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Grammar — Verbs

The basic form of the verb is the infinitive, which has the −i ending, and this is the form you will find in the dictionary.  It is the equivalent of English “to do”, or sometimes “doing”:  Min plaĉas legi librojn (I like to read books, or I like reading books).  This “doing” form is called a gerund, and it names an action.  Esperanto has no true gerund; it just uses the infinitive instead.  English also has an active participle, which has this same −ing ending, and behaves like an adjective, describing a person or thing as performing the named action, such as “running water”, (water that is running).

Finite Verbs

The main verb in a clause is in one of the three primary tenses (past, present, or future), or in one of the nine seldom-used compound tenses.  Past-tense verbs end with −is, present with −as, and future with −os:  Li parolis, li parolas, kaj li parolos plue (He spoke, he is speaking, and he will speak further).

Note that English makes distinctions called “aspect” in verbs, denoting something like the duration of an action, as “he is speaking” (saying what he is doing right now), as opposed to “he speaks” (saying what he does habitually).  Esperanto can make this distinction using compound tenses, but this is seldom necessary, and both English sentences above would most often be expressed as Li parolas in Esperanto.

Esperanto generally does not make the distinction English does between present perfect and simple past, so “He has read that book” and “He read that book” would both be expressed as Li legis tiun libron in Esperanto.

In the cases in which English uses the present tense to express future action, Esperanto uses the future tense:  “If I go to the book store, I’ll buy you the book you want” is Se mi iros al la librovendejo, mi aĉetos la libron, kiun vi deziras.

The conditional mood has no explicit tense, but is generally used as present; it is used where English would use either the subjunctive or the conditional:  Se mi havus guldenon, mi donus ĝin al vi (If I had a guilder, I would give it to you).  Here, “had” is not past tense, but present subjunctive, indicating a condition contrary to fact (I in fact do not have a guilder), and “would give” is conditional, expressing an action based on the truth of another.  Note that Esperanto uses the same form for both purposes, but we can tell the difference because of the places they occupy in the sentence.  As in other languages, conditional is sometimes used just to be polite:  Mi dezirus tion (I would like that), rather than Mi deziras tion (I want that).

The imperative is rather versatile in Esperanto.  Of course, it acts like the imperative in English:  Iru hejmen! (Go home!).  It is also called “volative” for denoting desires, and can have an actual subject:  Mi faru tion (Let me do that, I think I’ll do that), Ni iru tien (Let’s go there), Vi ekurtikozu (May you break out in hives), Paĉjo Niĉjo benu vin ([May] Santa Claus bless you).  It is almost always used in subordinate clauses when the main verb is deziri (to want), ordoni (to order), gravi (to be important), etc.:  Mi dezirus, ke ili silentu (I would like them to be quiet), Gravas, ke ŝi ne ekmalvarmumu (It’s important that she not catch cold).

Formally, there is no simple passive-voice form for verbs.  It’s possible to form one with the suffix −iĝ−, which has the basic idea of “becoming”.  Technically, though, this forms another related verb whose meaning is the passive of the original, so ami means “to love”, and amiĝi is another word that means “to be loved”.  The formal way to make a passive verb is to use one of the passive compound forms.

A compound verb consists of some form of the verb esti, “to be”, and a participle.  If this is one of the three passive participles, then this makes a passive form.

To begin, let’s consider all the simple forms of the transitive verb kanti, “to sing”:

finite and infinitive forms
kanti	to sing	infinitive
kantis	sang	past tense
kantas	sings	present tense
kantos	will sing	future tense
kantus	would sing	conditional
kantu!	sing!	imperative
participles
kantinta	having sung	past active
kantanta	singing	present active
kantonta	going to sing	future active
kantita	sung	past passive
kantata	being sung	present passive
kantota	going to be sung	future passive

Notice that of the last six forms, the participles, only two have one-word English translations, because English has only two participles.  There is a present participle, which always ends with −ing (just like the gerund), is always active, and can be thought of as an adjective form of the verb that describes someone or something as performing the action.  The other participle is technically the past passive participle, but is sometimes used with the verb “to have” in an active, past sense, and sometimes with the verb “to be” in a present, passive sense.  As an adjective, it describes someone or something which is the receiver of the action.

These six Esperanto participles can be used with the verb esti, “to be”, in any of the first six verb forms, forming thirty-six compound forms of the verb, half active and half passive.  The tense of the participle is secondary to the tense of the esti, if it is one of the three finite forms (estis, estas, estos).

Here are the eighteen active forms, consisting of the form of esti at the left and the active participle at the top, with an English explanation or translation of the compound form:

It takes some stretching to find English equivalents for some of these; it takes the same amount to come up with a reasonable Esperanto sentence that would need them.

And here are the eighteen passive forms, consisting of the form of esti at the left and the passive participle at the top:

The same stretching has to be done with the conditional and imperative forms here as with the active forms.

