Talk:Esperanto grammar

message: I removed "Esperanto has a regular grammar (sixteen rules without many exceptions)", since the sixteen rules are not even close to a description of the grammar. They're just a "quick reference sheet" for people already familiar with Latin-like languages (and aren't even all concerned with grammar). Brion VIBBER, Tuesday, April 30, 2002
:I'd be tempted to stick them in somewhere, for their historical value, adding some language about them being a traditional description that assumes a background in European languages.--Chris 23:52, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree. They're still how Eo is promoted, and they do a pretty good job too. kwami 00:02, 7 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Sixteen rules" 

message: These sentences: 
:"The alphabet includes new letters that are not found on any national keyboard, which is overcome by use of the h-system, x-system, or Unicode. (See Esperanto orthography.) Other languages, like Chinese, have similar problems." 
seem to be irrelevant in this article.  I reckon we should delete them. --Jim Henry | Talk 17:59, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: this belongs in Esperanto IMHO MarSch 13:46, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  Similar text was removed from Esperanto and put into Esperanto orthography instead when Esperanto was going through peer review.  I don't think we should add it back; it's trivia compared to most of the other material in the already fairly long (just under 32KB) Esperanto main article. --Jim Henry | Talk 17:45, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I noticed that this had been removed and then someone had put something similar back in. I tried cutting out the less relevant stuff, but you're right, it really doesn't belong here at all. However, I don't remember the orthography article mentioning that the reason for creating Esperanto-unique letters was to avoid problems with nationalism: the Esperanto alphabet is clearly based on Czech, but different enough to avoid appearances of bias. Whoever removes this paragraph might want to mention something like this in the orthography article. --kwami 23:44, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  Feel free to add material to Esperanto orthography explaining Zamenhof's reasons for creating unique letters, especially if you can find a source or quote to support it.  But it doesn't belong here. --Jim Henry | Talk 19:35, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)

text:  I wasn't aware there is also Esperanto orthography. It should clearly go there. MarSch 12:45, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Irrelevant bit about orthography 

message: I'm curious about the source of "Also to Zamenhof's regret, a limited number of adverbs do not end with -e." Is this supported? Zamenhof went out of his way to create an indefinite part-of-speech ending, -aŭ, for words like hodiaŭ that could be used as adverbs, prepositions, or nouns, and where most people would have difficulty deciding when to use -e. (Unlike adjectives, verbs, or nouns, adverbs aren't a semantically coherent part of speech.) If he did regret making this decision, he could always have started using the -e ending instead, as you will occasionally see: anstate, hodie, apene, etc. The fact that Zamenhof almost never bothered to do this makes me doubt that he regretted his decision. It's not like the choice of a particular ending is required by the grammar, unlike adjectival agreement. 
If this isn't supported in Zamenhof's writings, I think we should remove the "regret" wording and instead give the reasons for the "special" adverbs. --kwami 00:50, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  source for Zamenhof's "regret"? 

message: I'm editing the article, adding a few examples, and moving a couple sections (participles, grammar examples) to help it flow a bit better. 
One example I'd given earlier was the correlative neniel (nohow). Someone "corrected" this to "in no manner". However, no one ever says "in no manner"! "Nohow" has been used in formal writing for centuries. Here's an illustration from the OED: 
:1775 in Lett. Earl Malmesbury: A course of habitual improvement which nohow else is to be acquired. 
I put "nohow" back, along with the other colloquial translation, "no way". — kwami 23:13, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  editing 

message: I removed the introduction heading once. I see that it's back. Its existence makes it so the first thing you see is the ToC. Perhaps you have turned that off in your prefs or something, but if you take a look around the wiki, you will find that few other pages do it this way. -MarSch 12:48, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Okay, I'll take it out. The only reason I put it in was to make editing easier, but I see your point. kwami 20:52, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  introduction heading 

message: Are people comfortable with the example,
:la abeloj havas felon, sed ili ne taŭgas por karesi (Bees have fur, but are not good for petting) ?
Personally, I would say this in the singular in Esperanto, despite the English plural, but I'm on unsure footing here. 
Also, the article is getting a bit long. I suggest we move the sections on vocabulary and word formation (affixes) to a new article on Esperanto vocabulary. I'll do this if it seems alright with people, unless one of you would prefer to. --kwami 10:54, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  question, new article 

