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Concept
Esperanto grammar
Summary
Esperanto is the most widely used constructed language intended for international communication; it was designed with highly regular grammatical rules, and as such is considered an easy language to learn.
Each part of speech has a characteristic ending: nouns end with ‐o; adjectives with ‐a; present‐tense indicative verbs with ‐as, and so on. An extensive system of prefixes and suffixes may be freely combined with roots to generate vocabulary, so that it is possible to communicate effectively with a vocabulary of 400 to 500 root words. The original vocabulary of Esperanto had around 900 root words, but was quickly expanded.
Esperanto has an agglutinative morphology, no grammatical gender, and simple verbal and nominal inflections. Verbal suffixes indicate whether a verb is in the infinitive, a participle form (active or passive in three tenses), or one of three moods (indicative, conditional, or volitive; of which the indicative has three tenses), and are derived for several aspects, but do not agree with the grammatical person or number of their subjects. Nouns and adjectives have two cases, nominative/oblique and accusative/allative, and two numbers, singular and plural; the adjectival form of personal pronouns behaves like a genitive case. Adjectives generally agree with nouns in case and number. In addition to indicating direct objects, the accusative/allative case is used with nouns, adjectives and adverbs for showing the destination of a motion, or to replace certain prepositions; the nominative/oblique is used in all other situations. The case system allows for a flexible word order that reflects information flow and other pragmatic concerns, as in Russian, Greek, and Latin.
Esperanto orthography
Esperanto uses a 28-letter Latin alphabet that contains the six additional letters ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ and ŭ, but does not use the letters q, w, x or y. The extra diacritics are the circumflex and the breve. Occasionally, an acute accent (or an apostrophe) is used to indicate irregular stress in a proper name.
Official source
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