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It’s not easy getting hold of Esperanto books. High street book stores don’t stock them, so you’re usually left to pick them up second hand, most often online. As such, you rarely get to try before you buy, but my small library is slowly building up.

I’ve just got hold of a copy of Step by Step in Esperanto by Montagu C Butler; a fourth edition, published in 1933.

It’s challenging, even from the outside. Produced by the British Esperanto Association it is, undeniably, a very complete work. However, it was produced at a time when publishing was less advanced, and as such its basic appearance - inside as well as out - can be off-putting, giving the impression that you must read much further through it than with the Teach Yourself book before you have a basic workable grounding in the language.

There are some nice touches, like a two-line poem that will help you remember that when a word closes off with two vowels, the stressed syllable will be the last vowel but one, even if in English we would usually run the vowels together into a single syllable:

Stress the vowel last but one
Then your accent is well done

The main failing for a modern audience, though, is that while Esperanto’s entirely regular structure means old and new words follow a common thread, English has moved on in the 70 years since its first publication, rendering some explanations initially confusing:

I- is like a sign-post pointing ‘I’ndefinately, nowhither in particular…

It is, however, a textually stimulating volume, full of small tricks that help you think of the structure of words in a very visual manner. When thinking of correlatives, it helps explain the beginnings of the various constituent parts by asking you to look at the shapes of the letters themselves. Following on from the ‘I’ example above,

I- is like a sign-post pointing ‘I’ndefinately, nowhither in particular; K-, a post pointing in three directions - Which shall I follow? T-, a post pointing in one definite direction - That one. The accent over C is like a family umbrella, sheltering every one, each, all, beneath it; the letter C itself is shaped like arms stretched out to embrace each and all.

This might not make much sense to anyone who has yet to get to grips with the correlatives, but it is an excellent system for remembering how you distinguish between fiendishly similar words like which one, that one, someone, no-one and everyone.

As such, this remains a worthwhile - and indeed recommended - purchase, but only as an accompaniment to another course book; most likely from the Teach Yourself Series (only available second hand). To tackle it as a primary learning text would be either brave or disheartening, but that should not put anyone off.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 28th, 2006 at 9:48 pm and is filed under Language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.