mysterious reason (adv)

 

dialo = a divine reason, a majestic reason, a heavenly purpose, mysterious reason (n)

 

dialoy = divine reasons, majestic reasons, mysterious reasons (pl n)

 

dialaj = being for divine reasons, majestic reason, mysterious reason, god knows why (conj)

 

diame = at a marvelous time, with divine timing

 

diay = divine kinds, majestic kinds, heavenly kinds

 

die = divinely, superbly

 

dieye = divine place, majestic place, heavenly place (adv)

 

dieyo = divine place, majestic place, heavenly place (n)

 

dieyoy = divine places, majestic places, heavenly places (pl n)

 

diele = by divine method, in a majestic way, in a mysterious way (adv)

 

dielo = a divine method, a majestic method, a godly method (n)

 

dieloy = divine methods, majestic methods, mysterious means (pl n)

 

dielaj = divine method, majestic method, mysterious method, god knows how (conj)

 

diena = on the way to heaven, on the way to god, on the divine way

 

diene = heavenward, godward

 

dienas = going to a divine place, going god's way, going to a glorious place

 

dieni = to go someplace divine, to go god's way, to go to a glorious place

 

dies = the divine's, god's, heaven's

 

dio = a god or diety

 

diome = divine amount, just the right amount

 

dioy = gods or dieties

 

dioya = god-like, heavenly, wonderful, perfect (singular/plural)

 

dioyo = one or more gods or dieties

 

diules = demigod's, god-like person's, majestic person's, god's

 

diulo = majestic person, royalty, demigod, god in the flesh

 

diuloy = majestic people

 

diuloyo = one of more majestic or god-like people

 

Okay, I'll stop there for now, but notice that including the stem itself, that's thirty words formed from a single word stem. You absolutely do not need them all, but learning any one of them can multiply the number of words you can form from other stems that you learn.

 

Some of the examples I just gave are composites with a primary role ending indicating the part of speech and a suffix or secondary role indicator inserted between the stem and the primary role ending. Just as you can use a word stem in Esper as an unpolished form of a word, you can also use a form of a word stem with prefixes, suffixes, or secondary role tags added, without specifying a primary role tag. This is generally the form of corelorrelatives in the Esperanto language and they can be rather flexible in their usage, but it is useful to understand the more polished forms as well simply to have a if better idea of just how flexible a word really is.

 

Here's one example, with a few English translations, to show what I mean. Don't bother trying to memorize the translations.

 

"ilial" = for their reason, their reason, their reasons being, their reasons, their reason being

 

In general I will try to avoid excessive example translations of an Esper word, and rather stick with something easier to learn and remember. Just keep in mind that if you know only one translation of a word that doesn't mean it can express everything the translation word can express but it also does not mean that their are no other ways to translate it. What you want to aim for is understanding each word. Memorizing a translation label for a word as a means of helping you to recall it can be one step in that process. Unfortunately in some cases it is difficult to find a single concise translation that I feel conveys sufficient information about the word to be sure it's not misleading, so some definitions listed will be like that. I just thought I should say that before giving you yet another list of words. 

 

Nouns and adjectives form their plural counterparts by placing a "y" after the noun ending "o" or the adjective ending "a" to form "ay" as the ending for a plural adjective and "oy" as the ending for a plural noun. Note that the "ay" ending is pronounced as the "a" in the English word "father" followed by the "y" like in the English word "boy" making "ay" in Esper sound like the "y" in the English word "sky" or the "uy" in the English word "guy" rather than like the "ay" in the English word "bay" or "day".

 

If you are not accustomed to the concept of plural adjectives or noun adjective agreement, don't worry about it. You'll see and hear it enough to pick it up naturally if you can get using the language and all it's for anyway is to know which adjective goes with which noun no matter what order they are in, which really doesn't help if it turns out that you are using two or more singular nouns with adjectives or if you are using two or more plural nouns with adjectives, but many languages use such a concept, including the Esperanto language, so you will probably want to start using it as soon as you understand it. I will avoid using it for now unless necessary to clarify, so that it's one less thing to deal with, so for example, instead of writing "la belay esperoy" to mean "the beautiful hopes", the plural ending will be left off of the adjective and I would simply say "la bela esperoy" or "la esperoy bela" to mean "the beautiful hopes". Notice that the definite article "la" comes before the noun and adjective regardless of which order the noun and adjective are used in, and the meaning is the same both ways.

 

Keep in mind that I am trying to teach you to make your own words as you need them and to recognize new words as you encounter them, so the words in this list have been chosen with that goal in mind rather than as specific vocabulary to memorize. I suggest that you don't even try to memorize the words in the list, but rather to look for patterns and learn how the words are put together. In other words, learn the word stems and the tools used to shape those stem into less ambiguous forms.

 

So, here are a whole bunch more words for you to look over and think about and experiment with. Have fun playing with them. :)

 

tiulino = her, that woman

tiulitco = him, that man

iliam = their time

aliey = another place, other places

imiel = our method

mien = via me, going my way

sies = one's (in reference to the subject. In other words, his, hers, or its.)

vio = you (in the nominal sense rather than pronominal)

ayniul = anybody, any person

kia = what kind

kitiam = just when, exactly when

netiel = not that method, not that way, not like that

nenien = nowhere bound, on the way to nowhere, by way of nowhere, not going anywhere

nezies = not everyone's

zio = everything

jiul = this person

ilio = they (gramatically singular, taken as a group)

iliel = their method, their way, their solution

iliul = those people, one or more of those people, they (specifically meaning people)

alien = otherward, otherways, going someplace else

aliules = another person's

imial = our reason, for our reason, our reasons

imies = ours

imio = one or more of us

mia = mine, my kind (similar to me)

miey = me place, a place of my own, a place where I belong

miules = my person's, mine personally

sial = one's reason (specifically, the subject's reason)

siam = one's time, when one is ready, at the subject's time

sien = by way of the subject

via = yours, your kind (similar to you)

vial = your reason, your reasons, for your own reasons

viam = your time when you are ready

viey = your place, your home, your town, etc.

viel = your style, your method, as you would do

vien = by way of your location, your direction

vies = yours, your possession

viom = your amount, the amount you have, the amount for you (depending on context)

vioy = you (nominal plural), all of you

viules = yours personally

viulo = you as an individual

aynia = any kind

aynial = for any reason

ayniam = any time, whenever

aynie = by any means, in any way, of any sort (adv)

aynieye = anywhere (adv)

aynieyo = anywhere (n)

ayniel = anyhow, by any method

aynien = any which way, aimless

aynies = anyone's, anything's

aynio = anything

ayniom = any amount, to any extent

ayniules = anybody's, any person's

ayniul = any person or people

ayniulo = any person

ayniuloy = any people

ia = some kind

ial = for some reason

iam = sometime

iay = some kinds

ie = by some means

iey = somewhere

iel = somehow, by some method, some method or methods

ien = someway, via somewhere, to somewhere, going somewhere

ies = someone's

io = something

iom = some (amount), somewhat

ioy = some (things) (pl)

iules = somebody's

iul = somebody, some people

kial = why, what reason

kiam = when

kiay = what kinds

kie = by what means

kiey = where

kieyo = what place

kiel = how, what method

kien = which way, going where

kies = whose

kio = what

kiom = how much, to what extent

kioy = what ones

kiules = who's

kiulo = who

kitia = which kind

kitial = exactly why

kitieyo = what place exactly

kitiel = just how, by exactly what methods

kitien = which way exactly

kities = just whose, specifically whose

kitio = what specifically

kitiom = just how much, exactly to what extent

kitioy = what ones specifically

netia = not that kind

netiey = not there

netieyo = not in that place

netiel = not that method, not like that

neties = not that person's, not that one's

netio = not that

netiom = not that much, not to that extent

nenia = no kind, no type

nenial = for no reason

neniam = never

neniey = nowhere

neniel = no way, no how, no method

nenies = no-one's, nobody's

nenio = nothing

neniom = no amount, none, to no extent

neniules = nobody's (does not belong to a person)

neniul = nobody, no people, no person

nezia = not every kind

nezay = not all kinds

neziey = not everywhere

nezio = not everything

neziom = not all (amount), not to the full extent

zia = every type

zial = for every reason, all reasons

ziam = always

ziay = all kinds

ziey = everywhere, everyplace

ziel = in every way, every method

zien = on the way to everywhere, going everyplace

zies = everyone's, everything's

zio = everything

ziom = the whole amount, the full extent

zioy = all things

ziules = everybody's

ziul = everybody, all people

jia = this kind

jial = for this reason

jiam = this time, now

jieya = here, in this place (adj)

jieye = here, this place (adv)

jieyo = here, this place (n)

jiel = in this way, by this method, like this

jien = on the way here, via this place, toward here

jies = this one's, this person's

jio = this, this thing

jiom = this amount, this much, to this extent

jioy = these, these things

jiules = this person's

jiul = this person, these people

tia = such, that type, like that

tial = therefore, that reason, the farther away or less recently mentioned reason or reasons

tiam = then, that time

tiay = such kinds, those types, like those

tiey = there

tieyo = that place, that area

tiel = thus, that method, that way, thusly, the less recently mentioned method, the distant method or methods

tien = on the way there, by way of that place

ties = that one's, his, hers, its

tio = that, that thing

tiom = that amount, that much, that extent

tioy = those, those things

tiules = that person's

tiul = that person

 

It may seem like I'm jumping back and forth a bit with the concepts I'm presenting here. Well, that's because I am. The idea is to refresh your memory as we go, so that the concepts and methods stick in your mind more quickly.

