Special Esperanto adverbs


A limited number of Esperanto adverbs do not end with the regular adverbial ending -e. Many of them function as more than just adverbs, such as hodiaŭ "today" and ankoraŭ "yet" or "still". Others are part of the correlative system, and will not be repeated here.
The word class "adverb" is not well defined in any language, and it is sometimes difficult to say whether a word is an adverb. The Esperanto suffix -e is restricted to words that are clearly adverbial.

Adverbs and the suffix ''-aŭ''

Alongside dedicated part-of-speech suffixes of Esperanto, such as adverbial -e, adjectival -a, and nominal -o, the language has a grammatically neutral suffix -aŭ that has no defined part of speech. Words ending in -aŭ may be used for multiple grammatical functions. They are typically words whose part of speech is difficult to identify in other languages. The suffix -aŭ is not lexically productive: it is limited to a closed class of only a few words. To specify the part of speech of these words, the dedicated suffixes may be added to the -aŭ. For example, anstataŭ "instead of" is the base of the adverb anstataŭe "instead", the adjective anstataŭa "interim" or "deputy", the verb anstataŭi "to take the place of", and the noun anstataŭo "replacement" or "substitution". Most -aŭ words have inherent adverbial uses; anstataŭ is one of the few that do not. The adverbial -aŭ words are:
Because this -aŭ is a suffix, it may be dropped or replaced by a productive grammatical suffix. For example, alongside anstataŭ and anstataŭe there are anstat and anstate, but this is rare and in practice does not occur outside poetry.

Bare-root adverbs

Other adverbs occur as bare roots, without any suffix. Some of these bare-root words are grammatical particles, in which case true adverbs may be derived from them by adding the suffix -e. They are:
Occasionally grammatically redundant forms such as tree are seen in poetry.