(b) Participles and Auxiliaries
The following table illustrates the perfect simplicity and terseness of the Esperanto verb.
Every tense, active and passive, is formed with never more than two words. Every shade of meaning (continued, potential, etc., action) is expressed by these two words, of which one is the single auxiliary esti (itself conjugated regularly). The double auxiliary—"to be" and "to have"—which infests most modern languages, with all its train of confusing and often illogical distinctions (cf. French je suis allé, but j'ai couru), disappears. Contrast the simplicity of amota with the cumbersome periphrasis about to be loved; or the perfect ease and clearness of vi estus amita with the treble-barrelled German Sie würden geliebt worden sein.
This simplicity of the Esperanto verb is entirely due to its full participial system. There are six participles, present, past, and future active and passive, each complete in one word. The
only natural Aryan language (of those commonly studied) that compares with Esperanto in this respect is Greek; and it is precisely the fulness of the Greek participial system that lends to the language a great part of that flexibility which all ages have agreed in admiring in it pre-eminently. Take a page of Plato or any other Greek author, and count the number of participles and note their use. They will be found more numerous and more delicately effective than in other languages. Esperanto can do all this; and it can do it without any of the complexity of form and irregularity that makes the learning of Greek verbs such a hard task. Bearing in mind the three characteristic vowels of the three tenses—present -a, past -i, future -o (common to finite tenses and participles)—the proverbial schoolboy, and the dullest at that, could hardly make the learning of the Esperanto participles last him half an hour.
It would be easy to go on filling page after page with the simplifications effected by Esperanto, but these will not fail to strike the learner after a very brief acquaintance with the language. But attention ought to be drawn to one more particularly clever device—the form of asking questions. An Esperanto statement is converted into a question without any inversion of subject and verb or any change at all, except the addition of the interrogative particle ĉu. In this Esperanto agrees with Japanese. But whereas Japanese adds its particle ka at the end of the sentence, the Esperanto ĉu stands first in its clause. Thus when, speaking Esperanto, you wish to ask a question, you begin by shouting out ĉu, an admirably distinctive monosyllable which cannot be confused with any other word in the language. By this means you get your interlocutor prepared and attending, and you can then frame your question at leisure.
Contrast Esperanto and English in the ease with which they respectively convert a statement into a question.
English : You went—did you go?
Esperanto : Vi iris—ĉu vi iris?