message: According to the article, -ent is a suffix.
AFAIK, prezident-o is an import from European languages, with a restricted meaning over that of prezid-ant-o.
They are closely related etymologically, but from a syntactic point of view they are unrelated.
There may have been proposals for -ent- (reference) but they have no currency.
If you need a tenseless active participle, you use -ant- or try another way.
:-ent is sometimes considered a sort of pseudo-suffix, but you're right. kwami 11:23, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I wondeer if this section should be deleted, except for the bit about -igx-, since it strikes me as being someone's idea of how Eo should develop in the future rather than Eo as it actually is. Likewise with the Conditional Participles. --Chris 21:11, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I've tried bringing in interesting tidbits, so this article won't just repeat what can easily be found elsewhere. I've seen conditional participles, though of course they're rare in the extreme. kwami 22:39, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Maybe there should be a section for experimentalist things like ri, -u-, and -ent-. Anyway, I don't think the article should suggest that they are part of normal Esperanto, in the way that bluas for estas blua is.--Chris 23:50, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Esper-ent-o 

message: Should ambaux be counted among numerals?
:No. It's a pronoun, and maybe a conjunction? Like other pronouns, it can be used substantively or attributively, and the attributive usage is something like attributive numerals, but no more than tiu etc. kwami 11:15, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ambaux 

message: In the title of the Kipling story, "would be" is not a conditional, but a slightly archaic past-tense form. You could say of Prince Charles, that he is "la viro kiu* estus rego" if the Queen dies or abdicates (or "la regunto" using a conditional participle). But Kipling was writing about a freebooting English soldier who tried, but failed, to become king of Kafiristan; so the translation would be something like "La viro kiu* volis esti rego". 
*or whatever, I'm pretty shaky on the Eo correlatives.--Chris 21:34, 4 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: All very true, though we could apply the title "The Man Who Would Be King" to Al Gore as a joke, and people would understand perfectly what we meant, so it can be understood as a conditional today. The participles are the one point of Eo grammar that English speakers really have a problem understanding, and I've tried to come up with something that would click in people's minds. That's why I've been fighting to keep this, even if it's not historically accurate. I'd fight for the Wile E. Coyote example too. The tree-chopping one is pretty boring, and I'd love to have something better. kwami 01:00, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I've always understood Kipling's "would" in the title as archaic "wanted to". --Thnidu (talk) 05:59, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  "The Man Who Would Be King" 

message: i've deleted Interrogatives in Esperanto and redirected here, in case anyone wants to rescue anything from it. kwami 06:15, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  deleted article 

message: I have notices the following inaccuracies in the chapter:
1. English less : least has nothing to do with ablaut sensu stricto (i.e. a Proto-Indo-European change of vowel quantity or quality). The difference between the two words is due to a Middle English shortening of the vowel before ss.
::But it is vocalic apophony. Can you come up with a better example for adjectives? kwami 06:27, 17 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: No, all IE languages retain ablaut to some extent. But this could be worded better. kwami 06:27, 17 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, most. There are few cases in which it is all. kwami 06:27, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

text: Thanks for the points, esp. the last. I'll try to get them in. kwami 06:20, 17 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Non-Indo-European aspects? 

message: If the historical nasality and proto-IE origin were made explicit, the Lithuanian 5th declension would be something like -, -s, -n, -ns, parallel to Eo -, -j, -n, -jn. Proto-Esperanto had -s for the plural, though I don't know what he did for the accusative. Anyway, the -jn is the one thing people keep insisting is "non-European", to justify their claim that Eo is not a (purely) European language. The Lith. morphology is a rather tenuous connection, but then the use of -jn to justify classifying Eo as non-IE is just as tenuous. kwami (talk) 22:45, 24 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Lith/IE parallel to -jn

message: I disagree with the statement that "pronouns also have a genitive case." The possessive pronouns (mia, via, etc.) are possessive adjectives, as evidenced by the fact that they are A) denoted by the adjectival suffix and B) fully declined as other adjectives are. The genitive in Esperanto is formed using the preposition "de" as stated in the Fundamento. Compare this to Latin, in which there is both a genitive and a series of possessive (adjectival) pronouns. "Eius" is not declined, as it is an independent noun, while "suus, -a, -um" is declined as an adjective. Esperanto's possessive adjectives are similar to the latter. There is, however, once genetive form created without use of a preposition: the correlatives ending in -es. Since these are undeclinable, freely associating nouns, they better fit the description "genitive." --N-k, 12:05, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Okay, you're right. kwami (talk) 17:53, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Possessive Pronouns 

