#gratitudeNow: A Little Linguistic Power

So recently as I’ve been studying Esperanto, I’ve stumbled across something really cool, and a little… weird.

In Esperanto you can modify an adjective to use it like a verb. It’s somewhat akin to the English concept of the gerund, using a verb as a noun, like “swimming.” But while that feels natural to me, this other thing feels distinctly odd.

I’m happy to give you an example. You could say, “I’m happy” as…

Mi estas feliĉa.

But you can also write it as….

Mi feliĉas.

Which is sort of.. “I’m happy-ing.” Semantically they mean exactly the same thing. But stylistically, that second one is sort of oddball. It’s like speaking with a weird accent, maybe. I did a little digging, even found a note on the Esperanto stack overflow about it. (And who the heck would have guessed there even was an Esperanto stack overflow, am I right?)

Okay, so why do I care about this, and why should you? What’s the granda afero, the big deal here?

A few things.

First, using that odd style makes your Esperanto a bit less English-like, and more compact. So if you’re going for speaking discretely in public, making it harder for casual listeners to suss out what you’re saying, this helps with that.

If you’re a big, telling their little that their naughty behavior makes you unhappy,

Via fia konduto malŝatas min.

is a bit harder to discern for nosy vanillas than

Mi malŝatas vian malbonan konduton.

Second, that adjective-as-verb business is kind of a language hack for expressing certain ideas in consensual power exchange and ageplay relationships. Take the concept of feeling, getting, or being made to feel “little.” It’s super awkward in English to say that someone “littles” you. They make-you-feel little, or make-you-become little. Snuggling your favorite teddy bear might do that, for example. But there’s not a good, compact way to express the idea in English.

But not so in Esperanto. Take this sentence for example.

Panjo, ŝi malgrandigas min enmetante min en vindotukon.

That is, “Mommy, she makes me feel little by putting me in a diaper.”" Literally, “Mommy, she littles me, by putting me in a diaper.”

I think that is cool as hell.

#gratitudeNow: Sweet Beef Money Niece?

So as I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been teaching myself Esperanto using Duolingo. It’s quick and fairly easy, something I do every day for around 15 minutes at least.

I really really like Duolingo. It’s free to use, unless you opt in for the pro version. I never realized before that it was a sort of open source language school. So much of their content is free.

Yes, they are a private company. But they’re clearly doing good in the world.

I know that in the month or so I’ve been actively using it, I am definitely learning. I’m able to read and write on a very rudimentary level in Esprinto already.

I first got the app a couple of years ago to try to learn Spanish. An ex of mine was married to a man who mostly spoke Spanish. I thought it would be a good idea for me to learn it too. That went by the wayside, but I still had the app and my account when I got bit by this new bug .

So about that goofy post title. For the most part I find the way Duolingo teaches me to be really smart, and on the nose. Instead of drilling grammar rules into me, it teaches me words and simple phrases.

Every once in a while though the app really surprises me, in a couple of ways. Sometimes the example Frases it wants me to translate are really odd, or are wonderfully inclusive and progressive. Just recently I translated a bunch of sentences about Adam and his husband, and Sophia and her two boyfriends.

One of the ways it teaches you is by having you select potential words for a phrase out of a pool of choices. Whenever I do this is zero in quickly on what I think are the correct terms. Sometimes after I’m done I take a look at the words that are left in the pool.

More often than not what’s left over is completely ridiculous.

Just now, laying in bed, I was taking a lesson where the phrase was: La edzino de mia frato estas mia bofratino. That is, My brother’s wife is my sister-in-law.

What was left over? You guessed it: sweet beef money niece.

Sekreta lingvo por Ni!

Who what now? That is, a secret language for us. That language is Esperanto. Esperanto is a constructed language, created about 100 years ago by a polish ophthalmologist, LL Zamenhof.

The Esperanto flag

The language has 16 grammatical rules which I’m still learning, and a vocabulary which is based on many different European languages. I speak French, although it’s been a while, and that’s been really helpful in my learning. Esperanto’s rules never have exceptions. This makes learning the language really fast and really easy.

Part of what sparked my imagination about doing this is that this is a language that is both everywhere and nowhere. It doesn’t really belong to anybody. There are about 2 million people who speak it, as a hobby. They are scattered all over the world.

It occurred to me that this could work in my favor, in our favor. That is, that kinky people in general and age players in particular could get a lot of use out of this thing.

Having the ability to have a conversation that cannot be understood easily if overheard is damn useful. The only people who know this thing are those who make the effort to know it.

Plus, in the month or so that I’ve been learning it, several interesting things have happened to me.

Learning something useful and real for its own merit on my own time feels remarkably childlike to me. The time I spend every day in practice is a bit like having piano practice, or chores.

There are some Esperanto words which just sound little and are fun to say.

Here are a few fun sentences, see if you can figure them out:

Ĉu via vindotuko estas malseka?

Vi estas tre fia.

Mi pensas, ke iu bezonas frapadon sur la fundo.

Mi volas tuŝi vin en specialaj lokoj.

So fun! I’ve been taking a Duolingo course to learn it. And over on the Big Little Podcast slack I’ve started a channel for others who are learning it with me.

I’d love it if you’d join me!