Esperanto · Chapter 2 · Lesson 21 · Themed review
Tempo kaj loko
When and where. You have been using nun, jam and tie since chapter 1 without ever seeing them laid out against the nouns they modify.
Practise this lesson
21-word session
A quick mix of exercises - recognise, recall, type and build each word. Miss one and it comes back round until it sticks.
Worth knowing
Nun, jam, ankoraŭ: the small words that fix a sentence in time
You have been using , jam and tie since chapter 1 without ever seeing them next to the nouns they attach to. Here they are together, and there is a pattern worth noticing: the time and place words split cleanly into two groups, and they behave completely differently.
Group one: the correlatives
These sit in the grid, and you can read any of them off it:
| question | that | some | every | no | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| time | |||||
| place | tie |
is always, is never, is then, is where. You do not memorise these one at a time; you build them.
The place ones take -n for movement towards, which is worth remembering because it comes up constantly:
Mi estas tie. - I am there.
Mi iras . - I go there (to there).
Group two: the ones that do not fit anywhere
These are ordinary adverbs and each has to be learned on its own. They are also the ones that carry the most nuance, so they repay the attention:
- now. Straightforward.
jam - already. It marks that something has happened sooner than expected: li jam venis, he has already come.
- still, yet. The opposite side of jam: li estas tie, he is still there.
- immediately, at once. Stronger than . Venu . Come right now.
jam and are the pair English speakers muddle, because English uses yet for both halves of the idea depending on whether the sentence is negative. Esperanto keeps them apart: jam is the change has happened, is the change has not happened.
The nouns
is time in general. is a day, a year, a night. is a moment.
is the one to watch, because it is time in the countable sense - three times, not a long time:
Mi vidis lin . - I saw him three times.
Mi ne havas . - I do not have time.
English uses the same word for both and Esperanto does not, which is one of the small places where Esperanto is more precise than the language you came from rather than less.
The places
is a place, a house, a door, a town, the world, the earth or the ground.
Two of these are quietly productive. plus the -- suffix is , a cottage; plus -- it is o, a mansion. And --, the place suffix, turns almost any verb into a location: gives o, a workplace.
Put it together
tie, . - Now I am there, but tomorrow I will go there.
. - He is still working.
jam . - She has already come.
. - There is always time.