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I was reading useful sentences from the Wikipedia article about Esperanto (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Useful_phrases). One in particular caught my eye: Do you speak Esperanto? It is translated as "Ĉu vi parolas Esperante?".

I couldn't find any information about this -e -suffix. Why is it Esperante and not Esperanton?

seequ
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1 Answers1

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They decided to treat that construction as verb+adverb, not verb+object. Adverbs are derived with -e and singular noun objects are marked with -on.

user6726
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  • So it is like that for no special reason? – seequ Apr 04 '15 at 16:45
  • The -e suffix for adverb is a general convention of the language. But it's somewhat arbitrary that in "speak X", the language conventionalizes that expression as being like "speak X-ly", and they could have decided that the language name should be in the "object" case. Since these are conscious decisions in the design of Esperanto, you might be able to find some explicit reasoning on that choice. – user6726 Apr 04 '15 at 17:40