Lesson 1: The Web Esperanto Course -- Notes

The shortest sentences, of course, consist of interjections. A list of these is given in the Plena Analiza Gramatiko de Esperanto. At some point I'll post these. However, I should warn you that the most popular are not given there. These are the short words that correspond to what, in English, are commonly known as "Anglo-Saxon four-letter words." These may be covered in a separate, advanced E-mail course, at some later date.

In English, you can't have a declarative sentence without a subject, and so the place holder "it" is used, as in the examples. Esperanto does not require this.

Impersonal conditions don't have to relate to the weather, of course. One of my favorite examples, from a friend of mine in China, read somewhat as follows:

    Plenas je homoj en la cxambro.

This is one way of expressing that the room is full of people. Literally: "It is full with people in the room." In Esperanto, this subjectless sentence is a perfectly good way of expressing this condition -- here the emphasis is on the general environment, rather than on a condition of the room.

Many Esperanto speakers will express this idea as "AS-vorto" (AS-word) -- certainly a more succinct term than "present tense of the verb".

English adds an -S to the third person singular of most verbs, for reasons that I have never fully understood. It adds an 'S to show the genitive singular case of a noun (sometimes), and an S' to show the genitive plural case of a noun (sometimes). It adds an -S (usually) to show the plural of a noun. The letter S has to be the most overworked letter in the English language.

ĂLA is not used 100% the same as the English THE, but the differences are not too important -- the more so since Zamenhof himself said that you don't even have to use it at all if you don't want.