Esperanto ĉe la Universitato de Roĉestro

Homework

• If you didn’t send me your solutions to chapter 5, check your answers against the key on the course page.
• Start reading chapter 6 for next Tuesday, and do exercises 6.1–6.3. As usual, you can send me your answers for corrections.
• If you haven’t written to a penpal yet, do so now! If you need help writing something, just let me know.

In class

We reviewed chapter 5 and watched part 4 of Mazi en Gondolando:

Impersonal verbs

Chapter 6 introduces the idea of impersonal verbs — verbs that don’t need a subject. Impersonal verbs are often used when describing the weather. Pluvas (=Estas pluve), it rains. We don’t say Ĝi pluvas, because there’s no “ĝi” that is raining! Hajlas, neĝas, tondras, fulmas. It’s hailing, snowing, thundering, lightning. Frostas (Estas froste), nebulas, nubas, rosas, silentas, sunas, ventas, ŝtormas. It is frosty, foggy, cloudy, dewy, silent, sunny, windy, stormy.

Poetry

We also read and translated the simple poem Ho, mia kor’. Note how elision is used to achieve the desired rhyme and meter. In Esperanto the final -o of nouns can be omitted (“elided”) when there are no other grammatical endings following it. So we can elide the -o in koro, for example, but not in koroj or korojn. The elided -o is replaced with an apostrophe, and the stress within the word remains the same as before.

We can also convert la to l’ in cases where it is preceded or followed by a vowel: de la batado becomes de l’ batado.