The Esperanto Passive: -ata, -ita, -ota and esti

Esperanto's passive participles are the active ones with the n taken out: -at- for an action being done, -it- for one done, -ot- for one still to come. Add esti and you have a passive sentence.

• La letero estis skribita de mia patrino. - The letter was written by my mother.

Three more participles, same three vowels

The vowel is the vowel of the tense: a as in -as, i as in -is, o as in -os. Only the missing n separates the one doing it from the one it is done to:

The endings work as for every participle: -a describes, -e says how or when, -o names a person:

They agree like adjectives

A passive participle in -a is an ordinary adjective, and the most useful thing on this page:

• la perdita libro - the lost book
• la amata amiko - the beloved friend

It takes -j and -n like any adjective:

• Mi trovis la perditajn leterojn. - I found the lost letters.
• La legotaj libroj estas sur la tablo. - The books still to be read are on the table.

The -o forms: people things happen to

-o turns a passive participle into the person it happens to, as leganto is the person reading:

• La invititoj alvenis. - The guests (the invited) arrived.

Building the passive sentence

Esti plus the participle. The tense sits on esti; the participle says how far along the action is:

Two prepositions add who and how, and never share a job. De is the doer, per is the means:

• La letero estis skribita de mia patrino per krajono. - The letter was written by my mother with a pencil.

The participle agrees with the subject in number: La leteroj estis skribitaj. (The letters were written.)

Only transitive verbs have one

A passive needs something to be done to. Veni, iri, dormi and fali take no object, so they have no passive participle: venata is not a word. English agrees: nobody says he was arrived.

The suffix -ig- makes such a verb take an object, and then it has a passive:

• La infano estis dormigita. - The child was put to sleep.

Transitivity lists which verbs take an object.

-ata or -ita?

In the present everyone agrees: konstruata is going up, konstruita is finished. In the past, two readings have argued for generations:

The camps are called itismo and atismo. Itists give esti the time and the participle the stage of the action, so estis konstruita is the plain past passive. Atists read the participle's vowel as time relative to esti, so estis konstruita is a past before the past. The quarrel peaked in the 1960s; in 1967 the Akademio de Esperanto declared, by 26 of the 31 votes cast, that only the itist reading matches Zamenhof's traditional usage and that any other reading is unofficial; a later Akademio resolution goes further and calls ignoring that decision a linguistic error. Itist usage is now far the commoner, and atist texts still turn up and are understood.

The reason: it is what the Akademio decided in 1967, and the usage you will meet most. If you read an older text where estis konstruata plainly means was built, you have met an atist.

Often better: oni or -iĝ-

Good Esperanto uses the passive less than English does. Two tools say the same thing with no participle:

Use oni when the doer is unknown or does not matter, -iĝ- when it simply happened, and esti plus a participle when the thing acted on deserves the front of the sentence.

Mistakes English speakers make

What to do next

1. Take five verbs that take an object and build -ata, -ita and -ota for each.
2. Write three passive sentences, then rewrite each with oni.
3. Then read compound tenses: esti with the active participles.

See also

• Participles - the active -anta, -inta, -onta set these mirror.
• Making and becoming: -ig- and -iĝ- - often a better choice than a passive.
• Impersonal constructions - oni, the other way to leave the doer out.
• Participles as nouns - leganto, invitito and the rest.