Esperanto · Chapter 13 · Lesson 21 · Themed review
Sur la tablo
Bread, water, meat and cake. The food and drink words, and the -ajxo suffix that turns a verb or a root into the concrete thing you can put on a plate.
Practise this lesson
14-word session
A quick mix of exercises - recognise, recall, type and build each word. Miss one and it comes back round until it sticks.
Worth knowing
Manĝi, manĝaĵo: the suffix for the thing itself
is to eat. o is food - the stuff you put on your fork. No second root had to be learned, no unrelated word borrowed from Latin for the noun: -- means the concrete thing that comes of the root, bolted onto the verb you already knew. is to drink; o is a drink. That single move is what this session is really about, and once you have seen it once you never have to be taught the rest.
The thing that the verb makes
English keeps two unrelated words for the pair: you eat, but you consume food; you drink, but you order a beverage. Esperanto refuses the waste. Take the verb, drop -i, add -aĵo, and you have named the concrete result. is to bake, so o is baked goods - the loaves and the buns, not the act. is sugar, so o is a sweet thing, a something-made-of-sugar. The suffix means, reliably and forever, "a concrete thing characterised by the root". Meet an unfamiliar -aĵo word in the wild and you can read it straight off its root: if you know the root, you know the noun.
Which roots do not need it
Here is the other half, and it is the half that keeps you from over-using the suffix. Plenty of food words are already concrete things in their own right. is bread. is meat. is an egg. is fruit, an apple, a cake, soup. , , , , - water, milk, coffee, tea, wine - are simply roots that name a substance. None of them is built from a verb, so none of them wants --. You do not say "panaĵo"; the bread is already the thing. The rule is clean: the suffix earns its keep only when you are turning an action into its product. When the thing already has its own root, leave it be.
Put it together
. - I am eating bread and drinking water.
o . - The food is on the table.
on? ? - Do you want a hot drink? Coffee or tea?
, , on . - She bought fruit, eggs, and baked goods from the village.
