Esperanto Aspect Affixes: ek-, re-, -ad-, dis- and mis-

The verb tenses article makes a boast that is entirely true: five endings, no irregular verbs, nothing else to learn. What it does not say is that those five endings mark tense and nothing else. There is no ending for started to, none for kept on, none for did it wrong.

A Slavic speaker meeting this for the first time usually assumes Esperanto is simply poorer than their language here. It is not. Aspect exists, it is just on a different axis.

Two axes, not one

An Esperanto verb is a root, an optional aspect affix, and a tense ending. The affix says what shape the event has. The ending says when it happened. Neither interferes with the other.

That is the whole system in one table, and it is why Esperanto needs no perfective and imperfective pairs of the sort that make Russian verbs a two-year project.

ek-: the moment it starts

ek- marks the beginning of an action, or a single momentary flash of one. Those look like two jobs; they are one job seen through two kinds of root.

On a root describing a state or a long process, ek- marks the boundary you cross going in:

• dormi (to sleep) gives ekdormi, to fall asleep
• scii (to know) gives ekscii, to find out
• sidi (to sit) gives eksidi, to sit down
• stari (to stand) gives ekstari, to get to your feet

On a root that is already brief, there is no long stretch to begin, so ek- marks one sharp instance instead:

• krii (to shout) gives ekkrii, to cry out
• vidi (to see) gives ekvidi, to catch sight of
• rigardi (to look) gives ekrigardi, to glance
• kapti (to catch) gives ekkapti, to grab

Seven of those eight are already in this course as vocabulary. You learned them as words. They are one prefix.

Ek also survives as a bare interjection meaning roughly off we go, and as the preposition ekde, meaning as from some point in time.

The false ek-

Four common words open with those two letters and contain no prefix at all: ekzisti, ekzemplo, ekster, ekzameni. Strip the ek- and you are left with zisti, zemplo, ster and zameni, none of which are roots. That is the test, and it takes a second.

re-: again, or back

The word building article introduced re- in a line. It deserves a paragraph, because it has two meanings and English keeps them apart with different words.

The pattern is not arbitrary. If the action has somewhere to return to, you get back. If it does not, you get again. Coming and going and giving all have a point of origin; seeing and reading do not.

Where both readings are genuinely available, do not be clever about it. Denove means again and costs one word, and adding a destination handles back. Precision beats elegance in a language people read at speed.

Beware here too: resti, respondi, regi, religio and revo are all plain roots and none of them contains re-.

-ad-: the long version

-ad- stretches an action out, or makes it repeated and habitual.

Its second job is quieter and you meet it more often: -ad- on a verb root makes the noun of the activity, as opposed to a single instance or a result.

Parolado (speech, speaking), laborado (ongoing work), vivado (the living of a life), movado (a movement, as in an organised one), penado (striving). All five are in this course, all five are a root plus -ad- plus -o, and none of them was ever presented to you as built.

The contrast with vivo is the clearest one. Vivo is a life, the thing you have one of. Vivado is living, the thing you do continuously. English needs two unrelated words and a gerund to keep those apart.

Do not scatter -ad- around. It is not decoration, and on a verb where the plain form already says what you mean it reads as padding.

ekdormi against dormadi

The contrast is worth setting out in full, because it is the clearest demonstration in the language that aspect and tense are independent.

Li dormis. He slept. Neutral. No claim about how long.

Li ekdormis. He fell asleep. One instant, the boundary.

Li dormadis. He slept and slept. The whole stretch, and rather too much of it.

Li dormetis. He dozed. That is -et- from the size and people article, lightening the sleep rather than timing it.

Every one of those is past tense with the same -is ending. And the affixes stack, in a fixed order with prefixes outside and suffixes inside, so li ekdormadis is a legal word meaning he dropped into a long sleep.

Now compare the compound tense route. Li estis ekdormanta is grammatical, means he was in the act of falling asleep, and costs three words and a participle. Li ekdormis costs one. That article recommends the simple tenses and this is the machinery that makes the recommendation affordable: the affix does at the root what the compound tense does at the clause.

dis-: apart, in all directions

dis- scatters. Whatever the verb does, it now does outwards, to several places at once.

• doni gives disdoni, to hand out
• iri gives disiri, to go separate ways
• sendi gives dissendi, to circulate, to send round
• ĵeti gives disĵeti, to strew
• rompi gives disrompi, to smash to pieces
• fali gives disfali, to fall apart

It is not mal-. Mal- reverses polarity; dis- chooses a direction. Doni gives you both redoni (give it back, one direction) and disdoni (give it out, every direction), and neither is the opposite of giving.

Disigi is the general-purpose one: dis- plus the causative -ig- that the igi and iĝi article covers, meaning to separate two things. Diversa has nothing to do with any of this and is a plain root.

mis-: wrongly

The narrowest of the five and the easiest. mis- means the action was performed, but performed wrongly.

• kompreni gives miskompreni, to misunderstand
• legi gives mislegi, to misread
• uzi gives misuzi, to misuse
• kalkuli gives miskalkuli, to miscalculate
• konduti gives miskonduti, to misbehave
• trafi gives mistrafi, to miss

English happens to share this prefix, which makes it feel free. It is worth noticing what it is not. Miskompreni is to understand incorrectly. There is no malkompreni, because the opposite of understanding is not something you do. And nekomprenebla is incomprehensible, a third thing again. Three prefixes, three genuinely different claims.

Mistero is a mystery, and contains no mis-. It is not a wrong earth.

What to take away

Five prefixes and suffixes, applied to roots you already hold, and Esperanto turns out to say things about the shape of an event that English needs a phrasal verb and a hopeful adverb to approximate.