Sidebar: The irregularities of Esperanto

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• The plural pronouns are separate lexical entries. Compare Quechua, where for example 'they' paykuna is formed by adding the regular plural suffix -kuna to the singular pronoun pay 'he, she'.
• The table of correlatives is clever and fascinating, but embodies morphological processes used nowhere else in the language, e.g. the genitive suffix -es, or the distinction between kiu for persons and kio for things, not reflected in the personal pronouns or the nominal system.
• It's unpredictable whether a particular root will be nominal or verbal, even for items in the same semantic field: e.g. martelo 'hammer', segi 'to saw' -> segilo 'saw'.
• It's unpredictable whether a verb will be inherently intransitive (kreski 'grow') or transitive (rompi 'break').
• Etymons from the source languages may appear in multiple forms: kun 'with' vs. kom- in many words; chambro 'room', kamero 'chamber'; -segno in 'design' vs. signo 'sign', vidi 'see' vs. -vu- in intervjui, kuri 'run' vs. kori- in koridoro 'corridor'; lakto 'milk' vs. galaksio; legi 'read' vs. leci- in leciono 'lesson'; lango 'tongue' vs. lingvo 'language'; skribi 'write' vs. manuscripto, okulo 'eye' vs. binoklo 'binoculars', paroli 'speak' vs. Parlamento, meti 'put' vs. permesi 'permit'; -gnozi in 'prognosis' vs. -gnosti- in 'agnostic'; regi 'rule' vs. regho 'king'
• Some roots which could have been formed via regular derivation instead are taken from the source languages: fido 'faith' vs. fidela 'faithful'; granda 'big' vs. grandioza 'superb', akto 'act' vs. aktiva 'active', miri 'marvel at' vs. miraklo, signo vs. signalo, studi 'study' vs. studento, etc.
• It's not easy to predict what preposition to use with a particular verb.

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