 

So by now you should hopefully understand that nouns and adjectives do not form their plurals in the same way as personal pronouns in Esper. If you forget one way or the other, or which is which, feel free to use what you remember, so that you don't get stuck, and just look it up later to refresh your memory. Plural pronouns in Esper are simply singular pronouns with an "i" prefixed to its beginning, while plural nouns end in "oy" like in the English word "boy".

 

Here's another word stem for you: "amik" meaning "friend". The infinitive verb "amiki" means literally "to friend" and the adverb "amike" means "friendly".

 

The noun "amik" means "a friend" or simply "friend", with its plural form "amikoy" meaning "friends".

 

Nouns can take on many cases in a single language, and often the learner of the language has to deal with multiple forms of the same word to accommodate various cases. In the Esperanto language there is an "n" ending used on both nouns and the adjectives which are used to modify their meanings, to indicate the accusative case, and all other nouns are considered to be in the nominative case unless preceded by a preposition to expressly identify the use of some other case. This Esperanto feature is supported in the Esper language, but not encouraged since prepositions can be extended to express all noun and adjective cases. In the Esper language, the nominative is implied if no preposition is used but can also be expressed explicitly with the preposition "hu" or the more formal "huwi", and the accusative case can be expressed through the use of the preposition "qon" or its more formal fully qualified form "qonwi". Note that the fully qualified nominative preposition "huwi" is a two syllable word just as "qonwi" is, and the "wi" ending simply shows explicitly that they are meant as prepositions rather than some other part of speech. The double vowel "uu" can be pronounced with a short glottal stop between one "u" and the other, or a tone change, or a noticeable doubling of the length, but what ever your preference it is important to make it distinguishable from a single "u" sound. This is the same as in the case of any letter being found twice in a row in the Esper language. As in Esperanto, every letter in an Esper word should be pronounced as clearly and recognizably as reasonably possible.

 

The phrase "imi havas qon espero" means "we have hope".

 

Notice the preposition "qon" used here. This is pronounced almost like "ho" but with a stronger and more raspy consonant formed by restricting air flow through the throat, and an "n" sound on the end. It has no exact translation into English but can easily be remembered by thinking of the old but rather well known phrase "land ho" which someone on the lookout tower of a sailing ship might have yelled out to mean roughly "I see land" which would translate into Esper as "Mi vidas qon lando." The use of this preposition though has nothing specific to do with seeing, but rather introduces the direct object of a verb. In English the direct object of a verb is determined by word order. In Esperanto it is recognized by the accusative case ending. In Esper, the accusative case ending is of course allowed, but this preposition has been included to allow people to work around having to use the accusative case ending on nouns and adjectives in the early stages of learning, since it seems to be one of the biggest problem areas when it comes to learning the Esperanto language. The "n" on the end of the preposition "qon" can be thought of as an encapsulation of the accusative case ending into the accusative preposition so that the nouns and adjectives involved don't have to change their forms. There is really no advantage of one method over the other. It's simply that the use of a preposition, rather than a word ending on nouns and adjectives, allows the person to think of the accusative case in a different way and fits in well with the use of prepositions for expressing many other similar concepts.

 

It is a good idea to practice using the nominative preposition as well, even though it is not required to identify the nominative case, as part of your linguistic brain training. This will also prepare you for understanding phrases with and without it specified and will allow more flexibility of sentence structure than the implied nominative form allows.  

 

One formal version of the phrase meaning "we have hope" would be "huwi imi havas qonwi espero". 

 

Notice that I can also express the same thing by saying "hu imi havas qon espero", or "havas qonwi espero huwi imi", or "qonwi espero huwi imi havas", or "huwi imi qonwi espero havas", or "hu imi qon espero havas", or "qon espero hu imi havas". The all mean the same thing. In all of these examples the subject is identified as "imi" and the direct object of the verb "havas" is identified as "espero". The order of these three parts can be arranged however you want because each part is clearly identified. The only requirement for the word order is that the object of each preposition has to directly follow the preposition that it belongs to. If either preposition were to be left off, the recipient might not know which part you meant as the subject and which part you meant as the direct object. You can do this in Esper, and it is not considered "wrong", but it may lead to misunderstanding so it is discouraged. If you are going to leave out the nominative preposition, be careful of your word order so as not to leave the subject looking like part of the direct object as in "havas qonwi espero imi", which could be misunderstood, and if you are going to leave out the accusative preposition it's a good idea to use the accusative case noun and adjective forms as defined in the Esperanto language in order to avoid misunderstanding, such as for example "imi havas esperon".

 

The phrase "imi estas amikoy" means "we are friends".

 

Notice that there is no direct object of the verb because the verb "estas" is simply equating "imi" and "amikoy" to express that they are the same thing. In other words, the verb is not expressing anything happening to anything, nor anything that has happened or will happen. Nothing is expressed as being held or hit or hidden or abandoned or in any other way effected, so there is no direct object. The verb is intransitive, so there is no accusative case to indicate.

 

In such a case, it is possible to leave the phrase ambiguous as to which item was the actual intended subject and which was meant to be taken as describing that subject, as was done in the example just given. Changing the word order to "amikoy estas imi" does nothing to remove that ambiguity since the order of the words can not be relied upon to mean the same thing to different people, so if you want to clarify that "imi" is the explicit subject, then you could say "hu imi estas amikoy" or "amikoy estas hu imi" or even "estas amikoy hu imi" but it is questionable whether or not "estas hu imi amikoy" would be any more clear than the original form.

 

The phrase "vies amiko mi estas" means "I am your friend" or "your friend I am". Formally, this could be clarified as "vies amiko hu mi estas" to express that the intended meaning is to identify yourself as the message recipient's friend rather than to identify the message recipient's friend as being the you, the speaker. Afterall, there may be only one of you and several friends of the person you are talking to, some of which are not you. Again notice that there is no direct object involved here. If one were to say "mi estas qon vies amiko" it would be treating the verb as transitive and could be taken to mean something like "I am being your friend" rather than simply "I am your friend". In other words, the expression of a direct object should cause the verb "estas" to be understood in the sense of "actively in the process of being" as if to say that you are "demonstrating" your friendship rather than simply being known by it. This concept may seem a bit foreign to some people, as the idea of "being" something is generally thought of as a static state rather than an activity.

 

The phrase "vi havas qon amiko bela" means "you have a beautiful friend".

 

Notice here that if I said "qon amiko bela havas vi" it would mean the same thing, but if I said "qon amiko bela vi havas" there could be some confusion as to whether the word "bela" is meant to describe "vi" or "amiko" so this arrangement should be avoided when using the implied nominative case for the subject and not using the explicit accusative case ending on the direct object itself. The explicit accusative ending "n" as used in Esperanto on the direct object is one way of avoiding that problem, as "amikon belan vi havas" clearly indicates that "belan" is part of the direct object because it is in the accusative case. There are other cases as well where certain word orders may cause more ambiguity in Esper if one chooses does not take full advantage of the noun adjective agreement features used in Esperanto and simultaneously not to take full advantage of case identifying prepositions, but you can use such features in Esper any time you want and the idea of not making them required is mainly to allow the learner to start using the language without having to keep track of so many details. So if you say "qon amiko bela hu vi havas", the use of the preposition "hu" clearly identifies the start of the subject and gives the reader or listener a little more information with which to figure out what you meant, just as formalizing the prepositions such as in "qonwi amiko bela huwi vi havas" adds explicit information about how the words "hu" and "qon" were meant to be understood, since the "qonwi" and "huwi" forms are a little more polished and can be seen clearly by someone who knows this feature of the Esper language as fully qualified prepositions, so as not to risk being mistaken for some other role such as the conjunctions "qonaj" and "huaj". This is the idea behind having assigned word endings for such things in the Esper language, or the Esper dialect of Esperanto if you wish to think of it that way. Just as a side note since I mentioned their conjunction forms, the conjunction "huaj" can be thought of as "effected by" and the conjunction "qonaj" can be thought of as "having an effect upon" in relation to what ever follows it, and in reference to the relation of what precedes it. For example, "kato huaj muso" means roughly "cat effected by mouse" and is basically a way of specifying exactly which cat, whereas "kato qonaj muso" would specify a different cat which is doing or has done something to the mouse rather than the mouse having done something to it. Although it could happen, I'm not expecting to come across anyone using these exact words since I don't know of any way of expressing these exact meanings in any language other than Pont or Esper, but since I had mentioned them, I felt it only fair to give a little description of their meanings in order to highlight the use of the conjunction ending in forming conjunctions from arbitrary word stems. Note that the form of the conjunction ending is identical to the suffix "aj" which identifies a thing based on the word stem, such as "mandjajo" meaning "food" from the stem "mandj" of words such as "mandji" meaning "to eat". The logic behind this is that a conjunction ties two or more things together and makes them in some sense part of the same thing. For example, if for lunch I had an apple and a banana, then the apple and the banana are both part of lunch. If my options on a voting ballot are to vote "yes" or "no" then those choices are each part of my set of options. If the mouse ate the cheese, then the cheese is now part of the mouse, and if the cat ate the mouse, then the mouse is now part of the cat, and I can express this relational set of three elements in the Esper language with the conjunctional phrase "kato mandjaj muso mandjaj fromadjo" meaning something like "cat of which mouse is food of which cheese is food" which could mean that the cheese and mouse have already been eaten or that they simply have the potential to be, but regardless of the timing or actual actions involved the set of objects are considered in a sense to be a single thing being talked about, which is specigically a unique set with relation to the cat. Such a set may be thought of a plural by some people and thought of as singular by other people depending on the focus of such a distinction, but it is both in the sense that it is a single set but has a plural number of elements.

