Which Preposition Does the Verb Want? Verb Government in Esperanto

Esperanto's advertising is that the grammar is regular, and it is: sixteen rules, no irregular verbs, no genders, no agreement you cannot see. What the advertising skips is that regularity does not reach as far as prepositions, because which preposition a verb takes is not grammar at all. It is vocabulary, and vocabulary is where every planned language stops being a system and starts being a language people actually used.

So pensi wants pri. Dependi wants de. Partopreni wants en. Nothing in the rule book predicts any of that, and no amount of understanding the accusative or the preposition system will hand it to you. Knowing what a prepozicio is does not tell you which one a verb wants, any more than knowing what a verb is tells you what it means.

The consolation is threefold, and it is bigger than the problem. The list is short. It is far more forgiving than its equivalent in any national language, because Esperanto lets a great many verbs take either a preposition or a plain object. And the Fundamento provided two escape hatches on purpose, one of which is a whole preposition kept in reserve for exactly this.

The table

Thirty verbs, each row checked against PMEG, the Reta Vortaro or the Fundamento itself. Where two constructions are attested, both are printed, because printing one would be inventing a rule the language does not have.

Two things to notice before the principles, because they are the whole reason the table is bearable.

The pri column is enormous. Pensi, paroli, demandi, dubi, plori, zorgi, okupiĝi, ridi, konsenti, timi in its second sense: PMEG's own definition of pri is montras temon, tion, kion ago traktas aŭ koncernas - it shows a topic, what an action treats or concerns - and once you read it as the topic marker rather than as English about, most of the column stops needing memorisation. If the complement is what the verb is about, try pri first.

The al column is the other half. Aparteni, okazi, plaĉi, respondi, and the receiving end of helpi, obei, kredi, fidi, danki. Al marks the party the action reaches. Between them, pri and al account for something like two thirds of every case a learner meets.

Why an object and a preposition are so often both correct

This is the part that makes Esperanto's government kinder than French's or German's, and the licence for it is in the Fundamento. Not, as almost every write-up of this subject claims, in Rule 14 - Rule 14 only ever talks about je, and the next section deals with it. The wider permission is in the Ekzercaro, exercise 29, which is Fundamental text in its own right and which every learner should read once:

El la dirita regulo sekvas, ke se ni pri ia verbo ne scias, ĉu ĝi postulas post si la akuzativon (t. e. ĉu ĝi estas aktiva) aŭ ne, ni povas ĉiam uzi la akuzativon. Ekzemple, ni povas diri "obei al la patro" kaj "obei la patron" (anstataŭ "obei je la patro"). Sed ni ne uzas la akuzativon tiam, kiam la klareco de la senco tion ĉi malpermesas; ekzemple: ni povas diri "pardoni al la malamiko" kaj "pardoni la malamikon", sed ni devas diri ĉiam "pardoni al la malamiko lian kulpon".

In English: if you do not know whether a verb takes the accusative, you may always use it. Obei al la patro and obei la patron are both correct. But not where clarity forbids it: pardoni al la malamiko and pardoni la malamikon are both fine, and yet when both the offender and the offence are present you must say pardoni al la malamiko lian kulpon, because a verb cannot have two objects.

That is a remarkable thing to find in a language's founding document. It is Zamenhof anticipating precisely the problem this page exists for, and answering it with a general permission rather than a list. It is why so many rows in the table carry two constructions.

The same exercise 29 supplies two of the best examples in the language, printing the alternation out loud with aŭ:

Mi sopiras je mia perdita feliĉo (aŭ: mian perditan feliĉon)

Mi ridas je lia naiveco (aŭ mi ridas pro lia naiveco, aŭ: mi ridas lian naivecon)

Same sentence, two and three ways, and the Fundamento prefers none of them. The same freedom is what lets simili appear in the literature as li similas leonon, as ni similas al akvo and as ni similas je la verda kreskaĵo, all three in the citations under one headword.

Where the two constructions differ in meaning rather than in taste, the table says so, and the case that actually matters is kredi. PMEG sets it out in three lines:

Kredi je iu aŭ je io = kredi, ke tiu aŭ tio vere ekzistas.

Kredi ion, al io, pri io = kredi, ke tio estas vera.

Kredi al iu = kredi, ke tiu diras la veron.

