Lesson 2 - Nouns

Nouns are the names for things (both abstract and concrete) and living beings. In English a word out of a context is often not recognizable as a noun, a verb, an adjective or another part of speech. For example house is a noun in "This is a house", but it is a verb in "We can house two more people". But an Esperanto noun is always recognizable as such because it invariably has the ending -o. Here are a few examples of Esperanto nouns:

akvo (water)

libro (book)

domo (house)

auto (motor-car)

tablo (table)

Every Esperanto noun consists of a root (e.g. akv-) which is followed by -o. In classical grammar (i.e. the kind of grammar associated with Latin and Greek) we could classify this -o as the ending for singular nouns in the nominative case, but it is much more convenient to see it as just an ending that is used to build words from roots. In this respect you can compare it to the English suffix -y which is sometimes used to derive an adjective from a root (e.g. watery from water).

In English a noun very often only consists of a root (and the same applies to verbs and adjectives), but this is not the case in Esperanto. A noun always consists of the root plus the ending -o. A noun can have more than one ending though.

The plural of an Esperanto noun is made by attaching the ending -j to the -o ending. So, from libro (book) we can derive libroj (books). The classical grammarian would possibly classify the entire combination -oj as the ending for plural nouns in the nominative case, but we just regard -j as a suffix that expresses the plural. We do in fact not make a sharp distinction in Esperanto between word formation and inflection.

Here are the nouns from the previous list in the plural:

akvoj (waters)

libroj (books)

domoj (houses)

autoj (motor-cars)

tabloj (tables)

In English it is possible to create compound words by simply glueing nouns together (e.g. housewife, kitchensink) and this method is used very frequently in Esperanto too. In English there are no rules that prescribe whether a compound should be written as a single word or whether a hyphen or a space should be used to separate the parts of a compound word. It is not unusual to find for example kitchen garden, kitchen-maid and kitchensink in the same English dictionary. In Esperanto such compounds are in principle written as one word without spaces (although hyphens may be used at the discretion of the writer in unusual or difficult to unravel compounds). Even long compounds like aertrafikreganto (air traffic controller) are written as one word. Note that it is customary to leave out all the -o endings except for the last one if they are not necessary for easy pronunciation. What easy pronunciation exactly is will obviously depend on the linguistic background of the speaker. For a Japanese person whose native language has only syllables that end in a vowel or in -n, the full form aerotrafikoreganto would probably be much easier to pronounce than the shortened form.

Closely associated with nouns are the parts of speech called articles. In Esperanto there is only one article, la which corresponds to English the. There is however no indefinite article like the English a. The absence of the definite article la indicates indefiniteness. This method is actually also used in English, where there is no indefinite article used with plural nouns (e.g. "She likes horses"). The only difference between Esperanto and English here is that Esperanto does not use an indefinite article in the singular either.

In fact the article la can in principle be left out too. If you are in doubt whether you should use la or not use it, then you should leave it out. The use of la was made optional for the benefit of speakers who do not have articles in their native languages (e.g. Russian).

**Vocabulary**
Esperanto	English
akvo	water (cf. aqueduct)
arbo	a tree (cf. arboreal)
au	or
auto(mobilo)^*	an automobile
domo	a house (cf. domestic)
kaj	and
la	the
pomo	an apple
pomarbo	an apple-tree
tablo	a table
tero	earth, land (cf. terrestrial)
terpomo	a potato (cf. French pomme de terre)

^* The word automobilo is actually composed of the Greek prefix auto- (self) and the Latin word mobile (movable). However, automobil- should be seen as a single Esperanto root. Officially there is no prefix auto- in Esperanto, although it is used in many international words of Greek origin (e.g. autonomio, autokrato) which are often preferred over compounds made from roots and official Esperanto affixes. An example is the use of autodidakto instead of memlerninto ("self-learned-one"). It can be argued that the use of such international words makes Esperanto easier for speakers of most European languages and the many others who know a European language. But the only way in which they can be fitted into the Esperanto vocabulary is by regarding automobil-, autokrat-, etc. as roots, no matter how obvious it is that they are etymologically really compounds.

Exercise 2-1

Translate into English:

domoj, la auto kaj la domo, pomoj kaj pomarboj, pomo au terpomo, akvo kaj terpomoj, la tablo, autoj, domo kaj automobilo.
Exercise 2-2

Translate into Esperanto:

a potato, cars and houses, the apples, earth and water, trees or houses, a table, potatoes, the tables.

Key to the exercises