Esperanto · Chapter 10 · Lesson 8 · Grammar primer
Compound words: vaporsxipo and friends
Vaporo plus sxipo gives vaporsxipo, a steamship. How roots stack, which root goes first, and when a linking vowel earns its keep.
The short version
The last root is the one that counts
Glue roots together freely, and the rightmost one is the head. Vaporŝipo is a kind of ship; ŝipvaporo would be a kind of steam. Only that final root takes the grammatical ending, so the whole thing behaves as one word, vaporŝipojn, with a single stress on the penultimate syllable. English does exactly the same in steamship, then cannot decide whether to write ice cream, ice-cream or icecream.
vaporŝipo
Read a long word from the right-hand end
You have never seen malsanulejo and you can still take it apart, provided you start at the back. -ejo is a place, -ul- is a person, san- is healthy, mal- reverses it: a place for unhealthy people, a hospital. The linking -o- between roots is a pronunciation aid rather than a rule. Drop it when the join is easy to say, as in tagmezo and fervojo, and keep it when it is not, as in noktomezo and dormoĉambro.
malsanulejo
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