These forms are available for use when they are absolutely necessary, and you should understand them in case you encounter them being used by others, but the best advice I can give about compound tenses is to avoid them.  English has both past (“he sang”) and present perfect (“he has sung”) tenses for the verb, and a past progressive aspect (“he was singing”), but it’s best in Esperanto to use the simple past for all three when the difference is not vital:

• La knabo legis la libron.
  The boy read the book or The boy has read the book or The boy was reading the book.
• La knabo estas leginta la libron.
  The boy has read the book (emphasizing that the action is now completed).
• La knabo estis leganta la libron.
  The boy was reading the book (the past action occurred at a specific time in the past, possibly over a period of time).

The passive voice is more easily avoided in Esperanto than in English.  One way to emphasize a part of a sentence is to move it out of its usual place to somewhere else, and one way to do that is to put the sentence in the passive voice.  “My cousin wrote that book” can be made more emphatic by mentioning the book first and the cousin last, saying “That book was written by my cousin”, but Esperanto can move sentence parts around without using the passive.  The equivalent of this sentence would be Mia kuzo skribis tiun libron in the plain form, and Tiun libron skribis mia kuzo in the fancy one.  You can tell that libron is still the direct object by the −N ending.

One common active phrase in Esperanto that would be passive in English is the notation in a translated work, Elangligis Johano Forĝisto, “John Smith [translated] out of English”, where we would normally say “Translated from English by John Smith.”

Another use of the passive is to avoid the use of an active subject altogether.  “The dishes have been washed” is an example of this.  Esperanto could express this as Oni lavis la pladojn, using the indefinite pronoun oni, the equivalent of saying in English, “One has washed the dishes”, and although this is rather stilted English, it is perfectly normal Esperanto.

Although the −iĝ− suffix mentioned above builds forms with a passive feel to them, the point of using this is more to avoid the use of a compound tense than to avoid the passive voice.  We might say, Li mortiĝis, rather than Li estas mortita for “He was killed.” Also, if you say La libro legiĝis for “The book got read”, it avoids having to choose between two somewhat equivalent compound forms, La libro estas legita (The book is in a state of having been read) or La libro estis legata (The book was in a state of being read).

If a participle is converted to a noun by changing the adjective −A ending to a noun −O ending, it names a person (generally not a thing) performing the action at the time specified by the tense of the participle:

• la kantinto = the person who was singing (or who sang)
• la kantanto = the person who is singing
• la kantonto = the person who will be singing (or who will sing)
• as opposed to la kantisto = the singer

This last word, la kantisto, uses the suffix −ist− to form a noun denoting someone who performs the action professionally or habitually.

If a verb is converted to a noun by giving it the −O ending, the noun generally names an instance of the verb, so instrui means “to teach, to instruct”, and instruo means “a teaching, an instruction”.  The abstract notion of “teaching, instruction in general” is formed with the suffix −ad−, whose basic meaning is “continuation”:  instruado.

In English, every proper sentence has a subject.  Even when the verb is imperative, such as “Run!”, we say that there is an understood, but not expressed, subject:  “you”.

In some sentences, the subject is the pronoun “it”, but the pronoun doesn’t stand for anything.  For example, in the sentence, “It is raining,” the word “it” stands where the subject should be, but doesn’t mean anything.

In Esperanto, sentences such as this simply have no subject at all.  The sentence, «Pluvas,» means “It is raining.”  To say, “It’s warm today,” we say «Estas varme hodiaŭ.»  Note that “warm” is expressed as an adverb, rather than an adjective, because there is no noun to modify.  Here, it modifies the verb.

There are other sentences in English with “it” as the subject, not refering to anything, and these have no corresponding pronoun (such as «ĝi») in Esperanto, but they are in fact a different situation.  For example, the English sentence, “It is important to read the instructions,” would be expressed in Esperanto as «Gravas legi la instrukcion.»  Here, the English has what is called an “anticipatory subject”, which stands in the place of the subject at the beginning of the sentence, while the true subject follows the verb.  In this example, it is the infinitive clause, “to read the instructions”.  In Esperanto, we simply allow the infinitive clause to follow the verb, and there is no need for an anticipatory subject.

In some sentences, the subject is an entire subordinate clause, rather than just an infinitive clause, and this works the same way.  The sentence, “It seems that I have made a mistake,” with an anticipatory subject, can be translated into Esperanto as, «Ŝajnas, ke mi eraris.»  The subject is the clause «ke mi eraris.», and there is no anticipatory subject needed.

The same holds for many English sentences beginning with “there”, especially when this is followed by the word “is” or “are”.  In Esperanto, the pair of words is translated as simply «estas»  “There are three books on the table.” = «Estas tri libroj sur la tablo.»

Note that there are pairs of English sentences that can be translated by pairs of Esperanto sentences, so either English sentence, “There are five cars coming,” or “Five cars are coming,” can be translated as either «Venas kvin aŭtomobiloj,» or «Kvin aŭtomobiloj venas.»

Questions or suggestions?  Please write, and I’ll get back to you.