Esperanto · Chapter 14 · Lesson 8 · Grammar primer
Nouns, adjectives and agreement
The -jn echo: adjectives agree in number AND case, belajn hundojn is the proof, and the predicate never takes -n. The paradigm in full, including the object-complement subtlety.
The short version
Whatever the noun wears, the adjective wears
Four forms, and they are the entire noun-and-adjective paradigm of the language: la bela hundo, la belaj hundoj, la belan hundon, la belajn hundojn. English adjectives have not inflected for anything since roughly the Norman Conquest, so the -ajn -ojn cluster is the part your fingers refuse to type. Say it aloud until the rhyme does the grammar for you. The echo is what pays for free word order: the endings, not the positions, say who did what.
Mi vidis la belajn hundojn.
After esti the adjective never takes -n
La hundoj estas belaj, never belajn: a predicate describes the subject, subjects take no -n, so nothing agreeing with one does either. After an object, though, both versions are correct and they say different things. Mi trovis la belan hundon means I located the beautiful one; mi trovis la hundon bela means I formed an opinion of it. Ŝi farbis la ruĝan pordon is redecorating a door that was already red; ŝi farbis la pordon ruĝa is the redness as the result.
Ŝi farbis la pordon ruĝa.
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
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