When I was last studying Esperanto about twenty years ago, I never really grasped the range of uses of -u. Last night, having found the old Esperanto Bible a good lady gave me all those years ago, I came across a good example of what I had previously failed to master.

"Zorgu, ke vi diru nenion al iu..." Sankta Marko 1:44

'Zorgu' I understand - imperative.

I also get things like 'ni iru: let's go'.

I'm less certain of 'vi diru'. I'd translate the sentence as, "Take care, that you say nothing to anyone..." but I don't really get the rationale behind it, nor could I compose a sentence of my own using the same grammatical principle.

Can anyone point me in the right direction here?

A word that will greatly help you in translating -u words is "should".

-u words express a wish, aim, desire, command, etc.

Mi volas ke vi iru.
Literally - I want that you should go. (in regular idiomatic English, I want you to go).

Vi iru. You should go.

Pretty much any English phrase that has a construction like "I want you to...", "John wants Mary to...", etc. will involve the -u ending. "John volas ke Mary __-u", "Mi volas ke vi ___-u"

I think that he should come tomorrow - Mi pensas ke li venu morgaux. (it is my hope/wish/desire that he come tomorrow)

The important thing to remember here is that the -u ending doesn't have a tense, so it is not associated with any particular time.

Your sample sentence, "Zorgu, ke vi diru nenion al iu...", I would translate as "Take care, that you say nothing to anyone"

You could translate it a little more literally as "Take care that you should say nothing to anyone"

Let's imagine for a second that we wanted to use a different tense; -as, for example, "Zorgu, ke vi diras nenion al iu". That would mean "Take care that you are saying nothing to anyone"

But getting back to the text, you don't really want to say to someone, "Don't be saying something right now". You want to say "Don't say something at any time". Therefore you want a verb ending that doesn't express any particular time. The only verb endings that meet these criteria are -i, -u, and -us. You can't use -i because it's not a personal verb. That is, it doesn't take a pronoun; you can't say "vi diri", "mi diri", etc. And if you were to use -us, the meaning would turn into "Take care that you would say nothing to anyone". The use of -us tends to have an implied "if" in there. "Mi dirus ion se vi volus" (I would say something if you wanted). "Mi ne venus" (I would not come; you can kind of hear the implied "if"; the listener is waiting for the speaker to give the condition to this statement. I would not come IF I didn't have the money, I would not come IF no one else came, etc). This is why -us is the "conditional" ending. We use it when there are conditions attached, and that usually means some kind of "if" statement.

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If you have studied another language, you will notice that we use -u in Esperanto in many cases where other languages use a subjunctive form. As it happens, in many Romance languages, the subjunctive forms coincide with imperative forms. They are closely linked, though it might not appear so at first. This might help you as well. Since subjunctive forms express wish, hope, uncertainty, it makes sense to use a verb ending that isn't linked to any particular tense.

Erinja, many thanks indeed for that explanation!

I could see that it was something like a subjunctive (knowledge of which I didn't have twenty years ago), but knew that there were no specific subjunctive endings in Esperanto.

So, can I say:

Mi opinias, ke vi nun mangxu ion.

Li volis, ke ni flugu al la insulo.

Also, what would the difference be between:

Mi opinias, ke vi devas nun dormi.

and,

Mi opinias, ke vi nun dormu.

Mi opinias ke vi devas nun dormi = It's my opinion that you must sleep now.
This one isn't necessarily saying that *I* think that you should sleep. To me it almost gives the sense that I have information that you're supposed to sleep now. Perhaps someone told me that you are supposed to sleep now, and I am reporting this; I believe that I heard that you have to sleep now. I can't imagine a situation where I would say this exact sentence but I must say, when I read it, my first thought was lights out at summer camp!

Mi opinias ke vi nun dormu = I think you should sleep now.
This one is actually expressing my opinion. I think it would be a good idea for you to sleep now.

However I wouldn't use "opinii" with -u. It's hard to explain why. Maybe it's because "opinii" usually deals with factual things rather than feelings or hopes; an opinion can be right or wrong; it isn't really a wish. In English, I don't usually have the opinion that you should come tomorrow. I think you should come, I hope you should come, but I don't "opine" that you should come.

So, "God save the queen" would be, "Dio savu la reĝinon."?

Subjunctive is a tricky thing for Engish speakers to understand at first because we don't have much of a subjunctive mood anymore besides "I would...". Proper English would be to say, "If I were you..." instead of "If I was you...".

So would this be in Esperanto, "Se mi estu vi..."?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_subjunctive

That article clears up stuff pretty well.

It would be "Dio savu la reĝinon" (we are asking God to save the Queen, or alternately, hoping that God will save the Queen; this is -u to show a hope, wish, request, or goal)

BUT it would be "Se mi estus vi"

The 'if' part makes it pretty clear that -us is appropriate. Remember that -us is the conditional. If I were you, I would go. It's an if-then statement (if I were you, then I would go; if I were you, then I would be happy, etc)

My rule of thumb is when trying to figure out how an "se" sentence should be done properly, I think about my intended meaning rather than what I want the individual words to be.

Thus -us/-u/-as/-is/-os etc is chosen depending on what I am trying to say. Needless to say, the "se (verb)-" part pretty much always gets -us because "se" should always bring up a condition and a conditional result. If you need tense or a sense of obligation in your "condition", then you can generally rely on either the context, or on helper words (e.g. devi). The language is luckily flexible like that.

ceigered:My rule of thumb is when trying to figure out how an "se" sentence should be done properly, I think about my intended meaning rather than what I want the individual words to be.

Thus -us/-u/-as/-is/-os etc is chosen depending on what I am trying to say. Needless to say, the "se (verb)-" part pretty much always gets -us because "se" should always bring up a condition and a conditional result. If you need tense or a sense of obligation in your "condition", then you can generally rely on either the context, or on helper words (e.g. devi). The language is luckily flexible like that.

If you can follow the "se clause" with "but I'm/you're/it's/etc not.........." use the conditional. That's how we learned when to use the corresponding subjunctive form in Spanish.

orthohawk:

ceigered:My rule of thumb is when trying to figure out how an "se" sentence should be done properly, I think about my intended meaning rather than what I want the individual words to be.

Thus -us/-u/-as/-is/-os etc is chosen depending on what I am trying to say. Needless to say, the "se (verb)-" part pretty much always gets -us because "se" should always bring up a condition and a conditional result. If you need tense or a sense of obligation in your "condition", then you can generally rely on either the context, or on helper words (e.g. devi). The language is luckily flexible like that.

If you can follow the "se clause" with "but I'm/you're/it's/etc not.........." use the conditional. That's how we learned when to use the corresponding subjunctive form in Spanish.

Nice, I'll have to try and remember that one!

Back to the original post.

"Take care, that you say nothing to anyone..."

What you don't realise is that here "say" is not in present tense but in the present subjunctive mood. They are both conjugated as "say". If you were to say however:

"Take care, that you be here..."

you know that "be" is not second person singular present tense (are). "Be" is the present subjunctive mood conjugation. If you don't know a lot about grammar I probably just confused you but if you do, then that hopefully cleared something up.