 

The phrase "vi estas bela" means "you are beautiful".

 

The phrase "ivi estas bela" also translates into English as "you are beautiful" but with "you" used in the plural sense specifically. In the English language and in the Esperanto language, there is no distinction between the singular and plural forms of the second person pronoun, although in Esperanto you would still be expected to use the plural form of the adjective to indicate that it describes a plural noun if you had meant it in the plural sense, but in the Esper language plural pronouns are all formed the same way and there are no exceptions, and number agreement in adjectives is not required. If you make a mistake, don't worry about it. This is just to give you less rules and no exceptions to remember, so that you can practice rather than struggling to recall the rules and exceptions. Trust what you learn with one word to work with another word and just use them the way you think is best. You can worry about learning exceptions when you move on to a language or dialect which has them.

 

Just as there are two ways of forming plurals in Esper, there are also two ways of specifying gender. In the Pont language, the prefix forms specify lexical differences while the suffix forms specify grammatical differences, and in the Esperanto language the masculine form is more often assumed than used, but in the Esper language you don't need to worry about such details. Simply use what seems to work best for you and consider a word with no gender specified to not have a gender implied either. My recommendation is to use the prefix forms for gender specific pronouns derived from gender neutral ones, if you want to speak or write of such things in gender specific terms, and for specifying required genders of animals of people or cases where a known gender is important to the intended communication. For example, if you specifically have a "femhundo" which is a "female dog" and you wish to make puppies, or "hundidoy" which is the plural of "dog offspring" derived using the "id" suffix before the "oy" plural noun ending, then not just any "hundo" will do the trick, because if it's not a "virhundo" then the "femhundo" is not likely to become "graveda" from their encounter, and not a single "hundido" is likely to be produced insuch a way.

 

Here's the first phrase I ever encountered in the Esperanto language: "La kato kuras". It means "the cat runs" or "the cat is running" as "kuras" is the present tense of "kur" meaning "run" and "kato" is the noun form of "kat" meaning "cat". If I wanted to say "the run cats" meaning that "run" is now the singular noun, and "cats" is now the first person singular present tense verb, I don't have to worry in Esper or in Esperanto or Pont about the verb being "first person" or "singular" as you do in most other languages, as that has no effect on it's form, but unlike in English, the order of the words will not tell you which one is the verb. I could say "la kuro katas" or "katas la kuro" and either way it means "the run cats" and not "the cat runs". You may notice that the definite article "la" stayed in front of the noun in both cases, so if you had left the "o" off of the word "kat" and the "as" off of the word "kur" it would still be possible to tell that it was meant as the noun in the sentence, especially since "katas" has the "as" ending to show that it is a present tense verb, so you know the verb has been accounted for. On the other hand, since there is no indefinite article in Esperanto, and people from different linguistic backgrounds are accustomed to different word order meanings, and other such factors, it is generally a good idea to supply as much useful information in each word as reasonably possible. Also notice that if I say simply "la kat kur" it could be taken to mean "the running cat" or "the cat runs" or "the catting run" or "the catly run" or any of several other such things, as only the article can be narrowed down to one specific part of speech meaning. 

 

So, what if I want to say "a kitten runs" with what I know so far? Remember the "id" suffix? I could say "katido kuras" or "kuras katido" and they both mean the same thing.  If you want, feel free to throw in the indefinite article "o" to form "o katido kuras" meaning "a kitten runs", but keep in mind that there is no indefinite article in the Esperanto language, and unlike in English the indefinite article in Esper does not specify that the noun is singular, so "o katidoy kuras" or "kuras o katidoy" simply translates into English as "kats run" since the English language does not use an indefinite article with a plural noun. In Esper, the indefinite article is optional, as the definite article technically also is in Esper and even in Esperanto, since Esperanto inventor LLZ himself recommended that people who were uncomfortable with the definite article due to their linguistic background could simply do without it until they became comfortable with it.

 

By the way, the "mal" prefix is used to form the opposite or more accurately the antonym of whatever a word would otherwise indicate. Keep in mind that this is not the "absence" of what the stem indicates, unless its absence and its opposite are the same thing. For example, while the absense of beauty may be just rather plain, but not really "ugly" which is its opposite, the absence of "light" (in the sense of illumination) would be "dark", and the absense of "bright" would also be "dark" but with a different meaning. In English it is hard to know which form of "dark" was meant unless the context gives more details. If you meant "light" in the sense of having an absense of weight, then the opposite would be "heavy" but there again it is difficult to tell without context which form of "light" is meant, and you may have noticed that in English the word for the opposite of something rarely resembles the word for what it is meant to be the opposite of. Another example is the word "amo" which means love, and it's antonym "malamo" which means hate. This is not the same thing as "neamo" which is basically "non-love".

 

The opposite of the Esper word stem "lum" is "mallum". Notice that the letter "l" happens to be twice in a row. Try to pronounce them both, so that you won't be misunderstood.

 

The opposite of "lumo" meaning "light" like from a lamp, is the word "mallumo" meaning "darkness". 

 

The opposite of "luma" meaning "light" as an adjective, is the word "malluma" meaning "dark". 

 

The opposite of "brila" meaning "bright", is the word "malbrila" meaning "dark" or literally "un-bright". 

 

The opposite of "peza" meaning "heavy" is the word "malpeza".

 

All words which have opposites can be used in this way with the "mal" prefix to form their opposites.

 

From a word stem, the simple future tense can be formed by attaching the "os" ending, or the simple past tenst can be formed by attaching the "is" ending.

 

The future tense phrase "la suno brilos" means "the sun will shine".

 

The present tense phrase "la suno brilas" means "the sun is shining" or simply "the sun shines".

 

The past tense phrase "la suno brilis" means "the sun shined".

 

Since verb conjugation is identical for every word stem that makes any sense to be able to conjugate as a verb, you can trust the form used for one verb to work with any other. For most languages you would be expected to memorize several basic conjugation forms for various groups of verbs and yet still have to memorize tables of conjugated forms for many verbs individually both to get used to which verbs belong to which groups and to learn the many exceptions. As in the Esperanto language, this is not the case with the Esper language. Simply learn how to form the tenses for one verb and apply what you have learned to any other verb. More generally in Esper, apply what you have learned of verb tenses to any word stem for which verb tenses would make any sense at all.

 

To ask a question, use a question word. In many languages the word order or tone of voice must be relied upon to identify a question, often indicated in text through nothing more than a trailing punctuation called a question mark. This can lead to misunderstandings when someone is learning a new language as the word order or vocal tonality may feel foreign to that person or may have already been learned to have different meanings than are common in the targeted language or dialect. Using a question word helps to remove the chances of such ambiguity or potential misunderstanding. For a "yes or no" type question, or one with a specific set of options specified, the word "tcu" meaning "weather" can be placed at the beginning to alert the reader or listener of a question being postulated. This is similar to the leading inverted question mark used in some languages, except that it is actually pronounced rather than merely written.

 

So if you want to ask "Do you understand me?" the question could be postulated as "Tcu vi komprenas qon mi?"

 

Did you recognize the preposition "qon" used there? I mentioned it earlier as Esper's regularized way of expressing the accusative case. Although there is nothing stopping the Esperanto language from adapting this method as an alternative to the "n" ending, using the current method in Esperanto of indicating the accccusative case, the word "qon" would have been left out and the word "mi" would have been changed to "min" to indicate that it is being used as an accusative case pronoun. This process of attaching an "n" on the end of the word is used in Esperanto on nouns and the adjectives which modify them as well, and if you want to use it instead of the preposition "qon" there's nothing wrong with that, but I would recommend you avoid using both methods at once, and it's probably easier for most people to stick with the preposition until they feel comfortable enough with the language to more easily deal with the other form without it getting in the way of their overall progress.

 

So called intransitive verbs differ from transitive verbs in whether or not they take an object. The object of a transitive verb may be either expressed or implied. Note that in the Esperanto language the object of a transitive verb is traditionally indicated by the ending "n" added to the end of a noun and any adjectives which modify it. However, other verb cases are expressed through the use of prepositions, and there is no rule stating that the transitive case can not be formed in this way, so while you may choose to use the accusative case ending in Esper as in Esperanto, in order to avoid having to practice one way of forming one case and a different way of forming every single other case, the preposition "qon" can be used to indicate the accusative case in the Esper language.