message: There seems to be nothing in the article about subordinate and relative clauses. Such as
 When I wrote this sentence, I was using a laptop.
 The man that robbed the bank has been captured. 
 The thief the police captured escaped.
There is a section on conjunctions but this is not the same. 
For example, can I place the 'when' in the example after the word 'sentence'? Can I put 'that robbed the bank' before 'the man'? Interestingly no grammar that I can find online seems to indicate the order of such clauses relative to their head-word (The fact that this is not addressed generally seems to suggest that people are not aware that many languages don't work with the above word order (and Esperanto is likely not very easy for speakers of say Japanese where the head-first aspect of Esperanto is only easy for speakers of head-first languages). Macgroover (talk) 14:42, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: You're right, the order is fairly fixed. I'll expand the section when I get a chance. — kwami (talk) 15:08, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

text: Didn't get to that, but added a more general section on word order which should answer your question. The short answer is 'no'. You're right, you often have to simply infer the rules from examples, but Wells does discuss this at some length, including comparisons to Japanese et al. — kwami (talk) 08:16, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Subordinate and Relative clauses 

message: Both PMEG and PIV list suffix -unt- as "experimental". This means that while the suffix may be used by some, it's not considered to be a feature of mainstream Esperanto (yet). Therefore I believe it's inappropriate to discuss such a feature in "Esperanto grammar". Maybe we should split that part to a separate "Variations of Esperanto grammar" article? --Vilius Normantas (talk) 13:42, 16 October 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: We note on the section header that this is unofficial. It keeps cropping up, however, as it's regularly derived from the official grammar. — kwami (talk) 18:21, 16 October 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Suffix -unt- 

message: I can’t begin to imagine what test can be done, or objective standard is to be met when the opening paragraph states:  A highly regular grammar makes Esperanto much easier to learn than most other languages of the world. Without any citation, or substantiation, this would appear to be POV or original research, and should probably be removed unless there is some way of backing it up. The slight let-out that is given, saying that speakers of some backgrounds may find some elements of it difficult is a complete cop out, as it seems to me (and this I have no problem in stating is completely POV) that it is a grammar/ language largely incompatible with Germanic languages such as English, which with nearly 5% of the world’s speakers as a first language is quite a lot of people with a problem… Jock123 (talk) 15:20, 8 July 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: This is commonly noted, so is not OR, and borders on being obvious.  — kwami (talk) 18:43, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

text: Actually it isn't obvious. The regularity of a grammar has no relationship to the ease or rate of its acquisition, as the Wug test shows. 24.91.44.95 (talk) 00:12, 12 August 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Perhaps not for L1, but it makes a huge difference for L2, which is what we're talking about here. — kwami (talk) 22:57, 23 October 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  “Easy to learn”: POV? 

message: A while ago, I changed the assertion "With the -aŭ suffix, this is nearly universal, and the -aŭ is rarely dropped: anstataŭ 'instead of', anstataŭe 'instead', anstantaŭa 'substitute', anstataŭo 'a substitute', anstataŭi 'to replace', etc. (Rarely anstate, anstata, anstato, anstati.)" by replacing "rarely" to "not" and removing the parenthesis. However, my edit was reverted and I don't understand why. The words anstate, anstata, anstato, anstati are not part of Esperanto. I have never heard them in my entire life, there are 0 occurrences on tekstaro.com and, if someone uses them, they will be considered obvious mistakes. If anstate is worth mentioning on this article, then it should also be mentioned that ke can be a relative pronoun because many beginners make this mistake. Mutichou (talk) 11:14, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: It's not a mistake, it's per Zamenhof. Never caught on, but still a possibility. — kwami (talk) 23:12, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  anstate, anstata, anstato, anstati 

message: Shouldn't this be "Ili ŝparis la arbojn hakigotajn", or "Ili sxparis la arbojn faligotajn" - or something? Anyway, somehow this sentence seems incorrect. I'd have difficulty coming up with a plan for trees chopping anything, so they're probably the recipients of the chopping. I'm still studying a basal reader in basic Esperanto at this point, so I don't know. I haven't gone over your userpages, so I don't know if there's an expert here. Is there an expert here? 203.215.119.201 (talk) 08:41, 22 April 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: The trees are going to be chopped, in this case — you probably read hakontajn — this user 14:28, 28 December 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  ili ŝparis la arbojn hakotajn 

