Episode: 197
Title: HPR0197: Vulgar Esperantist Part 2
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0197/hpr0197.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 13:35:23

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Hello and welcome to episode two of the Vulgar Espronthus.
Vulgar Espronthus is a podcast which we will learn every day Espronthus together.
The title of the podcast, the Vulgar Espronthus, is referring to the word vulgar in the traditional
sense. That is the language with the tongue of the common people, of the common folk.
That is to say that we're not concerned with low level grammatical issues or debates
of semantics. We're just interested in learning Espronthus so that we can use it on an everyday
basis to better communicate across national, cultural, and linguistic barriers.
Mino muesta, setko, kajshmi, estosvia, instristonthus, episode two nouns.
In the previous episode, we learned a little bit about Espronthus, what, why it exists, how it
became developed. And we also learned about the importance of the endings of words and
how greatly simplified that is from other languages. If you've ever had any experience
trying to learn Spanish, your French, your Italian, or Latin, or anything like that,
you know that there are masculine and feminine endings to a lot of different words that
you have to sort of match up in your head. And you have to know whether something is
masculine or feminine. In Espronthus, there is no such concern. Nouns end with an O.
Adjectives end in an A. And infinitive verbs end in an I. What on earth is an infinitive
verb? It is one of those verbs, or it's a verb in the form of to-do, or it's got the
word to in front of it. That's what they call infinitive. So if you're going to program
a software application to program, program me. Both nouns and adjectives that are plural
as we found out last episode end in a J. But the J sounds like a Y. So if it is a person,
it would be Homo in Espronthus. If it is people, many persons, it would be Homoi. Simple
as that. At a J, it becomes plural. Now there are no exceptions to these rules. This is
Espronthus. You don't have to worry about certain words being given a certain kind of plural
ending only if something else is true. It's not like that. At a J, it's a plural. Simple.
What else is simple? We're going to try to concentrate on nouns in this episode primarily.
So one of the things that you associate with nouns often are things called definite
and indefinite articles. Now definite article, and you don't need to worry about the terms.
You'll know exactly what I'm talking about. Definite article is V. So if I'm saying V
bicycle in Espronthus, it is La. It is always La, LA. Now I know in French, for instance,
there's La and Lue and Le. Well, in Espronthus, there is La. That's all there is. It's very refreshing.
So if you're going to say V bicycle, it is La, but Biciclo. La Biciclo. V bicycle. Simple
as that. You don't have to worry about whether it's a masculine or a feminine object that
you're referring to. If you want to put a definite article in front of a word, it is always
La. It's very simple. To even simplify things further, there are no indefinite articles.
For instance, in English, we might say, get a bicycle. The word A, that's an indefinite
article. We're not speaking about any particular bicycle. So we say, get a bicycle or get
an something starting with a vowel. Get an egg. We're not talking about a specific egg.
We're just saying, get an egg, and that's all. So those are indefinite articles. They
don't exist in Espronthus. You don't have to worry about them at all. So to say, get
a bicycle in Espronthus, well, we would think about what kind of verb we want. Now, in
the last episode, we learned that the U ending, if you put U at the end of a verb instead
of that I, that is the, I keep forgetting the word for this kind of verb, but it's when
you are demanding something or telling someone. I know there's a technical term for this,
and I should have looked it up before I started this episode. But it is that. So that if
you're saying to use something, to use would be Utsu. Utsu. Okay. So in this case, the
verb that we want to use for get a bicycle is get the translation for get in Espronthus.
One of them would be preny, P-R-E-N-I, preny, to get, to acquire, to get, to seize. Okay.
So preny, well, we want to, instead of having the eye at the end to denote something that
is, you know, something that needs to be done, we want to give a command. We want to say
get, so you add the U. So it's prenu, the sequel, prenu, the sequel, that is get a bicycle.
Now if we were, talking about a specific bicycle, if we'd ridden a bicycle somewhere and we
were walking away and then we realized we need to get the bicycle that we brought with us,
we might tell our friend, prenu, lab, the sequel, prenu, lab, the sequel, get the bicycle.
But if it's just any old bicycle, we just want to go get a bicycle, prenu, the sequel.
Okay. So that's pretty simple. That's definitive and definite and indefinite articles. So definite
articles, there's one in that law, indefinite articles, there are none. And that makes it
pretty simple on everyone. Okay. So moving on a little bit to some adjectives because there's
just not that much you can say about nouns at first, although there are some things that you
can do to nouns that are pretty cool, but we'll leave that for now. Adjectives, as I said,
they end in an A. And one of the neat things about adjectives is that they always end in an A.
