Esperanto Reported Speech: Why li diris, ke li venos Keeps Its Tense

English does something to reported speech that you have never once noticed yourself doing. Someone says I am ill, and an hour later you report it as he said he was ill - even though he is still ill, even though nothing about the illness moved into the past. That is backshift, and English applies it automatically.

Esperanto does not do it. You quote the tense the speaker used.

That is the entire rule, and it is simpler than the English one. It is also, for exactly that reason, the thing you will get wrong for a month, because the English habit fires before you have finished thinking.

The ke-clause

Reported speech hangs off ke:

Li diris: "Mi venos." - He said: "I will come."

Li diris, ke li venos. - He said he would come.

Three mechanical points, all small and all worth having straight.

The comma is standard. Esperanto puts a comma before ke, and before a subordinate clause generally. It is not a stylistic flourish; well-edited Esperanto does it every time.

Ke is never dropped. English happily says he said he would come with no that at all. Esperanto has no such option: leave out ke and the sentence stops parsing.

The addressee takes al. Diri says the words, al says who to: li diris **al mi**, ke li venos - he told me he was coming.

The tense stays put

Here is the comparison table that does most of the teaching:

The Esperanto column simply reuses the speaker's own ending. Read it as: the tense inside a ke-clause is measured from the moment of speaking, not from now. Estas means at that moment, ill. Venos means after that moment, coming. Vidis means before that moment, saw.

That relative reading is why li diris, ke li estis malsana genuinely does mean he said he had been ill. The illness was already over when he spoke. Esperanto gets the pluperfect meaning out of a plain -is, because the reference point has moved, and does not need estis vidinta to do it. The compound tenses are there if you want to be emphatic about it, and almost nobody is.

The -us trap

This one deserves its own heading because it is the single most common error in the topic.

English reports a future as would. Esperanto's -us is not that would. -us is the conditional, the one covered in the conditional and commands article, and it makes an event hypothetical:

Li diris, ke li venos. - He said he would come. (He said: I will come.)

Li diris, ke li venus. - He said he would come, if something else happened.

Two different reports of two different men. The English sentence is the same for both, which is English's problem, not Esperanto's. Ask what the person actually said: if the original words were mi venos, the report is venos.

Reported questions

Yes/no questions keep ĉu, exactly as they had it when they were direct:

"Ĉu vi venos?" becomes Li demandis, ĉu mi venos.

Two things to stay away from. The first is se. English uses if for both if it rains and I asked if he was coming; Esperanto's se covers only the first. Li demandis, se mi venos says he asked something on the condition that I turn up, which is not a sentence anyone meant to write. The second is stacking: ke ĉu is not a thing. Ĉu is the conjunction here; it does the job alone.

Question-word questions use the ordinary ki- correlative:

Ŝi demandis, kie mi loĝas. - She asked where I lived.

Mi ne scias, kiam li venos. - I do not know when he will come.

Li demandis, kiom da tempo ni havas. - He asked how much time we have.

English speakers brace for a re-ordering step here, because English has to undo the inversion of where do you live to get where you lived. Esperanto never inverted anything: kie vi loĝas is the direct question too. There is nothing to undo. Note the tense staying honest again: loĝas, because she asked about the present, not loĝis.

Reported commands and requests

A command inside a reported clause takes the volitive -u:

"Dormu!" becomes La patrino diris, ke la knabo dormu. - The mother told the boy to go to sleep.

Ŝi petis, ke mi helpu ŝin. - She asked me to help her.

Li ordonis, ke ni restu en la urbo. - He ordered us to stay in town.

The -u carries the force by itself; you never add a word meaning should or to. This construction works after every verb of asking, telling, ordering, wanting and needing, which is why it is the one to learn.

With peti and ordoni you may instead name the person as an object and use an infinitive: li petis min helpi lin. It is perfectly good Esperanto and often reads more lightly. It just does not generalise, so keep ke plus -u as the default.

Pronouns, and where si stops

Reporting moves the pronouns. I becomes he, my becomes his, nun may become tiam. All of that is common sense.

What is not common sense is si. The rule is: si refers to the subject of its own clause, and a ke-clause is its own clause with its own subject.

Li diris, ke li vidis sian patron. - He said he had seen his own father.

Li diris, ke mi vidis lian patron. - He said I had seen his father.

In the first, the ke-clause subject is li, so sia points at him. In the second the ke-clause subject is mi, so si would have to mean my father, which is not what is meant; lia reaches back to the main-clause li instead. Si can never climb out of its clause to grab the subject of the sentence above. The reflexive article works through the whole system; this is the corner of it where reported speech does the damage.

What to take away

• ke plus a comma, always, and never dropped.
• The tense inside the clause is the speaker's own: li diris, ke li venos.
• -os for a reported future; -us only if the original was conditional.
• Reported yes/no questions take ĉu, never se.
• ki- questions need no re-ordering, because Esperanto never re-ordered them.
• Commands become -u inside the ke-clause.
• si belongs to the subject of its own clause and cannot cross ke.