Making and Becoming: The Esperanto Suffixes -ig- and -iĝ-
There is a sentence English speakers write in their first month of Esperanto, and it is wrong:
Mi bolas la akvon.
It looks fine. It is built the way English is built. And it says, roughly, I am boiling, the water, because is something water does and not something you can do to water.
The correct sentence is **boligas** , and understanding why is worth more than any other single hour you spend on Esperanto affixes.
Two suffixes, one fence
The word-building article covers -, -in-, -- and the rest, which change what a word means. -- and -- are different in kind. They change what a word does in a sentence.
--adds a causer. The result is always transitive: it takes an object, and that object wears the-nfrom the accusative article.--removes the causer. The result is always intransitive: it cannot take an object at all.
Li la laboron. - He stopped the work.
La laboro . - The work stopped.
One circumflex on a g is the entire difference between make it happen and it happened. Esperanto asks a lot of that character, and it earns it.
They stick to anything
Both suffixes are fully productive, which means they attach to any root where the result makes sense, and the resulting word is real without any dictionary having to bless it.
| Root type | With -- | With -- |
|---|---|---|
adjective | i to heat something | i to get warm |
adjective | | |
noun | | |
intransitive | | |
intransitive | | |
transitive sci- | | |
particle for away | | |
Several of those you already know as vocabulary. , to be born, is (to give birth to) with the causer taken off. , to kill, is with a causer bolted on. , to become, is (to make) with nobody doing the making. You have been using this machinery since chapter one without being told it was machinery.
The transitivity traps
This is where English speakers actually lose points, so here is the list of the pairs that catch people, with the English one-word-for-both verb that causes the trouble.
| English says | Intransitive (it does it) | Transitive (you do it) |
|---|---|---|
| boil | | i I boil the water |
| begin | | |
| end, finish | | |
| stop | | |
| move | i it moves | |
| burn | | i I burn it |
| change | | |
| open | i it opens | |
| wake | | |
| rise, raise | | |
Notice that the fence does not run the same way for every pair. and are transitive roots, so the intransitive member is the derived one. and are intransitive roots, so the transitive member is derived. There is no rule of thumb that will get you all ten. You learn which root sits where, once, and then it never changes again, which is a considerably better deal than English irregular verbs offer.
Why the extra syllable is a feature
It is tempting to file this under annoying. I would file it under honest.
English lets you write the window broke and say nothing whatever about how. That vagueness is sometimes useful and often a dodge. Esperanto makes you pick:
La fenestro is. - The window broke, on its own, nobody's fault.
Iu la fenestron. - Somebody broke the window.
Two different claims about the world, and Esperanto will not let you blur them by accident. Given how often the English passive is reached for precisely to avoid naming a culprit, a language that costs you two letters to be clear is not a language that is charging you very much.
-- is not the passive
Worth stating flatly, because the two get confused. is is the door closed. is the door was closed, by somebody unstated.
Take the side: prefer --. It is shorter, it is more idiomatic, it does not drag you into the long-running quarrel about which passive participle a completed action wants, and in the great majority of cases where a beginner reaches for a passive, what they actually mean is the -- verb. Build the passive when the agent genuinely matters and you genuinely do not want to name them. Otherwise let the thing do it to itself.
Cut the suffix loose and it is a verb in its own right, meaning to cause or to make:
Li min ridi. - He made me laugh.
Tio min feliĉa. - That made me happy.
Object plus infinitive, or object plus adjective. It is the same pattern as English make somebody do something, and it exists for the cases where the causative would need to attach to a whole clause rather than a single root. exists too, and means to become, doing exactly the job does.
What to take away
--causes it and takes an object.--happens and takes none.- Both stick to adjectives, nouns, verbs and particles alike.
- Every root is permanently transitive or intransitive; the suffix is the only way across.
as, never--is not the passive, and it is usually the better choice than one.andalso work as standalone verbs: to make and to become.