The Proverbaro Esperanta: 15 Zamenhof Proverbs and the Grammar Each One Carries
Markus Zamenhof taught languages for a living and spent years assembling the same proverbs across Russian, Polish, French and German, lining up the parallels. His son had built a language. The son translated the father's collection into it, and the o appeared in 1910, running to roughly 2,600 entries.
It is the closest thing Esperanto has to inherited folk wisdom, and it comes with an honest caveat: nobody sat around a fire in Esperanto for six centuries polishing these. They are European proverbs, translated once, by one family. What has happened since is that speakers used them for a hundred and fifteen years, which is how anything becomes idiomatic.
For a learner the value is not sentimental. A proverb is a grammatical structure compressed into six words and shaped to be memorable. You will retain riskas, after two readings and you will retain the correlative pair with it. Textbook sentences cannot compete with that.
Zamenhof died in 1917, so all of this is public domain and you can go and read the lot.
Fifteen, with the grammar each one carries
1. .
Time is money. A freebie to start, and it does teach something: links two nouns and neither takes the accusative. is not an object, it is what is. The -n never appears after . Beginners over-apply the accusative here more than anywhere else.
2. riskas, .
Who does not risk, that one does not win. The classic correlative pair. opens the clause, picks it back up in the main sentence, and the two are the same table row with different first letters. English drops the and the sentence limps; Esperanto keeps both halves and the structure is unmissable. See correlatives for the full grid.
3. , .
Such a father, such a son. Another correlative pair, and , this time asking about kind rather than identity. Note there is no verb at all. Esperanto permits a verbless equational sentence when the two halves are simply set against each other, and proverbs use it constantly because it is shorter.
4. .
Not everything shining is a diamond. Our all that glisters. is (to shine) plus -ant- plus the adjective ending -a: the present active participle, doing the work of an English relative clause. is everything that is shining in two words. This is the compression participles exist for.
5. , libero.
Better bread without butter than cake without freedom. The comparative is ... , and the two words are inseparable: if has appeared, is coming. Note also that takes the plain nominative, as every Esperanto preposition does except when direction is involved.
6. o o.
Repetition is the best learning. Two things at once. is the superlative, the partner of , and it is the whole of it: there is no -est ending to learn. And -ad- marks sustained or repeated action, so (to repeat) gives o (repetition as a practice) rather than one repetition.
7. .
Hope does not give bread. The accusative doing its one job. is the object, and it sits before the verb rather than after it, which in English would make it the subject. The -n settles the question by itself, so word order is free to do something else. This is the argument for the accusative in a single line. More in the accusative article.
8. .
Every bird praises its own nest. is the reflexive possessive, and it means belonging to the subject of this clause. Ĝia would be some other bird's nest. English has no equivalent and is permanently ambiguous about it. Note that carries the -n too: adjectives agree with their noun in case as well as number.
9. .
Even a small fly is not without a mouth. is even, one of the small unchanging words worth learning early. is reversed by -, the workhorse of word building. And it rhymes, with , which is not an accident: Zamenhof reached for a rhyme wherever the sense allowed one, because that is what makes a proverb portable.
10. ploro.
A friend in joy and weeping. Prepositions in Esperanto are bare and unfussy. governs both nouns across the and does not need repeating, and neither noun changes shape. Compare a case language, where both would need marking. See prepositions.
11. Post a lumas .
After ugly weather shines the sun most bright. Two lessons. The verb lumas comes before its subject , which is perfectly legal because nothing depends on position. And both adjectives follow their nouns, a and , which is also legal and is done here for the rhyme. Esperanto's word order is a stylistic choice rather than a rule, as word order and style sets out.
12. , .
First came, first took. Our first come, first served. is an ordinary adjective, first, standing on its own with no noun behind it and functioning as the subject. Any adjective can do this when the noun is obvious. Both verbs are -is, the past, and it is the same past for both actions with no sequence-of-tenses machinery required.
13. , .
Who jumps too quickly soon stops. is the adverb from , describing the verb rather than a noun, so -e and not -a. is one of the primitive adverbs that ends in - and never changes: it did not come from an adjective and cannot take -a. That small closed set catches learners out.
14. .
Do not shove your nose into a strange vase. The best line in the collection and the densest. is the -u imperative, negated with . takes the accusative as the object. And takes the accusative after because there is motion into it: is inside it, is into it. Two entirely different uses of -n in one rhyming line.
15. semas , .
Who sows wind will reap a thunderstorm. The tenses move independently across the clauses, -as in the first and -os in the second, with nothing needing to agree. And is (lightning) plus (thunder), a transparent compound of the sort compounding covers, where the last root is the thing and everything before it modifies.
How to actually use these
Take three, not fifteen. Say them aloud until they are automatic, then look at what each one is doing structurally. The grammar arrives attached to something you already have in your head, which is the reverse of the usual order and works considerably better.
The full Proverbaro is freely available online and is worth an occasional browse rather than a systematic read: much of it is farming advice from the nineteenth century and some of it has aged exactly as you would expect. The commonest fifty are the ones speakers will actually recognise.
If the hatted letters in , and are still slowing you down, the alphabet page sorts that in ten minutes. For the community that keeps these phrases in circulation, and the vocabulary that comes with it, see the congress article. And the curriculum puts all of this in order.