pronomo

The metalanguage set is nearly complete. These are the words you need to talk about the language rather than in it, and the course has been collecting them: substantivo at 2,010 is a noun, adjektivo at 2,132 an adjective, verbo at 1,714 a verb, prepozicio at 2,424 a preposition, and pronomo at 2,768 completes the run. Beyond them lie adverbo, konjunkcio, artikolo, interjekcio and numeralo, all built the same transparent international way. Learn the six and you can read a grammar written in Esperanto, which is the point at which the language starts teaching itself.

Esperanto's pronoun system is nine words and one ending. The personal pronouns are mi, vi, li, ŝi, ĝi, ni, ili, oni, si. Add -n for the object (min, lin, sin) and -a for the possessive (mia, ilia, sia). There is no separate set of object forms to learn - no me/my/mine, no je/me/moi - because the same two endings that work on every other word work here too. That is one of the places where the sixteen rules pay out most visibly.

Three pages that go deeper, and one live argument.Si at rank 40 is the reflexive, and it is the single hardest pronoun for English speakers because English has no equivalent that behaves the same way: the reflexive article is the one to read. The correlatives - kiu, tiu, io, nenio and their table - are pronouns too, handled in the correlatives. And the question of what to do about ĝi, li, ŝi and the proposed gender-neutral ri is the most argued-about topic in the modern movement; the gender in Esperanto article sets out both sides, including why the Akademio has not adopted ri and why a large part of the speaking community uses it anyway.