So mi kredas al vi is I believe you, I take your word for it, and ReVo's citation pins it: ne kredu al li eĉ unu silabon. Mi kredas je vi is I believe in you, I hold that you are real or that you will come through, and the citation there is en mia infaneco mi kredis je Dio kaj je senmorteco. Nobody will misunderstand you if you swap them, but the pair is worth knowing because it is one of the very few places where an Esperanto preposition carries real semantic weight. ReVo makes exactly one prescription in the entry, and it is the same distinction: for ĉu vi kredas la potencon de la egiptaj dioj? it suggests pli bone: ... je la potenco ....

The other thing to say out loud: where both are allowed, both are allowed. PMEG's page on object-taking verbs, discussing helpi, says oni ankaŭ povas uzi al-komplementon anstataŭ objekto - one may also use an al-complement instead of an object - and neither PMEG nor ReVo states a preference between them. The transitivity article makes the same point from the transitivity side, where it belongs. What this page adds is that the licence reaches further than helpi, obei and pardoni: simili, fidi, memori, partopreni, sopiri, dubi and koleri all carry attested objects beside their prepositions. Choose one and be consistent inside a text. Do not extend the licence to a verb not on the list, because plaĉi, manki and aparteni never take one at all.

Two footnotes on that licence, both of which stop it being a licence to invent.

Pardoni and peti swap slots rather than adding one. With pardoni the object may be the offender or the offence, and whichever one you promote pushes the other into a preposition: mi pardonis al la malamiko lian kulpon or mi pardonis la malamikon pri lia kulpo. PMEG's limit is flat: Ne diru: *Mi pardonis la malamikon lian kulpon*. Peti works identically, and gets the same ruling: Ne diru: *Mi petas vin pardonon*.

Some old constructions have simply died. Miri once took an object, and PMEG records both the swap and the obituary: Neniam ŝi miros je sia propra malaltiĝo becomes neniam ŝi miros sian propran malaltiĝon, and then nuntempe oni prefere diras pri sia propra malaltiĝo aŭ pro sia propra malaltiĝo. ReVo is blunter, noting that the transitive use, found in Zamenhof and in his daughter, intertempe arĥaikiĝis - has become archaic in the meantime. Edziĝi is the same story with a date attached: the Fundamento's Ekzercaro has li edziĝis je ŝi, and PMEG's comment is one word longer than it needs to be to be devastating - nun oni uzas kutime al aŭ kun. A construction being Fundamental does not make it current.

And one where the manual and the classics disagree. Enamiĝi is the sharpest case in the set. PMEG argues from the word's structure that the love points at the beloved rather than into them, so oni prefere diru mi enamiĝis al vi, ne *mi enamiĝis en vi(n)*, and allows enamiĝi je iu as a third option. The Reta Vortaro attests all three - and both of its en plus accusative citations are Zamenhof (vi enamiĝis en min; li sammomente enamiĝis en ŝin), while the al example is from a magazine piece in 2000. PMEG's preferred form is the one with the thinnest classical backing. Write al if you want the modern manual behind you, and do not correct anybody who writes en.

Je, the official when-in-doubt preposition

Rule 14 of the Fundamenta Gramatiko, in full, because it is short and it is the constitutional basis for everything above:

Every preposition in the international language has a definite fixed meaning. If it be necessary to employ some preposition, and it is not quite evident from the sense which it should be, the word je is used, which has no definite meaning; for example, ĝoj'i je tio, "to rejoice over it"; rid'i je tio, "to laugh at it"; enu'o je la patr'uj'o, "a longing for one's fatherland". In every language different prepositions, sanctioned by usage, are employed in these dubious cases, in the international language, one word, je, suffices for all. Instead of je, the objective without a preposition may be used, when no confusion is to be feared.

Three details worth pausing on.

The examples in the rule are all government cases. Ĝoji je, ridi je, enui je: Zamenhof did not illustrate Rule 14 with clock times or measurements, which is what je mostly does today. He illustrated it with verbs, because verb government is the problem it was invented to solve.

Usage has moved anyway, and one of the three examples has been abandoned. PMEG's own account of ĝoji gives it a pri-complement or a pro-complement, and the Reta Vortaro's whole article on the root carries no je example at all. So ĝoji je tio is simultaneously the Fundamento's illustration of Rule 14 and a construction the modern dictionary does not record. Ridi je fared better and survives beside ridi pri and ridi pro, all three attested. Nobody will mark ĝoji je wrong, because it cannot be marked wrong; nobody writes it either. This is exactly the situation the Fundamento and Akademio article describes: the rule cannot be repealed, so the dead form stays legal.

