Noun
Any of the basic correlatives in Esperanto, often displayed in a table.
- Examples
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And how many little words and particles that fit nowhere must we learn? Esperanto's inventor Zamenhof had a stroke of genius on that: the so-called table words.
More examples (4)
There is a table of words for what/when/where / that/then/there etc, but that's about it... ¶ If you are learning just by reading the text, a useful trick to know is that words and word-roots can be stuck together to make bigger words. (But the above-mentioned tablewords are *not* made that way.)
Doubters may wish to investigate the 600+ page _Plena analiza gramatiko de Esperanto_ by Kalocsay & Waringhien. The sixteen "rules" are of the second type, and even for this they are not complete (they do not address the table-words, for instance).
While I like the table words (tabelvortoj), there is a fundamental flaw in it: The question words are also overloaded for use as relative pronouns. This is clearly a highly Eurocentric design.
The grammar of Esperanto provides good opportunities to create pithy and catchy PUs, especially proverbs. Zamenhof, for example, made extensive use of a set of Esperanto correlatives, the so-called table-words. This is a closed subsystem that allows the completely regular formation of 45 pronouns and adverbs through cross-reference in a table [15].