Esperanto word endings: -o, -a, -e, -i

The last letter of an Esperanto word tells you what kind of word it is. A noun ends -o, an adjective -a, an adverb -e and a verb in the dictionary -i. Learn four letters and you can parse a sentence before you can translate it.

The four endings on one screen

Each ending at work in a sentence:

English gives you no such help. Record, present and content can each be a noun, a verb or an adjective, and only the sentence around them tells you which. Esperanto settles it in one letter.

Read a sentence by its endings

Pick out the grammar of this line without knowing a single root:

• La bela lingvo estas tre granda. - The beautiful language is very big.

That is the skeleton of the sentence, recovered from endings alone. What is left to learn is vocabulary, which is the part a dictionary can hand you. (The -as that replaced -i is a tense ending: verb tenses has all five.)

One root, four words

The ending carries the part of speech, so the root never has to change to move between them:

The same root in four sentences:

• Ni volas paroli. - We want to speak.
• Lia parolo estis longa. - His speech was long.
• Ĝi estas parola lingvo. - It is a spoken language.
• Mi diris tion parole. - I said it orally (not in writing).

English needs good and well, two unrelated shapes for one idea. Esperanto needs bon- plus endings you already know: bona, bone, and bono (a good thing) thrown in. Two hundred roots are closer to eight hundred words, and you only learned the two hundred.