I am *so* not learning...

...Esperanto.

Esperanto has taken over from Italian as the language I'm not really learning, but occasionally allowing myself to be distracted by.

I found Italian strangely alluring right up to the point where I went to Italy.  Now I find I'm over it.  It seems as though all of my vague and ill defined reasons for being interested in Italian have been trumped by "yeah, but Italy kind of sucks".

Maybe I'll come back to it one day through my love of English (once I rekindle it).  It is one of the close cousins of the English language - both languages having Latin as an ancestor.  I have a feeling I'll get around to revisiting French first, though.

Right now, though, Esperanto seems more interesting - and a lot easier.  It's sliding into my head in a way I find strangely appealing, but also slightly alarming.  After reading over a basic grammar key, I can remember not only what "kio estas tio" means, but also why it means that - I'm parsing sentences much more easily than in the early days of German or Estonian.

Actually, I think it would be exceptionally interesting to compare Estonian and Esperanto.  Estonian is complicated and difficult (and the Estonians seem almost proud of that), while Esperanto is simplified and straightforward (and the Esperantists are definitely proud of that), but I've noticed a lot of similarities.

The whole building-blocks approach that Esperanto has seems very Finno-Ugric to me - and there's even a similarity in some of the vocabulary.

Take the question "Do you love me?" for example.

In Estonian it is "Kas sa armastad mind?" and in Esperanto it's "Ĉu vi amas min?"

Now, both "Kas" and "Ĉu" have exactly the same function - they just flag the rest of the sentence as a yes-or-no question.  It's a catch-all for the way we start questions with certain verbs ("do you", "are you", "does he", "is she", "did they", etc).

"Sa" and "vi" ("you") are the subjects of the sentence, so they have no endings.  If they were the objects, they would be "sind" and "vin" respectively.  "Mind" and "min" ("me") are the objects.  If they were the subjects, they would be "ma" and "mi" respectively.

"Armastad" and "amas" ("love") are both constructed by putting specific endings on the root of the verb ("armasta" in Estonian, "am" in Esperanto).  The "d" in "armastad" signifies that it is present tense - which is exactly what the "as" signifies in "amas" (the "d" also signifies that it is performed by "you", which is a distinction that doesn't exist in Esperanto - but that's another story).

If I were to push the sentence into the past tense, I'd add an "s" and an "i" (not necessarily in the same order) into the verbs in both.  "Armastad" would become "armastasid".  "Amas" would become "amis".

All of which leads me to attempt to write a short poem in both languages:

Kas sa armastasid mind?
Kas ma armastan sind?
Kus meie oleme, nüüd?
Ja, siit,
Kuhu?


Ĉu vi amis min?
Ĉu mi amas vin?
Kie ni estas, nun?
Kaj, de tie ĉi,
Kie?



(Actually, I suspect I should have written "ĉi tiam" instead of "nun" - but I've probably made a heck of a lot of other mistakes as well.  At least one of which being crappy poetry...)