The Fundamento has no Esperanto text of this rule. The Fundamenta Gramatiko is en kvin lingvoj - French, English, German, Russian and Polish - and Esperanto is not among them. There are Esperanto renderings: Zamenhof's own in the Fundamenta Krestomatio of 1903, which drops all three examples, and PMEG's, which is a composite of the five national columns. Neither is the law. If you see Rule 14 quoted in Esperanto, it is a translation, and it is worth knowing which one.

Je is a last resort, not a first one, and PMEG says so. Its advice is ĝenerale oni evitu je, se pli bona alternativo ekzistas - generally avoid je if a better alternative exists. It says something similar about the reverse swap: the accusative may in theory always replace je, laŭ regulo en la Fundamenta Gramatiko, but tiaj esprimoj kun N-finaĵo estas nuntempe tamen sufiĉe nekutimaj, such expressions are now rather unusual, and ordinare oni uzas taŭgan rolvorteton - normally one uses a suitable preposition. So both escape hatches are legal and both read as slightly archaic. Tricky prepositions makes the same case at length. Where usage has already settled je onto a construction - kredi je, je la tria horo, pli alta je unu kapo - use it without apology. Where it has not, you are inventing, and the invention will not be understood.

Pri- as a prefix: the preposition disappears inside the word

The second escape hatch, and the more elegant one.

PMEG's account is three sentences and it is exact:

En kombinoj prefikseca pri kreas objektajn verbojn. Aŭ ĝi faras senobjektan verbon objekta, aŭ ĝi faras el jam objekta verbo novan objektan verbon. Normale tia pri-verbo havas originan pri-komplementon kiel objekton.

Prefixal pri creates object-taking verbs: either it makes an objectless verb take one, or it builds a new object-taking verb out of an already transitive one, and normally the thing that was the pri-complement becomes the object. So the preposition is swallowed and the topic is promoted:

Li silentis pri la afero. -> Li prisilentis la aferon.

Mi pensas pri la problemo. -> Mi pripensas la problemon.

Mi skribas pri la vojaĝo. -> Mi priskribas la vojaĝon.

The first two are PMEG's own worked examples, and it takes trouble over the second: pensi is already an object-taking verb whose object is the thoughts themselves, sed kiu ofte aperas tute sen objekto, and pripensi is an object-taking verb kies objekto estas la temo de la pensoj - whose object is the topic of the thinking. The prefix does not add an object so much as change which participant gets to be one.

PMEG then sorts the rest into two more groups. In prirabi, prisemi, priĵeti, prikonstrui, priserĉi, prilumi and pripluvi, pri has lost its own meaning entirely and is there only to shuffle the sentence roles: prirabi domon is to rob a house, not to rob about it. And in prirespondi, prijuĝi and priĵuri, pri adds a new sense of its own, which PMEG compares to the suffix -um-. Prirespondi is the warning label on the whole family: it does not mean a transitive respondi, it means to be answerable for something, and PMEG notes that respondeci is now the commoner word for it.

That is the trap in general form: the two-word form and the pri- form are not synonyms, and the shift is consistent enough to be useful.

• pripensi is not think about but think over, consider properly. Mi pripensos vian proponon promises deliberation; mi pensos pri via propono promises only that the thought will occur.
• priskribi has drifted furthest and is simply to describe. Nobody now hears skribi pri inside it.
• prilabori is to work something over, to process it: a manuscript, a field, a dataset. Labori pri is just working on a thing.
• pridemandi is to question, to interrogate, which is a good deal more pointed than demandi pri.

Those four are this page's examples rather than PMEG's list, which is worth saying because they are the four a learner meets first and it would be easy to assume the manual endorses them individually. It endorses the machine.

So the honest rule is: learn the pri- verb as a separate word, and keep the two-word form for the ordinary topic. If you cannot say what the prefix added, you wanted the two-word form.

The English traps, in one place

Four failure modes account for most of the errors a native English speaker will actually make.

Adding a preposition to a verb that already takes an object. Atendi is the flagship: mi atendas la trajnon, never mi atendas je la trajno or por la trajno. ReVo's citations are all direct objects and no je construction is recorded. Serĉi behaves identically: you search the key, you do not search for it. English wait for, look for, ask for and listen to all carry particles that Esperanto simply does not want.

