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SVO word order in Esperanto? | ||
Tags: Esperanto | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Esperanto |  | |
| JacobTM Groupie United States Joined 5409 days ago 56 posts - 67 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 4 24 January 2010 at 12:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hey,
So I'm looking into Esperanto, and I started an email course in Spanish for it (that's double points). Something that worries me right away is that word order apparently doesn't matter at all. However, translating from Spanish or English, I would always think in Subject, Verb, Object. For people who actually speak Esperanto with others, is there ANY sort of convention about word order? For instance, does the SVO thing dominate because so many people (presumably) speak an SVO language to begin with? Or does ones native language more-or-less dictate their choice of word order in Esperanto, so that Japanese and Turkish Esperantists would speak similarly and English and Spanish Esperantists would speak similarly as well? Or is there some other convention not tied to native languages? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6281 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 2 of 4 24 January 2010 at 1:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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SVO is the most common, and even Japanese Esperanto speakers tend to use it because so much of the input is in that format. When it comes to adjectives however, there are significant differences, some people preferring to put adjectives before and some after nouns.
Part of this is a matter of style - you can achieve different highlighting through word order. The words at the beginning or the end of the sentence draw more attention than the rest, and in spoken Esperanto, prosody also comes into it a bit. To understand more about the effect this can have, study the famous poem "Ĉe fenestro de vagonar'" by Julio Baghy. This version at Lernu allows you to call up translations of each individual word by clicking on it. Good luck in your studies! Edited by Sprachprofi on 24 January 2010 at 1:12pm 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Akao aka FailArtist Senior Member United States Joined 5147 days ago 315 posts - 347 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Toki Pona | Message 3 of 4 27 April 2010 at 6:17am | IP Logged | ||
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If you become fluent in Esperanto I don't think you will need to worry about word order,
just focus on the words instead of the sentence. Also, for speaking, just use whatever you wish to use. If you want to use another one for fun you can and still be correct, but may put false impressions in some cases. Or you could just use SVO if you wish to have it feel more natural. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6250 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 4 of 4 27 April 2010 at 3:02pm | IP Logged | ||
It's a bit reminiscent of written Russian or Hungarian - or even German, a little. Word order is flexible, poetry exploits this beautifully, and everyday speech uses it to some extent. It can change emphasis in subtle ways. SVO dominates, but other forms do definitely appear. Practice makes using other forms easier. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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