message: The article makes it sound like stripping the part-of-speech endings from a root that normally requires them is an established way of deriving prepositions. I disagree - to the best of my knowledge the controversial far is the only time it's been tried.
:There's also cit as a quotative particle, but I agree that this is not a productive means of forming prepositions. It is however a fairly common way of forming interjections. — kwami (talk) 16:07, 11 May 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Sounds like we have substantial agreement on this, though I won't suggest another rewrite for the moment. Arbarulo (talk) 18:02, 11 May 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: Derivation of ''far''

message: Estas muso en la domo is at best a controversial example of an impersonal sentence. Typically muso is considered the subject. Undisputed examples of impersonal esti, if it is necessary to include one, are those like estis terure.
:Yes, that might be better. Or both: We're dealing with a mostly anglophone audience for whom "there is" is the usual way of stating existence. We should note that there is no equivalent of that 'there' in Eo. — kwami (talk) 16:23, 11 May 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Sounds like we have substantial agreement on this, though I won't suggest another rewrite for the moment. Arbarulo (talk) 18:02, 11 May 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: Existential ''esti''

message: Anstataŭ is sometimes used as a conjunction, but primarily as a preposition. If we're going to include it in a list of conjunctions, I think it should have some kind of qualifying statement. Before my intervention the list also included krom, to which similar considerations apply and which I would also be open to reinstating with qualification, and kun, which is not a conjunction in any sense.
:Qualifications are fine. I didn't think it worth noting, but you may be right. — kwami (talk) 16:24, 11 May 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Sounds like we have substantial agreement on this, though I won't suggest another rewrite for the moment. Arbarulo (talk) 18:02, 11 May 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: Anstataŭ

message: I doubt that this word order exists in normal Esperanto. It isn't mentioned in PMEG and the first 1,000 hits for the string ' ne.' in Le Monde Diplomatique in the Corpus of Esperanto plus the first thousand hits in La Ŝtona Urbo include no examples.
:Maybe best omitted, as you had done. But that's referred to in the following paragraph, so it's confusing to remove it without adjusting the latter. I agree that it's minor enough that it may not be worth mentioning, esp. since a reader would have no problem understanding it if they encounter it. — kwami (talk) 16:28, 11 May 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Sounds like we have substantial agreement on this, though I won't suggest another rewrite for the moment. Arbarulo (talk) 18:02, 11 May 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: Clause-final ''ne''

message: I'm not wedded to 'anticausative' as the replacement, but I think saying 'middle voice' is misleading because -iĝ- is not grammaticalized as a voice alongside active and passive - rather it derives intransitive and therefore always active verbs.
:It plays a very similar role to the middle voice. Whether it actually is one is something I'm not prepared to say. I never took the phrase "middle voice" literally. Is the Spanish "middle voice" a voice? One problem with calling it "anticausative" is that the article we link to is heavy on the "unaccusative" terminology, which is problematic -- the term "unaccusative" is used inconsistently in the lit and heavily theory-dependent, to the extent that it's often best avoided altogether. Our "middle voice" article is more accessible. — kwami (talk) 16:37, 11 May 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: As a fluent second-language Spanish speaker raised and living in Costa Rica, I've never encountered the concept "middle voice" in relation to Spanish. Are you referring to the use of reflexive pronouns? In the languages to which I've seen "middle voice" applied (primarily Ancient Greek and Sanskrit) it is literally a voice just like active and passive. Would you be okay with glossing -iĝ- as 'intransitive'? That's really all that its various uses have in common. Arbarulo (talk) 18:02, 11 May 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, I meant the refl. PNs used with a similar sense. If you read our article, the English examples of what is supposedly "middle voice" are similar to -iĝ, and I've commonly seen the phrase used for something like that, which isn't really verbal voice. Formally you're right: middle voice is the Greek-type situation, so maybe it's not the best choice here despite being commonly used to label this kind of situation. I'd prefer anticausative over just 'intransitive', though, because 'intransitive' doesn't capture the change of state. Regardless, there's another place in this article we call it "middle voice", and the two glosses should be consistent. — kwami (talk) 23:36, 11 May 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: I wasn't aware that "middle voice" was being used for this kind of thing in addition to its original meaning. I consider that a regrettable choice, but since it's in the scholarly literature, I withdraw my objections to using it on Wikipedia. Arbarulo (talk) 15:00, 12 May 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not sure we should use it. The two dicts of linguistics I checked defined it as you have. The fact that I had a different definition due to my exposure to the term doesn't mean that we should adopt that definition here. I think we should consider this further so that we don't further a suboptimal use of the term. — kwami (talk) 18:59, 12 May 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: Gloss of ''-iĝ-'' in the text sample