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If you think you want to learn Esperanto, then my first piece of advice, is "don't bother"; spend your time learning a natural language that you're interested in. But if you're still going to study it, then here's my second piece of advice: You need to know about the two Esperantos. Not knowing about them can cause a lot of frustration.
The first Esperanto was created by Zamenhoff mostly in the 19th century, but he released his final version of it in 1905.
This is probably what you think of when you think of Esperanto.
The rules are minimal and regular, which makes it easier to learn than a natural language. It's a pretty flexible language that tries to accommodate the native tendencies of speakers of several European languages, so if you speak a European language, many of your natural tendencies are going to work out OK in Espreranto.
The second Esperanto is sort of a dialect of the first, but quite a bit more complicated. This second Esperanto is based on Zamenhof's, but with many of the conventions and quirks of the relatively tiny number of Esperanto speakers codified as official rules.
Now when I say 'tiny', I mean by language standards. Esperanto is only [current year - 1905] years old, and while it's difficult (impossible) to measure how many fluent speakers there are, a recent estimate would probably be about a hundred thousand. (wikipedia)
Compare that to Khoekhoe, one of the "click" languages of Africa. There are about 200,000 native speakers of Khoekhoe, but unlike Esperanto, it's a language with a long history and culture and remains a national language of Namibia. With this small number of speakers, it's considered an endangered language.
As far as I know, nothing in Esperanto #2 violates any of the rules of Esperanto #1, but #2 adds additional rules that restrict what you can say and how you can say it. Therefore, Esperanto #2 is essentially a subset of the original.
The problem is that speakers of Esperanto #2 won't tell you that they speak a subset of the language. They think there's only one Esperanto; the one they speak.
If your goal is to learn the actual Esperanto, the one created by Zamenhof, then these people are going to lead you astray. Some of the rules they give you will be legitimate, and some will just be common conventions that they've mistaken for rules. You think you're learning Esperanto, but some of what you're learning is nothing but a collection or habits that come from the random assortment of people who've left written examples of the language over the years.
These additional rules make the language much harder to learn, since they can be pretty arbitrary. But they can also make it hard for you to see the original rules clearly.
If you want to learn Esperanto as spoken by a hand-full of nutbags on the internet, then head on down to lernu, ask about things on help forums, etc.
But if you want to learn the original, there's really only one resource you need. The "Fundamento".
The Fundamento de Esperanto is the book written by Zamenhof and published in 1905 that describes the grammar of Esperanto. In the first part of the book, Zamenhof gives kind of a brief overview of the grammar, but just reading that probably won't be enough, because it'll leave you with a lot of questions. But don't worry, because the second half of the book, the ekzercaro (exercise-collection) will walk you through the features of the language in detail.
The exzercaro is a series of lessons providing sentences in Esperanto for you to translate. Using the brief grammar from the first part of the book, and the vocabulary provided, you'll be able to translate the sentences yourself. They start out very simple and progressively get harder.
Many publications of the Fundamento included translations of the sentences so you can check your work. You can find these on project Gutenberg and Archive.org for free.
As you work through the lessons, something great happens: the lessons begin to teach you the finer detail of Esperanto *in* Espranto. For example, Zamenhof will describe in Esperanto how saying thant the birds fly "en la gardeno" means the birds are in the garden and they are flying. However, saying the birds fly "en la gardenoN" means they fly into the garden. That 'n' on the end of the word for garden changes the meaning.
Zamenhof will also explain to you (in Esperanto) the flexibility of the language. For example, he'll explain that if none of the prepositions seems right, you can use the catch-all preposition, "je". And if using a preposition doesn't seem right, you can just put that 'n' on the end of the noun and the context should make it clear what you mean. You can see how the flexibility accomodates speakers whose native language doesn't use prepositons in places where other languages do. And if your native language doesn't use articles, that's OK, because the article 'la' is optional.
(There are natural languages that don't use prepositions, and languages that don't use articles, so it's almost a given that some people will be inclined to omit them in Esperanto). (Justin Rye, Personal Communication)
If you speak a subject-verb-object language such as English, you can use that order in Esperanto, but if you speak a subject-object-verb language, that order works too. The noun and adjective declension allow for a fairly flexible word order.
You can see how the inherent flexibility of the language allows for people to speak Esperanto in very different ways, yet still understand each other. This flexibility, this accomodation of different native-language tendencies, is eroded by trying to conform to the Esperanto habits of others.
By the time you work your way through all of the exercises, you'll have a good understanding of Esperanto's grammar, and a small vocabulary. At this point, you'll be able to understand pretty much anything written in Esperanto as long as you look up the word definitions.
There are some set ways of saying things in Esperanto that take some getting used to, so you may still get stuck on a phrase here or there. But practice is all you'll need at this point to acheive fluency.
There are a few often-quoted resources that describe Esperanto as commonly spoken by it's tiny number of speakers. One of them is called PAG and the another is PMEG. Both of them are descriptive grammars; they describe how people commonly use the language. This means they talk about how things are 'usually' said, and these things can sound like they are official rules, but they aren't.
The Fundamento is the only authority on Esperanto. If a rule isn't in the Fundamento, it's not a rule. Well... that's not quite correct. Esperanto assumes some rules that are common to European languages, without explicitly naming them (Rye). Unless your native language comes from outside of Europe, you'll never need to ever worry about it.
If you're asking questions in a help forum and you manage to get someone to cite their source for something (which is rare), then if the cite PAG or PMEG you know which kind of Esperanto speaker they are (#2).
Number 2 speakers tend to think that PAG and PMEG are authoritative, but they are not. The first World Esperanto Conference named the Fundamento as the only authority over the language, and it represents Zamenhof's final version of the language. Zamenhof provided methods for adding vocabulary, because additional vocabulary will be needed.
Rules that limit the number of ways of saying something can actually make a language easier, however (Rye). It may be that many of the rules that #2 advocates promote would improve the language, but these rules are not in the Fundamento, so they are simply not part of Esperanto.
If you decide that you want to learn to mimic the way other people speak Esperanto, as if their personal quirks and tendencies are rules, then you can go ahead and do that. Natural languages change over time and the only way to say what's 'correct' or not, is to look at how most educated speakers are using the language. But Esperanto is not a natural language. Its rules were set in stone in 1905.
Don't be fooled by the #2 speakers out there. They aren't the authority on the language the way speakers of English, French, or Spanish are. Compared to all natural languages, Esperanto has had practically no history and has been spoken by almost no one.
The Esperanto "community" likes to claim that they now control the language and it's rules, because they own the language now. I don't buy it.
Esperanto (Wikipedia via Gemini)
Zamenhof, Fundamento de Esperanto
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✍️ Last Updated: 2021-11-18