Esperanto Correlatives: The 45-Word Table You Can Learn in an Afternoon

English asks you to learn who, what, where, when, why, how, whose, that, there, then, someone, somewhere, everyone, everywhere, always, nobody, nowhere and never as eighteen separate words with no visible relationship to one another. There is no rule connecting what to that, or when to never. You memorise them one at a time, as a child, over years.

Esperanto builds all 45 of them from fourteen pieces.

The grid

Five beginnings, telling you which series a word belongs to:

Nine endings, telling you what category is being asked about:

Cross them and every cell is predictable:

That is 45 words. You learned fourteen things.

Reading a correlative you have never seen

This is the real test, and it is the reason the system is worth the afternoon.

You have never met nenial. Break it: neni- is the no-series, -al is reason. For no reason. You are right, and you did not look it up.

Ĉiom? ĉi- is all, -om is quantity. All of it.

Ties? ti- points, -es possesses. That one's.

No natural language lets you do that. In English, knowing when tells you nothing whatsoever about never, though they belong to the same grid, because the grid was smashed by two thousand years of sound change.

The four that carry most of the weight

You do not meet these 45 evenly. In real Esperanto these come up constantly, so learn the column properly:

Kio okazis? - What happened?

Kiu venis? - Who came?

Kie vi estas? - Where are you?

Kiam vi venos? - When will you come?

And their negatives, which English speakers reach for more than they expect:

Mi neniam sciis. - I never knew.

Nenio okazis. - Nothing happened.

Neniu estas tie. - No one is there.

Kiu versus kio

The one pair worth pinning down.

Kiu picks an individual out of a set. It is countable, so it takes the plural and the accusative like any other -u word: kiuj, kiun, kiujn.

Kiu homo venis? - Which person came?

Kiun vi vidis? - Whom did you see?

Kio asks about a thing in the abstract. It takes the accusative but does not pluralise.

Kio okazis? - What happened?

Kion vi diris? - What did you say?

If you can point at candidates, use kiu. If you cannot, use kio. English who and what split along nearly the same line, so this one transfers.

The -om column: kiom, tiom, iom and da

Quantity is the column with a grammar attached. On its own, kiom simply asks how much:

Kiom kostas? - How much does it cost?

Kiom vi dormis? - How much did you sleep?

Put a noun after any -om word and Esperanto insists on da between them, the preposition it keeps specifically for quantities:

Kiom da akvo vi trinkis? - How much water did you drink?

Kiom da homoj venis? - How many people came?

Mi ne havas tiom da tempo. - I do not have that much time.

Note that one kiom da covers both how much and how many; Esperanto does not split countable from uncountable the way English does.

The quiet star of the column is iom, some amount. It has drifted into everyday use as a softener meaning a bit - iom laca, a bit tired; iom pli, a bit more - and it is one of the most common words in the language. You will say iom daily and ĉiom roughly never, which is the usual fate of the ĉi-row's stranger cells.

The -es column: kies and possession without apostrophes

Esperanto has no apostrophe-s. Where English glues 's onto a noun, Esperanto reaches for de (la libro de Maria) or, inside the correlative system, the -es column:

Kies libro estas tio? - Whose book is that?

Mi trovis ĉapelon, sed mi ne scias, kies ĝi estas. - I found a hat, but I do not know whose it is.

La decido estas ĉies afero. - The decision is everyone's business.

Two things make this column easy. First, -es words never inflect: no -j, no -n, ever, so kies is the one question word you can never get the ending wrong on. Second, ties (that one's) and ies (someone's) decode on sight even though English has no single word for either.

Correlatives are half your pronouns

If you arrived here searching for Esperanto pronouns, you have found most of them. The -u and -o columns are the language's interrogative, demonstrative, indefinite and negative pronouns: kiu, tiu, iu, ĉiu, neniu and their -o counterparts do the work that who, that one, someone, everyone, nobody, what, something, everything, nothing do in English, and they take -j and -n like any noun-ish word.

What the table does not cover is the personal pronouns, and those are mercifully few and completely regular: mi (I), vi (you), li (he), ŝi (she), ĝi (it), ni (we), ili (they), plus the reflexive si. Add -a to any of them for the possessive (mia, via, ŝia), which is the same -a-marks-an-adjective rule the rest of the language runs on. The reflexive si has its own article, because it fixes an ambiguity English cannot express.

ĉi and the missing this-series

There is no this-series in the table, and there does not need to be one. The particle ĉi pulls a ti- word towards the speaker:

Both ĉi tiu and tiu ĉi are correct. One particle replaces an entire extra column, which is the same instinct that runs through the whole language.

What to take away

• Five beginnings, nine endings, 45 words.
• You can decode a correlative you have never seen, and build one you have never been taught.
• -u counts and pluralises; -o is abstract and does not.
• -om words take da before a noun; -es words never inflect at all.
• ĉi moves a ti- word closer, so there is no separate word for this.

Spend an afternoon on the grid rather than a month on a word list. It is the single clearest illustration of what Esperanto is actually for.