 

By the way, you may have noticed the posessive ending "es" on a few example words by now. In the Esperanto language this ending, at least at the time of this writing, only applies to a select few words to indicate the possessive case, with pronouns being given the adjective ending to indicate the related "genitive" case, and all other possessive cases being indicated by the preposition "de" meaning "of" which is also supported in Esper. However, the Esper language allows the use of the possessive ending "es" on any word that a possessive case could make sense for. In order to keep proper names recognizable when forming the possessive case, you may wish to take advantage of an Esper language feature which allows you to separate parts of a word with an apostrophe character. This is actually something you can use for any word at any time, for example to make the word's stem easier to spot, and it is not restricted to use with the possessive case ending but rather can be used with any affixes or endings or even between roots of a compound stem. If a word stem from a different language or a different spelling method is used, you should always precede the stem with a hyphen and follow it with an apostrophe. That way it can easily be recognized as something that may need to be sounded out differently or understood in a different way than one might otherwise expect.

 

"-Donald'es ekzemplo" = "Donald's example"

 

A suffix can be attached to the end of a word stem to modify or narrow down its meaning. 

 

"domo" = "house"

"dometo" = hut

"domego" = castle

"domatco" = shack

 

"instruo" = "instruction"

"instruisto" = "teacher"

 

Some suffixes in the Esperanto language can also be used as word stems because they either started out with that capability or have gained it in time through usage and generalization. In the Esper language of course you can feel free to experiment with such things quite freely to make the learning process more enjoyable and more productive. To help you get started learning how to diversify the forms of a word with suffixes and equate their meanings to particular concepts, here are a few common suffixes with word endings attached to them forming words with specific grammatical roles, along with approximate English interpretations.

 

aja = thingy (adj)

aje = thingly

ajo = a thing

ada = continual, ongoing

ade = continually

adi = to last

ado = continuation, continuance

adu = should last

ayaw = ouch

ayi = to ouch

ana = memberral

ane = memberrally

ani = to member

ano = a member

anu = should member

ara = group (adj)

are = grouply

ari = to group

aro = a bunch, group, array

aru = should group

etsa = quality (adj)

etse = qualitatively 

etso = a characteristic, a quality

eyi = to place

eyo = a place

eyu = should place

era = atomic, particulate, elemental

ere = elementally, bit by bit, in tiny increments, by the smallest amount

eri = to disintegrate, to atomize

ero = a unit

estre = leadinglly

estri = to head up

estro = a boss, leader

estru = should head up, should be in charge

ida = offspringal, childish

ide = like a son or daughter, like an offspring (adv)

ido = an offspring

idu = should baby

ile = as a tool, like a tool (adv)

ilo = a tool

ilu = should tool (v)

ina = feminine, female (adj)

ine = femininely

ino = a woman, a female

inu = should be female, should act female, should become female

inga = sockettal, sheath like (adj)

inge = sockettally

ingi = to sheath

ingo = a holder, a socket

isma = having to do with doctrine, orthodox (adj)

isme = orthodoxically

ismo = doctrine, a way of life, a way of doing

ismu = should indoctrinate, should act according to doctrine

ista = professional (adj)

iste = professionally, as a hobby

isti = to be a professional

isto = a professional, a hobbyist 

istu = should be a professional, should take seriously

itca = masculine, male (adj)

itce = masculinely

itco = a man, a male

itcu = should be male, should act male, should become male

uya = containing (adj)

uye = containingly

uyo = a container

ula = personnal

ule = personnally

uli = to person

ulo = a gal, a guy, dude, person (n)

ulu = should station someone, should person, should people, should occpuy, populate

 

Don't count on this working with all affixes or between prefixes and suffixes as there is no rule defining all prefixes, suffixes, and words stems as interchangeable. It just happens to be the case that people who learn a specific meaning for a particular sequence of letters or sounds have a tendency to think of that meaning as applicable in other situations. For example, having learned the meaning of the suffix "ul" and no word stem meaning for the same thing, it makes sense that many people who did not know a word stem for that concept have tried using it and as such it has become common usage. However, using a prefix which you've learned as if it were a suffix or using a suffix which you've learned as if it were a prefix may turn out to be completely misunderstood, which can be even worse than not understood at all. 

 

Suffixes tend to be only one syllable long, starting with a vowel and ending with a consonant or a consonant blend and this is not by accident although it is not strictly required. This is what allows you to be able to attach more than one of them to a word stem without making the resulting word unreasonably long. 

 

A combination of suffixes may be thought of as a single compound suffix, where each suffix modifies to suffix or compound suffix before it. For example, from the noun "domo" meaning "house" we can form "dometo" roughly meaning "hut" and "domego" roughly meaning "castle" as the suffix "et" indicates diminutive size or intensity while the suffix "eg" indicates extreme size or intensity, so "dometego" would be an "extremely small house" such as a doll house, while "domegeto" would be something like a little castle or a "slightly big house". Note that I could just as easily translate "domegeto" to mean a "slightly extreme house" which still gives the general idea of something like a small castel, and I could translate "dometego" to mean an "extremely slight house" which is a more accurate literal translation but perhaps a little less natural sounding to an English speaker and still expressing the same basic concept. "eget" and "eteg" are therefore not a simple suffixs but rather compound suffixes formed by modifying one suffex through the attachment of another to the end of it. Therefore just as the word stem "et" which is derived from the suffix "et" can be used to form the adjective "eta" meaning "slight" or "small" and the adverb "ete" meaning "slightly", the suffix "eg" can be inserted into such words to form "etega" meaning "extremely small" or "extreme slight", and "etege" meaning "extremely slightly" such as may be used to describe something having moved barely detectable amount.

 

Prefixes may or may not start with consonant and may or may not end in a consonant, but tend to have only a single vowel and therefore also be only one syllable in length. 

 

Technically there is no exact distinction between a prefix and a simple word stem in Esper, other than in the sense of how it is used. If a word stem is used as a prefix, then it's a prefix. However, it may be helpful to identify some word stems as prefix in order to point out that they have frequently been found useful in that capacity.

 

Unlike the case with suffixes, thinking of two or more prefixes joined together as a compound prefix is generally not a good idea. The major difference here is that the modification is done by what comes earlier and what comes later is what gets modified, up to the end of the word stem to which the prefixes are attached. For example, "lito" is a "bed" and "tuko" is a section of cloth, but if I combine those two word stems into "tuklito" the result is a bed made of a section of cloth, while "littuko" or the more common form "litotuko" is a bed cloth, or litterally a section of cloth for use on a bed. If I then attach to one of those compound stems the prefix "pra" roughly meaning "ancient" or more precisely meaning of a distant time or relation, I would get "pralitotuko" roughly meaning an ancient bed-cloth, or "pratuklito" roughly meaning an ancient bed made of cloth, or more directly translted "a bed made of cloth, which is of a distant time or relation". In other words, the whole thing up to the end of the stem is modified, and the end of the stem defines the base meaning. Attaching yet another prefix to the start of such a word would not modify just the already attached prefix, but the whole prefix and stem combination. So for example, "fi" meaning "shameful" or "shamefully" can be attached to "pratuklito" forming "fipratuklito" which would be a word for a "shameful, ancient, bed made of cloth" rather than a "shamefully ancient, bed made of cloth".

 

While there is no rule in the Esper language saying a prefix or suffix must be only one syllable long, it is worth noting that there are plenty of one syllable suffixes to choose from and a two syllable suffix meant not to be a composite of two single syllable suffixes might easily turn out to match the exact form on a compound suffix quite by accident.

 

Prefixes are much more uncommon in Esper, and for example if one wished to use the prefix "anti" instead of the prefix "mal" to form the opposite of something, the choice is not likely to result in misunderstandings.

 

The prefix "mal" comes unchanged from the Esperanto language as by far its most used and most useful prefix, being used to form the opposite of whatever it's attached to, not counting any suffixes or word endings in this opposite forming process. For example, if "bela" is translated as "beautiful" then "belega" could be translated as "extremely beautiful" or "exquisite", but "malbelega" would mean "extremely ugly" since it would be the extreme of "malbela" which is the opposite of beautiful or basically "ugly". It would not mean the opposite of exquisite, whatever that is, which could be expressed directly as "male belega" with the adverb "male" meaning "oppositely" used to modify the whole word "belega". In most cases this distinction will probably make no significant difference, but being aware of its existence may help you to avoid the potential for misunderstandings in some rare cases.

 

Other single syllable prefixes which may come in handy are introduced one at a time in the next few paragraphs. Each of these can be used to multiply the number of useful words you can get out of a finite list of word stems.

 

 

The prefix "ge" indicates "of distributed genders" or "intentionally unspecified gender" which in any situation where one gender may be assumed, favored, oppressed, or otherwise treated differently by default, could be used as a way of clarifying that the gender is not important. For example, in traditional Esperanto many words for family relations have been treated as ambiguously male or gender unspecified, and the "ge" prefix has been used to mean "of both genders taken together" which didn't quite cover the case of wanting to express a simple concept like "parent" since saying "gepatro" basically labeled the parent as a hermaphrodite, but over the years it has become acceptable to think of "gepatro" in the Esperanto language as a parent of unspecified gender rather than a parent of both genders, and while the shift is being made toward "patro" meaning "parent" as it does in Esper or Pont, that shift is not complete at the time of this writing and some people may still make the assumption that it is meant as "father" rather than "parent". In such a context, using the term "gepatro" would stress the fact that the gender of the parent is not meant to be assumed. The related word stem "ge" may be used to form words as well, such as the adjective "gea" meaning "male and female" or "of distributed genders" or "without gender bias".