Importing the English preposition instead of the Esperanto one. Dependi de, not dependi sur, whatever depend on suggests. Ridi pri, not ridi ĉe. Timi takes the thing feared as a plain object, not de on the French pattern and not antaŭ on the German one: mi timas la doloron. Watch the noun, though, because it goes the other way and is Zamenhof's own: timo antaŭ la Eternulo, timo antaŭ sia frato. The verb takes an object, the noun takes antaŭ, and nothing about that is derivable.

Reaching for a preposition the sources do not carry. Several plausible-looking constructions turn up in learner material and in neither PMEG nor the Reta Vortaro: atendi je, timi antaŭ for the verb, koleri pri and koleri pro, esperi je, esperi pri, dubi je, rimarki pri, gratuli al iu, rezigni je. None of them is attested and none is used here. If you need a preposition for one of those verbs, the ones in the table are the ones people write.

Doubling up on the object. No Esperanto verb takes two accusatives, which is why danki is danki iun pro io and never the English shape. PMEG's ruling on exactly this is blunt: Ne diru: *Mi dankis lin la tujan plenumon*. The reason goes into transitivity properly; the consequence for this page is that the second participant always ends up inside a preposition.

Assuming that because two forms exist, any two forms exist. Helpi al is fine because it is attested. Plaĉi min is not fine, because plaĉi has no object in the language at all, and the impersonal constructions article is where that whole family lives: plaĉi al, manki al, ŝajni al, sufiĉi al. Government is a lookup, and lookups do not generalise.

What to do when you genuinely do not know

In order, and the order matters.

1. Ask what the complement is doing. If it is the topic, pri. If it is the party reached, al. If it is the source or the cause the outcome hangs on, de. If it is the reason somebody is grateful or angry, pro. That heuristic gets you the right answer most of the time.
2. Try the plain accusative. Rule 14 licenses it wherever no confusion is feared, and confusion is rarely feared. Mi sopiras la hejmon is good Esperanto.
3. Use je. It exists for this. It is not elegant and it is not wrong.
4. Rebuild the sentence. Mi ne certas pri tio instead of guessing what certi governs. Mi havas timon pri... instead of guessing at timi. The language has enough spare parts that no single verb has to be a bottleneck.

What you should not do is stall. A learner who writes je and moves on has written a sentence; a learner who stops to look up the government of every verb has written nothing. That is the whole reason Rule 14 is in the grammar rather than in a style guide.

What to take away

• Verb government is vocabulary, not grammar. Nothing in the sixteen rules predicts dependi de or partopreni en.
• Pri is the topic marker and covers a third of the table: pensi, paroli, demandi, dubi, zorgi, okupiĝi, plori, ridi, konsenti.
• Al marks the party reached and covers most of the rest: aparteni, okazi, plaĉi, respondi, and the second construction of helpi, obei, danki, fidi, kredi.
• Many verbs take either an object or a preposition, and both are standard: helpi, obei, simili, fidi, memori, partopreni, sopiri, dubi, koleri. Neither PMEG nor ReVo ranks them.
• Kredi is the one where the choice changes the meaning: kredi al iu is believing a person, kredi je io is believing in something, a plain object is believing a statement.
• The wide licence is Ekzercaro 29, not Rule 14: if you do not know whether a verb takes the accusative, use it, except where clarity forbids. Obei al la patro and obei la patron are the Fundamento's own example.
• Rule 14 gives you je when nothing fits, and lets the accusative stand in for je. Both now read as slightly old-fashioned, and PMEG says as much.
• Pri- as a prefix absorbs the preposition and hands the verb an object, with a shift of sense: pripensi is to think over, not merely to think about. Prirespondi is the exception that proves it, and means to be answerable for.
• The English traps: atendi la trajnon with no preposition, dependi de not sur, danki iun pro io and never two objects.
• Unattested and best avoided: atendi je, timi antaŭ (the verb), koleri pri, esperi je, dubi je, rimarki pri, gratuli al iu.

See also

• Transitivity - which verbs take an object at all, the plaĉi reversing set, and why no verb takes two.
• Prepositions - the survey: one fixed meaning each, and no preposition governs a case.
• Tricky prepositions - je and po in depth, and the accusative of direction.
• The accusative - the -n that Rule 14 lets stand in for a preposition.
• Impersonal constructions - plaĉi al mi, mankas al mi, and the frames with nobody in them.
• Word building - the machinery pri- belongs to.
• The Fundamento and the Akademio - why a rule from 1905 still settles arguments in 2026.