Kljunar:In duolingo I've seen adjectives with an -as ending (belas, for example) and they are used without the verb esti I've looked around and found nothing on the subject. Does anyone know anything about it?

Probably answer can be found inside PMEG. PMEG presents modern use of Esperanto.

Wowzers, I've never seen a community that is this friendly and helpful before. I guess that's one of the pros of this language isn't it?

Anyway thank you all very much, I plan to be back with some more questions later on!

Just as I finished typing my last post I thought of a question related to this.
I get that you can change adjectives to verbs or adverbs according to the root, does this mean that the verbs follow all rules for verbs?

I couldn't find a decent way to word the sentence. Basically what I mean is can 'belas' also be used as
'belis'
'belos'
'bel [insert verb ending here]'

And still be grammatically correct?

Kljunar:Just as I finished typing my last post I thought of a question related to this.
I get that you can change adjectives to verbs or adverbs according to the root, does this mean that the verbs follow all rules for verbs?

I couldn't find a decent way to word the sentence. Basically what I mean is can 'belas' also be used as
'belis'
'belos'
'bel [insert verb ending here]'

And still be grammatically correct?

Exactly.

Hodiaŭ la vetero varmas.
Hieraŭ la vetero varmis.
Morgaŭ la vetero varmos.
Se la vetero varmus, mi ĝojus.
Mi preĝas, por ke la vetero varmu.

And you can combine different roots (morphemes) in order to create new words:
Mi varm'ig'as la akvon.
La akvo varm'iĝ'is.
La tutmonda varm'iĝ'o estas grava afero.
Fridujo estas mal'varm'ig'ant'aĵ'o.

mal'san'ul'ej'o = A noun (o) describing the place (ej) for un-healthy (mal'san) people (ul) = hospital
antaŭ'e'n'ir'ad'o = A noun (o) describing the repeated or long-time (ad) act of going (ir) to the front (antaŭ'e'n).

Some compound words are ambiguous though: sen'tem'a =/= sent'em'a and pom'aĉet'o =/= pom'aĉ'et'o

This is all beginning to click

Kljunar:Just as I finished typing my last post I thought of a question related to this.
I get that you can change adjectives to verbs or adverbs according to the root, does this mean that the verbs follow all rules for verbs?

I couldn't find a decent way to word the sentence. Basically what I mean is can 'belas' also be used as
'belis'
'belos'
'bel [insert verb ending here]'

And still be grammatically correct?

Any root can take on any combination of prefixes, suffixes, and endings and be a valid word form.

Whether that word will *mean* anything or not, is a separate question.

Example: nepersonulo: ne- = not, person- = person, -ulo = a person characterized by the root. What does this word mean? A person characterized by not being a person? A person not characterized by being a person? Not a person characterized by being a person? Do any of these meanings make sense?

Similarly, in English, statements such as, "I am not I." are grammatically correct, but logically meaningless.

eshapard:Any root can take on any combination of prefixes, suffixes, and endings and be a valid word form.

Whether that word will *mean* anything or not, is a separate question.

My English isn't good enough to fully understand your statement. If your statement means "any root can take on any combination of prefixes, suffixes, and endings and will always be a (morphosyntactically) valid word", please read on. Otherwise, please ignore this post and pardon my lack of understanding.

There are several rules which must be obeyed when composing words. For instance inflectional morphemes like -as, -os, -is, -us, -u, -j, -n can only appear in certain places and in certain numbers. Similar restrictions apply to derivational morphemes like -a, -o, -e etc.

vort'o'j'o, vort'o'o, vort'o'j'j, vort'j'o, vort'n'o, vort'o'n'j, trov'is'a, trov'i'n, frat'ge, ven'i'de, du'n, du'j, de'n, de'j for instance are not valid words although their components are Esperanto morphemes.

Although "jen est'as mi trov'is'a pom'o" for "jen est'as la pom'o, kiu'n mi trov'is" would be neat, it is a bit too Asian for being Esperanto.

nornen:
There are several rules which must be obeyed when composing words. For instance inflectional morphemes like -as, -os, -is, -us, -u, -j, -n can only appear in certain places and in certain numbers. Similar restrictions apply to derivational morphemes like -a, -o, -e etc.

You're reading too much into what I said. Let's keep it simple for the OP. Isn't he 14 and only been studying for 1 month?

Yes, I over-simplified the case, but I don't think he's going to go combining roots, prefixes, and suffixes in all possible orders and numbers like a mad man because of what I said.

So long as you stick with the rules of putting word elements together (like not putting suffixes as a prefix, or vice versa), you can combine practically anything in Esperanto. Logic will dictate whether this word makes any sense or not.

This becomes an issue in Esperanto scrabble games. You can keep tacking on suffixes to someone's word on the board but there comes a point where the word might not make any sense anymore. I was once in a game where it was decided that you have to use a word in a sentence before playing it, to put some reasonable limits on this.

We allowed people to play roots without grammatical markers, or also to add the suffixes and endings as desired.

Someone played mok (from moki, to mock, or moko, a mocking). Someone added ig to that, for mokig (mokigi, to cause someone to mock). Then someone added ajxo. Mokigajxo? A concrete thing that causes someone to mock? There was some debate about whether that was a good word or not, it was allowed in the end. However, if someone had added "trans" to the beginning (transmokigajxo? a concrete thing that causes someone to mock across?), I think the answer would have been no, that this is a step too far, the word no longer makes sense.

nornen:

eshapard:Any root can take on any combination of prefixes, suffixes, and endings and be a valid word form.

Whether that word will *mean* anything or not, is a separate question.

My English isn't good enough to fully understand your statement. If your statement means "any root can take on any combination of prefixes, suffixes, and endings and will always be a (morphosyntactically) valid word", please read on. Otherwise, please ignore this post and pardon my lack of understanding.
...

Certainly there are differences between (alleged) words which are morphosyntactically valid and words which have any real meaning. For example 'malhundaĵajn' is a morphosyntactically valid word (mal-hund-aĵ-a-j-n) which in the real world is nonsensical. Theoretically in Esperanto one can string almost any number of morphemes together legally. Whether any given such conglomeration will have any real meaning is totally another thing. There is such as thing as common sense.