 

The prefix "bo" indicates "related through marriage" or "according to the law" or "by the rules" as in "bopatro" meaning "parent in law" or "bopatritco" meaning "father in law" or literally "masculine parent in law". This is of course particularly useful in forming descriptive terms for many different family relations, even to a level of detail you may find a bit extreme, but you always have the option of NOT taking advantage of such linguistic flexability. It's there in case you need it, or choose to use it, or need to understand a message containing it. For example, from the word "kuzo" meaning "cousin" we can get "bokuzo" meaning "cousin in law" or "cousin through marriage" or in other words meaning someone married to a cousin of a specified person. From that we can get "prabokuzo" meaning someone married to a distant cousin of a specified person, or "bokuzino" meaning a female cousin in law, or "bokuzitco" meaning a male cousin in law, or "gebokuzo" meaning something like "one who is married to the specified person's cousin of either or both genders" to clarify that the gender of the cousin being talked about is meant not to be assumed. Another example can be derived from the word "prava" meaning "true" or "right" in the sense of not mistaken or not in error, which can be prefixed with "bo" to form "boprava" meaning "technically true", and similarly the word "djusta" meaning "correct" or "accurate" can be converted into "bodjusta" meaning "technically accurate" or "correct according to the rules". The prefix "bo" also has a matching word stem, which can be used to form words such a "boa" which can be used to mean "related by marriage" or the adverb "boe" roughly meaning "in a legal sense" or "technically".

 

The prefix "eks" causes the formed word stem to indicate something that WAS but is NO LONGER what would otherwise have been indicated by the word stem. For example, "edzo" is a spouse, and "eksedzo" is an ex-spouse. The related adjective "eksa" can be translated as "former".

 

The prefix "fuc" indicates a messed up version of what the word stem would otherwise indicate. For example, a "fako" is a "department" and a "fucfako" is a messed up department, or in other words one that is doing too many things wrong or has too many things wrong with it. Likewise, the plural noun "planoy" means "plans" and "fucplanoy" is plans which are messed up or no good. The word stem "fuc" means roughly the same thing as the prefix and can be used as a raw word stem or with fully qualified with word endings and affixes. For example, "fuca" means roughly "messed up" and the interjection "fucaw" can be used to indicate frustration with how messed up a situation is.

 

The prefix "dik" basically means "thick" or "fat". This is a good example of the difference between using an affix to modify a word and using another word to indicate the modification. While the word stem "dik" is not defined specifically as any different than the prefix, through common usage in Esperanto and the fact that a constructed word actually is treated as a new word in some sense while a pair of words is not, it is interesting to note that "dika fingro" simply means "think finger" or "fat finger" while "dikfingro" actually has become the common word for "thumb" regardless of whether or not the particular thumb is in fact any thicker than any other finger.

 

The basic number names in Esper match those in Esperanto, with two exceptions. The number name for "one" in Esper is "on" which matches the impersonal pronoun "oni", rather than "unu" as in Esperanto, and the number name for "zero" is "nul" rather than "nulo". This makes each of the single digit numbers only one syllable long. 

 

"nul" means "zero".

 

"on" means "one".

 

"du" means "two".

 

"tri" means "three".

 

"kvar" means "four".

 

"kvin" means "five".

 

"ses" means "six".

 

"sep" means "seven".

 

"ok" means "eight".

 

"naw" means "nine".

 

"dek" means "ten".

 

For larger number names, the spoken Esperanto number names can simply be transliterated into Esper', but the following Esper' number names are recommended.

 

"hek" means "hundred".

 

"kil" means "thousand".

 

"meg" means "million".

 

"gig" means "billion" or "thousand million".

 

"ter" means "trillion" or "million million".

 

Multiple digit numbers have number names which agree with the order of the digits, with the words "dek" or "hek" prefixed as needed by the word for any single digit greater than one.

 

"dek on" means "eleven"

 

"dek du" means "twelve"

 

"dudek" means "twenty"

 

"dudek on" means "twenty-one".

 

"dudek du" means "twenty-two".

 

"hek on" means "one hundred one"

 

"hek dek du" means "one hundred twelve"

 

"duhek" means "two hundred"

 

"duhek on" means "two hundred one".

 

"trihek kvardek ses" means "three hundred forty-six".

 

"kvin kil sepdek" means "five thousand seventy".

 

"naw kil okhek" means "nine thousand eight hundred".

 

As in Esperanto, fraction names can also be used as prefixes, but in the Esper language the prefix "div" is used to form such fractions, in order to avoid confusion between the "on" suffix traditionally used in Esperanto for the same purpose and the "on" ending for accusative nouns, since role endings are optional in Esper. This use of the "div" prefix to form fraction words works much like a division sign in that it can be placed as a word or as a prefix, between the numerator and denominator of any fraction name.  

 

The word stem or prefix "div" indicates division, and when used as a prefix of preposition it indicates division by what follows it.  

 

For example, "du divwi tri" or "du divaj tri" or "du divtri" means "two thirds" or "two divided by three".

 

Likewise, "kvar divwi kvin" or "kvar divaj kvin" or "kvar divkvin" means "four fifths" or "four divided by five".

 

The main difference between a preposition and a conjunction is that a conjunction joins two or more elements forming a combined element which expresses a relation between the original separate items, while a preposition encapsulates an expressed or implied element which comes after it into a sort of container so that it can be be modified or effected by another expressed or implied element which generally comes before the preposition.

 

The conjunction form is therefore preferred for fractions over the preposition form, unless there is no numerator or an implied rather than expressed numerator of one, because the resulting expression can be treated as a single compound grammatical entity. If you're not sure, simply use the word stem form or the prefix form, but keep in mind that using a specific grammatical form of a word rather than its unqualified stem may help to make the results less ambiguous.

 

The preposition form can be used as a shortcut for the Esperanto phrase "dividita per". For example, "ili estis divwi dudek" means literally "they were divided by twenty".

 

Using the prefixed form of fraction name as a prefix itself, "divdufratitco" means "half brother" and a "divduplano" is a "half plan". This form should be thought of as a set of related multi syllable prefixes formed by prefixing simple number names with "div", rather than as compound prefixes which would violate the way prefixes are used in Esper. Note that suffixed number prefixes used in the same way in Esperanto also violate the way prefixes are applied unless thought of as related rather than composite, but the idea behind using the "div" prefix was not simply to trade one troublesome set of prefixes for another. By avoiding using "on" as a suffix for fraction names is allowed the number for "one" to be changed to the single syllable "on" and simultaneously eliminates the potential conflict with the singluar accusative noun ending which may still be used in Pont as an alternative to using the preposition "qon" to indicate the accusative case.

 

Some words in English function in multiple grammatical roles without changing forms. Many function in multiple roles with form changes and many are unchanging particles which are very inflexible in their usage. This situation tends to train people not to trust being able to use a known word in a new grammatical role even if there is a known transformation which would adapt most words to fit such a role. In the Esper language you can feel free to apply such known transformations to know words so that they can function in new grammatical roles. For example, the word stem "kun" roughly means "together" or "with". Using it without a role ending can leave its grammatical function ambiguous and potentially lead to misinterpretation of the word order used. Here are some examples with full grammatical qualification.

 

"kune vi kay mi" = together you and I

 

"vi kunaj mi" = you with me

 

Keep in mind that I could have translated "mi" as "I" or as "me" in either case. The meaning is the same even though the English representation of that meaning is different depending on how it is to be used grammatically. This is the same concept as the different forms of the same word in Esper, except that in Esper the word root always retains its form and functions as a stem from which to build the various grammatical forms of the word. In the case of the single syllable personal pronouns, the standard form of the word is the word stem itself. In the case of the conjunction "kunaj" and the adverb "kune" you may have observed that the stem of the word is simply "kun" which by itself does not specify its intended grammatical usage.

 

Notice that without the part of speech identified by a role ending the same meaning can be expressed but a bit more ambiguously.

 

"kun vi kay mi" = together you and I

 

"vi kun mi" = you with me

 

Try to get into the habit of attempting to identify the word stem in any new Esper word you encounter.

 

Here are some fully qualified conjunctions. Some of these may not have direct translations into English, but I'm hoping that anyone reading this will understand by this point that being about to translate a specific thought or concept into a limited language is not as important as having the ability to express it in the first place. I'll include approximate English translations, but keep in mind that the grammatical usage of a conjunction is to express the relation between what comes before it and what comes after it.

 

"ambaj" = both, taken as a pair with

 

Example: "kato ambaj hundo" = both cat and dog

 

ankoraj = still, remains

 

Example: "knabo ankoraj homo" = child remains human

 

awaj = either, or, xor, exclusive or 

 

Example: "knabitco awaj knabino" = boy or girl

 

estaj = being

 

Example: "hundo estaj hundido" = dog being puppy

 

kawaj = and/or, inclusive or

 

Example: "knabino kawaj knabitco" = girl or boy or both

 

kayaj = and 

 

Example: "knabitco kayaj knabino" = boy and girl

 

keaj = that

 

Example: "mi deziris ke mi povus" = "I wished that I could"

 

Note that the English word "that" has many grammatical uses and at least a few similar but not identical meanings. As such, other words and other forms of the same word may also translate into the word "that" depending on the context. In particular, certain words with the proform stem "ti".

