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Esperanto

Page history last edited by Dave Raftery 15 years, 1 month ago

Esperanto is a man made language which is very easy to learn.

 

 

Site for learning Esperanto

 

Esperanto version of Wikipedia

 

New Engalnd Esperanto Group

 

10 part Esperanto course

 

Multimedia Esperanto course

 

Online course

 

Ideas for using with OLPC.

 

Zagreb method

 

Book

 

Esperanto USA

 

Esperanto at Stanford - a 3 quarter course

 

Vocabulary game

 

MIT Esperanto club - has there own simple book for download

 

How to learn


It is probably the only language to have no irregular verbs (French has 2,238, Spanish and German about 700 each) and, with just six verb endings to master, it is reckoned most novices can begin speaking it after an hour.

 

Rather than create a vast lexicon of words, then expect people to learn them all, Zamenhof decided on a system of root words and affixes that alter their meanings ("mal-" converts a word into its opposite, for example). And because word endings denote parts of speech (nouns end in "-o", adjectives in "-a", etc), word order is immaterial. Although modern Esperanto now has around 9,000 root words, most meanings can be expressed by drawing from a pool of about 500 and simply combining them - a creative process that is regarded by Esperantists as acceptable and even commendable.

 

Three-quarters of the root words are borrowed from the Romance languages, the remainder from Germanic and Slavic tongues, and Greek. This means that around half the world's population is already familiar with much of the vocabulary. For an English speaker, Esperanto is reckoned to be five times as easy to learn as Spanish or French, 10 times as easy as Russian and 20 times as easy as Arabic or Chinese.


About 75% of Esperanto's vocabulary comes from Latin and Romance languages (especially French), about 20 % comes from Germanic languages (German and English), and the rest comes mainly from Slavic languages (Russian and Polish) and Greek (mostly scientific terms).


The main languages contributing to Zamenhof's original vocabulary were Italian, French, English, and German, the modern languages most widely learned in schools around the world at the time Esperanto was devised. The result was that about two thirds of this original vocabulary is Romance, and about one third Germanic. Only a few roots were taken directly from the classical languages: The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ...

 

Latin: sed (but), tamen (however), post (after), kvankam (although), hodiaŭ (today), abio (fir), and the adverbial suffix -e.

 

Classical Greek: kaj (and), pri (about), the plural suffix -j, the accusative case suffix -n ["muse" in Greek is the a-declension word musa, musaj, musan and in Esperanto is muzo, muzoj, muzon; cf. also the Greek o-declension word logos, logoj, logon (word), and parallel adjectival declensions such as aksia, aksiaj, aksian (worthy)]. Greek was perhaps also the model of stressed i in Esperanto words like familío (family), which follows the common Greek pattern of aksía (worthy) and ojkíaj (houses).

 

Surprisingly few roots appear to have come from other modern European languages, even those Zamenhof was most familiar with. What follows is a fairly comprehensive list: Latin is an ancient Indo-European language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. ... An adverb is a part of speech-class. ... Greek (, IPA - Hellenic) is an Indo-European language with a documented history of 3,500 years, the longest in the Indo-European family if the Anatolian languages are excluded. ... Look up Plural in Wiktionary, the free dictionary Plural is a grammatical number, typically referring to more than one of the referent in the real world. ... The accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a verb. ... MuSE is an acronym that stands for Multiple Streaming Engine. ... In linguistics, declension is a paradigm of inflected nouns. ...

 

Russian and Polish: barakti (to flounder), barĉo (borscht), bulko (a bread roll), celo (an aim, goal), ĉu (whether), eĉ (even), kaĉo (porridge), kartavi (to pronounce R in the throat), klopodi (to take steps), kolbaso (a sausage), krado (a grating), krom (except), luti (to solder), via moŝto (your highness), nepre (without fail), nu (well!), ol (than), pilko (a ball), po (per), pra- (proto-), prava (right in opinion), svati (to matchmake), ŝelko (suspenders), vosto (a tail), and perhaps the collective suffix -ar-;

 

Lithuanian: tuj (immediately);

 

Hebrew: perhaps the jussive mood in -u (but see below);

 

Swedish: Comparative the (as in "the more the merrier") ju ... des.

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