Esperanto · Chapter 30 · Lesson 21 · Themed review
La tero
Sea, mountain, river, forest. The words of the landscape, and the handful of prepositions that place one thing against another: sur, en, cxe, apud, trans.
Practise this lesson
13-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
Sur la monto, en la valo: placing the landscape
Say and you are in the sea, bobbing about, going nowhere. Add one letter - - and you are diving in, crossing the boundary from dry land to water. English needs two different words for that, "in" and "into". Esperanto needs a suffix it already uses for the direct object. That economy is the whole session, and the landscape is where it earns its keep.
The closed set of place words
Prepositions of place in Esperanto are a small, well-behaved family, and once you have them you never guess again. is on, is in, is at, is beside, is across, is under, super is over. Bolt any of them onto a landscape noun and you have located yourself precisely: on the mountain, in the forest, beside the river, across the valley, under the rock. There is no hidden list of exceptions, no preposition that means three unrelated things depending on the noun. English makes you learn that you stand "on" a beach but "in" a forest for no reason anyone can state. Esperanto lets and each mean exactly what the preposition says.
The one letter that means "into"
Here is the elegant bit. Every one of those prepositions describes position - where a thing sits, at rest. To turn position into motion, into arrival, you add the accusative -n to the noun. is on the mountain; is up onto it. is inside the cave; is into the cave. is on the far bank already; is the act of crossing it. The preposition stays put; the noun grows a tail; the meaning shifts from being-there to going-there. One rule, applied identically to , , , the lot of them. No English speaker gets a free ride here, but nor does anyone get a special case.
Put it together
super . - The bird is flying over the sea.
velas , . - The ship sails to the island, across the horizon.
. - We climbed up onto the mountain and looked at the valley.
. - The child ran into the sea.