 

Here are some word stems with of more words which may sometimes be used as conjunctions, shown here without the conjunction ending but with translations that may make sense in some cases where they are meant as conjunctions.

 

kial = why

 

kiam = when

 

kiey = where

 

kiel = how, by what means

 

kontr = versus

 

kun = with

 

kvankam = although

 

kvazaw = as if

 

malgr = yet, notwithstanding, in spite of

 

minus = minus

 

ne = no, not 

 

nek = neither, nor, and also not 

 

ol = than

 

pley = most 

 

pli = more 

 

plus = plus

 

por = for 

 

se = if

 

sed = but 

 

tamen = yet

 

tcar = because

 

tcu = whether 

 

tial = therefore, so

 

tio = that

 

yes = yes

 

Other grammatical uses of the same word stem may often make sense translated the same way, but not always. The idea is not to learn each translation of each grammatical usage but rather to learn to understand the word stems and how they can be used in various grammatical roles and with various affixes and ending role markers.

 

I said in the forward that I would introduce you to a side benefit. It is based on a number memorization system I made up years ago for use with the sounds of the Spanish language and adapted to work with English as well, although in each case there were certain problem areas to deal with. In the case of the Esper language those problem areas are eliminated.

 

In the Esper alphabet, there are a total of five vowels, fifteen sustainable consonants, and six unsustainable consonants. The letter "r" may be unsustainable in some accents which might only use a "tapped" or "trilled" sound for the letter "r", but sustainable forms exist and so it is considered one of the sustainable consonants.

 

What I am about to teach you is not a number naming system, but rather a way of encoding digits into vowels with various leading consonants and decoding vowels with various leading consonants into digits. This is not needed to use the Esper language, but can be used to help you memorize numbers, and may also be helpful in using numbers to recall words, although this may be somewhat less effective since the same number may encode into any of several words. In this sense, it can be considered a form of word organizing system that gives each word a unique number but not each number a unique word, so that words with the same number could theoretically be learned in groups. At the time of this writing, this has not yet been attempted.

 

If the vowel is not preceded by any of the unsustainable consonants, then it would decode into one of the following five digit values:

 

a -> 0

e -> 2

i -> 4

o -> 6

u -> 8

 

If any of the consonants preceding a specific vowel is an unsustainable consonant, then the vowel would be numerically decoded with the same value as before, plus one, to form an odd numbered digit. 

 

For example:

 

ba -> 1, da -> 1, ga -> 1, ka -> 1, pa -> 1, ta -> 1 

be -> 3, de -> 3, ge -> 3, ke -> 3, pe -> 3, te -> 3 

bi -> 5, di -> 5, gi -> 5, ki -> 5, pi -> 5, ti -> 5 

bo -> 7, do -> 7, go -> 7, ko -> 7, po -> 7, to -> 7 

bu -> 9, du -> 9, gu -> 9, ku -> 9, pu -> 9, tu -> 9 

 

If the vowel is preceded by more than one consonant or by no consonant at all, the rule is simply that it decodes to its higher value only if one ormore of the consonants preceding it as an unsustainable consonant.

 

I will demonstrate this encoding here with no attempt to use actual words but rather a sampling of some possible syllables and two syllable combinations. Note that when an unsustainable consonant falls on the end of a syllable it has no effect on the numeric encoding of that syllable but rather effects digit encoding of the syllable which follows it, if any. In a phrase used for memorizing a string of digits, this would extend to any unsustainable consonant on the end of a word effecting the digit encoding for the first syllable of the following word, up to the end of the phrase.

 

a -> 0, e -> 2, i -> 4, o -> 6, u -> 8

ca -> 0, fe -> 2, hi -> 4, jo -> 6, lu -> 8 

ma -> 0, ne -> 2, qi -> 4, ro -> 6, su -> 8 

va -> 0, we -> 2, xi -> 4, yo -> 6, zu -> 8 

tca -> 1, ofte -> 63, adhi -> 05, djo -> 7, plu -> 9 

impa -> 41, unte -> 83, otqi -> 65, metro -> 27, tsu -> 9 

akva -> 01, fitwe -> 43, zipxi -> 45, pyo -> 7, edza -> 29 

ba ->1, de -> 3, gi -> 5, ko -> 7, pu -> 9, ta -> 1

 

Using this method, imperative verbs can be found to encode numbers ending in "8" or "9", infinitive verbs and pronouns can be found to encode numbers ending in "4" or "5", adjectives can be found to encode numbers ending in "0" or "1", nouns can be found to encode numbers ending in "6" or "7", and regularly formed adverbs can be found to encode numbers ending in "2" or "3". Any Esper prhase may be decoded into a numeric sequence in this fashion, and the flexible word order and ability to leave off a word's role ending should allow just about any numeric sequence to be encoded into something memorable, which may be decoded at a later date to recall the original sequence of digits.

 

Here are some short words encoded into numbers. Some numbers have more than one word listed for the same number. Note that "00" is not the same as "0" and "01" is not the same as "1" since the leading zero represents a syllable with "a" as the vowel and no unsustainable consonants before it. These are actual Esper words, but don't worry if you don't know or understand them all at this time. I'm just listing them here as a concrete example of how the encoding and decoding I was just talking about works. It would be good practice though to try making sense of as many of the words as you can, but keep in mind that you're more likely to have it right if you recognize the stem of a word and any affix or role ending than if you just guess based on what word it reminds you of, although that can work sometimes also.

 

0 <- aq, aw, ha, la, mal, naw, ya

 

0' <- amb, atc, malgr, mandj

 

1 <- kaw, kay, kvar, pra, tcar, tcaw

 

1' <- kat

 

2 <- ne, se, ses, yes

 

2' <- eg, eks, est, et, nek, sed, sep

 

3 <- de, ge, ke, pley

 

3' <- dek, kelk, hek

 

4 <- ci, fi, hi, i, li, mi, kil, min, ni, si, vi

 

5 <- di, div, dji, djis, ki, kvin, pli, zi, ti, tri

 

5' <- dik

 

6 <- ho, o, ol, on, qon

 

6' <- ok

 

7 <- bo, por

 

7' <- kontr

 

8 <- fuc, hu, lum, nu, nul, ul

 

9 <- du, kun, kur, plus, tcu

 

00 <- aja, ana, ara, awaj, ayaw, havas, mala

 

01 <- ada, ambaj, mandjaj

 

02 <- aje, ane, are, male

 

03 <- ade

 

03' <- nawdek, nawhek

 

04 <- ali, ani, ari, ayi, ayni

 

04' <- amik

 

05 <- adi, anti, mandji

 

06 <- ajo, amo, ano, aro

 

07 <- ado, ankor, fako

 

08 <- anu, aru, mallum

 

09 <- adu

 

10 <- damnaw, kawaj, kayaj, kvazaw, prava

 

11 <- dankaw, katas, kvankam

 

12 <- tamen

 

13' <- kvardek, kvarhek

 

14 <- kaci

 

15 <- platci

 

16 <- planoy

 

17 <- kato, patro, patroy

 

18 <- kacu

 

19 <- batu

 

20 <- era

 

21 <- eksa, estaj, estas, eta, etsa

 

22 <- ere

 

23 <- esper, estre, ete, etse

 

23' <- eget, eteg, sepdek, sephek, sesdek, seshek

 

24 <- eri, eyi, neci, nehi, nei, neli, nemi, neni, nesi, nevi

 

24' <- revid

 

25 <- estri, nedi, nedji, neki, nezi, neti

 

26 <- ero, eyo, neon

 

27 <- edzo, estro, etso

 

28 <- eyu

 

29 <- estru

 

30 <- bela, belan, belay, gea, keaj, peza

 

31 <- kelka, kelkay

 

32 <- teme

 

33 <- plede

 

34 <- pezi

 

35 <- tedi

 

36 <- belo

 

37 <- kelkoy

 

38 <- kreu

 

39 <- peku

 

40 <- cia, ciaj, cial, ciam, ciay, hia, hiaj, hial, hiam, hiay, ia, iaj, ial, iam, iay, ina, isma, lia, liaj, lial, liam, liay, mia, miaj, mial, miam, miay, nia, niaj, nial, niam, niay, sia, siaj, sial, siam, siay, via, viaj, vial, viam, viay

 

41 <- ida, inga, ista, itca

 

42 <- cie, ciel, cien, cies, ciey, hie, hiel, hien, hies, hiey, ie, iel, ien, ies, iey, ile, ine, isme, lie, liel, lien, lies, liey, mie, miel, mien, mies, miey, nie, niel, nien, nies, niey, sie, siel, sien, sies, siey, vie, viel, vien, vies, viey

 

43 <- ide, inge, iste, itce

 

44 <- ici, ihi, ii, ili, imi, ini, isi, ivi

 

45 <- idi, idji, iki, ingi, isti, izi, iti

 

46 <- cio, ciom, cioy, hio, hiom, hioy, ilo, ino, io, iom, ion, ioy, ismo, lio, liom, lioy, mio, miom, mioy, nio, niom, nioy, sio, siom, sioy, vio, viom, vioy

 

47 <- fingro, ido, ingo, isto, itco, lito

 

48 <- ciul, hiul, ilu, inu, ismu, iul, liul, minus, miul, niul, siul, viul

 

49 <- idu, istu, itcu

 

