Esperanto · Chapter 16 · Lesson 14 · Grammar primer
Correlatives in the wild
The table at work: tiu kiu, cxio kion, pro tio, kies without endings. How the 45 words actually behave in prose, and the tio-vs-tiu error that outs every learner.
The short version
Kio picks up a clause; kiu picks up a person
Li venis malfrue, kio ĝenis min. The annoying thing was the lateness, an event rather than a person, so it takes kio; write kiu there and you have said that a man annoyed you, which is a different complaint. The pointing side behaves the same way, and it builds the connectives that join one sentence to the next: pro tio (hence), post tio (then), krom tio (moreover), malgraŭ tio, anstataŭ tio. Every one of them is built rather than learned.
Li ne studis. Pro tio li ne sukcesis.
A ti- word holds the slot, a ki- word fills it
This one pattern is most of what the table does in prose: tiu kiu (the one who), tio kio (the thing which), ĉio kio (everything that), tie kie, tien kien, tiam kiam, tiel kiel, tiom kiom. Keep the ti- half whenever the main clause would otherwise look unfinished: mi faros tion, kion vi diros. And a comma goes before every ki- clause however short, as in mi ne scias, kion fari. Leaving it out is the most visible English fingerprint on a learner's Esperanto.
Mi iros tien, kien vi iros.
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