Badgers proven to be more evil than squirrels.

I met some lovely Esperantists today! It was quite a shock being greeting in Esperanto for the first time! My brain was slightly confused, despite how much I’d prepared by listening to Esperanto radio. And I definitely need to practice speaking more, not for pronunciation, but for actually coming up with sentences on the spot!

I came up with 2 words I liked this week!

1. Plendema = fussy

• plendi = to complain
• -em = a suffix which means “tendency to <root>”. See previous posts.

2. Korloko = soft spot (as in “I have a soft spot for a good curry”).

• koro = heart
• loko = location
• So it’s like saying “There’s a place in my heart for….”

And also a phrase that I kinda like:

• Ni rekafu baldaŭ! = We should go for a coffee again soon!

Neat huh? 😀

Got a question for you, ain’t I?

Aren’t affixes lovely? They are like the sprinkles of word building; shove some nice spongy root words together and sprinkle on the affixes. Some roots are so neat and generally useful they are all but official affixes.

You may be aware that over the many years of Esperanto’s life, many have tried to introduce new prefixes and suffixes for one reason or another. You can read about the ones that remain unofficial here (for prefixes) and here (for suffixes).

Some of those seem pretty useful, and others redundant, and some are useful for certain scientific folk. If all of those were official, can you imagine the learning load?! Getting the hang of the proper use of affixes in word building is a little trickier than just lumping roots together, so we definitely don’t want a whole barrel of them, but:

If you could have just one more affix widely used and official in Esperanto, what would you have? You could pick from the unofficial ones, or make up your own! You know you want to.

I quite enjoy one of the meanings of the unofficial suffixes, “e”. Check out meaning 2.

Say you’ve got an object, e.g. a brick (briko). And you want to say the equivalent of “brick-coloured”. You’d probably go for: “brikkolora”. Meaning 2 is exactly this. Instead of relying on suffixing the full “kolora”, you would just go “brikeo”. Short an sweet.

Only thing that bothers me, is that I’m not satisfied with my pronunciation of “e” followed by a vowel. It just feels unwieldy having to pronounce “e” as in “bet” followed by another vowel. I kinda wish “eĵ” was a suffix. Something about “brikeĵa” pleases me 😀

Though I wonder if there could be a more generally useful suffix than one that just means colour! 😛

Building words from phrases

I’m a little stunned that I’ve not come across this PMEG page before… I think not anyway… Though feel free to correct me if you’ve seen me mention it before.

It’s all about making words out of phrases (rather than just shoving roots and affixes together). It’s a goldmine of inspiration for word building, and gets you thinking about how to really play with your words.

I’ll probably write a couple posts over time on it, and today will be concentrating on the section entitled “Vortigo per A-finaĵo aŭ E-finaĵo”, which, as you may know, means something like “making a word with an A-ending or an E-ending”.

Now, you may recall that A-words (adjectives) are used to describe O-words (nouns). So if you’ve got your O-words (which shows a thing or concept), you can describe the kind of thing using an A-word:

• melo = a badger
• blua melo = a blue badger

E-words, describe everything else, and you’ll mostly see them describing actions.

• ŝi kuris = she ran
• ŝi rapide kuris = she ran quickly

So, what this section of the page talks about, is taking a phrase of some sort, and smooshing it into a single word, and then using it to describe something where that original phrase would apply.

A simple example is the first one.

• sur tablo = on a table
• surtabla lampo = a table-top lamp, a lamp which is on the table

You can even make an adverb version, if you’d rather describe an action:

• Ili sidis surtable = They sat on the table (literally like: they sat on-table-ly)

Instead of:

• Ili sidis sur la tablo

Just look at the flexibility of those examples on that page though!

This one’s really cool:

• kun blanka ĉapelo = with a white hat

You could be boring and start a sentence as below, which is going to be slow starting and lengthy despite the simple property you’re trying to express:

• La homo kun blanka ĉapelo… = The person with a white hat

Or you could set yourself up for a more interesting/complex yet succinct sentence with:

• La blankĉapela homo… = The person with a white hat / the white-hatted person

Ain’t that grand?

Here’s one that I just thought of:

• en la dorsa poŝo = in the back pocket
• La endorspoŝa telefono… = The back-pocketted phone… / the phone in the back pocket…

Written out long you’d have to go for:

• La telefono, kiu estas en la dorsa poŝo… = the phone which is in the back pocket

Ĝis!