50 <- brila, brilas, dia, diaj, dial, diam, diay, divaj, divnaw, djia, djiaj, djial, djiam, djiay, djisaw, kia, kiaj, kial, kiam, kiay, zia, ziaj, zial, ziam, ziay, tia, tiaj, tial, tiam, tiay

 

51 <- dika, divkvar

 

52 <- die, diel, dien, dies, diey, divses, djie, djiel, djien, djies, djiey, kie, kiel, kien, kies, kiey, zie, ziel, zien, zies, ziey, tie, tiel, tien, ties, tiey

 

52' <- divsep

 

53' <- divdek, divhek, kvindek, kvinhek, tridek, trihek

 

54 <- brilis, divkil

 

55 <- divkvin, divtri, kiti, ji

 

56 <- brilos, dio, diom, dioy, djio, djiom, djioy, kio, kiom, kioy, zio, ziom, zioy, tio, tiom, tioy

 

56' <- divok

 

57 <- pilko

 

58 <- diul, divwi, djiswi, djiul, kiul, ziul, tiul

 

59 <- divdu

 

60 <- ona, onaj, onal, onam, onay, qonaj

 

61 <- fota, hoka

 

62 <- hove, one, onel, onen, ones, oney

 

63 <- okey

 

63' <- okdek, okhek

 

64 <- oni

 

65 <- foti, hoki

 

66 <- oho, ono, onom, onoy

 

67 <- foto, hoko

 

68 <- onul, qonwi

 

69 <- voku, fotu, hoku

 

70 <- boa

 

71 <- bloka, droga

 

72 <- boe

 

73 <- bloke, droge

 

74 <- bone, dome, glore, kore, prove

 

75 <- bloki, drogi

 

76 <- domo

 

77 <- bloko, drogo

 

78 <- povus

 

79 <- bloku, drogu

 

80 <- fuca, fucaw, huaj, hura, luma, ula, uya

 

81 <- luda, lukra, luksa, lupa, suda, suka, supra, nuba, nuda, rudja

 

82 <- ule, uye

 

83 <- lude, lukre, lukse, lupe, sude, suke, supre, nube, nude, rudje

 

84 <- uli

 

85 <- ludi, luksi, suki, supri, nubi

 

86 <- lumo, muso, suno, ulo, uyo

 

87 <- hundo

 

88 <- huwi, ulu

 

89 <- ludu, suku, supru

 

90 <- kunaj, kuras

 

91 <- djusta

 

92 <- kune

 

93' <- dudek, duhek

 

94 <- brui, glui

 

95 <- dubi, gluti, krudi, kupli, putri, plugi

 

96 <- kuro, kuzo

 

97 <- tuko, dubo, gluto, krudo, kuplo, putro, plugo

 

98 <- kuru

 

99 <- glutu, krudu, kuplu, putru, plugu, dubu, tutu

 

As in the Esperanto language, Esper allows very expressive participles to be formed from any verb. Not only can you indicate active or passive mood, but also past, present, or future, plus you can clarify whether the resulting participle is to be understood as a noun, an adjective, or an adverb. This is done with a set of suffixes specifically for forming participles. The active participle suffixes are "int" for the past tense, "ant" for the present tense, and "ont" for the future tense. The passive participle suffixes are "it" for the past tense, "at" for the present tense, and "ot" for the future tense.

 

A tree which will fall is a "falonta arbo". A tree which falls in the present is a "falanta arbo", and a tree which fell in the past is a "falinta arbo".

 

A tree which will be seen in the future is a "vidota arbo". A tree which is being seen in the present is a "vidata arbo", and a tree which was seen in the past is a "vidita arbo".

 

Many useful suffixes exist in the Esper language, most taken directly from spoken Esperanto. As with other features of the Esper language, you are encouraged to play with them and not to worry about any exceptions while you're learning how to use them.

 

Here are a few suffixes for you to practice word building with. I'll give an example for each one.

 

 -jy- = (diminutive contraction)

pajyo = mommy or daddy

 

 -tcy- = (masculine diminutive contraction)

patcyo = dad or daddy

 

 -ny- = (feminine diminutive contraction)

panyo = mom or mommy

 

 -ey- = (place)

lerneyo = school

 

 -il- = (tool)

komputilo = computer

 

 -in- = (feminine)

musino = she-mouse

 

 -itc- = (masculine)

musitco = he-mouse

 

 -ist- = (title for professional or hobbyist)

okulisto = oculist

 

 -aj- (thing or substance) 

pakajo = package

 

 -ebl- (able to be)

kompreneble = understandably

 

 -atc- = bad-

knabatco = bad child

 

 -ind- = -worth/worthy

dankinde = thank worthy

 

 -obl- = (multiplier)

trioblita = trippled

 

 -ul- = -person

bonulo = good person

 

Please, try applying a random suffix from the list I just gave you to each of the following words. I've placed an apostrophe before the role ending or verb conjugation ending on words which have them attached to their stems in order to make it easier for you to identify the stem of each word so that you can attach a suffix to it. Feel free to play with exchanging the role endings and conjugation endings between words as well. Some of the resulting words may seem senseless or fanciful, while others may strike you immediately as useful ideas to be able to communicate in a single word. Many may lack obvious translations into your first language. That's okay. Translate what you can just for the practice, but keep in mind that translations are rarely exact and it's better to understand the word in a way which makes sense from its parts than to try to make it fit the meaning of a more familiar word.

 

aw = or

edz'o = spouse

bon'a = good 

tcar = because

fil'o = son or daughter

fatsil'a = easy

tcu = whether

grand'a = big or large

de = of, from or by

kat'o = cat 

grav'a = important 

ebl'e = maybe

knab'o = child

yun'a = young 

yes = yes

libr'o = book 

kelk'a = few

kaj = and

padj'o = page 

mult'a = much or many 

kun = with

paper'o = paper

nov'a = new

patr'o = parent

sam'a = same 

ne = no

plum'o = pen 

varm'a = warm or hot

tre = very

sedj'o = chair

tabl'o = table 

blank'a = white 

blu'a = blue 

brun'a = brown

en = in

akv'o = water

flav'a = yellow

sur = on

tcokolad'o = chocolate

griz'a = gray

kaf'o = coffee

nigr'a = black

rudj'a = red

verd'a = green

ti'o = that

hier'aw = yesterday

hodi'aw = today

morg'aw = tomorrow

yar'o = year

am'i = to love

monat'o = month

awd'i = to hear

bonvol'e = please

semayn'o = week

awskult'i = to listen

rayt'i = to have the right

tag'o = day

bezon'i = to need

cat'i = to like

dezir'i = to want or desire

djis = until

don'i = to give

dir'i = to say

est'i = to be

bezon'i = to need

far'i = to do or make

hav'i = to have

kompren'i = to understand

ir'i = to go

labor'i = to work

sci'i = to know

leg'i = to read

lern'i = to learn

mandj'i = to eat 

ripet'u = repeat

parol'i = to speak

salut = hello

pov'i = to be able

pren'i = to take

skrib'i = to write

sid'i = to sit

star'i = to stand 

stud'i = to study

trink'i = to drink

ven'i = to come

vid'i = to see

vol'i = to want to

ir'is = went

 

Each word in the following list has a single suffix before its role ending. Can you figure out exactly which part of each word is the suffix?

 

edzitco = husband

edzino = wife 

filino = daughter 

filitco = son 

knabino = girl

knabitco = boy

patritco = father

patrino = mother 

mandjajo = food

vespermandjo = supper

dankinde = thank worthy

 

Here are a bunch of words translated from Esper to English. Try to pronounce each one and think about how each word is formed, such as whether or not you recognize any part of the word and how that part helps to shape any part of the word's meaning or how it could be used. Keep in mind that there may be another Esper words which would translate to the same English word as one of the ones in this list, but perhaps with a slightly different meaning or usage. Some of these words have already been covered. Some have not. See if you remember which ones you have seen before and whether or not the same translation was suggested. This exercise should help you get to know the language better.

