A Complete Grammar of Esperanto
A Complete Grammar of Esperanto is a comprehensive textbook by Ivy Kellerman Reed, prepared in cooperation with Esperanto's creator, Dr. L. L. Zamenhof. In a single volume, it presents the international language in full: inflection, word-formation, and syntax explained clearly and systematically, alongside graded reading lessons and material for translation. Affixes, compound words, and correlatives are introduced gradually, only once the student has gained familiarity, and each lesson builds on the last. After the fifth exercise, the readings become coherent, genuinely engaging stories, so that mastery feels earned rather than memorized.
Beyond teaching Esperanto for its own sake, the book champions the language as a bridge to learning others, ancient and modern alike. Its great achievement is rigor without dryness: it explains why grammatical usages exist rather than merely asserting them, offering a complete, self-contained path to fluency in a tongue designed to unite the world.
How it begins
The Esperanto alphabet contains 28 characters. These are the characters of English, but with "q", "w", "x", and "y" removed, and six diacritical letters added. The diacritical letters are "c", "g", "h", "j" and "s" with circumflexes (or "hats", as Esperantists fondly call them), and "u" with a breve. Zamenhof himself suggested that where the diacritical letters caused difficulty, one could instead use "ch", "gh", "hh", "jh", "sh" and "u". A plain ASCII file is one such place; there are no ASCII codes for Esperanto's special letters. However, there are two problems with Zamenhof's "h-method". There is no difference between "u" and "u" with a breve, and there is no way to determine (without prior knowledge of the word(s) involved, and sometimes a bit of context) whether an "h" following one of those other five letters is really the second half of a diacritical pair, or just an "h" that happened to find itself next to one of them. Consequently other, unambiguous, methods have been used over the years. One is the "x-method", which uses the digraphs "cx", "gx", "hx", "jx", "sx" and "ux" to represent the special letters. There is no ambiguity because the letter "x" is not an Esperanto letter, and each diacritical letter has a unique transliteration. This is the method used in this Project Gutenberg e-text.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.