Esperanto · Chapter 15 · Lesson 21 · Themed review
La bestoj
Cat, dog, horse, sheep. The animal words, and the -id- suffix that gives you every young animal for free once you know the adult.
Practise this lesson
13-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
Ĉevalo, ĉevalido: every young animal, for free
A horse is . A foal is o. You did not learn a second word: you took the root you already had and bolted -- onto the end. The suffix means offspring, the young of, and it never means anything else. English makes you memorise foal as a fresh, unrelated shape with no visible link to horse. Esperanto asks you to remember one rule and reuse it forever.
One suffix, every young animal
Watch it run down this session's list without a single exception. is a cat, so a kitten is o. is a dog, so a puppy is . is a sheep, so a lamb is . is a cockerel, so a chick is . , bear, gives you o; , pig, gives you o; , wolf, gives you o. English demanded four or five unconnected words here - foal, kitten, puppy, lamb, chick, cub - and made you drill each one on its own. Esperanto asked for the adult and threw in the young at no charge. Learn and you have already, without noticing, learned o.
The same trick makes the female
-- has a sibling worth meeting on the same page: -in-, which marks the female. Look again at , the cockerel. The hen is - plus -in-, nothing borrowed. That is why the word for hen looks like the word for cockerel: it is the word for cockerel, feminised. Run the pattern back through the paddock and gives you o, a mare, while o stays the foal. One animal root now yields three words for the price of one: the adult, the female, and the young. is a mouse and a monkey; you can already picture o and o before anyone teaches them, which is rather the point. The root is fixed, the suffixes are fixed, and the meanings never drift.
Put it together
o o . - The mare and her foal stand in the field.
La kato lekas sian katidon. - The cat licks its kitten.
Ĉiu besto havas idon: la ŝafo havas ŝafidon, la porko porkidon. - Every animal has a young one: the sheep has a lamb, the pig a piglet.
La kokino kaj la koko gardas la kokidojn. - The hen and the cockerel guard the chicks.
