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Correlatives?

od miamaslegi, 25 października 2011

Wpisy: 16

Język: English

robbkvasnak (Pokaż profil) 26 października 2011, 18:29:42

I teach Esperanto. Last Friday we went over the correlatives. They have a similar pattern in most languages. For English speakers:
The k- words are question words (who, where, when, what, how ...)
The t- words are answers (that, this, these, there, then, that way...)
The ĉ- words start with every in English (everything, everyone, everywhere, every time, every way, ....)
The nen- words are no in English (nothing, nowhere, no way, nobody...)
the 0- words [io, iu, iel...] are "some" words in English (something, somebody, some how, sometime....)
So take courage, if so many people are studying English and have to master these words, then you will do it in Esperanto

Kalantir (Pokaż profil) 26 października 2011, 20:08:38

This pdf has a nice chart of correlatives in it that I found quite useful for memorizing.
http://ikso.net/libera/pdf/chap8_en.pdf

My advice is to learn each of the beginnings first. Then every ending you learn will give you 5 new words to use.

I haven't memorized the entire chart yet, but I'm getting there. Also, the Ana Pana course introduces them to you at a slow but steady rate. Don't feel compelled to learn the whole chart all at once.

Nephihaha (Pokaż profil) 23 października 2014, 19:14:33

Trouble is that they don't look like the relevant question words in Romance languages eg quand, quando, apart from the initial K-

bartlett22183 (Pokaż profil) 23 października 2014, 19:34:38

Ido has corresponding words to the Esperanto correlatives which might seem more "natural" IF YOU ALREADY SPEAK A WEST EUROPEAN INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGE (yes, shouting deliberate). Suppose your native language is Thai (or whatever, to pick something more or less at random), and that is all you speak. Then the supposed "naturalness" of the Ido correlatives would be no more meaningful than those of Esperanto. All too often, "natural" and "relevant" mean "natural to west European speakers," while this criterion is meaningless to ever so many people around the world if E-o is to be a truly worldwide international language.

Rugxdoma (Pokaż profil) 23 października 2014, 21:11:51

miamaslegi:Just seeing that table of 57 gajillion words that all look disconcertingly identical sends me into fits. malgajo.gif
Has anyone come up with (or does anyone know of) a trick to memorizing them? I've been trying to think of some sort of mnemonic device or anything that will help me get these down...
As has already been pointed out, start with a few of them and learn them. Later, when you want to learn more, you will see that the table is in itself the mnemonic device you are asking for. Instead of learning 45 (5 times 9) words, you only have to learn 13 wordparts 5 + 9).

The principle is this:
There are nine question words in Esperanto. Each of them has four answers which can be given by one single word.
Example: If you ask: "Where is he?" then you can answer:
There. Somewhere. Nowhere. Everywhere.

In Esperanto all have the "-e" at the end:
Kie? Tie. Ie. Nenie. Ĉie. The "-e" indicates place.
And so on.

zaragorti (Pokaż profil) 23 października 2014, 21:51:31

I can also recommend the short book by Sylvan Zaft. It includes mnemonic techniques such as remembering that -am endings refer to time because we talk about time in the morning being a.m. Also, the -al endings are about reasons because ALbert Einstein looked for the reason behind everything. A bit tacky, maybe, but the fact that I remember it means it works!

Having now (more or less) learned the correlatives it's a wonder to me that other languages have such a complex system to convey such simple meanings!

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