 

djis = until 

djui = to enjoy 

jus = just 

cafo = sheep 

cviti = to perspire 

akvo = water 

al = to 

ankaw = also 

atleto = athlete 

Azio = Asia 

bani = to bathe

bona = good 

Bruselo

dantsi = to dance 

danki = to thank 

de = of

dek = 10

deka = 10th

dekstre = rightly or to the right 

dimantco = Sunday 

dormi = To sleep 

du = 2

dua = 2nd

Ewropo = Europe

edzino = wife 

edzo = spouse 

edzitco = husband 

el = out of 

en = in 

esperi = to hope 

esti = to be 

fatsile = easily 

familio = family 

farti = to fare 

filino = daughter 

filo = daughter or son 

filitco = son 

filozofo = philosopher 

frawlino = unmarried female

frawlo = unmarried person

frawlitco = unmarried male

fratino = sister 

frato = sibling 

fratitco = brother 

gasto = guest 

Grekio = Greece 

ho = oh 

hodiaw = today 

informi = to inform

intervyuo = interview 

iri = to go

Yapanio = Japan

Yapano = Japanese

yen = here is, here are, etc

yes = yes

yudji = to judge 

kay = and

kapo = head

katastrofo = catastrophe 

kiey = where

kiel = how; as

kio = what (thing)

kompreni = to understand

kovri = to cover

kuri = to run

kuseno = cushion

kvar = 4

kvara = 4th

kvin = 5

kvina = 5th

la = the

labori = to work

latsa = weary, tired

legi = to read

lito = bed

lundo = Monday

mano = hand

mi = I, me

mia = my

mondo = world

naw = 9

nawa = 9th

ne = no, not

ni = we, us

nia = our

nomo = name

nu = well, now

ok = 8

oka = 8th

patcyo = Dad

panyo = Mom

pasporto = passport

patrino = mother

patro = parent

patritco = father

por = for

radio = radio

rakonto = story 

raporti = to report

revido = a re-see

rigardi = to look at; deem, consider

sako = sack

saluto = hello or greetings

sapo = soap

sedjo = seat, chair

sed = but

sep = 7

sepa = 7th

servo = service 

ses = 6

sesa = 6th

sidi = to sit, be sitting

sinyorino = lady, Mrs

sinyoro = lady or gentleman, Mr or Mrs

sinyoritco = gentleman, Mr

skulpti = to sculpt, carve

soni = to sound 

strato = street

telefono = telephone

teruro = terror

tiey = there

tri = 3

tria = 3rd

tuko = cloth 

tuta = whole, entire

urbo = town, city

veni = to come

vi = you

via = your

 

Did you recognize any of those words from the number encodings? Did you learn any new word stems or new uses of word endings, or any new affixes? If you think about such things, you're bound to learn. How many of these words do you think you would recognize and understand if you saw them without translations next to them? Can you remember other words which translate to the same thing as any of these? Relax and take your time. Go back over any part of this at any time. When you're ready for some more, here's another list of words with translations.

 

vorto = word

volonte = willingly, gladly 

voyo = way, road, route

vera = true

vere = truly 

vero = truth

vazo = vase; vessel

Varsovio = Warsaw 

tro = too much

trankvila = quiet, calm, tranquil

tra = through

tondri = to thunder

tigro = tiger

teo = tea

surda = deaf

sur = upon, on

suno = sun

suko = juice; sap

sub = under

stranga = odd, strange, peculiar

soifi = to be thirsty

skribi = to write

silenti = to be silent

sertci = to look for, seek

sento = a feeling

sano = health

sako = sack

rompi = to break

respondi = to reply, answer

pro = on account of, owing to

preni = to take

Pollando = Poland  

politso = police

poco = pocket

pluvo = rain

plumo = pen

platci = to please, be pleasing

peti = to request, to ask for

perfekta = perfect

pagi = to pay

ordo = order, arrangement

orandjo = an orange

nova = new

zio = everything

tce = at

tcar = because

Tcino = Chinese 

Tcinio = China 

vidi = to see

vendredo = Friday

vendi = to sell 

veki = to arouse, wake up

trinki = to drink

tre = very

tio = that thing

teni = to hold, to keep, to grasp, to maintain

sveni = to faint, to swoon

sumo = sum, amount

stulta = stupid, silly

stelo = star

simpla = simple

sen = without

stsii = to know about, to have knowledge of

sabato = Saturday

rudja = red

resti = to remain, to stay

rapida = quick, rapid, fast

problemo = problem

pri = concerning, about

pomo = apple

pensi = to think

paroli = to speak, talk

parko = a park

pardoni = to forgive, to pardon

paci = to step, to stride

oni = one, people, they

ofte = often

nun = now

nul = 0

muzeo = museum

mineralo = mineral

memori = to remember

membro = member

mateno = morning

manko = defect

manki = to be lacking, missing

manka = defective

litero = letter of the alphabet

listo = list

lingvo = language

lerni = to learn

leono = lion

lampo = lamp

kulpa = guilty, at fault

krutco = jug

korbo = basket

kafo = coffee

ye = at 

ya = in fact, indeed

yam = already

internatsia = international

interesi = to interest

hotelo = hotel

helpi = to help

halti = to stop

gratuli = to congratulate

galerio = gallery 

fulmo = lightning

Frantsio = France  

for = away

filmo = film

elefanto = elephant

Egiptio 

etc = even, including

diligenta = diligent

detektivo = detective 

demandi = to ask

dank = thank

dandjera = dangerous  

tserta = certain, sure

brili = to shine

bleki = to bleat, to call or cry out, to make an animal noise

besto = animal, beast

balai = to sweep

balas = sweeps

balidji = to be swept

balidjos = will be swept

balidjis = was swept

arto = art

aktsepti = to accept; receive

afero = matter, affair, business, thing

afabla = kind, affable

awtobuso = bus

awskulti = to listen to

cteli = to steal

djoyi = to be glad, rejoice

multa = much; many

morti = to die

morgaw = tomorrow

mono = money

momento = moment

merkredo = Wednesday

matematiko = mathematics

mardo = Tuesday

mandji = to eat

lia = his or hers

lies = his or hers

li = he, him, her, she

kun = with

kosti = to cost

kolo = neck

kliento = client, customer

kil = thousand

kiu = who, which, what action, what imperative 

kioma = which number

kiom = how much

kia = what kind of

kara = dear

kalkuli = to calculate, reckon, count, compute

inteligenta = intelligent

ilia = their

ili = they, them

ilies = their

idioto = idiot 

ideo = idea

horo = hour

horlodjo = clock; watch

hieraw = yesterday

grava = important, serious

granda = big, large; great

funktsii = to function

forgesi = to forget

floro = flower

flava = yellow

fermi = to shut, to close

fermiti = to be closed

fali = to fall

fakturo = invoice 

ekzisti = to exist

ek = start

domo = house

do = therefore, then, so

diri = to say, tell

hek = hundred

brako = arm

bildo = picture

Belgio = Belgium  

bela = beautiful, fine

banano = banana

arbo = tree

aktsidento = accident, mishap

Afriko = Africa

absurda = absurd

abstrakta 

aw = or

jongli = to juggle 

jawdo = Thursday

djies = its

dji = it

djardeno = garden

tcu = whether, is it true

tceno = chain

tcarma = charming

 

If you have read through this entire lesson to this point, and have done the suggested exercises, then you should have a pretty good understanding of the Esper language by now. Your actual vocabulary depends more on practice than first time exposure, but if you have been analyzing each word, that should help as well. However, it is actually possible to understand more Esper words by this point than you have encountered, thanks to the ability to apply what you know of the forms of almost any word to almost any other word you encounter. Here are some more easy ones for you to practice on.

 

aero = air

awto = car

kial = why

kiam = when

kruro = leg

okulo = eye

orelo = ear

koro = heart

korpo = body

libro = book

plena = full

sadja = wise

ami = to love

ebria = drunk

fama = famous

herbo = grass

iulo = someone

amiko = friend

denove = again

doni = to give

havi = to have

kisi = to kiss

virino = woman

botelo = bottle

tamen = however

tiel = thus, so

trovi = to find

arbusto = shrub 

egale = equally

neniulo = nobody

doktoro = doctor

dorso = back (n)

grawli = grauxli

malsata = hungry

montri = to show

nur = only (adv)

prizono = prison

pruvi = to prove

akuzi = to accuse

butiko = shop (n)

kompati = to pity

mistero = mystery

viziti = to visit

vulkano = volcano

da = of (quantity)

drinki = to drink 

ziey = everywhere

freca = fresh, new

imagi = to imagine

spetsiala = special

kongreso = congress

preferi = to prefer

tiulo = that person

ankoraw = yet, still

biblioteko = library

grumbli = to grumble

post = after; behind

 

Okay. That should about do it. If you can understand most of the Esper words listed or explained so far, then you can probably easily figure out any of the Esperanto orthographies and understand the Esperanto language in spoken form, so I'm not going to just keep listing words for and translations because the list could go on forever and you're better off using the language as soon as you are able, than just reading word lists and trying to increase your vocabulary. In fact, it only takes a few words to begin actively using a language. So here's the last Esper word list I'm going to include here. I hope by the time you have gotten this far you'll be able to understand most of the words without even looking at their translations.

 

 

verci = to pour

viro = man; male

komentsi = to begin

ya = in fact, indeed

mantelo = coat; cloak

zie = every which way

bati = to beat, strike

komforta = comfortable

porti = to carry; wear

savi = to save, rescue

dolori = to be painful 

finfine = at long last 

varo = commodity, ware

prava = right, correct

inter = between, among

medikamento = medicine

kaci = to hide, conceal

meti = to put, to place

kredi = to believe, think

metio = handicraft, trade

coforo = driver, chauffeur

permesi = to permit, allow

okazi = to happen, to occur

antaw = before; in front of

fari = to fare, to do, make

babili = to chat, to chatter

pakajo = package (n), luggage

tsirkonstantso = circumstance

verdire = to tell truthfully 

sola = lone, alone, only, sole

tiu = that one, that imperative

atendi = to wait, await, expect

fotografajo = photograph-thing 

glaso = drinking-glass, tumbler

pretsize = precisely, accurately

cantso = luck, chance of success

noti = to note, to mark, to grade

neniu = no individual, no imperative

koni = to know, to be acquainted with

abomeni = to abhor, to loath, to hate 

kuratsi = to treat medically, to cure

iu = some individual, some imperative

malsanuleyo = unhealthy-person-place, hospital 

kay tiel plu = and likewise more, so furthermore, and so on 

 

Donald Arthur Kronos