And you can put them right in front of the noun that they refer to. So if we were going to say
that we were going to prenu, nova, the sequel, what do you think that would mean? Prenu, nova, the
sequel. You're probably already figuring it out. It's get a new bicycle. Nova is new. So it's
as simple as that. Prenu, nova, the sequel. Get a new bicycle. Notice how you're not even thinking
about the endings, really. You're just thinking, if you know the words, then it's just a no-brainer
to string them together. It's not going to stay exactly this simple but pretty close to
be honest. This isn't the hardestest for them to get. There are some further concepts that we're
going to get into later, but this is literally how easy it is most of the time. And that's why it's
such a great language to learn because it really is just so, so simplified. Now here's a really
cool thing. And this is going to cut vocabulary lessons basically in half. And you're going to get
a lot of this kind of thing in Esperanto. And that's the concept of prefixes and suffixes.
But in Esperanto, there are ways of stringing different elements, different prefixes and suffixes
together to create new words. So right away, if you've learned nova, which is new in Esperanto,
you may not realize it, but you've already learned two words in Esperanto. Because nova means new,
but if you put the standard prefix, mal, m-a-l, in front, any adjective, it makes that adjective
mean the opposite. So if you've got nova is new, malnova would be not new or old, however you want
to think about it. Mal is an easy one to remember for me because if you think about it,
the word mal and I think a great many languages means bad or negative, something ill, something
wrong, negative. So nova is new, malnova is old. Simple is that in a lot of different cases.
Grande is big, malbranda is small. Lots of different adjectives you're going to run across
that you can just throw a mal in front of and reverse it completely in terms of what it means.
So if you've got faxila, easy, mal faxila would be not easy or difficult.
Bona, good, malbona, bad.
So if we were going to say that we wanted to get an old bicycle, it would be prenu malnova
this equal. Get an old bicycle. Don't get to a nice new one, get an old bicycle. And again,
you don't even have to think about the indefinite article of an because it's just implied prenu malnova
this equal. If you're not saying la this equal or prenu la malnova this equal,
which would be get the old bicycle. So if you've got a line of bicycles, they're all brand new,
except one, that's the old one. You want the old one, prenu la malnova this equal.
If you don't say la, you're implying that it's an indefinite article. You're not specifically
talking about a certain thing. You're just talking in general. Go get something.
Okay, so that's really, I mean that's that's nouns and largely those are adjectives.
The thing about adjectives in Esperanto is that you want to make the adjective plural
if it's a plural noun. So in that sense, it's good to match the adjective and noun.
And it's pretty easy. I mean that's if you're saying prenu la malnova
this equal, then you're saying get the old bicycles. So you know that the adjective that you're
using to describe the bicycle is malnova, right? And you know that you're talking about mini bicycles.
So you're going to be talking about mini old bicycles. So you go ahead and throw the J on the
adjective. Honestly, that took a little bit of getting used to for me because I don't,
if I do it in English, I'm not cognizant of it. And there are probably lots of exceptions in
English because there are so many ridiculous exceptions in this language. But in Esperanto,
there really aren't. So as long as you remember to make the adjective plural when the noun is plural,
you're good to go. Prenu la malnova, the sequel would be get the old bicycles.
Prenu la malnovae, the sequel, get the new bicycles. Obviously there's no, it's not a big deal,
it's not a big deal in terms of the verb. The verb is going to stay the same. So if we want someone to
use the new computers, we would say utsu, utsu la nové computiloi. Use the new computers,
plural, both nové and computiloi are plural. But we're still just saying utsu la use the
plural new computers. It's pretty simple as you can tell. Just something to keep in mind,
that they do like to have the adjective plural along with the plural noun. And it helps group
those two things together too because if it's a more complex sentence, it just kind of helps both
for the speaker and I think for the listener to hear the adjective and the noun to which it belongs,
both being the same, whether the singular or plural, they're both that thing. So it's always good
to do that. Okay, quick review of what we learned. And I think next episode I'm going to do just
vocabulary. So the next time we've learned a good amount of sort of basic structure here,
I think next week and learn some vocabulary. So we can have a little bit more to work with.
And I think vocabulary lessons are always good to just kind of hear and play over and over and
over again. So I'll try to put on my best radio voice if I have one and just go through,
you know, a fair amount of vocabulary words. So today we learned, again, nouns in and O always,
adjective in and A always. Infinitive verbs in and I always, commanding verbs in and U.
The J sounding like a Y makes something plural at the end of the word. Bicicloy,
bicycles, compouty loy, computers. The word Mal in front of an adjective makes that adjective
mean the opposite of what it used to. Nova, new, Malnova, old, Grande, big, Mal Grande, small.
Etc. The definitive, the definite article, V is La. Regardless of anything, it's La.
There are no indefinite articles. Think that's about it for this week. Next time we'll get into
some vocabulary and then maybe we'll just dive right into verbs. Those are always fun because
you can actually say cool stuff with lots of action in them. Thanks for listening to Valdress
Prontist and be sure to turn tune in next time.
Thank you for listening to Hacquered Public Radio. HBO is sponsored by
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