One of the most difficult things to get to grips with when learning Esperanto is the correlatives: things like who, what, when, where, which and so on.

Look at them in English, and you can see that they’re all quite similar. They all begin with a ‘wh’ and they’re all quite short, yet they’re all very different and not usually interchangable. Say ‘why did he arrive’ when you actually meant ‘when did he arrive’ and you’ll see that the sentence is fundamentally different. The answer you got back would probably not be what you were expecting, either.

When he was putting the language together, Zamenhof decided that everything in Esperanto should be entirely regular. There are no exceptions to any rules in the whole codex, such that if a word ends in an ‘o’ you know it’s a noun. If it ends in an ‘i’ it’s always the infinitive of the verb. If it ends ‘as’ then it’s the present tense, regardless of the object or subject of the sentence, such that while in French you would have Je vais, vous allez, nous allons and so on for I am going, you are going and we are going, in Esperanto it would be Mi iras, vi iras, ni iras, with the ending never changing.

So, it was entirely predictable that this logical structure should be carried through in the correlatives, too, with them all starting ‘ki’, and all being impossibly short and curt, such that you have only one or two letters onto which you can grab to understand the sense of the word.

This gives us kiu, kio, kia, kie, kiel, kial, kiam, kiom and kies for who, what, what kind of, where, how, why, when, how much and whose.

This is very difficult to learn, particularly where kia and kial are so different in English (’what kind of’ and ‘how’), and the same being the case for kio and kiom (’what’ and ‘how much’) and kie and kies (’where’ and ‘whose’) yet so strikingly similar in Esperanto. The best you can hope to do is just learn the u, o, a, e, el, al, am, om and es endings and equate them to the definitions.

After a few days of puzzling over this, I think I may have cracked it with a little system, which I’ll detail here so that I always know where I can find it in the future. It’s not perfect, but it does seem to have worked for me.

Kiu is pronounced kee-oo. The oo sound can also be found at the end of who, so kiu means who or which.

Kio has a hard ‘o’ on the end of it, which is the same as the ‘o’ sound in the middle of ‘what’, or ‘wot’. Kio therefore means what.

Kia looks like kio. It’s almost identical apart from the fact that the ‘a’ has a tail on it, making it an ‘o’ with a little bit extra. So, the definition is the same, but a little bit extra, turning it from ‘what’ into ‘what kind of’ or ‘what a…’.

Kie ends in an ‘e’, which could stand for everywhere. This therefore means ‘where’.

Kiel ends with the ‘el’ sound, a bit like the ello ello of a 60s television policeman. What do you do after you say hello to someone? You ask them how they are, so kiel means ‘how’.

Kial is ‘why’. Why? I don’t know. It’s the only one I’ve not been able to find a system for, but that makes it unique, so it’s easy to remember.

Kiam has only two letters you need to remember: ‘am’. This means morning in Latin (ante meridian), where as ‘pm’ would mean afternoon, so it’s obviously related to time, so it must be ‘when’.

Kiom ends with ‘om’, which isn’t a hundred miles away from ‘oz’, which we use for ounce. An ounce is a quantity, so Kiom is about quantities. It must mean ‘how much’ and ‘how many’.

Kies takes the ‘es’ extension. I started to remember this by thinking of a mis-spelt whose (’whoES’) as ‘whose’ is actually the definition, but I’ve since found it easier to think of the ‘es’ coming from ‘whose shoES’, which rhymes, and still helps me remember the first word of the pair, ‘whose’.

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