The one thing I’m finding difficult about Esperanto isn’t the vocabulary, or the wonderfully logical and flat-form verbs and tenses. It’s not the adjectives and adverbs, or the comparative clauses that revolve around combinations of kiel and tiel. It’s the direct object.
That’s something we have in English, too, but it’s not something you ever think about when you know a language well.
Basically, the direct object is the subject of a sentence on which the verb is carried out. If I read a book, then ‘book’ would be the direct object. In English, though, that doesn’t really matter since it’s obvious that the book is what was read because it couldn’t happen any other way. A book couldn’t read me, after all. Likewise, if ‘I like Mark’, then Mark would be the direct object.
But not all languages structure sentences in the same way, and so the subject / verb / object (and optional indirect object) structure doesn’t always run in the same linear fashion. Esperanto, which was only ever designed to be used as a second language, has to cater for this by allowing sentences to be built either forwards or backwards to suit the national sensibilities of the speaker in question.
So, ‘I like Mark’ doesn’t actually make any sentence in Esperanto because you can’t tell whether it’s me or Mark is doing the liking and who is the one being liked. That’s a pay-off for the brilliantly easy verb structure, which doesn’t make any distinction for the person who is performing the verb action or indeed when how many of them there are. So, I like is ‘mi amas’, and you like is ‘vi amas’ and he likes is ‘li amas’ and they like is ‘ili amas’. No change at all, you see, regardless of who is doing the liking.
So, while an English speaker might read ‘Mi amas li’ as ‘I like him’, anyone who speaks a language in which sentences are built in the opposite order would read that to mean that he is liking me.
You therefore have to indicate through the addition of an extra ‘n’ at the end of the word representing the direct object what is being affected by the verb. So, I like him is ‘Mi amas lin’ rather than ‘li’. It would be equally correct to write ‘lin mi amas’ or ‘lin amas mi’ because the ‘n’ at the end of lin always shows that ‘he’ is still the direct object and so it is still the thing that has the verb done to it (he is the one being liked).
That’s all pretty simple and easy to understand, but it’s less clear when you’re talking about more transient and ethereal verbs like to see. Do you apply the direct object then? I don’t know. And what about conditional verbs like should or shall we go to the cinema? I’m fairly sure that that would be cxu ni venu al la kinejon, but from what I can gather it seems to work on a case by case basis, so it could just be kinejo. I’m sure that’s not right, though. Either the book I’m using isn’t entirely clear on this point or, more likely, I’ve not yet worked out full how this rather important bit of grammar works. In Esperanto or, at the age of 33, the language I’ve been speaking all my life: English.
And that’s annoying.
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First, a niggley point which I apologise for – “veni” is “to come”. “Iri” is “to go”. Anyway..as I understand it, the use of the ‘n’ ending is used when something is being done to something, or to show motion towards something when it has not already been made clear. I believe that in your example, there should be no “n”, as nothing is being done to the cinema and you say “al la”, indicating motion towards. “Al la kinejo” describes the manner of your going, it’s not the object. Intransitive verbs take no object, I think! Sorry for being a smartarse. http://www.lernu.net is a great resource.